Cartwright's Expository Essay

However, Brennan is incorrect in that Cartwright solely blames the immigrants’ behavior for their predisposition to yellow fever. Brennan fails to consider the context around some of Cartwright’s claims that suggests the implication of New Orlean’s society. For example, while Cartwright chides the immigrants’ use of alcohol, he precedes this with the observation that “while the comforts of life … were shut against [the immigrants], the doors of more than a thousand grog shops were open day and night, tempting them into dissipation” (303). Thus, Cartwright attempts to explain the immigrants immoral behavior by highlighting their vulnerability and exaggerating the availability of supposedly corrupt practices like drinking. In doing so, he holds

Cartwright implicates the tyrannical European governments for cruelly oppressing and exploiting their people, thereby instilling actions that predispose the Irish immigrants prior to arrival in America. In these European cities “where bread is dear, fuel scarce, the winter cold, and wages low,” the poor are forced to take measures to ensure their survival (Cartwright 298). Cartwright points out that the Irish continue some of these habits once in New Orleans. Behaviors such as “crowding together in small confined rooms,” and “closing the doors and windows to keep the cold out,” are inappropriate given their ability to breed and help spread yellow fever (307). However, they are not faults of the immigrants themselves, but ramifications of the immigrants’ homeland governments. Unable to afford fuel to heat their homes due to the excessively inflated rent, the Irish relied on shielding themselves from the cold in these confined and unventilated spaces to maximize body heat. True products of their abusive political system, the Irish are not the sole guilty party as Brennan argues, since many incriminating and explanatory factors are outside of their