Irish Immigration: Potato Famine In America

Irish Immigration

Without the potato or some food substitute available in sufficient quantity to replace it, the Irish simply died. Historians dispute how many died but the best of the experts, like Cormac O’Grada, estimate that about one million did. Some died of outright starvation, perhaps as many as 9 percent in Mayo, but most died of the diseases that easily infected and ravaged the malnourished, like dysentery or diarrhea. Whatever the cause, they died everywhere: in their mud cabin hovels, on the roads, in the fields, even in the squares of towns where they had fled looking for relief. In Kenmare in Kerry, the local priest, Archdeacon O’Sullivan wrote, they were “dying by the dozens in the streets.” 1 Even nearly a hundred years after the famine, old men and women told the Irish Folklore Commission that there were mounds in fields or the ruins of cabins scattered around the country where no one would walk because they believed famine dead lay there.

Between 1846 and 1850, a potato famine led many Irish citizens to leave their country.

The famine led many people to leave their homeland behind and started to consider new places to live at. Many Irish moved to America, the mainly settled in New York, Boston, and Pennsylvania. Even though immigrants usually bring with them problems and diseases that affect the stability of the country, however that was not the case with the Irish immigration. Irish immigration had tremendous benefits in the American society, the immigration improved many economic, political, and religious

matters.

The Irish immigrants contributed on improving the economy of the United States. Most of the Immigrants worked on farming for many years, therefore; they were they found it difficult to find a job in America at the beginning. In addition to that, they were uneducated and poor. In addition to that the steryotype against Irish made it even more difficult for them to find a job. “In fact, the Irish generally were viewed as a separate "race," although the term would hardly be applied to Irish Americans today. The basic elements of the stereotype were innate low intelligence, unreliability, laziness, and (for males) a penchant for drunkenness and fighting. Newspaper and magazine cartoonists of the era often portrayed the Irish with simian features. They were regularly characterized as racially inferior to Americans of Anglo-Saxon origin, even in the pages of respectable intellectual periodicals”. Because of that, Irish took whatever job was available. They worked in constructing streets, bridges, and railroads. All of these jobs were risky, actually many Irish workers got liver cancer, but they had no alternative. This competition over jobs helped on growing the American economy.

Irish immigrants changed America’s politics, many Irish presidents such as Andrew Jackson and George Washington contrubited in the development of this country. One of the biggest opsticals that Irish had to deal with was the Know Nothing Party. “ Know Nothing Party is a U.S. political party that flourished in the 1850s. The Know-Nothing party was an outgrowth of the strong anti-immigrant and especially anti-Roman Catholic sentiment that started to manifest itself during the 1840s. A rising tide of immigrants, primarily Germans in the Midwest and Irish in the East, seemed to pose a threat to the economic and political security of native-born Protestant Americans. In 1849 the secret Order of the Star-Spangled Banner formed in New York City, and soon after lodges formed in nearly every other major American city.”(Britannica) They accused the Irish in trying to destroy the democracy of the country. However, the number of Irish immigrants increased day by day, which meant more Irish were able to vote. The first Irish United States president was Andrew Jackson. Jackson changed the country by establishing this party, and took the country in a whole different level.

“The major policy of Jacksonian Democracy was the expansion of suffrage, or voting rights, to all white men over a gradual period of time. This policy was enacted to reflect Jackson's belief that the common (white) man should be more involved in the democratic process, something considerably at odds with the beliefs of the Founding Fathers, who put in place a complex electoral process specifically to avoid giving too much power to the common man. By expanding suffrage, Jackson infused the country with a more democratic ideology and character. The second major impact Jacksonian Democracy had was westward territorial expansion. Under President James K. Polk, the U.S. annexed Texas in 1845, signed a treaty with Britain to split the Oregon territory in 1846 and fought a war with Mexico the same year to claim California and the Southwest. This territorial expansion provided the country with many new resources such as gold in California, as well as extensive land on which to settle, but had a negative impact on Native Americans, many of whom were forcibly relocated.”(synonym)

Irish immigrants brought their religion with them from Ireland, many people converted to Catholicism between 1850 and 1900. Even though that African American and Asians hated Catholic Irish because of the competition over jobs, but many people became Catholic overtime. The immigration brought diversity to America, people in the area knew more about this religion after meeting Irish. Although Irish did not face as much discrimination as African America and Asians, because they were white and spoke English, but they cared about improving the life in the country. One example of an Irish Catholic women role model was Mother Jones. “Mary Harris, later known as Mother Jones, committed more than fifty years of her life to unionizing workers in various occupations throughout the country. Her dedicated effort resulted in arrests, personal attacks, and many hardships but she also earned audiences with United States presidents from McKinley to Coolidge.” (Government) People like Mother Jones helped on showing the aspects of Catholics, therefore; many people wanted to know and to convert to this religion. “There were 1.1 million Catholics in United States in 1845 and 3.1 million in 1860. The numbers of congregants continued to grow in subsequent decades to 6.3 million in 1880”(Rotman).