Irish in America

Terry O'Keefe · Apr 12, 2010

Interesting tome on the plight of the Irish in the early 1800's .....Irish then sounded a lot like certain groups today.

We are not the first generation of New Yorkers puzzled by what to do about the underclass. A hundred years ago and more, Manhattan’s tens of thousands of Irish seemed a lost community, mired in poverty and ignorance, destroying themselves through drink, idleness, violence, criminality, and illegitimacy. What made the Irish such miscreants? Their neighbors weren’t sure: perhaps because they were an inferior race, many suggested; you could see it in the shape of their heads, writers and cartoonists often emphasized. In any event, they were surely incorrigible.

But within a generation, New York’s Irish flooded into the American mainstream. The sons of criminals were now the policemen; the daughters of illiterates had become the city’s schoolteachers; those who’d been the outcasts of society now ran its political machinery. No job training program or welfare system brought about so sweeping a change. What accomplished it, instead, was a moral transformation, a revolution in values. And just as John Wesley, the founder of Methodism in the late eighteenth century, had sparked a change in the culture of the English working class that made it unusually industrious and virtuous, so too a clergyman was the catalyst for the cultural change that liberated New York’s Irish from their underclass behavior. He was John Joseph Hughes, an Irish immigrant gardener who became the first Catholic archbishop of New York. How he accomplished his task can teach us volumes about the solution to our own end-of-the-millennium social problems.
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How One Man Saved The Irish

I've never heard of this man, I think gipper taught history in New York for awhile before he went to law school. Have you heard of him?

RECcane · Apr 13, 2010

Damn Irish!!!

gipper · Apr 14, 2010

Terry
For some reason Archbishop Hughes is not as celebrated as other clergy who followed him were. For instance there are high schools named after Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop Molloy, Bishop Loughlin and Monsignor McClancy.
There is no question that the Irish more than any ethnic group were the leading Catholic population. It's no coincidence that the Catherdral of the NY dioces is St. Patrick's. Catholic schools were always closed to honor St. Patrick on Mar. 17. (Come to think of it, there wasn't much difference at ND.)
In any event, Archbiship Hughes was not mentioned to any degree in history in NYC in the parochial schools. Oh and BTW for four years I taught science and math.

Terry O'Keefe · Apr 15, 2010

Science and Math? Interesting, what did you get your degree in at ND?

gipper · Apr 15, 2010

Science and Math? Interesting, what did you get your degree in at ND?
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History. Guess that they figured if I could graduate from Notre Dame, I could handle 5th grade math and science.

Terry O'Keefe · Apr 15, 2010

So you're smarter than a 5th grader, eh!

gipper · Apr 15, 2010

So you're smarter than a 5th grader, eh!
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Ah well ....I used to be.... :wink:

George Krebs · Apr 18, 2010

Terry O'Keefe · Apr 18, 2010

I'll bet none of those guys has bathed in a month! Hate to have to be in the same room with them.

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