Every new group of immigrants were treated badly when they first came to America.
Exactly. A few other things went against the Irish in America as well:
1. They were primarily, as Mescalhead noted, Roman Catholics. In the 19th century, calling yourself a Roman Catholic in Protestant America was like calling yourself a Communist in 20th century America. There are still small pockets of extreme Evangelical groups in secluded parts of the American South and Midwest today who talk the language of Papist conspiracy theories; in the 19th century they were mainstream. The future President Millard Fillmore for instance, while in Buffalo, N.Y., founded several societies and organizations designed to maintain Protestant leadership and society in the face of what they saw as a(n Irish) Catholic immigration onslaught. The
Chautauqua Institute for instance was founded in this same "keep-the-Catholics-out" movement - though happily that institution gradually developed into a more humane scholarly institute. BTW, in early Colonial and American history there was a significant Protestant Irish immigration, especially to the American South, and nobody said a thing about it at the time.
2. Which brings the second issue; namely that it wasn't merely a matter of a few Irishmen showing up; in a ten year period (1845-55) 1.5 million Irish showed up on American shores, most of them desitute and very desperate. Now, we know the Irish certainly had valid reasons for leaving Ireland - that little mass-starvation thing we call the Potato Famine - but any country that receives 1.5 million foreignors in a ten year space is going to develop some sort of social reaction.
And keep in mind that from the point of view of the Protestant and general American population of the mid-19th century, their worst nightmares did indeed come true; it's just that modern Americans don't think that's such a bad thing. According to the 2000 census, Americans with an Irish ethnic heritage are the second-largest ethnic group in the U.S., topping some 43 million (of a total population of 281 million, or about 15% of the population). Roman Catholics are now one of the largest Christian groups in the country; if you walk quietly near a 19th century American cemetery you can probably hear them spinning in their graves.
3. Third point - which is that well, they were
Irish. The Irish were seen as the bottom rung of the British Empire's social hierarchy, as low as low gets, and the Americans of the 19th century were still imbibed with many British prejudices. Imagine - Indians and Burmese were seen as worthy of attention and study by British scholars in the 18th and 19th centuries, but, with only a few exceptions, not the Irish. During the American Revolution one of the rallying cries for the rebels was that London was treating her American colonies like the Irish, and Americans repeatedly made a comparison between the "Intolerable Acts" of 1774 imposing martial law on Boston and the English suppression of the Irish Revolt in the mid-17th century - with the point being that London had no right to treat English colonials the same way as Irishmen. (It was quite OK to treat Irishmen that way, just not
Americans!) It should therefore be no surprise that a tinge of English anti-Irish chauvenism should have survived in the Americans.
4. Final point - which is that, well, they were
Irish. The Irish have merged into American society so well, and mainstream American culture has embraced them so strongly that it's difficult to imagine a non-Irish America - but this just masks the reality that there was a greater social and cultural difference during the 19th century between Irish and Anglo-Americans. Modern Boston may revel in its Irish roots but its earliest roots are from a bunch of wacko English Protestant extremists. The Irish who came to American shores were much less European, much more secluded from Continental history and culture than modern Irish are. This isn't a value judgement; it's an observation of how different they truly were to Anglo-Americans.
