Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (9 page)

Or not. The question of whether the Great Famine produced what the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs called a “collective memory” among the Irish—emigrants as well as those who remained in their native land—remains contested. But there is no question that a bumper crop of bitterness and rage was harvested from the island’s blackened potato fields. Famine survivors absorbed a new and fundamental lesson about power: Those who possess it will never be helpless, and those who are denied it are doomed to starvation and exile when resources become scarce.
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In his last speech in the House of Commons, a dying Daniel O’Connell, his once-powerful voice reduced to a whisper, told his colleagues in early 1847 that “Ireland is in your power. If you do not save her, she cannot save herself.” The Irish people themselves understood how powerless they were, and how much their survival depended on the powerful. “The Potatoe crop is much worse than the last,” wrote James Prendergast, a farmer in County Kerry, in 1846. “We expect good measures from the British parliament this year but we [must] wait to know the issue.” Prendergast’s expectations were dashed, and he would not survive the famine. His children emigrated to the United States.
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This sense of powerlessness in the face of disaster traumatized the Irish on both sides of the Atlantic. When faced with the ultimate sense of powerlessness—they could not feed themselves—they found government to be aloof, unsympathetic, and judgmental. They had expected more. A group of local relief administrators criticized the government’s response in a letter to Prime Minister John Russell in 1847, insisting that starvation “could have been easily prevented by a liberal policy on the part of Her Majesty’s government.” Whether or not the British could have done more to prevent mass starvation, whether they should have halted exports of food from the island while its population starved, remains a matter of academic debate all these years later. In a cultural sense, the argument is beside the point; the Irish were convinced that the authorities could have done more and did not.
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When the children and grandchildren of the Famine achieved power in the United States, they would hold onto it and keep it from their enemies, even if that meant defying what Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “Yankee proprieties.” Reformers and civic elites who sought to bring down urban machines and their immigrant constituents—whether through criminal prosecutions, outright disenfranchisement, or moralistic reform campaigns—unwittingly invoked in Irish-American politicians and their constituents Famine memories of powerlessness, of state power mobilized on behalf of the propertied and the privileged.
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From the perspective of New York politics and Tammany Hall, one assertion is inarguable: The Great Famine immigration marked the beginning of the end of old New York, a city governed by Anglo-Protestant patricians and mercantile elites. That is not to say nativists and old-stock families simply surrendered their cultural and political power once Famine ships began docking along Manhattan’s East Side waterfront. Quite the opposite. A powerful anti-immigrant movement capitalized on the fear and loathing of the starving Irish in the 1850s. But try though they might, the anti-immigrant campaigners in New York could not counter the power of sheer numbers, for the Famine marked a demographic tipping point in the struggle over power and identity between new Irish-Catholic immigrants and native-stock New Yorkers. The island’s population was 371,000 in 1845. It grew to 630,000 in ten years as the hunger took hold in Ireland. By the time the Famine wave receded in the mid-1850s, more than one in four New Yorkers was a native of Ireland, and 52 percent of the city’s residents were foreign-born.
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The new Irish, the starving Irish, would not have to storm Tammany Hall to demand respect. The door would be open upon their arrival.

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The hunger did not affect all of Ireland, or all classes of Irish people, the same way. The island’s western counties, where traditional Gaelic culture stubbornly defied the forces of modernization and Anglicization, were hit especially hard. Until the Famine, they had been able to resist Victorian Britain’s moral reformers, who regarded their way of life as not simply premodern but morally inferior, requiring not a more equitable distribution of resources but reform of the peasantry’s character. A newspaper in Ulster, Ireland’s northernmost province, argued that the Famine did not affect the heavily Protestant areas of the island because “we are a painstaking, industrious, laborious people who desire to work and pay our just debts, and the blessing of the Almighty is upon our labour. If the people of the South had been equally industrious with those of the North, they would not have so much misery upon them.”
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The immediate cause of Ireland’s misery was
Phytophthora infestans
, a deadly fungus exported to Ireland from the New World, just as the potato itself had been. But even as the starving and dying were underway throughout Ireland, British administrators and politicians sought to pinpoint what they saw as the calamity’s true cause—the character, or lack thereof, of the Irish people. Sir Charles Trevelyan, the British civil servant placed in charge of administering public-works projects and other relief efforts during the first two years of hunger, insisted that the catastrophe was a reflection of Ireland’s collective moral failings, “the judgment of God on an indolent . . . people.”
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The British government did not simply throw up its collective hands, even if God’s judgment was involved. Government soup kitchens fed three million people a day in the summer of 1847, an extraordinary administrative and logistical effort. By the end of the year, however, London shifted the burden of paying for relief to Irish landlords, in essence leaving the Irish to devise their own solution to the catastrophe because, in Trevelyan’s words, local ratepayers “know how to discriminate between the different claims for relief.”
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Trevelyan, like many other Victorian politicians, was intent on establishing the moral worthiness of those who applied for government assistance, which is why he believed local ratepayers were in the best position to judge who was worthy of charity—and who was not. Victorian economic policy bore the influence of a handful of economists who also were Protestant clerics, most prominently Thomas Malthus and Nassau Senior. They viewed laissez-faire economics as more than a system to promote commerce. From their perspective, the market, uninhibited by artificial regulations, encouraged virtue among the lower classes and served as a framework for determining the difference between the worthy and the unworthy poor.

Those precepts determined Trevelyan’s course of action during the Famine, but he was not alone in his moralistic approach to the catastrophe. Charles Wood, Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer during most of the Famine years, asserted that the true cause of “helplessness” among the Irish was their “habit of depending on government. . . . If we are to select the destitute, pay them, feed them and find money from hence, we shall have the whole population of Ireland upon us soon enough.” A new publication called
The Economist
insisted that government interference in the distribution of food would only transfer resources “from the more meritorious to the less.”
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British policymakers feared that efforts to assist the starving might make them even more dependent on government charity. It was important, they believed, that government policy should encourage self-reliance. Relief projects, Trevelyan wrote, should be “so unattractive as to furnish no motive to ask for it, except in the absence of every other means of subsistence.”
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Those who were granted outdoor relief—that is, labor on some form of public works—generally toiled up to ten hours a day without a meal break. Other starving Irish people reported to workhouses, fearsome places of death and disease. In a single week in 1848, fourteen hundred people died in the workhouses, out of a total workhouse population in Ireland of about one hundred twenty thousand. While these deaths were regrettable, policymakers believed some good would come of the suffering. Eventually, Trevelyan hoped, Ireland would “begin to understand that the proper business of a Government is to enable private individuals of every rank and profession in life to carry on their several occupations with freedom and safety,” interfering as little as possible with “the business of the land-owner, merchant, money-lender, or any other function of social life.”
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As they dispersed across the Atlantic world, Famine emigrants reached a very different conclusion about “the proper business of a Government.” When they were starving, the government told them they lacked character; when government offered aid, it did so with reluctance. When survivors and their children built new lives in New York and elsewhere, they made it clear through their votes and their actions that they regarded those who provided jobs and influence as their friends and those who offered disdain and moral uplift as their enemies.

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Bishop John Hughes was among the first on either side of the Atlantic to suggest that starvation in Ireland was the result not of an absence of food but of flawed economic dogma. In a remarkable speech in Lower Manhattan’s Broadway Tabernacle on March 20, 1847, Hughes declared that the potato crop’s failure should not have led to “so frightful a consequence” because it was “but one species of the endless varieties of food” grown on the island. The problem, Hughes said, was not to be found in Ireland’s potato fields but in the ideology of a political and economic system that placed profits and the privileges of commerce ahead of human needs.

“The soil has produced its usual tribute for the support of those by whom it has been cultivated, but political economy found the Irish people too poor to pay for the harvest of their own labor and has exported it to a better market, leaving them to die of famine or to live on alms,” he said. “And this same political economy authorizes the provision merchant, even amidst the desolation, to keep his doors locked and his sacks of corn tied up within, waiting for a better price, whilst he himself is, perhaps, at his desk, describing the wretchedness of the people.”

Hughes conceded his church’s traditional belief in the “sacredness of the rights of property” but argued that “the rights of life are dearer and higher than those of property, and in a general famine like the present, there is no law of Heaven, nor of nature, that forbids a starving man to seize on bread wherever he can find it.” He acknowledged that some saw God’s hand in the catastrophe—he asked them “not to blaspheme Providence by calling this God’s famine.” The catastrophe, he insisted, was man-made. The state should take action to “guard the lives of its members against being sacrificed by famine.”
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In linking starvation in Ireland to the British government’s devotion to laissez-faire economics, John Hughes launched a broader assault on the priorities of the transatlantic world’s political and mercantile elites. Hughes’s analysis of the Famine quickly made its way to Ireland, where it won the approval of a group of political dissidents in Dublin called Young Ireland. The bishop’s lecture was reprinted in Young Ireland’s journal,
The Nation
, in early May, touching off an intense political debate in Ireland about the true causes of the ongoing death and displacement. In seeking a political explanation for the Famine, John Hughes helped to create a debate over land ownership, political economy, and distribution of resources in Ireland itself.

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The tens of thousands of Irish who settled in New York during and just after the Great Famine were different, even when compared with their fellow immigrants of an earlier generation. Between 80 and 90 percent of the newcomers were farm laborers or servants with few skills and no assets; only about 10 percent were skilled artisans. Only twenty years earlier, in 1826, 48 percent of Irish immigrants had been skilled workers. More than half of Famine immigrants were from regions where Irish speakers were a majority of the population. And nearly all the new immigrants brought with them the embittering experience of mass starvation and, in many cases, mass eviction.
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The Famine immigration led to profound changes in New York’s civic and political life. After trying to please nativists and immigrants alike in the early 1840s, Tammany Hall’s leaders recognized the power of numbers and the inevitability of a shift in power in the city, abandoning for good the machine’s occasional flirtations with nativism. The city’s old mercantilist and cultural elites responded to Tammany’s embrace of these strangers with reform movements that sought to portray professional politicians as inherently corrupt and the voters who supported them as unworthy of the franchise. Inevitably, these Protestant-dominated reform movements associated corruption with Catholicism. Walt Whitman echoed their complaints. “Shall these dregs of foreign filth—refuse of convents—scullions from Austrian monasteries—be permitted to dictate what Tammany must do?” Whitman asked in 1842. Increasingly, the answer to Whitman’s question was “yes.”
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Famine immigrants transformed New York into the capital of a transatlantic Irish diaspora. New York City accounted for an astonishing 12 percent of all Irish immigrants in the United States during the Famine years of 1845 to 1851. Huge sections of the city became virtual extensions of Irish townlands and villages—four wards along the East River from the Battery to Grand Street were more than a third Irish-born in 1855. So was the famed Sixth Ward, home to African-Americans as well as the immigrant Irish.
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The city became the base of operations for Irish revolutionary organizations and immigrant aid associations, the seat of the profoundly Irish Catholic Church in the United States, and a center of political and cultural debate about Irish identity in America. Bishop Hughes and a cadre of immigrant journalists and political polemicists developed a political interpretation of the Famine that called into question Anglo-American economic dogma and established an ideological framework for the urban liberals who would rise to power in Tammany Hall during the Progressive Era. Indeed, if Progressivism can be defined as (among other things) a rejection of laissez-faire economics, Irish America’s interpretation of the Famine might well serve as a starting point in the development of that critique, long before the excesses of the Gilded Age.
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