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2 “Shall We Fight for England?” 19 T wo days after the Sixty-ninth had tramped up Tenth Avenue in the slush, as war with Germany bore down heavily on the United States, the Irish World and American Industrial Liberator asked its 35,000 readers “Shall We Fight for England?” It was a question New York’s Celtic community was now asking— and arguing about. The editors of one of the most important proIrish newspapers in the country warned of what would happen if the United States, especially its Irish-American citizens, went to war. “The function of a vassal is to fight for the interests of his suzerain and not for his own,” they wrote. “He fights that he may be retained in vassalage. So England has drawn upon her Hindoos and Gorkhas and her Irish and Scottish serfs. The more they suffer and die for their over-lord, more their chains are riveted. So it is with us.”1 The editors found many sympathizers in the ranks of the Sixtyninth . One of them was John Prout of F Company, the supply officer when the regiment had been in Texas. Prout was Irish born and a supporter of Sinn Fein. In the 1920s, he went back to his native country to fight in its Civil War. He became a major general in the army of the Irish Free State and was credited with founding Ireland’s version of West Point. He once explained to the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick his feelings about England. “To the English,” he had told them, “Ireland means a happy hunting ground for the adventurer, the confiscator, the hangman, the tax collector, penal laws and servitude.” And sounding much like the editors of the Irish World, Prout said he did not care what others thought of the Irish and their bloody rebellion against king, the parliament, and the people of England. “One hour of freedom, accompanied by poverty and suffering, was better for the soul of 20 DUFFY’S WAR Ireland than ages of material prosperity, with subserviency to any alien government.”2 It was this hatred Irish Americans felt for England—with roots going back through generations and embraced by Prout and others— that had brought about the creation of their own regiment. In the early nineteenth century, before there was the Sixtyninth , New York had been a city of explosive ethnic change. The Irish had provided much of the fuel firing that change. With famine and repression driving them out of their native country, especially in the 1840s, they spiked the population of Manhattan— raising it from just over 300,000 to more than 800,000. In the decade leading up to the American Civil War they had played the most dramatic part in turning Gotham into the country’s largest metropolis. Soon one in every four New Yorkers was Irish born. Yet they were humiliated, shunned, and discriminated against by an establishment that had been losing too much ground to them too fast. The door of opportunity had been slammed in their faces. They found refuge amongst their own in the crowded wards below Fourteenth Street. They found political power there, too, in the wards. In time the Irish would govern most of the city, spreading out from the wards to the wigwam of Tammany Hall, where they grabbed control in 1872 when Honest John Kelly took over— the first of ten successive Irish bosses. In the meantime, the monarchs of the ward ruled with iron fists. They paid off city officials, bought votes, and doled out prize jobs—from fire fighting and police work to street cleaning and sanitation. Another place of refuge for the Irish was the neighborhood militia. In Ireland they had been denied the right to bear arms or take part in any form of military training unless they did so in the British army or navy. In New York and other urban centers where they had settled, volunteer militia units soon appeared, bearing names like the “O’Connell Guards,” the “Erin Guard,” or the “Irish National Grenadiers.” In the neighborhoods around Manhattan’s Prince Street, the city’s newest citizens had gathered at the headquarters of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a local tavern known as Hibernian Hall. There they had argued politics, the fate of the old homeland, and what had to be done, and then organized companies of militia. They had elected officers and sergeants and had drilled; and many had dreamt of a...

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