“I Always Did Despise the Irish”: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Hibernophobia

In a 1923 essay titled “Is America Too Hospitable?” Charlotte Perkins Gilman complained bitterly about the “swarming immigrants” flocking into the United States who, she claimed, lacked the “progressiveness, ingenuity [and] kindliness of disposition which form a distinct national character.” The liberal United States immigration policies, she argued, had led to an influx of foreign interlopers who were attracted to “an established nation [with] more remunerative employment than they can find at home.”¹ Regrettably, were she alive today, there is no question that she would align herself with the strident anti-immigrant movement that supports the building of a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico. Gilman’s hostility to a liberal immigration policy is also clear in her autobiography: “Americans are the kind of people who have made a country that every other kind of people wants to get into!”² Her rancor is perhaps most evident when she laments that by the early part of the twentieth century, New York City had become so populated by “foreigners” that only “7 per cent” of its inhabitants were “native-born.” The immigrant population was so large, she carped, that “I had forgotten what my people looked like!” (316). Gilman did not mince words when she vilified the political idealism of the “high-minded old forefathers” who took pity on “the poor and oppressed” asylum seekers. “The resultant flood of low-grade humanity is not immigration at all, but sheer importation,” she complained.³

While Gilman’s xenophobia was largely generalized, her contempt for the Irish was particularly virulent; her writings often betrayed blatant hibernophobic leanings: “Even . . . long-established residents as the Irish remain Irish,—they are not Americans,” she groused. “They would willingly sacrifice the interests of this country, or of the world as a whole, for the sake of Ireland.”⁴ Her hibernophobia—a deep-seated prejudice toward Ireland or Irish immigrants—persisted throughout her life. Just two days before her suicide at the age of seventy-five, Gilman, gravely ill from the breast cancer that had transformed her once-vigorous body to “just bones and drapery,” continued her indictment of the Irish in the final letter she wrote before her death. To her old friend, Edward Alsworth Ross, Gilman remarked: “I alwa[y]s did admire & like the Scotch—and despise the Irish! Did you ever think when the New Wave opened and Little England, Little Scotland, Little Portugal, Little Holland and Sweden and Norway and Denmark put to see [sic] in their cockleshells and helped themselves [to] the new land, little Ireland never produced one boat!!! Preferred to sit still and holler about being oppressed!”⁵

The bigotry that Gilman expressed on her deathbed echoed her sentiments from ten years earlier when she described to Ross her theory about the contributions of individual countries on the world stage: “Nations vary in value to the world, some useful, some of small account, some deleterious. . . . You’ll be amused by my estimate of Ireland’s achievements, but, as a nation, what have they contributed to the world besides a few writers?”⁶ Although we can only speculate about the origins of Gilman’s antagonism toward the Irish, it follows a long and familiar pattern of ethnocentrism in her life. Her hibernophobia may have been rooted in an irrational, lingering anti-Catholic sentiment to which Gilman clung and an acceptance of the prevalent stereotypes at the turn of the century that depicted the Irish as intellectually deficient. Despite their obviously white racial pedigree, Irish immigrants were not only considered racially inferior, but also, nativists believed, their Catholicism and Irish nationalism “made the Irish unfit for assimilation into the white American mainstream.”⁷ It is possible, too, that Gilman’s distrust of the Irish stemmed from the lingering effects of propaganda that originally swept through New England in the mid-nineteenth century that “Irish servants had been told by the [Catholic] Church to poison their Protestant employers.”⁸ In the early decades of the nineteenth century, too, Gilman’s great-grandfather Lyman Beecher, the renowned Calvinist preacher, promoted conspiracy theories warning that...