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>> 49 2 Good Paddies and Bad Paddies The Evolution of Irishness as a Race-Based Tradition in the United States In 1863, the first recorded St. Patrick’s Day celebration transpired in the city of Yonkers. After attending mass at St. Mary’s, “handsomely dressed” participants marched through the streets and avenues of Getty Square in the city’s southwest quadrant. Every residence “proudly” displayed American flags. A St. Patrick’s Day ball was added in 1876, and by the end of the century, Yonkers could boast of several Irish organizations . Although parades became less common during this time, Yonkers celebrated St. Patrick with nine-course banquets and lectures as well as Irish-themed plays and performances. By World War II, city hall marked St. Patrick’s Day with the adornment of green suits and ties, the distribution of potted shamrocks, a junior high school assembly on the life of St. Patrick, and a “Shamrock Shenanigans” dance at a local high school. A decade later, the city of Yonkers revived the St. Patrick’s Day parade tradition.1 Why were Yonkers parade participants “handsomely dressed” in 1863? What did nine-course meals have to do with St. Patrick? These local manifestations of Irishness that emphasized respectability were part of a larger transformation in how the Irish were viewed and came to view themselves. To comprehend this trajectory, this chapter 50 > 51 New York City and bordering Westchester County beginning in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In port towns such as Yonkers, Irish women worked in private homes as domestics, while Irish men labored on farms or loaded ships. After Ireland witnessed significant population growth across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries , the subsequent pressure on land access prompted many to look elsewhere for opportunity. Anywhere between 800,000 and 1 million people left Ireland for North America after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. But after a series of famines in Ireland during the 1840s, the Irish presence in Yonkers, as elsewhere, increased. In 1850, Yonkers had an Irish population of 756; that number grew to 11,889 by 1900. In a city of 47,931, nearly one in four were either Irish-born or the children of Irish immigrants. Though their numbers did not rival those in Manhattan, the proportion of Irish people in relation to the overall population in Yonkers did.2 These immigrants made a significant geographic journey from colonial Ireland to growing industrial cities such as Yonkers, but their encounters with race along the way ensured an equally important social crossing. The concept of race is generally accepted in academic circles as a social construct, a way of thinking about physical difference that has no biological basis. Race, however, is more than an ideology; the ways that human bodies are represented are deeply rooted in larger structures of power, which determine how resources are distributed. Not only does race have structural and cultural dimensions, but also, as a social construct, the meaning of race can change over time.3 The Irish, once depicted as a racially inept “other” under British rule, and later racially adept in nineteenth-century U.S. society, present an illuminating example of race as a sociohistorical process. Early British accounts depicted the “wild Irish” as cannibals, murderers , and sodomites, serving to justify both the invasion and the colonization of Ireland in the twelfth century. By the time of the Protestant Reformation, religion had become the language with which to establish difference and bar Catholics from serving in the army, owning land, or having a profession or a Catholic education. Within the larger context of European capitalist and colonial expansion in the nineteenth century , as Britain forged an empire under the reign of Queen Victoria, the innate difference between the Anglo or British and Celtic or Irish 52 > 53 living in dirty and disheveled hovels; if middle-class, British domiciles required hardworking, temperate husbands and caring, orderly wives, the “disorderly” Bridget and the “lazy” Paddy, who preferred getting drunk over work, inhabited working-class Irish homes. Domestic standards did not coordinate private life alone; they also provided the basis for these racial opposites, which justified the larger extraction of wealth from Ireland and the larger unequal distribution of resources achieved by British colonialism and capitalist expansion. On the other hand, the disorderly Bridget and the drunken Paddy sometimes could be considered charming. After all, the British would have difficulty incorporating the Irish within their empire if they were too repugnant. That...

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