Daniel Deagler

The first St. Patrick’s Day celebration in America took place in Boston in 1737. It was organized by the Charitable Irish Society of Boston, a Protestant group founded that year to help needy (Protestant) Irishmen. Although there are few counties in New England today where Catholics do not make up a majority of the population, from it’s founding in 1620 to the middle of the eighteenth century (230 years), New England was an exercise in Calvinist self rule. Anglicans and Quakers were not particularly welcome, let alone Papists. This changed dramatically in 1845, and the reason for the change is the lumper.

The lumper is a type of potato. It is a waxy potato, meaning it’s low in starch, and is not considered particularly good tasting. Its value is that it produces high yields. This is why the Irish enthusiastically embraced it when it was introduced into Munster around 1810, from whence it spread quickly to the entire island. (Potatoes are not native to Ireland; they come from the Andes Mountains of South America.) 70% to 90% of the Irish potato crop was planted in lumpers when a blight, called Phytophthora infestans, killed off the lumpers in the years 1845 to 1849. The resulting famine killed twenty-five percent of the Irish population – one million people – and forced another million to emigrate. Most came to America and their arrival profoundly changed America. The Irish poured themselves into a soup that had previously consisted only of  Protestants from a handful of northern European countries. They changed the American broth into a stew.

Unlike other immigrant groups, the Irish did not fan out to farm and ranch the vast American wilderness. They settled in cities and to this day the highest concentrations of Americans who consider themselves predominantly Irish are in the cities and suburbs of America’s largest eastern and mid-western cities. The Irish were settled in the slums and tenements when the second great wave of immigration, this time from southern and eastern Europe, arrived at the turn of the twentieth century.

One of the most peculiar shotgun weddings in American history was the accidental coupling of Irish and Italian immigrants into neighborhoods, schools and, most importantly, church. Although the Irish and Italians frequently had their own parishes, their common Catholicism threw these disparate peoples together. Neither party was thrilled with the arrangement. Except for their Catholic faith they had nothing in common, and even that was perceived differently within the two groups.

The Irish came from a place – northern Europe – where everybody but them had abandoned the old faith, and they suffered for it. Their faith was their identity, the thing that made them what they were. Irish Catholicism was the Church Militant. The Italians came from a place – southern Europe - where Catholicism was the default religion: the pope was Italian and the Church an Italian institution. In their Catholicism was found the greatest art and music of Western Civilization, the genius of the Renaissance.  Italian Catholicism was the Church Triumphant.

Because of their fifty-year head start it was the Irish who formed and shaped the institutional Catholic Church in America. Their strength in numbers in the cities allowed the Irish to exploit the political system, and Irishmen swelled the ranks of the big city police and fire departments and every other municipal agency. And St. Patrick’s Day became the granddaddy of all ethnic holidays in America.

The Italians especially resented the domination of the Irish. Today Irish-Italian rivalry is mostly good-natured and light-hearted, something done across the table at the Knights of Columbus, and many thousands of Americans share both ancestries. But it was not always so, especially when the Irish in power did all they could to keep the Italians out of it. The Italians also believe, not without justification, that theirs is the superior culture. (Think “Irish cuisine,” an oxymoron if there ever was one.)

And St. Patrick’s Day puts them right over the edge. From their perspective only on St. Patrick's Day are so many so proud of so little.  Ask an Italian if he or she is going to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and the most polite answer you’ll get is, “Please….”  Less polite answers will sound like dialogue from the Sopranos.

On March 17th, African-Americans and South Asians, Jews, Japanese, and Mexicans will join the Irish in  wearin’  of the green.  Pisans? Not so many.

Daniel Deagler is a letter carrier for the US Postal Service. He is three quarters Irish.