Treatment of Irish immigrants- Duffys cut.

jonniebgood1

Duffys cut was a part of the excavation for a railway across America that made use of Irish immigrants in the early 1800's. This story focuses attention on what type of treatment Irish immigrants in this era got from the native population. Interest in this story arises from a report featured on the news at 1 today detailing how the remains of Irish workers had been sought out in the valley containing 'Duffys cut'.

Frank and Bill Watson, the historians who first located the remains of Irish railroad workers, many of whom are believed to have been murdered in 1832, say that the mass grave they have been seeking is unreachable.

It has been located 30 feet underground but too near to an existing Amtrak track to unearth it. It is said to hold the remains of up to 57 Irish emigrants from Donegal, Derry and Tyrone.

The Watsons, believe most of the Irish were likely victims of lynch mobs driven by anti-Irish sentiment which was widespread at the time

Read more: http://www.irishcentral.com/roots/Duffys-Cut-dig-ends-as-Amtrak-refuses-mass-grave-excavation-132908668.html#ixzz1odAPw73v

So was this common treatment?
What were conditions like on the railway projects?
Who were the other workers on these projects? Chinese, etc?
Any other information on Duffys cut or similar happenings are welcome as they will show if this is isolated or common?

jonniebgood1

The general welcome received by the Irish was in many times negative. From Kinsella:

All major cities had their "Irish Town" or "Shanty Town" where the Irish clung together. Our immigrant ancestors were not wanted in America. Ads for employment often were followed by "NO IRISH NEED APPLY." They were forced to live in cellars and shanties, partly because of poverty but also because they were considered bad for the neighborhood...they were unfamiliar with plumbing and running water. These living conditions bred sickness and early death. It was estimated that 80% of all infants born to Irish immigrants in New York City died. Their brogue and dress provoked ridicule; their poverty and illiteracy provoked scorn.

The Chicago Post wrote, "The Irish fill our prisons, our poor houses...Scratch a convict or a pauper, and the chances are that you tickle the skin of an Irish Catholic. Putting them on a boat and sending them home would end crime in this country." http://www.kinsella.org/history/histira.htm

I would like to know if the 80% statistic is correct, it seems extraordinarily high.

the Irish arrived at a time of need for America. The country was growing and it needed men to do the heavy work of building bridges, canals, and railroads. It was hard, dangerous work, a common expression heard among the railroad workers was "an Irishman was buried under every tie." Desperation drove them to these jobs.

Not only the men worked, but the women too. They became chamber maids, cooks, and the caretakers of children. Early Americans disdained this type of work, fit only for servants, the common sentiment being, "Let Negroes be servants, and if not Negroes, let Irishmen fill their place..." The Blacks hated the Irish and it appeared to be a mutual feeling. They were the first to call the Irish "white ******." http://www.kinsella.org/history/histira.htm

MarchDub

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

The general welcome received by the Irish was in many times negative. From Kinsella...

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

I would like to know if the 80% statistic is correct, it seems extraordinarily high.

The site you give doesn't look reliable to me - the 'Kinsella' one I mean. I don't see any references etc. it just seems to be a written opinion and we can't see where any of the claims/statistics are coming from. Although there is reliable information on the fact that the Irish were not treated well on their arrival there.

But some of what is being quoted, for example, may come from anti-Irish propaganda exercises of the time in nineteenth century America. There was a woman, called Maria Monk for instance who wrote excessively anti-Irish, anti-Catholic screeds but her wild claims entered the narrative of how the Irish lived in America, how Catholics behaved and their relationship with other groups. She had long been discredited. So - as always with history - it's important to know source material, why it was written and by whom etc.

One of the best acknowledged experts on the Irish in America is Lawrence J McCaffrey [retired Professor, Loyola University, Chicago] who has written extensively on this subject - as well as on Catholicism in Ireland.

I have some of his books and papers, including The Irish Catholic Diaspora in America and will look through it and see what information he gives on some of the questions you ask, like infant mortality.

MarchDub

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

Duffys cut was a part of the excavation for a railway across America that made use of Irish immigrants in the early 1800's. This story focuses attention on what type of treatment Irish immigrants in this era got from the native population. Interest in this story arises from a report featured on the news at 1 today detailing how the remains of Irish workers had been sought out in the valley containing 'Duffys cut'.

The Duffy's Cut excavation is very interesting indeed - and I have been trying for awhile to get further information on it. Here is the site for information on the work so far.

http://duffyscut.immaculata.edu/Articles.html

jonniebgood1

MarchDub wrote: »

The site you give doesn't look reliable to me - the 'Kinsella' one I mean. I don't see any references etc. it just seems to be a written opinion and we can't see where any of the claims/statistics are coming from. Although there is reliable information on the fact that the Irish were not treated well on their arrival there.

I agree about the site, I tried to get a source for the 80% figure but not much success yet. It is mentioned in several places so I will keep looking:

http://www.rzuser.uni-heidelberg.de/~el6/presentations/Irish_Americans_S2_WS2003/Anti_Irish_Sentiment.htm

http://www.grin.com/en/e-book/109765/irish-immigrants-in-new-york-city-1850

http://www.propaganda.net/skoleside/?stil=1427

It would obviously be more helpful if these mentions included where they got the 80% from.

MarchDub

I couldn't find any actual figures for infant death in McCaffrey except a reference to 'a high' infant mortality rate. But I did learn that the US census did not include infant deaths until the census of 1910. A published paper by Cormac O Grada and others on The Fertility of the Irish in the United States draws this from the 1910 census figures:

Almost 70 percent of first-generation Irish immigrants had lost at least one child. Twenty-nine percent of children born to these women died by the census date. The second-generation Irish and native-born also had high child mortality, but not as high as the first generation Irish. For emigrants from rural Ireland, these high child mortality rates were one of the new conditions they encountered in America. Child mortality in the Irish countryside was low by the standards of the time.

jonniebgood1

A look at the tenement conditions and the subsequent protest movement against the conditions in these tenements shows that in New York Irish immigrants would have had to endure difficult living arrangements. A more believable infant mortality rate of 10% is given in this 1874 New york Times report: http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=FB0F15F63A5D1A7493C2AA178CD85F408784F9
I think they may have based this figure on research the previous year by Jacob A. Riis who found that the tenements had this rate of infant mortality: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/503662/Jacob-A-Riis

The Irish were not alone in these poor conditions. In 'Formative years: children's health in the United States, 1880-2000' By Alexandra Minna Stern, the author refers to high infant mortality amongst the German immigrant community in New York, it being far higher than in small towns in Germany (pg 25).

Much of this was due to the conditions of the tenements (mirroring later problems in Dublin by accounts). Conditions were not pleasant.

In the summer time, when the heat was very intense, people often slept on the fire escapes and/or roofs.

Most tenements in the lower east side were in multi-use neighborhoods and situated close to factories, docks, slaughterhouses, and power stations which provided employment to some in the area. Convenient to get to work but with it meant living with increased air pollution, high noice levers, foul air and obnoxious smells.

There were frequent issues with vermin: mice, rats, roaches. For many years pigs roamed the streets. The major means of transport was horse cart and the animals were kept in the neighborhood. http://maggieblanck.com/NewYork/Life.html

This website seems to have a balanced and well sourced commentary on the tenements of New York http://maggieblanck.com/NewYork/Life.html
For example it references areas of foreign occupation

The poverty, filth and over-crowding is some foreign quarters is pitiable and sickening. There are sections that resemble ant hills and beehives more than human habitations.....

"The neglected children of our foreigners, crowded in dark and unwholesome tenement houses, furnish an ever increasing army of young criminals. The presence of foreigners is exerting a blighting influence on our American Sabbath. The shops and stores are in full operation on the Lord's day. The streets are crowded with push-cards and eager venders are loudly shouting their wares. Pleasure excursions, dance halls and theatres do an enormous business on Sundays.........

The bigotry and ignorance of some of our foreigners surpasses belief. During the past summer the Polish Jews in New York have been intensely excited because they believe that Christian missionaries seek to brand their children with the sign of the cross."

By the reverent W. T. Elsing

New York City Mission Monthly, Volumes 12-13, 1899

MarchDub

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

It would obviously be more helpful if these mentions included where they got the 80% from.

OK I think I may have uncovered where it likely came from.

I have found a reference to very high Infant mortality rates. The rate I found is 75% infant mortality and is in Kerby Miller’s Emigrant and Exiles; Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. The original ref that he cites is from Charlotte O’Brien's article published in 1884. I had to type the following out myself so it took a little time….but the description of life in the US for Irish immigrants is so appalling that I wanted to post some of that also.

Given the persistent poverty of Irish emigrants and their children, it was not surprising that descriptions of lower working class Irish-American neighbourhoods in the 1920s were often strikingly reminiscent of the destitution and demoralization described at mid-[19th] century. Both residents’ and outsiders’ accounts of Irish slum life in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and other cities revealed societies ravaged by chronic unemployment, alcoholism and disease. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Irish Americans still contributed to a higher proportion of the nation’s paupers than did any other white ethnic group; for example in 1891 the Irish born constituted 66 per cent of New York almshouses inmates, only a slight drop since 1870, and in 1900 the Irish in Boston’s North and West End neighbourhoods received a proportion of public relief far exceeding their percentage of the population.


Mortality rates, especially from tuberculosis, remained appallingly high: in 1915 the Irish death rate in New York City was 34 per 1,000, highest in the city and twice that of contemporary Ireland. Infant mortality assumed frightening proportions; after a visit to New York in 1882 Charlotte O’Brien claimed that 75 percent of the children born "among the Irish poor die”. “It would keep you poor burying your children” one woman told her.

Charlotte O’Brien – daughter of William Smith O’Brien- was a nineteenth century Cork woman who concerned herself with poor living conditions in Ireland and who wrote about the conditions of abysmal poverty amongst the Irish in New York after a visit there. She published an article ‘The Emigrant in new York’ in 1884 and the infant mortality figures are given in there. I assume that her infant mortality figures are the ones being used by other authors, as they are with Miller.

jonniebgood1

The American author Henry David Thoreau wrote about the Irish immigrants. His views were mixed but are an account from the time. Some seem quite racist, he describes individual immigrants negatively in 'Walden' (John Fields, pg. 359) and collectively dismisses the Irish labourers "Their condition only proves what squalidness may consist with civilisation" (pg 61).
More relevant to this thread is the link between the Irish and the railroad and there is also a clear reference to these Irish labourers being expendable

Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again.

taken From Walden full text availiable here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm

jonniebgood1

I was looking into historical myths in relation to a different thread and in trying to link to Irish myths I came across some analysis on the "No Irish need apply" signs that some people believe welcomed Irish immigrants to the US. The analysis is by a retired history professor and can be read in full here http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/no-irish.htm . As it seems to be something that is open to challenge I post it here to see if anyone can challenge it.

He outlines a number of interesting ideas in relation to this.

The fact that Irish vividly "remember" NINA signs is a curious historical puzzle. There are no contemporary or retrospective accounts of a specific sign at a specific location. No particular business enterprise is named as a culprit. No historian, 2 archivist, or museum curator has ever located one 3 ; no photograph or drawing exists. 4 No other ethnic group complained about being singled out by comparable signs. Only Irish Catholics have reported seeing the sign in America—no Protestant, no Jew, no non-Irish Catholic has reported seeing one.
....
In the entire file of the New York Times from 1851 to 1923, there are two NINA ads for men, one of which is for a teenager. Computer searches of classified help wanted ads in the daily editions of other online newspapers before 1923 such as the Booklyn Eagle, the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune show that NINA ads for men were extremely rare--fewer than two per decade. The complete absence of evidence suggests that probably zero such signs were seen at commercial establishments, shops, factories, stores, hotels, railroads, union halls, hiring halls, personnel offices, labor recruiters etc. anywhere in America, at any time.
....
The late Tip O'Neill remembered the signs from his youth in Boston in 1920s; Senator Ted Kennedy reported the most recent sighting, telling the Senate during a civil rights debate that he saw them when growing up 5 Historically, [End Page 405] physical NINA signs could have flourished only in intensely anti-Catholic or anti-Irish eras, especially the 1830—1870 period. Thus reports of sightings in the 1920s or 1930s suggest the myth had become so deeply rooted in Irish-American folk mythology that it was impervious to evidence.

So is Jensen correct on this. What real evidence is there of discrimination against Irish immigrants?