The Real Irish-American Story Not Taught in Schools
Tuesday, March 17, 2015
By Bill Bigelow
28 Comments
To support the famine relief effort, British tax policy required landlords to pay the local taxes of
their poorest tenant farmers, leading many landlords to forcibly evict struggling farmers and
destroy their cottages in order to save money. (Sketch: The Irish Famine: Interior of a Peasants
Hut)
“Wear green on St. Patrick’s Day or get pinched.” That pretty much sums up the Irish-American
“curriculum” that I learned when I was in school. Yes, I recall a nod to the so-called Potato
Famine, but it was mentioned only in passing.
Sadly, today’s high school textbooks continue to largely ignore the famine, despite the fact that it
was responsible for unimaginable suffering and the deaths of more than a million Irish peasants,
and that it triggered the greatest wave of Irish immigration in U.S. history. Nor do textbooks
make any attempt to help students link famines past and present.
Yet there is no shortage of material that can bring these dramatic events to life in the classroom.
In my own high school social studies classes, I begin with Sinead O’Connor’s haunting rendition
of “Skibbereen,” which includes the verse:
… Oh it’s well I do remember, that bleak
December day,
The landlord and the sheriff came, to drive
Us all away
They set my roof on fire, with their cursed
English spleen
And that’s another reason why I left old
Skibbereen.
By contrast, Holt McDougal’s U.S. history textbook The Americans, devotes a flat two sentences
to “The Great Potato Famine.” Prentice Hall’s America: Pathways to the Present fails to offer a
single quote from the time. The text calls the famine a “horrible disaster,” as if it were a natural
calamity like an earthquake. And in an awful single paragraph, Houghton Mifflin’s The
Enduring Vision: A History of the American People blames the “ravages of famine” simply on
“a blight,” and the only contemporaneous quote comes, inappropriately, from a landlord, who
describes the surviving tenants as “famished and ghastly skeletons.” Uniformly, social studies
textbooks fail to allow the Irish to speak for themselves, to narrate their own horror.
These timid slivers of knowledge not only deprive students of rich lessons in Irish-American
history, they exemplify much of what is wrong with today’s curricular reliance on corporateproduced textbooks.
First, does anyone really think that students will remember anything from the books’ dull and
lifeless paragraphs? Today’s textbooks contain no stories of actual people. We meet no one,
learn nothing of anyone’s life, encounter no injustice, no resistance. This is a curriculum bound
for boredom. As someone who spent almost 30 years teaching high school social studies, I can
testify that students will be unlikely to seek to learn more about events so emptied of drama,
emotion, and humanity.
Nor do these texts raise any critical questions for students to consider. For example, it’s
important for students to learn that the crop failure in Ireland affected only the potato—during
the worst famine years, other food production was robust. Michael Pollan notes in The Botany of
Desire, “Ireland’s was surely the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely
the most convincing proof of its folly.” But if only this one variety of potato, the Lumper, failed,
and other crops thrived, why did people starve?
Thomas Gallagher points out in Paddy’s Lament, that during the first winter of famine, 1846-47,
as perhaps 400,000 Irish peasants starved, landlords exported 17 million pounds sterling worth of
grain, cattle, pigs, flour, eggs, and poultry—food that could have prevented those deaths.
Throughout the famine, as Gallagher notes, there was an abundance of food produced in Ireland,
yet the landlords exported it to markets abroad.
The school curriculum could and should ask students to reflect on the contradiction of starvation
amidst plenty, on the ethics of food exports amidst famine. And it should ask why these patterns
persist into our own time.
More than a century and a half after the “Great Famine,” we live with similar, perhaps even more
glaring contradictions. Raj Patel opens his book, Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the
Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System: “Today, when we produce more food than ever
before, more than one in ten people on Earth are hungry. The hunger of 800 million happens at
the same time as another historical first: that they are outnumbered by the one billion people on
this planet who are overweight.”
Patel’s book sets out to account for “the rot at the core of the modern food system.” This is a
curricular journey that our students should also be on — reflecting on patterns of poverty, power,
and inequality that stretch from 19th century Ireland to 21st century Africa, India, Appalachia,
and Oakland; that explore what happens when food and land are regarded purely as commodities
in a global system of profit.
But today’s corporate textbook-producers are no more interested in feeding student curiosity
about this inequality than were British landlords interested in feeding Irish peasants. Take
Pearson, the global publishing giant. At its website, the corporation announces (redundantly) that
“we measure our progress against three key measures: earnings, cash and return on invested
capital.” The Pearson empire had 2011 worldwide sales of more than $9 billion—that’s nine
thousand million dollars, as I might tell my students. Multinationals like Pearson have no interest
in promoting critical thinking about an economic system whose profit-first premises they
embrace with gusto.
As mentioned, there is no absence of teaching materials on the Irish famine that can touch head
and heart. In a role play, “Hunger on Trial,” that I wrote and taught to my own students in
Portland, Oregon—included at the Zinn Education Project website— students investigate who or
what was responsible for the famine. The British landlords, who demanded rent from the starving
poor and exported other food crops? The British government, which allowed these food exports
and offered scant aid to Irish peasants? The Anglican Church, which failed to denounce selfish
landlords or to act on behalf of the poor? A system of distribution, which sacrificed Irish
peasants to the logic of colonialism and the capitalist market?
These are rich and troubling ethical questions. They are exactly the kind of issues that fire
students to life and allow them to see that history is not simply a chronology of dead facts
stretching through time.
So go ahead: Have a Guinness, wear a bit of green, and put on the Chieftains. But let’s honor the
Irish with our curiosity. Let’s make sure that our schools show some respect, by studying the
social forces that starved and uprooted over a million Irish—and that are starving and uprooting
people today.
© 2015 Zinn Education Project http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/03/17/real-irishamerican-story-not-taught-schools
Bill Bigelow taught high school social studies in Portland, Ore. for almost 30 years. He is the
curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools and the co-director of the Zinn Education Project. This
project offers free materials to teach people’s history and an “If We Knew Our History” article
series. Bigelow is author or co-editor of numerous books, including A People’s History for the
Classroom and The Line Between Us: Teaching About the Border and Mexican Immigration, and
most recently, A People's Curriculum for the Earth: Teaching Climate Change and the
Environmental Crisis.
Top Comments
armybrat1d We learned a lot more when I went to school - including about 'enclosure laws' and
tenant farmers - and I was never interested in UK history (beyond mythology). Wonder if kids
these days learn about the tulip bubble/scandal either - or Charles Martel - or the Asian exclusion
acts... kids these days don't get 'an education' - they get trained to do a job without thinking or
asking too many questions. Dewey would have loved it.
MaPol1d When I was a kid (i. e. from the mid-1950's through the late 1960's) in school growing
up going to the public schools in a suburban town, and a large suburban public high school, what
was taught to us in United States History classes didn't even really begin to scratch the surface,
generally. Inotherwords, we were not even taught the half of it. The same holds true today,
obviously.
It wasn't just true of Irish-Americans, but Americans in general.
Delilah24h lest we not forget our people, were also slaves. We were worth less than our african
brothers. 5 schilling to their 25. We were made example of , if tried for escape. Our people were
bred like animals with the africans, but this practice was soon banned, to keep the African trade,
more profitable, much like the ban of marijuana, now, thanks to big medical.
marlborough22h And of course there is so much more! Irish faught on both sides during the Civil
War. They were caricatured in magazines and newspapers as little more than apes. Together with
Italians they were viewed with suspicion in terms of allowing Catholicism to enter and flourish
in the country. They were blamed for disease, gang violence political corruption etc. To really
teach, to really try to encourage an understanding of where the Irish in America came from, how
they were treated through the years and the abuse many of us faced is to learn about the emigrant
experience in this country from the emigrants' point of view. And perhaps we have the answer as
to why the history presented is so scant. It calls into question the fables kids are asked to believe
about democracy and justice, and we really don't want to raise a generation of voters or
employees who question and critically think. I'm Irish, born and raised there. And to be clear, we
don't eat corned beef and Irish beer is black. Make Zinn required reading from elementary school
to college.
ctrl_z22h Excellent piece. I'm going to send it to my daughter's school administrator.
wantrealdemocracy20h
ctrl_z Won't do any good. Since the establishment of the Federal
Department of Education all schools are under federal control. The Feds insist on high cost
testing and want to link federal education aid to the scores on these tests. The children are being
taught to regurgitate the 'right' answer (as decided by the corporate makers of the tests) as fast as
possible. No thinking allowed. This is not teaching. It is indoctrination. All activities the the
school must have federal approval. It is all a matter of boring repetition. The IQ or our students is
falling year by year---due to this bad education and the poor quality of our food. Fluoride, the
hazardous waste that is put in our drinking water, makes the children placid and apathetic. They
put this in the water at the Nazi prison camps and they were able to reduce the number of guards
by 75%. It makes people dumb and listless and unable to stand up and fight back. Welcome to
'merica! Sig Heil!
ctrl_z
19h
wantrealdemocracy Actually, she attends a public, non-profit Charter School and they create
their own curriculum.
bebeg90317h ctrl_z You're lucky yours is non-profit and public. I'm not sure how that works,
but I know most charter schools are even tighter on using the federally mandated curriculum than
public schools.
ctrl_z14h
bebeg903 These days anyone with their kid in a decent school is lucky.
nanabluect10h
CommonDreams For me the question has always been this. Why is it that the
starving people continued to grow the food but did not just eat? In germany, under Hitler, why
did the people continue to get on the trains? At first they did not know where the trains were
going, but eventually everyone understood that the jews were being slaughtered. In ireland, and
many, many countries before that, people get so down trodden that they act against their own
sense of survival. We, here in America, inherited a country that was founded on freedom. yes, it
is true, that there were and are continued problems. But this country has been a bastion of
freedoms since its conception. founded by men who, though flawed, wanted all men and women
to be equal. Will we continue to give up these freedoms by just ignoring the politicians who are
taking these freedoms away from us. Will we too either starve as we create the very food that
would save us, or will we climb aboard the trains to our demise? History always repeats itself.
There will always be people who are evil. But they are a small number when compared to the
people who are basically good. Why then is it that the minority of evil always gets the majority
to behave in a detrimental way, leading to their demise.
Mairead10h nanabluect For me the question has always been this. Why is it that the starving
people continued to grow the food but did not just eat? In germany, under Hitler, why did the
people continue to get on the trains?
It's an excellent question, and the answer is more or less the same as the answer to "why did
Milgram's subjects continue to (as they thought) deliver shocks to an innocent person?", and
"why didn't the soldiers of the 1914 Xmas truce simply refuse to resume killing one another?".
In every case, the answer is the same: they couldn't figure out how to stop and still survive. The
Irish would have been hanged for refusing to turn over their crops, the Jews shot in the street, the
soldiers shot as deserters, and Milgram's subjects would have felt a kind of social death from
shame.
.
Nothing less than revolution could have saved them. In every case but Milgram's where saying
No and making it stick would have been revolutionary enough, the victims would have had to
kill, or be killed for disobedience.
Hierarchy: it's not just another way of organising.
Mossonarock Of course, little is said of the Potato Famine today. It was hard to get anyone
outside of Ireland to even notice it at the time. During the famine, there were many English who
refused to believe there was a famine in Ireland. Many Englishmen who chose to be concerned
had to actually go over to Ireland to see for themselves. And even after seeing the suffering first
hand, they often weren't believed when they came back to tell the tale of what they saw and so
couldnt drum up any collective action to provide famine relief. The relationship between
Landlords and Tenants in Ireland varied greatly too. Some Landlords exhausted their funds to
feed their Tenants. Some Landlords were scoundrels.
Hobgoblin 9h We, here in America, inherited a country that was founded on freedom. yes, it is
true, that there were and are continued problems. But this country has been a bastion of freedoms
since its conception. founded by men who, though flawed, wanted all men and women to be
equal.
You don't really believe all that US exceptionialist guff, do you? Sounds like a speech from a tea
party rally. Well, come on, they didn't really want all men and women to be equal, did they? I
mean, you can drop the women for a start as they were excluded from voting and the political
process. So just the men then. You can also drop those whose skin tone was a bit on the dark side
as they usually tended to be slaves which is a condition, I think you'll agree, even a mind most
excellently skilled in cognitive dissonance would have a job hooking up to the concept of them
being inheritors of freedom. And you can drop all the poor folks who, not being property owners,
that is to say landed gentry, were not allowed to vote or have much input into the poltical process
of ruling the place. And you can drop the myriad tribes of native aborgines whose experience of
this glorious freedom you extol was a kind of slow or rapid genocide and the theft of their lands
where they had previously been probably a lot freer than anyone in the new system were offering
them. So you can exlude all them I guess, eh? but apart from all that, spot on! And now on to the
next step, let's give other folks in far away backward lands the benefits of that glorious freedom,
of which we are the gleaming bastion, by dropping bombs on them, until the whole world is as
free as we are*
*terms and conditions may apply, don't forget to read the small print.
diveshopingoa8h
Hobgoblin When the constitution was signed it gave rights to 11% of the
people that lived here. Freedom for some slavery for others.
norskmann8h But this country has been a bastion of freedoms since its conception. founded by
men who, though flawed, wanted all men and women to be equal.
Oh goodness... a perfect example of the poor education system in the US..
Popsiq8h 1 Like the Highland Clearances 50 years earlier and a host of other 'ethnic cleansings'
(our term) studding history, the 'famine' was a product of the 'politico-economic climate' of the
times.
This sad old world has seen its share of injustice and misfortune. What is evident is that there
seems to be no 'holocaust' from which human beings can not recover. If they don't forget, they
can forgive, learn something and move on to be 'better' than their afflicted ancestors.
It's when people can't forgive, nurture the trauma and refuse to learn something, that such
travesties are perpetuated and reproduced. When an injustice becomes the defining characteristic
of a people, they're doomed to repeat it, to relive it every day and it will 'screw them up'.
Popsiq7h Mairead You need to look at the nature of society in Ireland in the 1830's-40's. 'The
Famine' didn't happen in the cities. Nor did it happen to farmers with land or who weren't
subsistence tenants. In some places the effects were ameliorated - much of the emigration was
'charitably-funded'- there was no economic depression or other situation that was causal or
contributary. The deaths don't appear to have been deliberately provoked by government policy
although a 'laissez-faire' reluctance to intervene was prevalent during the early years of the
period.
Sadly, the Famine was caused by the failure of the staple crop of the poor, their inability to adapt
quickly to the changed circumstance and a general inability/reluctance to deal with a very large
problem affecting people with no social connection.
The 'Irish Clearances' came later historically toward the end of the 1800's. The point then was the
removal of the 'subsistance tenantry' who hadn't been dislodged by the Famine.
The Irish Famine pales in significance to the effects of similar situations that have occurred
regularly in Africa, India and China including in the past century. They're not taught at all.
Mairead7h Popsiq The deaths don't appear to have been deliberately provoked by government
policy although a 'laissez-faire' reluctance to intervene was prevalent during the early years of
the period.
You're pointing out one of the subtlest types of filtering, though apparently without recognising
it. When there is a disaster, and government functionaries choose to do nothing in amelioration
even though they could, they are actually choosing to support the outcome of the disaster. No
choice is also a choice, though often not recognised as such by the victims.
In the 1800s, many Scots clan chiefs decided to violate the age-old principles of the clan system,
in which the chief acted as a redistributor and the clansfolk supported him (nearly always "him")
in war and peace. But those scunners decided they could get more wealth from sheep, and
shipped the people off to live or die as they could on the coast of Nova Scotia (and elsewhere),
typically with no more than the clothes on their backs and happen a sack of tatties for the trip.
My own family didn't suffer that fate, but it was only luck that saved them.
Fabio7h Thanks for this informative piece, I never got to know about this issue and the story
behind it. I shared the story to my Italian acquaitances on FB, hope somebody will notice.
Werebat5h Mairead "In the 1800, many Scots clan chiefs decided to violate the age-old
principles of the clan system, in which the chief acted as a redistributor and the clansfolk
supported him (nearly always "him") in war and peace. But those scunners decided they could
get more wealth from sheep, and shipped the people off to live or die as they could on the coast
of Nova Scotia..."
And not long before that, Nova Scotia went by another name and was inhabited by my Acadian
ancestors, who were removed by the British in what would be called an ethnic cleansing if it
were to happen today.
We don't learn much about that in schools, either.
It seems like many of these things we don't learn much about in schools today boil down to the
British being "the White man's White man". Why is that?
Trog4h France, Prussia, Holland, and Russia all had the same potato blight, but no "famine"
because nobody was taking their other food crops away.
pcgorman3h
Trog Or as John Mitchel put it (in The Last Conquest of Ireland (perhaps)), "The
Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine."
evolver
2h As my family story goes, my Gramma’s dad came over from County Cork during The
Famine to NYC alone and with only the clothes he was wearing. He soon met a well to do doctor
that took him in as if he was his son, and sent him to school where my great grandfather became
a doctor. He entered the Oklahoma Land Rush and prospered as a farmer. Gramma told of riding
as a girl on the tailgate of their Conestoga Wagon, legs dangling into the high grass, watching
snakes’ heads pop up as they passed over. She had a tin-type picture of the family in front and on
top of a sod hut they had lived in. Having lost her first husband to TB, her second husband, my
Dad’s father, who had enough Cherokee blood to live on the rez, had been a cowboy, among
other occupations, and was known as Tar Bottom at the ranches he worked at for being able
“break” wild horses without being thrown. He had 3 relatives that were known outlaws, one of
them rather famous that became a lawyer while in jail and became friends with Wild Bill
Hickok.
I’m lucky for the tattered connections to the past that make it personal to me, that brings the
weight of realism to perspective. When I was very young, I thought my neighbor was the oldest
person in the world. She was 104, and remembered seeing Abraham Lincoln with her own eyes,
on the back of a train, while she was sitting on her father’s shoulders. My Gramma who rode a
Conestoga wagon watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, between soap operas. Our lives
often seem mundane yet we too are participants in the unfolding of history, counting perhaps
moreso now in ways as we live in very interesting times and outcomes of great magnitude
precariously hinge on the very acts we make in our mundane lives now. The history of the
Famine is alive today and our living connection to it is consequential now so that by looking in
the past we can see where to go into the future.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
evolver 2h I highly recommend reading Michael Pollan's "The Botany of Desire." Excellent
storytelling, drawing connections as far ranging as apples to Afghanistan, and liquor to land
sales. If you already know most or all of the astonishing facts revealed then you should be
writing books.
seas 2h I learned more about the potato famine in my English Literature class than in history
class. It was when we read Jonathan Swift's essay, "A Modest Proposal", that we had a
discussion about the potato famine. There are ways to sneak it into the curriculum, and a
literature class works quite well as some great authors did not mind telling the truth about what
they saw - especially poets and essayists.
Amyin
1h
seas This is one of the benefits to homeschooling--we read about real people and their
thoughts via their writing and their art, and their lives in the context of world history. Teaching
my children, I got the education that I missed in school!
RexTIII35m Even as a youngster with little 'factual knowledge' of the 'St Patricks' Day details, it
never seemed authentic in a way which mattered. Pinching someone for not wearing green celebrating a Saint, knowing nothing about him. Education provided nothing, 1950's - 1960's much anyway. Our entire education system needs this type of depth and overhaul, which will not
be happening anytime soon. As already clearly noted, our Education system is completely
controlled by interests which have no incentive to create thinking, real thinking. Fortunately, the
world does have a huge population of those who do think and do create and further what counts
in education, regardless of our age. Thanks for this excellent piece!
ralphwatzke18m Even though I'm a so-called "right-wing conservative", you are very correct in
your truthful article. It reminds me very much of a somewhat similar scenario almost a century
later, namely Stalin's infamous planned Holodomor famine-genocide in Ukraine (1932-33) in
which about 10 million Ukrainian peasant farmers were intentionally starved to death, by
confiscating all their food.
Were you aware that the Sultan of Turkey donated funds to aid the starving Irish - imagine that,
Turkey sending foreign aid to British-occupied Ireland (when Britain was the richest country in
the world! Despite Britain's wealth, the Protestant government and people of Britain REFUSED
TO AID THE STARVING IRISH, because the Irish were Catholics, and were considered a subhuman inferior race! No doubt, tyrant Stalin was inspired by what Britain perpetrated on the Irish
in the 1840's. All those who are British should be ashamed of the evil misconduct of their
ancestors. Some would say the Irish famine was a genocide, a precursor of the ones that occurred
in the following century. What say you all? Comments, anyone?