A Mighty Woman with a Torch
“. . . and her name Mother of Exiles.” Emma Lazarus
Monday was St. Patrick’s Day, named for the patron saint of Ireland and celebrated around the world, especially in cities with large populations of Irish descent.
In the spring that I turned five I was diagnosed with rheumatic fever, which required me to stay in bed from April to October. I had to be carried to the bathroom, and when we visited my grandmother near Cape Cod, I was carted to the beach in a red wagon. When at last the doctor told me I could get out of bed, I excitedly stood up, only to collapse immediately to the floor. I would need to learn to walk again.
My own patron saint through all of this was a young woman named Catherine Maguire, who had recently emigrated from County Longford in the Irish midlands. She was high-spirited, with a ready twinkle and a reddish birthmark over part of her face. She cared for me, played with me, disciplined me, and carried me everywhere for those six months. Later, when I had recovered, she would take my sister and me into New York City for the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Her Aunt Nell had a small railroad flat on Second Avenue, where the elevated trains rattled outside her parlor window, and Robbin and I slept on the couch.
The parade itself was a grand affair, overflowing Fifth Avenue with Hibernian societies and marching bands and politicians from Tammany Hall to Albany, all of them wearing green. It seemed that every New York cop was Irish and Catherine knew them all, so we always had a front row perch.
Even then, in the early 1950s, the Catholic Irish were not fully accepted by the New York establishment. Their ancestors had been coming for well over a century; and after the Great Hunger struck in the mid-1840s, the Irish diaspora exploded. More than two million refugees came to America between 1845 and 1870, swelling the populations of eastern cities, crowding into squalid slums, working 80-hour weeks for a pittance.
"Predictably,” wrote Gregory Couch in The Bonanza King, “the influx provoked a backlash among native-born Americans. Anti-Catholic Yankees regarded the newest wave of destitute, starving refugees as 'Saint Patrick's vermin.'"
Gradually, through the rise of their political leaders and the Catholic Church, the newcomers got jobs throughout the city, particularly in the police, fire, and public works departments. By the late 19th century, another great wave of immigrants, primarily from southern and eastern Europe, had taken over the bottom rungs of the economic ladder; the assimilation of the Irish into the American mainstream was under way.
Looking back, it’s hard to imagine their struggles, and yet America remained always a beacon for them. “When the boat sailed into harbor,” Catherine’s younger brother, Hugh, told me years later, “the man next to me said, ‘that’s New York.’
“‘Go on with you now,’ I said. ‘In New York the streets are paved with gold.’”
“When Hugh comes home to visit,” his brother John told me years later in Ireland, “all he can talk about is how much better everything is in America.” By then Hugh had worked his way up managing an A&P in the Bronx and survived a bullet in his stomach while thwarting an attempted robbery.
The Irish were the first large wave of immigrants to come to this country. They came, as did those who followed, because they had few prospects at home. Most didn’t speak English and few could read or write. Labeled gangsters and drunkards, aliens and revolutionaries, their vulnerability and desperation made them ripe for exploitation. Many didn’t survive, but over time those who did worked their way into the fabric of American life. Americans take pride in having given them opportunity, and for many we certainly did. In return they built our country.
When Catherine sailed home to Ireland in 1953, I vowed to find her one day. Twenty years later I walked up the lane in Moyne Cross, County Longford, to the tiny farm on which she and her husband, Pee, were raising their nine children. But that’s a story for another post.