With Luck and Pluck
It was a hard-knock life for Irish-Americans.
By James R. Fisher, Jr. , Ph.D. © March 23, 2021
NOTE: This is an essay that will appear in a new book by Ken Shelton and Thurl Bailey titled “Rachial Synergy.”
In the mid-19th century, a million Irish immigrants left Ireland due to hard circumstances, such as the Irish potato famine, aka the Great Hunger. It began in 1845 when a fungus-like organism spread rapidly throughout Ireland. The infestation ruined half of the potato crop that year, and three-quarters of the crop over the next seven years. Since tenant farmers of Ireland—then ruled as a colony of Great Britain—relied heavily on the potato for food, the infestation had a catastrophic impact on Ireland, resulting in the death of roughly one million Irish from starvation and related causes forcing more than a million to leave their homeland.
No Irish Need Apply
When they arrived in America, many Irish faced prejudice, discrimination, and limited employment opportunities. In fact, in 1854, the phrase No Irish Need Apply was a terse summation of the job discrimination that Irish immigrants faced in America in the mid-19th century. The phrase turned up frequently in classifieds ads for jobs, and the sentiment was wider than the frequency of those exact words. Hundreds of other classified ads specified that job applicants be Protestant or American, effectively excluding Irish-Catholic immigrants. Whether the exact phrase “No Irish need apply” itself was ubiquitous, the sentiment certainly was.
My Irish-Catholic Ancestors
My ancestors on both my mother’s and father’s side came from Ireland. They were Irish Catholic and were mainly families of railroad workers in the Dingle Bay region just outside the Six Counties of Northern Ireland which were Protestant and loyal to the British Crown. One uncle and my mother’s brother-in-law’s people came from the Six Counties. Once in the United States in the mid-1830s, they settled in such places as Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and Chicago, Illinois with some coming as far as Clinton, Iowa to work on the railroad.
None of them were farmers or tradesmen but what became known as Shanty Irish as they either worked mainly on the railroad or as domestics. Lace Curtain Irish were tradespeople, exporters, and importers with family trees of some distinction. This was the case with the Kennedys and Fitzgeralds of President Kennedy’s family.
In the 19th and early 20th century, Clinton, Iowa had the largest network of railroad yards west of the Mississippi. There they manufactured boxcars for the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad freight car operations carrying freight to the West Coast and the Pacific Ocean.
Many members of my immediate and extended family in Clinton, including my grandfather, worked at one time or another in the Chicago Northwestern shops that extended for three miles along Camanche Avenue in Clinton.
Uncle Leonard Becomes My Model
My uncle Leonard, who became the model of my life, had two sisters and five brothers. He had to quit school in his freshman year at St. Mary’s High School to work as a telegraph operator for the railroad in support of the family. After four years of this, he quit and moved to Iowa City where he did four years of high school and four years of college at the University of Iowa in four years, going on to earn Ph.D.’s in psychology and economics. Having acquired these credentials, he pursued an academic career first at St. Ambrose College in Davenport, Iowa, then DePaul University in Chicago, eventually spending 20 years at The University of Detroit, a Jesuit university.
From age 12 to 15, I spent summers at his summer retreat at Higgins Lake in central Michigan. Lunchtime would be sessions on the Upanishads, Zoroaster, origins of monotheism, and some such after my uncle tired of my cousin Robert and I arguing about baseball.
When I was a student at Iowa, I took an elective in Catholic History from Father Kelly, whom my aunt told me was a distant cousin of mine, a relationship I never alerted the professor to, feeling he might favor me. I still got an A grade. Another rumor was that author James T. Farrell, a famous Chicago novelist for his urbane and social consciousness novels, such as the Studs Lonigan Trilogy was a distant relative as my grandmother’s maiden name was O’Farrell. I would read Farrell’s Studs Lonigan at Iowa in a required humanities course, staying up an entire night to read the trilogy, fascinated with Farrell’s sense of our Irish heritage. I was equally moved by his short stories which often exposed our false pride.
Equal Justice for All?
I recall this quote from Saint Thomas Aquinas: “Justice is a certain rectitude of mind whereby a man does what he ought to do in circumstances confronting him.”
Since I witnessed a lot of injustice and inequality for all, I once considered anger to be my greatest motivator to write. I confess to angry being close to my nature. This was suggested 50 years ago when I was incensed with how one side seemed to have all the political/cultural answers, and of course, and the other side to have none of them. Sadly, for the past four years, I have watched this drama intensify with increasing polarity and blowback on both sides. It resolved nothing as accusatory fingers never do.
Now hate seems to be consuming our culture at Mach speed. And yet haters don’t see themselves as haters but believe those who differ with them are. They can quote all the talking heads, pundits, and sophisticates that sound as if they know what they’re talking about, and are amazed when you don’t appreciate the same sentiments they express. We’ve moved so far from being in control of our lives that we are numbed to our essence, much less our senses.
Less Unity, More Uniformity
Only last Thanksgiving I had a discussion about organized labor unions with a highly successful electrical engineer of biomedical systems of hospitals and clinics in the Northeast. His company does not have a union, and he asked what I thought about unions. He believes in the catechism of what unions purport to stand for—job security, pay, entitlements, bonuses, perks, pensions, and familial benefits, such as childcare, and the like.
He was hoping for an endorsement of unions, but I feel the same way about unions as I do large corporations: as long as the company is viable, the corporation and unions mimic each other in structure, function, mission, authority, and in the infallibility of their “business as usual” practices. Translated, they have all the power and control, and the workers—be they in a union or with a nonunion company—have no power. When the national economy suffers a cold that triggers a fever, all bets are off. Corporate executives protect their elite while union leaders abandon their members conceding concession after concession to their corporate masters to survive.
This is absurd as workers have the knowledge power, critical to operations, whereas management has position power which is now atavistic. The same is equally true of labor unions which are structurally and functionally a mirror image of the anachronistic corporation.
Labor unions boomed after WWII and continued to do so as long as the world, decimated with war-time destruction, was in recovery. Today, 75 years, later the world is mostly back on its feet and successfully competing with American markets. Today labor unions are a minuscule entity of industrial and commercial enterprise in comparison to what they once were. Why? Because corporations now have found a way to finesse unions by duplicating what unions once offered while solidifying their control even more comprehensibly over workers!
Just as unions reached their zenith in authority and power, corporations are maxing out but no one is paying attention. Individualism is not dead—it has just faded. Without pausing to consider the cost, the world has rushed to embrace four titanic Big Tech corporations —AMAZON, FACEBOOK, APPLE, and GOOGLE—that are frenetically determined to control the world and its mind. Like religion of the late Middle Ages, these monolithic monsters purport to make the world a better place, while they systematically lay waste to individualism, privacy, spontaneity, creativity, and freedom. Consequently, we are now more alike than ever before in history as products of these corporations have become our ubiquitous pacifiers and “Toys of the Mind.”
Cultural Civil War
The mock cultural wars of disinformation with which they periodically orchestrate have further reduced the masses to puppets on a string without a mind. Consequently, we are now in a cultural civil war in which both sides are equally pusillanimous be the polarity race, gender, politics, religion, values, beliefs, interests, appetites, or yes, hatreds.
People rant passionately from whatever their platform with nothing changing. Why? Because they are yelling into an isolated echo chamber isolated from the reality of experience, unaware that everything is only getting worse. It is not fair, not constructive, and certainly not supportive of freedom, dignity, and human understanding to be lock-stepping to a figment of the imagination. This inclination has promoted the chaotic world that is now the American nation, a nation in retreat from self-interest and self-regard. This gigantic retreat has made us truly “a lonely crowd,” and for that reason, I still find myself quite angry.
Prison of Prisms
By 1996, America had the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement in its past, but I continued to see our principal failure to be of not being on the same page while talking over each other had risen to the level of being endemic. The problem?
We all view life through our own unique personal prism, while society attempts to have us view life through its prism. The same is true individual to individual. Of course, this doesn’t work; and so, at best, it is difficult for us to communicate with each other. The media, change masters, politicians, academics, parents, writers, philosophers, and, yes, friends want us to see things as they would have us see them which is through their respective prisms because in that manner they attain personal credibility.
Today we flaunt our stuff rather than apologize for it. We see the world through rose-colored glasses and different prisms. Whatever the prism that is the reality we staunchly defend, and sad to say, a reality far afield from that of a different prism. None of this is dishonest, but it leads to a painfully comic and counterproductive society, a society that has little sense of the rhythm of the universe or the thematic poetry to existence. With clashes of prisms, we have clashes of cultures – a morose if not moronic hypersensitivity on display, but little poetry.
An obsession with prisms leads to inescapable tension which finds the individual the enemy of his society. It places him in an impossible double-bind. If the individual acquiesces and conforms to the crazy quilt montage of societal prisms, he suffers the loss of personal freedom and identity. If the individual parks his prism at the door and views life with objective discernment, he suffers anomie or personal and societal disaffection. He can’t win for losing!
Viewing life through the prism of government idolatry is fashionable. Government, as a ubiquitous therapist, reveals a paradox: we keep ceding more of our sovereignty to a government that we trust less and less. We are angry but unwilling to take responsibility for anything that has gone wrong—from the National Debt to escalating crime and inflation; for the decline of the family to the rising rate of illiteracy, racial inequity, and religious bigotry and discrimination.
Release from Prism Prison
One remarkable man in my life showed me how to escape religious discrimination. My first cousin, Jack Clegg, had an Irish Catholic mother and an Irish Anglican Protestant father. He, in turn, married an Irish Protestant girl who, like Jack, was indifferent to religion. Jack Clegg was on Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941, with his repair ship the USS Vestal moored to the battleship The USS Arizona with nearly 1,000 entombed on the ship when it sank in nine minutes. Cousin Jack Clegg was in the engine room of The Vestal when the battleship sank suffering a broken back. He stayed in the Navy and became a certified welder, using that training to pursue a lucrative post-war career once out of the Navy.
Jack’s firstborn son, Timothy, was raised Protestant but would dress up with sheets to resemble a Catholic priest’s vestments and pretend to be conducting Mass when he was seven with his little sister as his audience. Though reared Protestant, Timmy never lost his interest in Catholicism. Thanks to his father making a good living building nuclear power plants in the American South, he was able to attend university in France after high school and then attend a French Catholic seminary at the expense of his father, and ultimately to be ordained a priest in St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome by His Holiness Pope Paul VI.
Timmy was a free agent as he was not obligated to any American diocese for his education. Once ordained, he traveled the world as an independent agent ministering to Catholics and Protestants alike, eventually following his father’s footsteps to become a chaplain in the U. S. Navy. Thus Father Tim quietly got beyond the rift that persists between Catholic and Protestant to our day. Remarkably, Father Tim doesn’t consider his scaling the breach between the two denominations especially noteworthy as intolerance of any kind is beyond the pale of his temperament.
What Happened to Pursuit of Happiness?
The youth of the day view life through a prism of cynicism. Their limited experience tells them that the best is past and they are being weaned on leftovers. This generation born between 1961 and 1975 is a product of too much too many too soon. The generation has been overexposed to stimuli to the point of distraction devouring new products senselessly as their consciousness is now electronically controlled by savvy corporate marketers.
When I was a little boy, I was told by my dad that our forefathers established American democracy for us to be happy and content. He told me this during The Great Depression when he had no job but still believed in America. In retrospect, it seems incongruous. Out of work but still undaunted, he remained secure in the glory of The Declaration of Independence. He read this to me then: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. This declaration became the bible of my existence and blueprint to a long and fulfilling life. My wonder now, however, is whatever happened to that pursuit?
How many are yawning at the suggestion of this rhetorical question? If you are between the ages of 25 and 54, you likely are. Pollsters tell us you are blasé about politics, bored to death with the media, and distrustful of government—as if the government is an entity beyond your concern, when in fact you are the government. Syndicated columnist Charley Reese writes:
“The view among political, business, and media elites is that the goal in life is to make as much money as possible and to accumulate as many toys as possible. The media are fascinated by the rich and often fawn over them. Politicians are always talking about economic prosperity as if that was the main goal of government. Business people watch every little blip of the stock market like a casino operator watches the daily take. Statistics are poured over like a fortuneteller looking at tealeaves.” The pursuit of wealth has become synonymous with the pursuit of happiness, but does this pursuit have legs?
Confusion between Need and Want
There is great confusion between need and want. The American ethic would have you trade in a perfectly serviceable automobile (need) for a bigger, more expensive, more powerful, and enviable machine (want) simply because you can.
My daughter’s 30-year-old married friend sold his $250,000 home for a $500,000 replacement because “I can afford it on my $100,000 income.” The need however was not in the equation. He who has the most toys is the winner, or is he?
Jobs are on the move. Pundits predict between 3 and 5 million high-paying jobs will leave the U.S. permanently in the next few years. It is no longer just blue-collar workers who are vulnerable, but the best and the brightest. While the 24 to 54 age group is buying bigger houses, more expensive clothes, luxury cars and boats, playing golf, jet skiing, or acquiring fashionable vacation homes, somebody else is eating their breakfast; and, if they don’t watch out, maybe their lunch and dinner as well.
The idea has evolved that free love (and free everything else) was the ticket to happiness; that we were too uptight, too regimented, too constrained for our own good. The sexual revolution has proven, however, that sex is neither love nor free. If you fail to see this revolution with the rise in venereal disease, broken marriages, shattered lives of men as well as women, where the belief persists that any inconvenience or disagreement is meant for the parties to move on, not to work out their differences; that the way to peace is through the avoidance of pain, not through the embrace of its source, then chances you are part of this quandary.
What’s Wrong with this Picture?
The world is catching up with the United States. Computers and electronics have sped up the process by 50 years. In time, wages about the world will come into balance; new jobs will be created requiring different tools and skills, making it insane to hide behind protective tariffs and “us against them” games. In time, we will realize we are part of a mutually interdependent global village. Then, we Americans will have no other choice than to finally grow up.
Just as there is confusion between need and want, there is similar confusion between aims and means. Dr. Hans Selye writes:
“A clear distinction must be made between our final aims – the ultimate achievements that give purpose to life – and the means through which we hope to attain them. For example, money is never a final aim; it has no value in itself. It can only act as a means, helping us to reach some ultimate goal which, to us, has inherent value.”
The pursuit of happiness will bring no peace of mind if the differences between aims and means are misunderstood. Means are good only to reach some final accomplishment which deep in our soul we can truly respect. With happy people, this is usually the urge for self-expression—doing what brings pleasure and comfort to others in some meaningful work. Dignity doesn’t come simply with a paycheck. Dignity comes with self-respect, and that comes from performing your role in life, whatever that is, and or doing your job well. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. writes:
“If you are called to be a street sweeper, sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’”
There is nothing wrong with society producing entrepreneurial millionaires and billionaires. Where it gets confusing is when people see the wealth of a Bill Gates and that is all they see. They don’t see a pioneer, risk-taker, adventurer, or philanthropist, only ostentatious wealth. They don’t see the pursuit of happiness as the journey that it is. They prefer instead to see it as an end in itself. They don’t see the hard work or the constant embrace of adversity, challenge, setback, and failure—all fundamental to the pursuit of happiness.
Several years ago, in the company of my executive colleagues in a restaurant in Amsterdam, somebody asked, What would you like to do? Not one of us said it was what we were currently doing. It reminded me of the final lines of the Sinclair Lewis novel, Babbitt, where middle-aged real estate broker, George F. Babbitt, confesses: “I never did a single thing in my whole life that I wanted to do.” It would appear Babbitt still lives.
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Jammes R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., author of several books in the genre of social & industrial psychology, is a former corporate executive of Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe, SA. His books are available online with www.amazon.com, www.barnes&noble.com, www.AuthorHouse.com, or a local bookstore. Email TheDeltaGrpFL@cs.com.
