The Good, The Bad, and The Bland

Ancestral home in County Tipperary. The tenants were evicted for stealing food in the 1840s.

A friend reminded me in the wake of 17 March that there are two times when everyone is Irish (or, rather, becomes momentarily Irish if one is not otherwise):

1) St. Patrick's Day

2) when you're dead

Don't ask me why, but people love "Danny Boy" and bagpipes at funerals.

As for St. Patrick's Day, based on my observations, it  appears to be an occasion for people to wear green and binge drink. Like Cinco de Mayo, we white people will don some reductive form of someone else's garb and suck down a bucket of booze.

Cinco de Mayo--"a day to pound booze and celebrate Mexican heritage even if you know nothing of its nature."

In the United States, we frequently rehearse the narrative that we are a "melting pot" of immigrant cultures. Quibble with the metaphor if you like (alt: "tossed salad"?), I would say that the final product consumes more attention than the ingredients that go into the recipe. Atlanta Archbishop Wilton Gregory put it well at a conference keynote this past January in Seattle:

"we are a country not especially distinguished for the length of our memory, much less the accuracy of it." 

We define ourselves in the present as we like. We "cherry pick" what we like from the past to shore up that definition. We may even invent some pasts to shore up that definition. Insofar as this is true, we are are Romantics (see 13 March essay). 

Plenty poor choices checker our collective American past (e.g. human chattel slavery). But I think we also get creative (err...selective memory?) regarding our particular pasts. Who exactly were the Irish who emigrated to the US? Who exactly were the Germans who emigrated to the US? and so forth. We are pretty good at recognizing the disingenuous and reductive injustice of President Trump's characterization of Latin American emigrants in the present time (i.e. as murderers, rapists, and drug dealers). But once current events become yesterday's events and once yesterday's news recedes further in the rear-view mirror, it becomes increasingly difficult to see those events clearly, accurately. We may know, intellectually, that our ancestors were humans--and therefore subject to doing questionable things--but nevertheless prefer to standardize and sanitize our narratives.  

Damage control

We do this in two ways:

1) We exaggerate the virtues of our ancestors

2) We understate the vices of our ancestors

History, and indeed genealogy, is WAY more interesting when we stop doing this. Our ethics and political philosophies also gain depth and integrity because they become more broadly, authentically human. The truth always humbles its seekers. It straightens crooked revisions, tempers rigid stoicism. It begets empathy.

Here are a some examples.

My great-grandmother sat down at a typewriter sometime around 1960 and churned out a 10 page account of her ancestry. They were Irish Gentry--descended from the ancient noble clans of Munster. For 500 years they lived at Mitchelstown, County Cork, and so forth.

It sounds distinguished but there are problems:

1) There's no paper trail to prove it.

2) Sullivan is one of the most common names in Ireland. Anyone with the name could say this.

3) There are noble Sullivans in Cork...at the other end of the County. They have plenty written about their many branches and various scions--none in Mitchelstown.

4) Even if it was true, the fact was obviously inconsequential when it counted most. If the family had access to power, prestige, and/or money in the mid-19th century then they wouldn't have done a terribly risky, unpleasant, inconvenient thing (i.e. left their home on a wormy sailboat to cross a stormy sea and shack up with relatives in a shanty town in New York). People don't embark on journeys where they have a high likelihood of burying a baby at sea unless the alternative is dire.

The fact is this: life was TERRIBLE in Ireland for a vast majority of the illiterate Catholic peasant population in the mid-19th century. Leaving one's home is traumatic--regardless of where one is going, who is waiting there, or what century one lives in. I personally despise moving. It is a hassle, even when an employer pays for it and professional crews load trucks that move your things efficiently on a modern interstate highway. It is disruptive and time consuming. Imagine this with sailboats and illiteracy!

This enormous pup named "Beast" was the best part of moving. He lives in the Maytag van.

People emigrated to the US because staying looked much worse. No one emigrates blithely--neither in the past nor now. 

Migration happens. And, for the most part, poverty/low socio-economic status cause it. We shouldn't need Emma Lazarus to remind us that immigrants will be "tired," "poor," "huddled masses." It's axiomatic.

Nevertheless, we Americans love to yoke our immigrant narratives to illustrious outliers. If I had a dollar--no, a nickel--for every time I've heard Central European or German 19th century immigration explained in terms of the "Generation of 1848" I'd be a rich man! Yes, a teeny, tiny number of elite literati escaped Europe around 1848 due to their revolutionary newspaper editorials and political tracts. And, undoubtedly, many of these people made lasting and outsize cultural impressions upon settling in the US. Let's just say that most of us don't descend from Carl Schurz. A vast majority of central European immigrants left because they were dirt poor landless farmers or serfs who suffered a hand-to-mouth, subsistence existence. They lived life on one plane and the literati lived life on another plane--not unlike the cultural chasms that separate "flyover country" from "Hollywood elites" ca. 2019. 

I'll never forget the time I discovered the music of Antonín Dvořák and went to tell my 100% Czech grandmother about him. What's more, 100 years ago Dvorak spent a year living barely 100 miles away in a Czech emigrant community! When I shared his story with grandma, she'd never heard of him, much less his music. Music was polka. That's it. No string quartets, no "New World Symphony," no song cycles of art songs. Different plane of existence.  

I suppose I've already wandered into narrative sanitation, part 2 (i.e. understating their vices). 

My illegal emigrant 2nd-great-grandfather. He was a productive, white, Republican farmer.

Acadians were deported to Louisiana. Georgia was a penal colony. (Australia was too). If they didn't go to Australia, plenty Irish petty criminals fled to the US to evade jail (including my relatives). Similarly, many families pass down stories of "draft-dodgers"--a family patriarch who evaded compulsory military service in some crownland of the Austrian Empire or from modern-day Germany. We laud their principled nationalism--because that was typically the motive--and we deterministically rationalize their choices through hindsight's privileged 20/20 vision (e.g. those decadent Hapsburgs got their comeuppance, didn't they? hehe, and so forth). Nevertheless, at the time, according to the law in force, such a choice made one an "illegal" emigrant. They left without permission. My own 2nd great-grandfather wouldn't write to his siblings in Europe for 30+ years for "fear that the government would find him, take him back, and execute him."

One final example: my great-great-great uncle Alois was a mysterious man. He died in 1892 of pneumonia contracted while fighting a spring prairie fire in central Kansas. His 4 young children were hardly old enough to remember him and, indeed, they never knew where he was buried. One son spent many Sunday afternoons of his adult life driving around the county trying to hunt down his father's final resting place. Everyone surmised that Alois was a tough, forgotten pioneer. 

Sort of, it turns out. He spent his 20s in and out of the penitentiary in Bavaria for assaulting fellas in bar fights. Apparently he brought his habits with him to the US because his wife divorced him in Kansas in 1882 for cruelty. A week after she won the divorce suit, he married the younger next-door neighbor in the back of a general store. Needless to say, the Catholic Church did not bless this hasty, second civil marriage and so, when Alois died a decade later, the wife buried him on their farm. 

Four more months of jail for uncle Alois.

I mention none of these cases to pass any personal moral judgments. There is no way (or point) for me to justly evaluate whether these peoples' behavior was "right" or "wrong." I cite them only to highlight that in their own time they were maligned as undesirable in their homelands, here in the US, or, sometimes, on both ends. This is an undeniable fact and a constant of immigration, as long as this country has existed. 

If I intended this reflection to be a balanced, Scholastic exercise, I would say that there are two extremes and that neither is quite right:

1) Our forbears weren't as great as we imagine

2) Our forbears weren't as bad as we imagine

But I didn't do this. I have only considered the first extreme through 2 ways that we whitewash the past. We don't consider our people from a morally neutral, sterile vantage. Nor do we typically give them a bad wrap. Rather, we invariably give our people a pass precisely because they are our people. We imagine the other people responsible for whatever unseemliness we uncover when we start turning over yellowed leaves of paper. Most genealogy is reverse-engineered from pride. 

Instead, consider it like turning over a ripe log in the woods! There is a lot to find and, depending on one's perspective the prospect is repulsive or rich. It's undeniably lively. We owe our life to this dank ecology.

Sometimes, however, there's not much to see. Nevertheless, we ought to search. This is a better way to celebrate our dynamic, living, evolving, blending cultures than silly hats, shots, Danny Boy, or, heaven forbid, bagpipes. 

We may find the good, the bad, or the bland, but it will be real.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

(from "The New Colossus," 1883 - Emma Lazarus)