USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Boston's immigrants, 1790-1865 : a study in acculturation > Part 14
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60 Cf., e.g., Daily Evening Transcript, January 6, 1832 ; Wade, op. cit., 225.
61 Boston Pilot, February II, 1854, March 17, 1855; Jesuit or Catholic Sen- tinel, May 28, 1831, October 23, 1830.
62 Cf. Boston Pilot, February 12, 19, January 22, 29, 1853, November 27, December II, 1858; Massachusetts House Documents, 1853, no. 62.
63 Cf. Boston Pilot, May 27, 1854, August 27, September 17, 1853. Brown- son was directed to write articles in defense of Spain by Mme. Calderon, wife of the Spanish ambassador (cf. Brownson, Brownson's Middle Life, 31I ff.), and
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They went to great lengths in vindicating Napoleon III al- though most Americans condemned the treachery of the coup d'état of 1851.64 The Irish were equally firm in shielding Catholic Latin America against filibustering Yankees whose "manifest destiny" led to repeated aggressions. They assailed alike the Texan "brigands" who threatened Mexico and those who attacked Cuba, while they supported the established church in Brazil, in a long series of unfortunate disputations which created bitterness by their very heat and which transferred, in the minds of many Bostonians, the qualities defended in these conservative countries to the Irish themselves.65
These political differences testified to the strength of the barrier reared between Irish and non-Irish by diametrically opposed ideas, whose literary and cultural expressions reflected and perpetuated the distinction. Resting on basically different premises, developed in entirely different environments, two dis- tinct cultures flourished in Boston with no more contact than if 3,000 miles of ocean rather than a wall of ideas stood between them.
Irish intellectual life had few contacts with that of their neighbors. Education, rare indeed in Ireland, was scarcely more widespread among the Irish in Boston. The ability to read was by no means commonplace,66 and repeated warnings against secular works narrowed the nature of what little the Irish did read.67 The few Irishmen conscious of Boston's con-
received from her financial aid through Nicholas Reggio, consul of the Papal States in Boston (cf. Nicholas Reggio to Brownson, Boston, April 1, 1852, Brownson Papers [MS., L. U.N. D.]).
64 Cf. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "English Traits," Collected Works (Boston, 1903), V, 350; Boston Pilot, March 17-November 10, 1855, November 20, 1852 ; Brownson, Brownson's Middle Life, 359. Catholics turned against him only in 1854 when he showed hostility to Austria and allied with England (Boston Pilot, March 4, 1854).
65 Cf. Schlesinger, op. cit., 207; Boston Pilot, April 16, 1842, May 23, 1846, January 29, 1853; United States Catholic Intelligencer, June 8, 1832.
68 Boston Pilot, March 10, 1860.
67 Cf., e.g., the fate of Ellen Harcourt in "Neglect of Prayer" (Boston Catholic Observer, July 10, 1847) ; also, that of Margaret in Mrs. J. Sadlier, "Alice Rior- dan - The Blind Man's Daughter" (Boston Pilot, July 4-September 27, 1851) ; cf. also Boston Catholic Observer, September 6, 1848; Boston Pilot, June 9, 1860.
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temporary literature were shocked and antagonized by its rational romanticism, regarding it as exclusively Protestant, overwhelmingly English, and suspect on both grounds. Com- pletely alien to the city's literary tradition, they branded Shake- speare a barbaric poet whose "monstrous farces" "befoul the stage with every abomination." Milton became a heretic minion of the Drogheda monster Cromwell, and English literature - "the most pernicious" that ever existed - merely a degraded and degenerate justification of the reformation, typified by "that liar and infidel, Hume" and "that hideous atheist, Hobbs." 68 Because this literature was basic to their thinking, the work of men like Emerson was necessarily rejected. C. M. O'Keefe spoke for many in gratitude that "We Irishmen are not yet reduced to that moral nakedness which startles and appals us in Mr. Emerson," whose "historical ... is only . . . equalled by his philosophical ignorance." 69
In place of Emerson's "puerilities" the most popular Irish writing of the day was that which glorified Ireland, its historic tradition, and its Catholic past. The dateless conflict with England, in all its phases, furnished an endless source of ro- mantic themes, at once reflecting and stimulating an Anglo- phobia out of place amidst the Boston veneration of things English.70 Stories of the Reformation - the root of all Irish misery - were always popular. A life of Mary, Queen of Scots, sold a thousand copies the day it was published in Bos- ton, and the Pilot frequently printed romances and articles based upon the struggles of that period justifying the Catholic position.71 That conflict continued in a long series of literary arguments, forgetting the injunction of a great German con- troversialist that disputes should be treated "with the utmost
68 Cf. Boston Pilot, September 2, August 26, 1854, March 21, January 10, 1857; Boston Catholic Observer, June 5, 1847.
69 Boston Pilot, January 10, 1857, March 2, 1861.
70 Cf. Dissertation Copy, 263, 264; Thomas Colley Grattan, Civilized America (London, 1859), II, 40 ff.
71 Cf. United States Catholic Intelligencer, October 1, 1831; Boston Pilot, November 8, 1856. Cf. also Elizabeth H. Stewart, "Rising in the North," ibid., September 4, 1858 ff .; Walsh, "Jerpoint Abbey," ibid., June 4, 1859.
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charity, conciliation and mildness." 72 On the contrary these theological battles, waged fortitur in modo as well as in re, wounded susceptibilities and stored up rancorous bitterness on all sides. Whatever the ultimate justice of the matter, de- fense of the inquisition and Saint Bartholomew's massacre, and continued attacks upon Luther, Calvin, and Henry VIII, the "infernal triumvirate" of Protestantism, and upon other prop- agators of "monstrous doctrines," scarcely drew the Irish closer to their neighbors who held completely different views.73 The sporadic clashes that marked the early years of Irish set- tlement in Boston stimulated this antagonism. Fitted into a familiar pattern, these conflicts became mere extensions of the old battle against English Protestantism. The Charlestown Convent fire left a heritage of bitterness, never eradicated. Years later Irishmen resented it and declaimed
Foul midnight deed! I mark with pain Yon ruins tapering o'er the plain ; Contrast them with your Bunker's height, And shame will sicken at the sight!
Already thou hast learnt the rule, Of Cromwell's bloody English school; And far and wide the fame has flown, Of crimes which thou must ever own.74
Nor did the novels in which the Irish delighted most - tales of ancient Irish grandeur, glorifying Celtic culture at the ex- pense of Saxon England - improve relations with other Bos- tonians. The common core of all was the inevitable contrast between Gael and Sassenach, decidedly to the disadvantage
72 John Adam Moehler, Symbolism ... (New York, 1844), xi.
'Cf. Brownson, Works of Brownson, I, xix; United States Catholic Intelli- gencer, February 24, July 13, 1832; Boston Catholic Observer, January 10, 1847, January 26, 1848; Jesuit or Catholic Sentinel, July 2, 1831; Boston Pilot, Octo- ber 5, 1839. For the contemporary Boston view of Luther, cf. Camillo von Klenze, "German Literature in the Boston Transcript," Philological Quarterly, January, 1932, XI, II.
74 J. Tighe, "To Massachusetts," Boston Pilot, July 4, 1846; cf. also "Lines on the Ruins of a Nunnery," Literary and Catholic Sentinel, August 29, 1835.
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of the latter.75 A series of violent articles by Dr. John McEl- heran furnished a philosophical and pseudo-ethnological basis for this contrast. "The divine spark of genius radiates from the Celtic centre of the world. . .. The Egyptians . .. the pure Pelasgi of Athens . .. the Romans by themselves - and the ancient Irish . . show us ... the natural tendency of the pure Celtic race, uncontaminated by Gothic bestiality, or eastern sensuality." The Gothic race, including the Germans, Scandinavians, Russians, Turks and Anglo-Saxons, were com- pletely different, "essentially stupid . . . false, cruel, treacher- ous, base and bloody .. . " with "little or no faculty for poetry, music, or abstract science." By every criterion of civil- ization, the latter were far inferior to the former. And the lowest of all were the Saxons, "the very dregs and offal of the white population in America. . . . These flaxen-haired German men and women . . . are lower than the race with black wool. . Even when they are well to do they send their children . .
out to beg." 76 Immensely popular, the publication of these articles elicited a steady stream of letters from readers asking for more of the same from the "Saxon-hating Dr." 77
As opposed to these discordant tendencies only one strain - pride in their contributions to the making of America - drew the Irish nearer their neighbors. Although "the great current of American history" was "overwhelmingly heretic," and Catholic students could "receive no support" for their "faith from reading it," they cherished its Irish episodes.78 The early Catholic explorers from St. Brandon to Marquette, and Charles Carroll, the Catholic signer, were important fig- ures whose biographies appeared frequently in their reading. Though they distrusted live Orangemen, the Irish made the
15 Cf., e.g., the "historical romances" of C. M. O'Keefe, Boston Pilot, May 8, 1858; Mrs. Anna H. Dorsey, "Mona: - The Vestal," ibid., January 5, 1856- March 22, 1856; United States Catholic Intelligencer, October 1, 1831.
76 John McElheran, "The Condition of Women," Boston Pilot, April 5- July 12, 1856.
" Cf., e.g., Boston Pilot, July 26, 1856, and the issues following.
78 Cf. Boston Pilot, October 16, 1858; Literary and Catholic Sentinel (Boston) , August 22, 1835.
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BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
dead Scotch-Irish their own; they were fond of tales of John Barry and other Celtic military heroes.79 But even this was pushed to a dangerous extreme when McElheran claimed all great Americans were "Celtic Normans, and French, and Span- iards, and Celtic Britons . . . and Gaels from Wales and Ire- land and the north and west of Scotland. Look to the pedigree of your heroes . .. look at their physique, and say, Is it the type of Gothic nations? Is it fat, lumpish, gross Anglo- Saxon? "' 80
While the chasm between Irish and native ideas deepened, cultural contacts furthered the assimilation of other immigrants. The Irish alone diverged from the Boston norm. All others participated readily in the intellectual life of the community. Englishmen were obviously at home there; and Germans were soon familiar in many phases of the city's activities. Admiring its school system and respecting Harvard, they sent their chil- dren to common schools as a matter of course. Germans were widely acquainted with western European literature. Their magazines contained sections on "Anglo-Amerikanischer," Eng- lish, and French as well as German and German-American literature, while their own writing frequently used American themes and expressed the American spirit.81 The thought and culture of Frenchmen was also broadly cosmopolitan; English and German works found a secure place in their reading.82 Meanwhile these groups enriched the natives with a new heri- tage accepted gratefully. Follen and Beck, together with the Americans, Bancroft, Longfellow, and Ticknor, popularized the German language until more than seventy Harvard men
79 Cf., e.g., Boston Pilot, November 24, 1855-March 8, 1856, November 15, 1856, January 21, 1854-January 20, 1855; Thomas D. McGee, History of the Irish Settlers in North America . .. (Boston, 1852), passim.
80 Boston Pilot, March 22, 1856.
81 Cf., e.g., Meyer's Monatshefte, March, 1855, V, 223; ibid., April, 1855, V, 298, 302, 309, 312 ; also "Die schöne Literatur Nordamerika's" (Amerika, wie es ist ... Serie III der Volkschriften des deutsch-amerikanischen Vereins . . . [Hamburg, 1854], 20-28) ; Franz Kielblock's opera, "Miles Standisch" (Der Pionier, April 5, 12, 1860).
82 Cf., e.g., Courrier des États-Unis, March 3, October 17, 1832, October 18, 1834.
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were studying it in the fifties.83 At the same time, the French press helped make the works of Balzac, Lamartine, and other authors and painters accessible to Bostonians.84
Ease of adjustment did not reflect a flat uniformity in the non-Irish groups. Each brought with it an intellectual tradi- tion of which it was proud, and which it was anxious to pre- serve. But though different in detail, all had the same roots, and eventually coalesced without serious conflict. Thus the clash of two vigorous musical cultures that grew out of German immigration actually enriched both. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Boston enjoyed a living, fruitful, musical tradition based upon the Anglo-Italianate musical life of eight- eenth-century London. It first took concrete form in the Philo-harmonic Society (1810), an amateur group predom- inantly American in nativity, but including some Englishmen and a Russian, and led by an Anglo-German, Gottlieb Graup- ner, once oboist in Haydn's London Orchestra. From this nu- cleus grew the Handel and Haydn Society, an organization of some hundred amateurs formed in 1815 to interpret the ora- torios of these composers. Later critics belittled its achieve- ments, but its influence upon the mechanics and artisans who formed its rank and file was deep, and was perpetuated for many years in the rural "singing skewls" of all New England. Throughout at least the first thirty years of its existence, it vigorously sustained the music of those after whom it was named.85
Nourished by the fruit of Beethoven's revolt, and steeped in
83 Cf. A. B. Faust, German Element ... (New York, 1927), II, 215; Karl Quentin, Reisebilder und Studien aus dem Norden der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika (Arnsberg, 1851), I, 80; von Klenze, loc. cit., 1-25.
84 Cf. Courrier des États-Unis, March 19, May 21, 1836, November 24, 1832. 85 Cf. William Treat Upton, Anthony Phillip Heinrich ... (Columbia Uni- versity Studies in Musicology, no. IV, New York, 1939), 71, 87; O. G. Sonneck, Early Opera in America (New York, n.d. [1915]), 144, 145, 197, 217; John Tasker Howard, Our American Music, Three Hundred Years of It (New York, 1939), 135-138; Justin Winsor, Memorial History of Boston ... (Boston, 1880), IV, 415-419; John Sullivan Dwight, "Handel and Haydn Society," New England Magazine, December, 1889, I, 382 ff .; Henry C. Lahee, "Century of Choral Singing in New England," ibid., March, 1902, XXVI, 102, 103.
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romanticism, German music by 1840 had evolved a tradition that was quite different. At first contact native Bostonians rejected it. Centered in a group of music masters who gave periodic concerts, but whose chief income derived from teach- ing culturally ambitious Bostonians, their normal musical life had little room for strangers. Travelling professionals might stop for an occasional concert; but isolated performances left little impression and there was no incentive for teachers with- out pupils to remain in the city. Heinrich, for instance, pre- ferred to live there, but was forced by the financial failure of his concert to go to New York, and Charles Zeuner, who did remain, felt he was misunderstood.86 With no one to play the new music, Bostonians could not become familiar with or like it.87 Englishmen and a few Italians closely related to them remained the most popular foreign musicians. Such un- familiar soil doomed the most valiant attempts at playing Beethoven to failure. Even Woodbridge and Mason confessed defeat after an unsuccessful series of concerts in the Boston Academy of Music, a product of their travels in Germany.88
The coming of the Germans who wanted German music teachers for their children made room for the new music. As soon as there was a resident basis of such musicians, Bostonians found opportunities to hear and to like it. Very quickly they learned it was not really strange for it synchronized with the romantic tendencies already woven into their culture. In the spread of the new music, Germans like Dresel, Kreissmann, Leonhard, and Heinrich, the Germania Society which came to Boston in 1849, the Mendelssohn Quintet Club, and the itin- erant foreign opera companies were influential, but hardly more so than native teachers like Lowell Mason, or Dwight's Journal of Music, which voiced the cause of German romanticism con-
86 Cf. Winsor, op. cit., IV, 421; Upton, Heinrich, 76, 199; Howard, op. cit., 155; Francis H. Jenks, "Boston Musical Composers," New England Magazine, January, 1890, II, 476.
87 Cf., e.g., the confused criticism which greeted Hermann & Co.'s musical soirées in 1832 (Daily Evening Transcript, June 22, 1832) .
88 Cf. Dissertation Copy, 272, 273; Winsor, op. cit., IV, 423, 426.
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sistently after 1852. Once the two cultures met, they found a common basis, fused, and under the vigorous leadership of Carl Zerrahn produced an ever more fruitful growth there- after. Germans and Americans, they were the same kind of people, their ideas and feelings were rooted in the same social background; there was no occasion for serious conflict.89
The common store of ideas that made this adjustment pos- sible was lacking in the intellectual relations of the Irish and non-Irish. The development of the fundamental aspects of their ideas left them so far apart there was no room for com- promise. Contact bred conflict rather than conciliation. Irish Catholics could not think like their neighbors without a com- plete change in way of life.90 And natives could adopt no aspect of Catholic ideas without passing through a radical intellectual revolution.
One outstanding personality attempted to adapt Irish Cathol- icism to American thought and failed signally in the attempt. By 1842 Orestes A. Brownson's intellectual development had itself carried him to the acceptance of many Catholic concepts. In philosophy he felt the need for tradition and revelation; in theology, for grace to counteract original sin and man's in- nate corruptness. In politics he was a conservative Democrat, opposed to abolition and reform, trying to temper the rule of the people by placing "Justice" above the popular will.91 But the eminently Irish Bishop Fitzpatrick - "the hierarchical ex- ponent of all that was traditional . . . in Catholic public life" - distrusted Brownson's philosophic background though it had brought him to the Church, and insisted upon complete renunciation before conversion.92 Brownson yielded, and for
89 9 Cf. Winsor, op. cit., IV, 429, 433 ff., 437, 441, 442 ; Howard, op. cit., 217 ff., 220-225, 244; Upton, Art Song, 31, 38, 70; Upton, Heinrich, 202 ff .; Elson, loc. cit., 236, 237; Faust, op. cit., II, 269; Christine Merrick Ayars, Contributions to the Art of Music in America ... (New York, 1937), 79.
90 Cf. a long article on this subject in Boston Pilot, May 31, 1851.
91 For the early phases of Brownson's thought, cf. Schlesinger, op. cit., espe- cially 75-88, 117-120, 136-137, 140-141, 149, 151, 159, 169, 241; Brownson, "The Convert," Works of Brownson, V, 120, 12I.
92 Isaac T. Hecker, "Dr. Brownson and Bishop Fitzpatrick," Catholic World,
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ten years loyally submitted to the dictates of his Irish religious superiors, handing over every line he wrote to the censorship of the Bishop. Until 1854 Brownson and the Review thor- oughly expressed the ideas of Irish Catholicism.93 In that year, stimulated by the criticisms of the Know-Nothing movement, Brownson reluctantly concluded that the Church in America must be American rather than Irish and thereby provoked a galling conflict with the Irish clergy that painfully grieved him and eventually drove him to New York where he hoped to profit from the less rigorous supervision of Archbishop Hughes.94 Thereafter, Brownson evolved a new social philosophy based on Gioberti's theology, which enabled him to attack slavery, sup- port the Republican party, and attempt to reconcile the Church with American ideas by liberalizing it.95 This endeavor met vigorous, relentless Irish disapproval. The Pilot, hitherto his cordial friend and follower, became his bitter foe, attacking his new position in a long series of sharp articles.96 His influence among the Irish vanished. Too late he recognized what Father Hecker had always known, that "The R. C. Church is not national with us, hence it does not meet our wants, nor does it fully understand and sympathize with the experience and dis- positions of our people. It is principally made up of adopted and foreign individuals." Without a common basis of ideas there could be no conciliation.97
The compromise too difficult for the acute mind of an intellec-
April, 1887, XLV, 7; Schlesinger, op. cit., 193, 194; Brownson, Brownson's Middle Life, 4, 8; Henry F. Brownson, Orestes A. Brownson's Early Life: from 1803 to 1844 (Detroit, 1898), 476 ff.
' As such, his works in this period have been used in this chapter. Cf. also 93 Schlesinger, op. cit., 213, 209 ff., 218, 219.
Brownson, Brownson's Middle Life, 98; Schlesinger, op. cit., 195, 210.
95 Schlesinger, op. cit., 219, 248 ff. For the difference in his attitude towards Gioberti's liberalism before and after he left Boston, compare the articles writ- ten in 1850 and in 1864 (Brownson, Works, II, 102, 106, 110 ff., and ibid., II, 2II-270).
96 Ibid., II, 142, 143; references to Boston Pilot, 1857-1864, Dissertation Copy, 277
97 Rev. Vincent F. Holden, Early Years of Isaac Thomas Hecker . . (Wash- ington, 1939), 202.
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CONFLICT OF IDEAS
tual aristocrat was never even attempted by the great mass of laboring Irishmen, completely preoccupied with the far more pressing problems of earning a bare livelihood. Hedged about by economic and physical as well as cultural barriers, they were strangers to the other society beside them. The develop- ment of Irish ideas created a further range of differences be- tween themselves and all others in the city that stimulated and developed consciousness of group identity.
CHAPTER VI
THE DEVELOPMENT OF GROUP CONSCIOUSNESS
Thinking to live by some derivative old country mode in this primitive new country, -to catch perch with shiners. . .. with his horizon all his own, yet he a poor man, born to be poor, with his inherited Irish poverty or poor life . . . not to rise in this world, he nor his posterity, till their wading webbed bog-trotting feet get talaria to their heels.1
ALL immigrants to Boston brought with them an awareness of group identity already sharpened by cultural contact with other peoples. Years of conflict with the English had strength- ened this feeling among the Irish. The Germans emigrated during a turbulent period of patriotic awakening; and the English, French, and Italians had felt impassioned currents stirred up by the Napoleonic disorganization of Europe. Na- tionalists to begin with, all retained their ties with the homeland.
As long as it derived from sources external to Boston society, awareness of nationality expressed merely a sentimental at- tachment. Thus, Englishmen observed the birthdays of the royal family; the Swiss collected funds for the village of Travers, destroyed by fire in 1865; the French celebrated mass at the Cathedral upon the death of Princess Adelaide; while German, Polish, and Hungarian emigrés sympathized with, organized for, and assisted the insurrections at home.2
Continuous demands from abroad likewise reaffirmed Irish devotion to the "bright gem of the sea." 3 Her needs were so pressing, so apparent, none could refuse assistance. Meager
1 Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods (Writings of Henry David Thoreau, II, Boston, 1894), 325, 326.
2 Cf., e.g., Boston Pilot, November 15, 1862 ; Bostoner Zeitung, November II, 18, 1865; Courrier des États-Unis, March 4, 1848.
3 "The Irish Emigrant's Lament," Boston Pilot, March 2, 1839; T. D. McGee, "A Vow and Prayer," Poems ... (New York, 1869), 123.
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DEVELOPMENT OF GROUP CONSCIOUSNESS
earnings somehow yielded a steady stream of drafts to friends and relatives who remained behind, and great disasters elicited even more remarkable contributions. Stimulated by Bishop Fitzpatrick's pastoral letter, Boston Irishmen remitted more than $200,000 during the scourge of 1847.4 The less serious famine of 1863 drew £149 from the Montgomery Union Asso- ciation of Boston alone, while a committee of Irishmen col- lected $18,000.5 And Irish parish priests could always rely upon aid from former parishioners when calamity struck their districts.6
Love of Ireland enlisted a host of organizations in the peren- nial struggle against English oppression. These cropped up sporadically through the twenties and thirties, but until the Repeal Movement of the forties, accomplished little.7 And though they then absorbed immigrants' attention for almost a decade, represented only a transitory influence upon Irish life in Boston. "The Friends of Ireland Society," founded October 6, 1840, by J. W. James and John C. Tucker, affiliated in 1841 with O'Connell's Dublin Loyal Association, and estab- lished agencies in South Boston, Charlestown, East Boston, Roxbury, and West Cambridge. At regular meetings in each locality it collected large sums of money, and its zeal inspired similar societies throughout the United States, which met in 1842 in convention in Philadelphia. A central directory in New York, formed in 1843, coordinated their activities and estab- lished a national fund for Ireland.8
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