Irish and America
The American connection is based on such enormous
numbers of Irish men and women making their way to the New World for so many
different reasons that nobody is quite sure of the actual numbers involved. It
is estimated that in the period between 1717 and 1775 something like a quarter
of a million
Ulstermen settled in the North American continent and,
between 1820 and 1920, something like four-and-a-quarter million people
emigrated from Ireland to earn a living in the United States. The reasons for
going were many. The Ulster folk who emigrated did so voluntarily, and were
almost entirely of Presbyterian stock, seeking to escape from the Protestant
Ascendancy, with which they had little or nothing in common. The early Irish
from the South were often bondsmen, who had sold their services as laborers, in
advance of their emigrating. The millions who went on the move went because of
the famines in Ireland. They crossed the Atlantic in fearful conditions and
they died in their thousands of cholera on arrival. They came in the
"coffin" ships from Queenstown, from Galway and from Liverpool. They
were mainly from the hardest stricken areas of the western seaboard, from
Clare, Mayo, Donegal, Kerry and Cork. They were unskilled laborers who tended
to herd into the cities of the east coast, and they were the men who built the
railroads of America and, in the main, were the hewers of wood and drawers of
water. The alternatives for the log-cabin Irish were, all too frequently, kill
or be killed. They more than survived -they prospered.
They made, in many cases, vast fortunes, they gave
America at least ten Presidents, if not a round dozen, and southern Ireland
ultimately produced John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. The round dozen would
include Richard Nixon who, on his visit to Ireland, unearthed Irish ancestors
on his Milhous side, and Jimmy Carter, who can claim Irish blood from the North
of Ireland on his maternal side. The Presidents from the historic counties of
Ulster inc1ude Andrew Jackson, James Knox Polk, James Buchanan, Andrew
Johnston, Ulysses Grant, Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison,
William McKinley and Woodrow Wilson. Three of them were born in Ulster, while
the remainder were of Irish descent. Speaking of Irish gallantry on the
American scene, perhaps it is best to draw the veil quickly over the activities
of the Costelloes and the O'Bannions, the Malones and the Sheehys in the
bootlegging days of Prohibition. When apprehended, they all claimed in court
that they were "as white as driven snow, " for they were doing their
thirsting neighbors a good turn, based on the days long ago back home when
their ancestors had made "poteen" and distributed it throughout the
neighboring countryside, without thought of profit. A lovable, hospitable and
hardworking section of the ethnic groups that go to make up the peoples of the
United States, the Irish have always and will always retain a deep love for the
land of their forebears.
Once the wave upon wave of Irish emigrants had found
work in America they to send remittances home to Ireland, and, of course, to
encourage their relations to follow in their footsteps. The Irish laborers of
the 1840s sent about a million dollars back to their homeland, andby the1870s,
whenmore than tenmillion dollars was f1owing back to Ireland, the countvf s
dependence on the 'Letter from America" became not only a way of life, but
a means of existence, particuarly in the congested districts of the west coast
conties of Ireland.
By the turn of the century, the Irish had settled in
as part of the labor force, working from dawn to dusg often in appallingly bad
coditions generated by New World capitalist cities. icy were shop, saloon ,
gamblers, prize-fighters, and railroad gangers. They were, in the ', the
pick-and-shovel brigade, who began to move west as the railroad tracks were
laid. They were the builders of roads and houses, and diggers of gold and
silver.
They began to 611 San Francisco and Virginia City, and
they were among the first to strike it rich in the new silver and gold mines of
the West. Some who made it to Nob Hill became bankers and industrialists, and
Nevada and Virginia City resounded with Irish names in the mid nineteenth
century.
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