Pataki and Potatoes
By Franklin Foer
After 150 years of
calculated disregard, the Irish potato famine has suddenly forced itself onto
the U.S. political scene. Thanks to a bill signed by New York Gov. George
Pataki, starting next fall, high school students in his state will be legally
required to study the Irish potato famine. The legislation amends a 1994 act
that mandated students take a course on human rights violations "with
particular attention to the study of the inhumanity of genocide, slavery and
the Holocaust." Now the mandate also covers "the mass starvation of the Irish
between 1845 and 1850."
Similar
bills are pending in other states, and a bill pending in Congress would require
the Department of Education to include the potato famine in all the model
curricula it concocts. Meanwhile, organizers of the upcoming St. Patrick's Day
parade in New York have made the famine the "theme" for this year's march,
claiming it's a much under-studied instance of genocide. And groups have
lobbied for the issue of a U.S. postage stamp commemorating the
150 th anniversary of the calamity.
The campaign bespeaks the transformation of Irish-American
life. When the Irish were on the way up, intent on mastering and merging into
American society, they viewed the Great Hunger as a somewhat shameful
episode--a tragedy to be cordoned off in the past and overcome. Now that most
have made it, the ethnic remnant that once ruled Tammany Hall, Albany, and
Boston, and anointed the governors and presidents, has retreated into
victimology.
Even though Irish-Americans
face virtually no discrimination, some have embraced a politics modeled after
the campaigns of African-Americans and Native Americans demanding their fair
historical due--that American institutions recognize their old hardships.
Tammany Tiger has died and come back as the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the
American Irish Teachers Association, the Irish American Foundation, and the
Irish-American Caucus--interest groups and old fraternal orders playing new
breed-identity politics.
But the
potato-famine campaign, and the historical interpretation it aims to canonize,
has more to do with the present than the past.
Like the Holocaust for the Jews or slavery for
African-Americans, the potato famine is the omnipresent, haunting presence in
Irish history. Consider the event's magnitude. At the start of the famine in
1845, nearly 9 million people lived in Ireland. Five years later, the
population had dwindled to 6.5 million: Two million had emigrated, and over 1
million had died.
The
famine is also synonymous with British oppression. Kept alive by folk
tradition, the idea now reverberates in political symbols and pop culture. In
speeches, Gerry Adams, the head of Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican Army's
political wing, continues to evoke the famine to condemn British occupation of
Northern Ireland. IRA prisoners held by the British have famously used hunger
striking, in part to allude to the famine--the most monumental historical
example of British tyranny. Or take folk rocker Sinead O'Connor's song
"Famine," released two years ago. Its lyrics argue that labeling the calamity
"famine" fails to draw enough attention to the British role in provoking
it.
These arguments draw on an interpretation of the famine
that has flourished since the event itself. It goes like this: In 1845, the
fungus Phytophora infestans arrived on the Isle of Wight, off the coast
of England, when an infected potato peel from an American ship washed ashore.
Within two months the blight had spread across Europe, from Ireland to
Scandinavia. But because of a deliberate British policy, the Irish bore the
brunt. Ireland's British rulers refused to curtail exports of wheat from the
country, which could have fed thousands, and heartless absentee British
landlords evicted starving tenants. For their part, the British claimed that
laissez-faire policy precluded intervention in the market to halt the crisis,
and that the Irish needed to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. But,
the interpretation goes, it was really racism and anti-Catholicism that led the
Brits to sit on their hands.
By
treating the potato famine as a human rights violation, the Pataki potato
amendment in New York assumes a variation of this interpretation. Natural
disasters don't violate human rights. As in the case of slavery and the
Holocaust, alongside which the famine will be taught, there must be a culprit.
And that would be the British. Pataki made this explicit at the bill's Albany
signing ceremony: "History teaches us that the Great Hunger was not the result
of a massive Irish crop failure, but rather a deliberate campaign by the
British to deny the Irish people the food they needed to survive."
Too bad for the kids who will be taught this
partisan line; most recent historical evidence doesn't support it. In the
1960s, a revisionist school of economic historians proved that limiting wheat
exports would have made only a puny dent in the calamity. British action
wouldn't have mattered. In addition, British intervention to assist the
starving assumes a more contemporary idea of the state's responsibilities that
doesn't jibe with mid-19 th -century realities. If Ireland got hit
hardest by the famine, it was because it depended more heavily on the potato
for sustenance than other countries.
Although scholarship
continues to ascribe some culpability to the British--for instance, the British
did contribute to the Irish dependence on potatoes--most historians emphasize
the famine was primarily a natural disaster, and conclude that British inaction
was hardly part of a deliberate plan.
Even the
Irish--the ones in Ireland--have distanced themselves from the New York
legislation. The Irish Times , one of the country's leading newspapers,
questioned the hyperbolic rhetoric of the amendment's supporters in the state
assembly. And an Irish government official, recently in the United States for a
symposium on the famine, has refuted Pataki's description of the famine and
distanced the Irish government from the New York law.
Yet New York state senators and legislators privately admit
they assented to the legislation because they were impressed with the ferocity
of the support for the bill. "It's pork," concedes one assemblyman from upstate
who voted for the measure. "A necessary move to get the Irish vote. We all have
Irish constituents in our district, and they care." Another representative of
Irish descent (from Syracuse), who vocally opposed the bill with the argument
that the legislature shouldn't dictate high-school curricula, has received
threatening phone calls that accused him of selling out his people. Other
opponents were deluged with calls, denouncing them as "anti-Irish bigots." And
that was after the bill passed overwhelmingly.
It's a
sectarian sort of reaction: Either you are for us or against us. And it's
symptomatic. Irish-Americans have fewer doubts about the more radical Irish
nationalism than do most Irish. For instance, Irish-Americans have celebrated
the Sinn Fein, which raises the bulk of its funds in the United States. Yet,
the party has never garnered more than 15 percent of the vote in an election in
Northern Ireland, and last year won only 2 percent of the vote in Irish
elections.
This tendency for descendants of immigrants to
take a harder line on nationalistic issues than the folks still living back in
the old country is not, of course, peculiar to Irish-Americans. It's the
"Diaspora
chic" Eric Liu described earlier in Slate: the recent tendency of American
minorities to think of themselves as communities in exile, a component of the
greater national obsession with finding one's roots. It is evident in
Irish-Americans' increased visits to Ireland (the Irish American Foundation
calls them "pilgrimages"); the burgeoning membership of fraternal organizations
like the Ancient Order of Hibernians (now at 100,000); and rising contributions
to groups like the American Friends of Sinn Fein (in 1995, it raised a record
$1.3 million).
The lure of the diaspora may
be more atavistic for Irish-Americans than other groups. About 30 years ago, it
seemed Irish-Americans would cease to identify strongly as Irish-Americans.
John F. Kennedy's election to the White House and the success of celebrities
like Grace Kelly proved that the WASP establishment, which long impeded access
to Irish-Americans, was crumbling. Because Irishness meant less to society, it
meant less to the Irish. Along with mass culture, the advent of television and
movies worked to eliminate the differences among ethnic groups. Also,
suburbanization shattered the old urban institutions, the pubs and fraternal
societies, that once provided the ballast for Irish communities.
When an identity is
contrived or reconstructed in exile after a long fallow period of
nonidentification--as in the potato-famine campaign--it's bound to be more
radical than the real thing, like the religious convert who becomes more
zealous than those born into a religion. The emotional connection to the
motherland becomes more intense than the connection to reality. The result is
romanticization: Terrorist groups like the IRA become freedom fighters, and a
blight becomes genocide.
