Let’s take this private for awhile. Lex, I’ve got a few things to share with you sometime from my research, and have two books on order from the local library that should prove intersting and may even provoke additional reading – one on Five Points, the other on historical population trends in NYC.

We can compare sources, perhpas come up with points of consensus.

Though we’ll come to no consensus regarding this foul, expanding bluster of the Irish as a “drunken underclass”.

It is difficult to imagine where to begin…

Trying to respond to that is like responding to a famous lawyer’s trick: “So when was the last time you beat your wife, Sir?”

I had a client once who was stunned by the verbal audacity of opposing counsel who was trying to cudgel him into embracing that which was not. With more than a bit of confusion, but an economy of language and a simple honesty I have treasured ever since, he said: “Man, he was wrong even if he was right.”

On the larger, point, you have made a tactical error, if you seek to obtain a retraction.

That the Irish in the Eastern seaboard cities were a drunken underclass is a historical fact so broadly known and proven and well-supported I scarcely know where to begin. But, I will actually make another post on it, citing among others Kevin Phillips, Thomas Sowell and other reputable sources, in detail.

Jenkins is right. And it is not anti-Catholic bigotry to point out that suffering several centuries of brutal oppression was not good for the character of the Irish Catholics. But they
overcame all this. That is the story. And a heroic story it is.

But, as my further research material filters in I will revisit all this. So, we can, I hope end the dialogue on this post, and resume it on a better substantiated basis than a tossed-off sentence based on a half-remembered statistic which started life as an email. If you want to go last here, feel free to do so.

One additional point of Lex’s needs to be highlighted because it is, I think, at the heart of this exchange – the assertion that the NYC Irish of 1840-1860 were a “drunken underclass”.

Good judgment will win out, I hope, when its author decides whether or not to stand by that characterization.

Yes, specific factual points are at issue – starting with the one Lex has acknowledged.

There is a greater issue.

I believe one of the writers referenced by Lex in the blog to which I originally responded – Jenkins of Penn State – is known for having remarked that the last acceptable prejudice in this country is anti-Catholicism.

That, of course, is not true – though it may ring true to those who have encountered it.

There will always be prejudices – lingering ones and those newly minted – to challenge those of us who are inclined to sin. Even in civilized company, in the midst of earnest discourse among reasonable men, we shouldn’t be too surprised when prejudice rears its ugly head.

I may have to concede on “vast majority”.

But I don’t concede it yet. It would be consistent with my basis understanding of what was going on in that era, in New York, among its Irish. I suspect I must have gotten it from somewhere, rather than dreamed it up. I usually don’t dream these things up.

I’m looking into it.

The article on Bishop Hughes is interesting and entertaining. It is also inconsistent, vague, and hyperbolic. An embarassment, I would say, to cite such an article as authority.

The author’s not precise as to the dates, but does refer to a population of 60,000 Catholics out of a population of 300,000 in NYC – in 1838?

He also claims “an estimated 50,000 Irish prostitutes in 1850.” 60,000 Catholics, an estimated 50,000 of whom are Irish hookers.

Not to make too fine a point of it, but he also refers to Five Points as one of two particularly loathesome Irish neigborhoods. I have no doubt it was nasty. Seems they had “as many as 17 brothels” there alone. At least there weren’t 18, or 20.

I wonder where “as many as” 49,000+ other Irish hookers hung their hats.

Let’s not forget the kids. For all his enthusiasm, your source does not stand as authority that “vast majorities” of Irish children were “born out of wedlock and frequently abandoned.”

He does claim: “Illegitimacy reached stratoshpheric heights” and that “tens of thousands of abandoned Irish kids roamed, or prowled, the city’s streets.”

Later in the piece his confidence rises and he states that there were “perhaps as many as 60,000 Irish children wnadering in packs around New York City.”

By the way – just how high is “stratospheric”? I think it depends on elevation.

Gosh, if there were 60,000 Catholics in NYC, 50,000 Irish hookers (if you really know the Irish, you know even the hookers were Catholics) and perhaps as many as 60,000 abandoned, prowling, roaming Jimmy Cagney knock-offs (Catholic, too, just as sure as Jimmy Cagney played off of the tough Irish Fadda in his films),.. well, gee, that doesn’t really add up.

60,000 total Catholics minus an estimated 50,000 Irish hookers minus 60,000 abandoned bastard Irish children, prowling and roaming in packs?

There must be a mistake here. What about the Irish fathers? Dads, I mean – and hey, for that matter what about the priests, too – where do they fit into these numbers?

Anyway, I’m still looking over your source to find a reference to that “vast majority” of illegitimate births. Perhaps I missed it.

Let’s make this simpler: a vast majority of Irish children were born illegitimately in NYC in the 1840′s and 1850′s.

Prove it.

Now that you’ve put it in writing, prove it: your authority, please, that during said period in NYC “vast majorities of (Irish) children were born out of wedlock and frequently abandoned.”

John

Whoa. I said nothing of the sort.

But, feel free to rebut this idea to your heart’s content.

My whole point was that affirmative is a medicine for a disease which isn’t even a disease.

I never think any government policy is temporary, so I’m sure I didn’t say that either.

In reality, the white-black gap on the National Assessment of Educational Performance tests given to schoolchildren is wider today than in 1985. On average, blacks in the 12th grade score like whites in the 7th grade. It’s nice to assume that white-black gap in performance will inevitably disappear, but it’s much more realistic to assume that the conditions that generate demands for racial quotas will remain roughly the same for as far into the future as we can foresee.

Second, most of those eligible for affirmative action are not black. Why in the world should legal immigrants, much less illegal immigrants, who chose America, warts and all, be eligible for the benefits originally designed for people whose ancestors were brought here in chains? Worse, this looks like another permanent class of beneficiaries, since Hispanics born in America average about 3 or more grade levels lower than whites on the NAEP. (Asians, of course, do fine.)

Third, as historian Hugh Graham Davis pointed out recently, the intersection of affirmative action and immigration is a time bomb. When affirmative action was invented in 1969, there were about 8 whites for every black, so when a black was given a job over a more qualified white, the cost per white on average was only 1/8th of a job, so the cost per white was not terribly high. The early 1970s expansion of quotas to immigrant groups, however, changed this dynamic. We are now headed toward an eventual 1 to 1 ratio of benefactors to beneficiaries. This is very similar to the same problem that Social Security is headed toward, except that it is much more politically explosive. After all, Social Security takes from you and pays your Mom, so it’s all in the family. Affirmative action takes from one race and pays to other races, so there is much less fellow-feeling. This seems to be a perfect recipe for Balkanizing American politics along racial lines.

The worst effects wroght upon the black underclass were during LBJ’s Great Society and the perverse unintended consequences it had, right when that process of assimilation should have kicked into high gear. The new welfare state made it economically rational for black mothers to do without marginally employable black males in the household, and the new war on drugs took black males out of the relationship market. This let them get away with staying in unhealthy criminal patterns.

Oh yeah, trying to “help” can indeed do much more harm than good.