Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race

Bruce Nelson

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780691161969
  9780691153124
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400842230
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

This is a book about Irish nationalism and how Irish nationalists developed their own conception of the Irish race. Bruce Nelson begins with an exploration of the discourse of race--from the nineteenth--century belief that "race is everything" to the more recent argument that there are no races. He focuses on how English observers constructed the "native" and Catholic Irish as uncivilized and savage, and on the racialization of the Irish in the nineteenth century, especially in Britain and the United States, where Irish immigrants were often portrayed in terms that had been applied mainly to enslaved Africans and their descendants.


Most of the book focuses on how the Irish created their own identity--in the context of slavery and abolition, empire, and revolution. Since the Irish were a dispersed people, this process unfolded not only in Ireland, but in the United States, Britain, Australia, South Africa, and other countries. Many nationalists were determined to repudiate anything that could interfere with the goal of building a united movement aimed at achieving full independence for Ireland. But others, including men and women who are at the heart of this study, believed that the Irish struggle must create a more inclusive sense of Irish nationhood and stand for freedom everywhere. Nelson pays close attention to this argument within Irish nationalism, and to the ways it resonated with nationalists worldwide, from India to the Caribbean.

PART 1

The Making of the Irish Race

Prologue: Arguing about (the Irish) Race

All is race; there is no other truth.

—Benjamin Disraeli, 1845

The truth is that there are no races.

—Kwame Anthony Appiah, 1992

This book is about race.¹ Therefore it must begin with the acknowledgment that few subjects have proven more contentious in the last several decades.² It was not so long ago—certainly in my “growing up” years, the 1950s—that race appeared to be not only a social phenomenon of major importance but also a fixed and immutable category. Then you were either white or black—or perhaps red, yellow, or brown. But mostly the poles were black and white, and there was little room in that binary for “in-between” people whose objective reality and subjective identity could not be captured by one designation or the other. I can’t remember when I first learned about Walter White, the long-time executive secretary of the NAACP, who actually looked white but chose to be black. “I am a Negro,” White declared in his autobiography. “My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me.” Then how could he be a Negro? I would have asked myself in those days. I would have found Cyril V. Briggs equally anomalous. Briggs, who features prominently in these pages, was born in the British Leeward Islands in 1888; he immigrated to the United States in 1905 and soon became a leading figure in the New Negro Manhood Movement that developed among African Americans in the early twentieth century. Like Walter White, Cyril Briggs looked white and chose to be black; indeed, one black newspaper editor characterized him as an “angry blond Negro.”³

It is significant that White and Briggs chose blackness. It is also significant that they did not choose—and could not have chosen—an “in-between” status, or racial hybridity.⁴ There were mulattoes in the United States and in the islands of the Anglophone Caribbean, to be sure; but especially in the United States, lightness of skin was not a ticket to in-between status for “colored” people. A few mulattoes passed for white; some chose to be black; most recognized that they had no choice because others had chosen for them. They resided in a world where the lines between whiteness and blackness were sharply drawn and where to be black was to be a second-class citizen, subject to all-encompassing discrimination, humiliation, and, all too often, violence.

Since then our understanding of race has changed dramatically. Even during my growing-up years, it had been changing in ways that were not yet reflected in popular culture or, for that matter, in the historical profession. As early as 1942, in the context of Nazi racism and the early stages of the Holocaust, anthropologist Ashley Montagu had characterized the “fallacy of race” as “man’s most dangerous myth,” and geneticists were in the process of discrediting—indeed, demolishing—the body of work that had long been regarded as the “science of race.”⁵ Today race no longer appears to be fixed, unchanging, immutable. On the contrary, it is, in Kerby Miller’s words, “subjective, situational, and variable,” and racial “in-betweenness” has become not only a possibility but a definitive marker of the human condition for millions of people, in the United States and all over the world.⁶

The new status of race, its lack of objective definition, has led some intellectuals to argue that race is ephemeral, even “illusory.”⁷ “How can you write a book about race?” an Irish friend asked me recently. At the very least, he argued, race lacks precise meaning, and thus to study it is to enter a “black hole” of subjectivity. Better to focus on something real, like . . . “Like what?” I asked. What could be more real than the crushing weight of centuries of white supremacist ideology or the persistence of deeply rooted structures of inequality that were (and at times still are) justified with appeals to racial difference and incapacity?

At the level of consciousness, my friend was light-years removed from Benjamin Disraeli’s insistence, in 1845, that “all is race, there is no other truth.” Few historians would make such a claim today. Not because race is unimportant, but because we have come to recognize that it is not and has never been an absolute category that can be understood apart from the historical contexts that have nurtured, and altered, it. Beginning as early as the fifteenth century, race derived much of its meaning from the rise of European colonialism, plantation agriculture, and chattel slavery in the emerging Atlantic World. Ironically, the eighteenth-century revolutions, above all in Britain’s North American colonies, served not only to sharpen the dichotomy between freedom and slavery but also to compel the founders of the new American nation to use race as a means of justifying the persistence of involuntary servitude in a society devoted to the expansion of liberty. Just as slavery required a cheap and abundant labor supply, “blackness” justified slavery, and blackness was about far more than skin color. It implied a set of racial characteristics—laziness, irrationality, congenital irresponsibility, and lack of self-control—that sharply differentiated the unfree from the free. Many slaveholders and their apologists argued that because of these characteristics the Negro was inferior, perhaps innately so, and thus fit only for servitude.

This is the terrain of race that is familiar to many of us. But to better understand the history of race discourse, we must return to Benjamin Disraeli’s proclamation that “all is race, there is no other truth.” When he made this statement, Disraeli was not referring to skin color. Rather, he was giving voice to another discourse of race that focused on relationships among Europeans dating from the days of the Roman Empire. His fictional character Sidonia declared that “all is race” in the context of a discussion of the “faculties” of the people of Italy, Spain, Germany, France, and England. For the intensely patriotic Disraeli, it was self-evident that England was flourishing while other European nations were declining or, at best, struggling in vain to keep pace with the “Saxon race.” “Is it the universal development of the faculties of man that has rendered an island, almost unknown to the ancients, the arbiter of the world?” Sidonia asked and immediately answered, “Clearly not. It is her inhabitants that have done this; it is an affair of race. A Saxon race, protected by an insular position, has stamped its diligent and methodic character on the century.”⁸

England, then, was led and populated mainly by a Saxon race that had given the nation its essential character. In this statement Disraeli was content to define England’s character as “diligent and methodic,” but others were prepared to go far beyond such prosaic references in accounting for its glorious achievements. Disraeli’s political and literary careers paralleled the emergence of an Anglo-Saxon school of English historiography that flourished throughout much of the nineteenth century. In his pioneering book Anglo-Saxons and Celts, published more than forty years ago, Perry Curtis identified Anglo-Saxonism as “the notion that the Anglo-Saxon people or race . . . had a peculiar genius for governing themselves—and others—by means of a constitutional and legal system that combined the highest degree of efficiency with liberty and justice.” Nineteenth-century historians of widely divergent political views could agree that (in John R. Green’s words) “we must look far away from England itself” to discover “the fatherland of the English race.” Green and his contemporaries were reaching back to an imagined “Teutonic antiquity” in the “free forests” of Germany, where “the infant genius of our liberty was nursed.” According to these historians, it was the westward migration of Teutonic and Saxon peoples in the fifth and sixth centuries that laid the foundation of the traditions of self-government that represented the crowning achievement of the Anglo-Saxons—above all in England, but increasingly in its white settler colonies as well.⁹

For Anglo-Saxonists, it was axiomatic that the true “English-speaking peoples” constituted a superior race that was destined to achieve dominion over much of the world. Perhaps this axiom was a necessary corollary of colonialism. But it was rendered far more insidious by the premise of the new science of evolution, namely that the process of natural selection inevitably contributed to “the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.”¹⁰ Increasingly, science, history, and literature facilitated the construction of an informal hierarchy of races based on the argument that racial traits were either in the blood, and therefore innate, or inculcated by centuries of cultural evolution until they became almost irreversible. Thus Alfred Milner, Britain’s high commissioner in South Africa, could claim that “the white man must rule, because he is elevated by many, many steps above the black man; steps which it will take the latter centuries to climb.” “It is quite possible,” Milner added, that “the vast bulk of the black population may never be able to climb [these steps] at all.”¹¹

In this smug affirmation of hierarchy, inequality, and (congenital) inferiority, the toxicity of race as a subject of cultural and political discourse in the nineteenth century becomes painfully evident. But it’s important to acknowledge from the outset that, in Matthew Frye Jacobson’s words, “the term ‘race’ was highly unstable and was applied with a staggering imprecision.”¹² “Race” could be synonymous with “nation”—the distinction was seldom clear; or it could apply to a family of nations, notably the Celts, who together were said to compose a single race, albeit with some allowance for geographic variations.¹³ “Race” often implied innate characteristics but sometimes suggested that a people could be redeemed, usually through a process of “Anglicization” designed to make backward races more like the English. Although race often created a sharp dichotomy between two peoples, it routinely strayed farther afield and brought third parties into the mix. Thus, in demonizing the Irish, English observers often compared them to the “savages” of North America and sometimes to the “Hottentots” of South Africa, who were “commonly seen as the ‘lowest’ of the savage races.”¹⁴

Racial discourse could be sympathetic; more than a few Englishmen and -women believed that the Anglo-Saxon’s habit of diligence and method should be complemented by the Irish penchant for sentiment and spirituality. Perry Curtis and others, notably Michael de Nie and Steve Garner, have demonstrated that English representations of the Irish varied, depending on the political and social conditions of the moment.¹⁵ In times of relative peace and tranquillity in Ireland, more-benign views predominated. But given the long history of conflict between “native” and “stranger” in Ireland, English critics could and did draw on a vast reservoir of hostile and demeaning views of the “Irishman by nature.” In fact, they had been doing so since at least the twelfth century.¹⁶ Few politicians exceeded Disraeli in this regard. He sometimes expressed the belief that governance with a firm hand, combined with a capacity for sympathetic understanding, would pacify the Irish and make them loyal and obedient citizens of the United Kingdom. But more often he tended to regard the Irish as the antithesis of the English. The Irish, he wrote in 1836, “hate our free and fertile isle. They hate our order, our civilisation, our enterprising industry, our sustained courage, our decorous liberty, our pure religion. This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character. . . . Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood.”¹⁷

Like Disraeli, many members of England’s educated and governing class defined themselves over against the “wild,” “indolent,” and “superstitious” Irish race. Irish vice made them all the more certain about English virtue, and the propagation of an Anglo-Saxonist creation myth only added to their certainty. According to Curtis, the ethnocentric—or racial—prejudice of English Anglo-Saxonists had the effect of “reduc[ing] the Irish Question . . . to an apparent conflict between two fundamentally incompatible races.”¹⁸

For well over a century this discourse of race as national (and sometimes multinational) character coexisted with the more familiar discourse of race as color. Scientists, ethnologists, and anthropologists developed an extensive literature that attracted a wide readership and, increasingly, defined the parameters of scholarly and popular thought about the definition and meaning of “race.” One of the most famous of these tracts was by the Scottish anatomist Robert Knox, whose book The Races of Men: A Fragment was published in 1850. “The object of this work,” Knox boldly declared, “is to show that the European races, so called, differ from each other as widely as the Negro does from the Bushman; the Caffre from the Hottentot; the Red Indian of America from the Esquimaux; the Esquimaux from the Basque.” Knox believed that although different races could coexist within nations, “nationalities, however strong, could never in the long run overcome the tendencies of race.” Nations came and went, whereas races had existed for many centuries, “unaltered and unalterable.”¹⁹ Knox’s successors—notably, John Beddoe in England and Madison Grant in the United States—offered variations on his basic themes, but what stands out about their work is the preoccupation with race as national or multinational character rather than with race as color.²⁰

Remarkably, this tendency—so foreign to our own understanding of race—continued well into the twentieth century. Thus, in 1944, the American novelist Wallace Stegner wrote an article entitled “Who Persecutes Boston?” which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. In the article he used the words “race” and “racial” fifteen times without ever referring to Negroes or blacks or whites. Stegner, who was teaching literature at Harvard at the time, was deeply concerned about the violent conflict between Irish Americans and Jews in Boston during World War II. Much of the violence was concentrated in Dorchester, where the population was overwhelmingly Jewish; most of it was aimed at Jewish youths, who were being assaulted by Irish gangs from Roxbury and South Boston.²¹ Stegner could have characterized the conflict in Boston as ethnic or even religious, since it appeared that the assailants were Irish and Catholic in virtually every case. But he chose the word “racial” to identify the nature of the violence, and he appeared to operate within the discourse of European races—albeit without accepting the invidious assumptions about superiority and inferiority that were at the heart of the narrative constructed over more than a century by its most notorious practitioners.

In retrospect, it would seem reasonable to suggest that Stegner’s frame of reference in “Who Persecutes Boston?” was outdated, even anomalous. After all, nearly half a century earlier, the Afr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1. The Making of the Irish Race
• Part 2. Ireland, Slavery, and Abolition
• Part 3. Ireland and Empire
• Part 4. Ireland and Revolution
• Notes
• Index