Recently I watched a series of videos (https://youtu.be/ZbJuT8IaMr0) about the great ocean liners connecting Europe and the United States for more than a century following the middle of the nineteenth century. Something which surprised me is that much if not most of the profits of those vast and luxurious sea-faring hotels came from the steerage passengers immigrating to America from Europe. Looking back at that era through the rear-view VR headset of Twitter, we often romanticize or ignore the conditions of that migration, usually dividing between those of us who welcome more immigrantion and those who fear it. Something else I learned suggests to me that to look at today's migrations through the rear-view mirror misses something profoundly different about the world in which today's migration occurs. That difference was suggested to me by the Irish custom of the American Wake.
Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century was what some today might describe as a shit-hole country. We might argue about the reasons for the conditions in Ireland, but it was a place many wanted disparately to escape. As many as 4.5 million Irish would emigrate to the United States, about half the population of Ireland, making them a third of all U.S. immigrants. Often before they left, families and friends would hold an American wake. Once they left the docks of Ireland, they would be as separated from their families as if they were dead. Migrants in that misty age left a country which was largely imaginary to the people of the country to which they were going, just as their destination was largely imaginary to the the people whom they were leaving. They would be strangers in a strange land, celts among angles and saxons, catholics among protestants. Many jobs would be closed to them, and the Ku Klux Klan would harass them. But, it was expected that the separation would be complete and final.
So far as I know, even though many Americans saw the Irish as dirty, ignorant, drunken catholics, there was no fear that they might take over the government or impose Irish law or customs. Rather, they were seen as diluting the purity of WASP America. The most dangerous thing about them was their catholicism, a danger shared with the Italians and Poles and Hispanics. The danger was not that they would try to impose Irish rule, but papal rule. (I saw this fear fleshed out during the 1960 U. S. presidential election. My great-grandmother, a protestant, had a catholic sister who visited that summer. During the heat of an Arkansas summer, the two sisters , Nora and Georgia, made war with their rocking chairs. The evil catholic sister was denied use of the car to attend mass. She faithfully walked each morning.) But it was expected that Irish- and other catholic-Americans would put their Americanism first, as John F. Kennedy tried to do. Some Irish-Americans did send money to support the Easter Rising, but I have found no evidence that they took any religious stance towards the Spanish-American War, although the St. Patrick's Battalion, a unit of 175 or so led by John Riley, had fought with the Mexicans in the Mexican-American War.
In general, the huge migration to the United States beginning in the 1840's of which the Irish were a large part, took place during, and was part of the nationalism and industrialisation of the age. The counties the Irish left, the duchies the Italians left, the petty principalities the Poles left, were more a part of their self-identity than any nation, a concept which was yet emerging in europe. In the United States they would land in a nation very consciously building itself, a country which enjoyed Henry Clay's claim that it had a manifest destiny. They were part of something larger, something about which one son of celtic immigrants would sing, 'This land is your land, this land is my land'. Just crossing the ocean they would have travelled much farther than their forebears. Now they spread out into a nation comprised not of uniting territories with ancient histories of their own, such as Bismark and Garibaldi were attempting, but a nation of territories cut out of whole cloth by the original states (Texas and California excepted). Industrialization was creating new jobs every week.
Now migration takes place in an era of globalism and post-industrialism. Nations are no longer the largest units of power: for many people Google provides more essential services than does the national government. Jobs is a category in chaos: it makes no sense to bar immigrants from jobs which no longer exist. We are all pretty much strangers in a strange world. There is often very little time for the families and friends to hold a wake for emigrants when they are leaving as the shells are falling, but neither is there any sense that, if they can survive, emigrants will never be heard from again.
We live in McLuhan's famous global village, where all of us have the latest gossip on everyone. It is a front porch on which we all are sisters fighting for identity--McLuhan argues that all acts of violence are ways of defining identities--as the world around us becomes smaller each day. Few historic artifacts have been more significant than Apollo 17's photograph of the blue marble that is 'this fragile earth,our island home', as Howard Galley described it.
The Irish migrated from a small island to what seemed a vast continent. Now we all live, whether we acknowledge it consciously or not, is a small island in space. Few of us are willing to do the work to understand what this implies. We tend to either deny our fears, or misplace them.
Some of us, who often call ourselves progressives, deny being fearful and stressed, and like to think we can absorb all the cultures and people that come to our shores. (Some of my friends in this category belong to a church which does not allow homeless people to sleep on their property or use their restrooms, and which cancelled Sunday breakfasts because people were migrating in from the streets.)
Some of us, who often call ourselves conservative, claim that without interference from foreign people and ideas, we could return to the greatness we imagine existed before World War II or some other watershed.
I would suggest that Alvin Toffler was right, and all of us are walking around in shock. We are all strangers in a strange land, and as the events of violence in the United States show again and again, we are quite capable of being overstressed without outside influences. If we want outside influences to justify our feelings of distress, there are plenty of them, willing to blame all the problems of contemporary life on capitalism or patriarchy or socialism or international trade or carbon dioxide in the atmosphere--pay your data and take your choice.
Once when Marshall McLuhan had been lecturing about the rate of change in which we live, he was asked, 'what should we do?' He replied, 'No one knows yet'. When we are all urged to take action, this is not a very satisfactory answer. But it is an honest answer, one which suggests that we need to pull back from bashing each other with our wheel chairs and realize that in a village most of the communication is gossip, neither gospel truth nor fake news. It is important that we listen. It is important that we, so far as we are able, understand. Most importantly we need to recognize our own fears, and develop some way of responding to them besides the fight or flight that were our options when we were few in number, wandering through the savannahs and deserts. On our little porch in our shrinking village, fighting just kills our sister and there's no room to flee.
