CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

So here’s another St. Patrick’s Day, reminding me of a place where I’d once belonged. My ancestors left me no memories, but I can imagine why they had to leave. For here we are again, governed by strings of arrogant, corrupt and bloodthirsty profiteers.

As the Irish Socialists wrote in 1908:

“We came here because we found that the government of the country was in the hands of those proprietors and their friends, and that army and navy and police were the agents of the government in executing the wit of those proprietors, and for driving us back to our chains whenever we rose in revolt against oppression. And as…that government was backed and maintained by the might of a nation other than our own, and more numerous than us, we could not hope to overthrow that government and free our means of living from the grasp of those proprietors. We fled from that land of ours and came to the United States.”

“We came here because we found that the government of the country was in the hands of those proprietors and their friends, and that army and navy and police were the agents of the government in executing the wit of those proprietors, and for driving us back to our chains whenever we rose in revolt against oppression. And as…that government was backed and maintained by the might of a nation other than our own, and more numerous than us, we could not hope to overthrow that government and free our means of living from the grasp of those proprietors. We fled from that land of ours and came to the United States.”

So my forebears came as workers, and yet all too soon, they—not the Irish Socialists, of course, but the Irish I knew—set out to prove themselves to the society that wouldn’t admit them into the country clubs. My father’s parents founded a travel company. Invisibly, they made good money in a spot on Chicago’s South Side after the Irish and Italians had moved out. The African-American manager was instructed not to tell the customers who actually owned the business, my mother told me.

In How the Irish Became White, Noel Ignatiev explained race........

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