Who will protect the working man now that the Irish are gone

Another St. Patrick's Day has thankfully passed, few, if any, of last night revelers will be at work today. For myself, I went and had a short one or two just to show my face at Molly's and the Bullhead's, waved farewell and came home to write a sodden bit of memory for jjorge's Irishness thread. Then I went to bed but my mind didn't. My brain fully energized by the ounce or two of Maker's Mark kept pondering the question: Who will protect the working man now that the Irish are gone?

I want to report what my mind decided at about 4:00am, but first read this bit of history from Tom Fleming, Jersey boy.

Don't Parade, Just Go Vote
By THOMAS FLEMING
Published: March 17, 2005 NYT

WHEN I was growing up in Jersey City, no one gave more than a passing thought to St. Patrick's Day. Ireland was a remote place where people sang weepers like "Mother Macree." Otherwise the country was seldom if ever mentioned. We did not even have a St. Patrick's Day Parade.

Some may find this more than a little strange because for 30 or so years, the city was governed by a mayor and four commissioners with Irish names. I went to St. Patrick's Parochial School. I had a grandfather, David Fleming, whose brogue was so thick I could not understand him most of the time.

Old Davey, as we called him, used to pay me a nickel a stanza to recite his favorite poem, "Why I Named You Patrick." These days I can remember only the final stanza, which more or less sums up the rest of this work of high literary art:

When you wear the shamrock, Son,
Be proud of your Irish name.
No other one I know of
Can stand for greater fame.

Except for the poem about St. Patrick, Davey never said a word about Ireland. Neither did my father, Teddy Fleming, who was chairman of the Board of Chosen Freeholders and later sheriff of Hudson County as well as leader of the multiethnic Sixth Ward. He often said that was his real job.

My father frequently referred to himself and others as Irish. But the only people from beyond our shores I ever heard him discuss were the Englishmen with whom his regiment trained before going into the trenches on the Western Front in World War I. He liked them.

After I recited "Why I Named You Patrick," Old Davey frequently told me about the "dirty thieving Republican Protestants" who seldom paid him more than 50 cents a day to dig ditches and roll barrels in his immigrant youth.

Getting madder by the minute, Davey told me what happened when he went to Jersey City factories in search of a better job. "Protestant or Catholic?" he was asked. If he said Catholic, the answer often was: "No work today."

Shortly after Davey arrived from Ireland, the Protestants won a municipal election and fired everyone on the public payroll with an Irish name. "From now on," one of the gleeful winners told a New York newspaper, "Irish men are nowhere."

I heard similar stories at election night parties in my youth. In Jersey City, Election Day was a lot more important than St. Patrick's Day. The voting booth was where we learned to tell the Protestant establishment that the Irish-Americans might be nowhere but they had no intention of staying there.

The man who did most of the telling in Jersey City was a tall, lean Irish-American named Frank Hague. He put together what students of the subject consider the ultimate political machine. Unlike other bosses, Hague refused to make nice with Hudson County's Protestant powers. He forced the railroads to pay millions in city taxes they had avoided for decades with the help of the Republican Party. This was no small accomplishment: the Pennsylvania and other lines owned 25 percent of Jersey City's property.

Hague also involved himself in labor disputes. Before he took office, thugs hired by the corporations often beat and shot striking workers on Jersey City's streets. Hague vowed to put an end to this practice. He forced the corporations to arbitrate the disputes (and served as an arbitrator himself). The workers usually won these bloodless arguments. And he confounded the Protestants by cleaning up downtown Jersey City. Hague closed brothels and dance halls where prostitutes picked up customers and reformed the Police Department, which had become all but indifferent to enforcing the law when payoffs were forthcoming. Hague was not a model of ethical perfection in other ways, but no one in Jersey City worried about that.

Davey Fleming used to say that Hague - "the Big Fellow" - had the nerve of a burglar going up the outside of a New York skyscraper.

My father, who had won a lieutenant's commission during the Battle of the Argonne, also liked Hague's hardball style. Teddy Fleming made sure that at least 90 percent of the Sixth Ward voted the straight Democratic ticket on Election Day. That was the expected percentage in all 12 Jersey City wards.

This Irish-American-led political juggernaut elected Democratic governors and senators and soon had a lot to say about judges, district attorneys and numerous other officials in the rest of New Jersey.

In 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to run for a third term against the wishes of the Democratic Party. Roosevelt went to Mayor Hague, who was vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and Hague's close friend, Mayor Ed Kelly of Chicago, and let them handle the nominating convention.

In Albany, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Jersey City, Kansas City, New York and Pittsburgh, which is by no means a complete list, tens of thousands of Irish-Americans found a way out of the slums thanks to their political machines. (A term no Jersey City Irish-American ever used - it was always "the Organization.") The grandsons and granddaughters of these policemen, firemen, court officers and other state and municipal jobholders armed themselves with college and law degrees and got somewhere in the larger American world.

What does all this mean on St. Patrick's Day?

Gradually, as I turned into an historian to understand the world in which I grew up, I realized we Irish-Americans have our own story to tell - a very different story from the Irish in Ireland. It's a story with plenty of troubles and not a little heartbreak. But threaded through it is the triumph of a defeated people who used America's freedom to win their share of pride and prosperity.

On St. Patrick's Day, that's worth a come all ye or two. But I hope we never forget the importance of Election Day.


Thomas Fleming is the author of "The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I" and the forthcoming "Mysteries of My Father: An Irish-American Memoir."

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Now my turn, and before this gets too long, if it isn't too long already, a bit of my family's history. My grandfather Martin and his brothers fled Ireland. The word is fled. Escaped. Yes, escaped is a very good word for describing the leaving of a horror and Ireland, when Grampy was twelve in 1900, was exactly that for any person in the working class. He was the oldest of five brothers and a sister and started his working life at ten years like all the other boys in Inch. Paddy Mike, Martin's dad, made sure he had the steamship fare by the time he reached seventeen then packed him off to America and freedom.

The Irish in Massachusetts were a lot like the ones described in Fleming's article above. They stuck together and taught each other how the system worked and just like in New Jersey it was the ballot box that brought the power. The power to protect unions, to contract for wages fairly and build better schools and roads were all part of the new life the Irish had in America and they had to fight tooth and nail to win concessions from the entrenched forces. Do I have to say white anglo-saxon protestants in order to make things clear?

"Why would a man have to work ten hours for a dollar when the fair wage would be twice that?" My uncle John of the Union Pacific used to ask in his dotage. We played checkers and he told me about strikes and stoppages, of pets killed and children threatened, but the thing of it was, the thing that the oppressors here in America didn't realize, was that it had been so much worse in Ireland that the micks didn't care. They stayed focused and won.

I had a few uncles and an aunt who were convinced that the Depression was brought on by the power structure in order to break the unions. What it did was the opposite and onto the American stage came FDR who saw where the real power of the American economy was, the working men and women of the nation. He built on the foundation of labor the social contract we have today. Government protections for labor helped provide the strength and energy needed to win World War II and made the USA the envy of the working world.

That's all gone now. It's 2005 and people have forgotten who hard it was to make a living amongst corporate greed. Corporate greed is now the standard. Unions have shrunk and disemboweled themselves through their own greed and lack of memory of their history and purpose, while corporations deliver pink slips to workers here and job applications to workers overseas. Huge retailers, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Lowe's, basically tell workers to like it or lump it when it comes to working conditions and the rest of us still line up to buy from them. Some solidarity that. Meanwhile, banks get bigger along with their ATM fees while actual persons in a bank are more likely to be mopping a floor then processing a loan. Phone companies --- ah, well, you know that story and don't get me started on energy companies either, we'll be here all day.

At the ballot box we've been bamboozled with more than half of the electorate staying home out of lethargy or confusion with the remaining quarters split down the middle over moral issues while the Republican winners chortle over their new tax cuts and their on-going campaign to undo all that FDR and the people created sixty years ago. And where are the Irish? Voting with the morals folks. Abortion-the right of a woman to choose. Gay Marriage. We've lost the strongest voices for equality for workers over those two issues and the Republicans have flim-flammed their way over and about and under those issues in order to keep those votes coming. (You think they will ever actually try to resolve either question? Not if it keeps people voting their way.)

So I would like to add my voice to Tom's and say that it's about time the Irish got back to being Irish before those false friends they've made lately dismantle their legacy. And to answer the question about who will protect the working man now that the Irish are gone?: the answer is nobody but you and me, nobody but you and me.


Joe(First Social Security then what? Medicare or Workmen's Comp?)Nation