Matt Visor, a journalist for the Washington Post, wrote a column on President Biden’s “Irishness” (WPost 3/18/21 p a14) that got my attention. A nicely written item but not very deep, sort of the usual things people say about the Irish. I will do my best to add some facts and history to the Irish of Scranton in President Biden’s time.
I got to know then Senator Biden when I was director of Amnesty International. Quite often I was in front of him in Congress re human rights situations and also we shared quite a few short but nice moments on train rides where I learned that he liked the Amnesty music tours I was doing because of our music choices, namely U2 and Bruce Springsteen.
My intent is to supplement Visor’s article with some depth. I was raised very Irish. Like the Biden family, my grandparents were Gaelic speakers from Mayo who lived in Scranton. The men were miners. Our house was a company house for $8 a month in a small place across from the mine called Grassy. The men came home at night covered with soot and grime. Life was hard and the mine owners refused to provide safety measures. My Mom was a first grade school teacher before she had 11 of us. My Dad started in the mines at 14 but left the mines for steel in Pittsburgh after he and my Mom married. Somehow we were always going and coming from Scranton until the final straw of the death of Uncle Tony McHugh in the mine. The Gaughan family (my mother’s side) still live in and around Scranton but the younger ones left for white collar work and prospered. In the early days of my Mom and Dad’s upbringing, times were rough for the Irish who spoke Gaelic. Gaelic speakers, who were from the west of Ireland, practiced a Catholicism that was more mystical than other Irish Catholics. St Patrick built the faith with the Druids, not against them. My Mom would speak of leprechauns and banshees and an itchy hand meant money was coming and a bird in the chimney had another message. This flavor of the faith bothered Oliver Cromwell who said to “Conemara or hell with these people.” Still, in the west of Ireland the people held onto their faith with serious determination and resolve. But my Mom’s faith was also, as I think was all the Gaughans, of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount that spoke of kindness to the widows, the poor and the lost and humility was part of the texture of their faith.
The long fight between the Irish and English was in the blood of both nations. The famine struck Mayo and the west of Ireland like a large lawnmower killing the potato crop year after year. Upon arrival in the US, a majority of those coming from Mayo ended up in Scranton for jobs in the mines. This became a war, not with the English, but with the major coal corporations in NYC who controlled the coal mines of eastern Pennsylvania, and who excelled in not providing safety and wages for the miners. In order to get control of the unions and to avoid the continuing and forgotten need to provide safety for the miners, the corporations in NYC sent in the Pinkertons to create a myth called the Molly Maguires and dropped it on the miners in the lower part of the coal reserves around the Lehigh Valley. The Molly Maguire conspiracy invented by the Pinkertons alleged enough murder, arson and insurrection to get 20 innocent Irishmen executed. The victims were mostly Gaelic speakers who were seen as the left wing of the unions because they had the poorer and rougher jobs due to their inability to speak English
Thus when we speak of Biden’s Irishness, it is important to add to the history of such a leader. His faith is not just the faith of many American born Irish folks. It is deeper than that, I think. It includes my mom’s memory and thought and a history of serious bigotry. That kind of upbringing adds steel to the back and focus to the mind. The sweetness of kindness is in this mix. I suspect President Biden comes from this historical past. I think it is closer to him and his history than the article in the Washington Post. With the memory of 20 federal executions backed by the NY Times, combined with bad safety in the mines, the soft side of Catholicism and British oppression with a famine that wiped out one fifth of our people……The President is a gentleman but he will act with a sense of history of his people and our experiences.
The real Molly Magurie was rumored to wake her children up each day with this line “awake, awake, what dictator should we bring down today?”