Deep American St. Patrick’s Day Roots and Revels on Lock Down

Despite the cancelations  of dying  the Chicago River green and  of the St. Patrick's Parade thousands of young revelers hit the bars early Saturday morning for a pub crawl in defiance of orders to limit large gatherings.  It so enraged Governor Pritzker that he order all bars and restaurants closed.

It is going to be a subdued St. Patrick’s Day this year.  In Chicago, where the celebration is perhaps more intense than any other city, the dying of the River Green and the annual downtown parade last Saturday were cancelled due to the Coronavirus emergency.  So was Sunday’s South Side Irish parade—an affair with a sort of chip on its shoulder since Mayor Richard J. Daley and the Plumbers Union moved to the Loop for politicians to strut their stuff—and the smaller Northwest Side and various suburban parades.

A few thousand young carousers turned out early Saturday morning anyway all decked out in Kelly Green and whooping it up for an annual pub crawl.  Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker was so outraged by the flaunting of his orders to drastically limit public gatherings that on Sunday he ordered all bars and restaurants to close by 9 pm last night.  He was the first official to take such sweeping action but was quickly followed by Massachusetts, New York City, and other locals.  San Francisco went one better by placing the whole city on indefinite lock-down. 

The hard hit hospitality industry has been forced to lay off thousands of low-paid servers, hosts, bartenders, kitchen personnel, and bus boys leaving these pay-check-to-pay check and tip reliant workers in dire straits.  While pizzerias, fast food joints with easy drive up service, and traditional take-out places like Chinese restaurants will make a killing, many other eateries are scrambling to figure out options for curbside pickup and delivery.  Independent and mom-and-pop are particularly hard hit with food inventories they can’t sell and fixed costs, especially rents.  Many do not have cash on hand to pay outstanding bills, pay April rent, or to re-stock when closure orders are finally lifted.  And they might to be able to immediately pay recalled employees.

 

Tons of corned beef and cabbage fixings could rot unless restaurants can arrange pickup and delivery services.  The dish was unknown in Ireland until American tourists started to demand it.  It originated as New England boiled dinner when the immigrant Irish met the Jews in the slums of 19th Century Boston.

 Meanwhile places are stuck with literally tons of corned beef and cabbage fixing and many are scrambling to find ways to sell by delivery or pickup today.  The house bound might find extraordinary deals today on the traditional American feast.  Saloons, however, will have no way to get rid of thousands of barrels of green beer that could go stale before it can ever be used.  On the other hand, your old scribe is not exactly weeping over the waste of that abomination.

Even if riotous revelry is not your thing and you would prefer to observe the day with a quiet St. Patrick’s Day mass, Chicago and many other cities have shut down church services for the duration.

Things are much the same in Dublin and the rest of Ireland, as well as in places with concentrations of the Irish diaspora like Britain and Australia.

I will confine my celebration this year to maybe some of that corned beef, a dram or two of Irish whiskey, and listening to some traditional Irish folk music at home.  Come to think of it, since my wife Kathy and I long ago gave up venturing out for amateur night, it may not be all that different.

Meanwhile, here is my traditional St. Patrick’s day post:

Up until the mid '60 St. Patrick's Day remained a religious festival in Ireland and the annual parade in Dublin, seen here in 1905, was mostly a religious procession, often led by the St. John's Total Abstinence and Benefit Society.  Now the parade is an American style extravaganza awash in Kelly Green, dancing leprechauns, shamrocks, and scantily clad girls.  General rowdiness is the rule of the day, largely due to the large annual pilgrimages to the Auld Sod by Irish Americans, now generations removed from the island.  This year Dublin canceled the parade.

Today is the Feast of St. Patrick, originally a low-key religious celebration in the Auld Sod.  In the U.S. it’s St. Patrick’s Day, which is, as they say, a whole other kettle of fish.  For better or worse this quasi-holiday is an Irish American phenomenon.  Let’s trace the metamorphosis from religiosity, to ethnic muscle flexing, to Irish nationalism, to partisan political display, to equal opportunity public drinking festival. 

It all began on March 17, 1762 with the very first St. Patrick’s Day parade anywhere in the world.  Irish soldiers in a British regiment headquartered in New York City marched behind their musicians and drew cheers from the small local Irish minority, both Catholic and Protestant—mostly Protestant in those days.  It became if not an annual event, one which was observed most years.  When the Redcoats left the city at the end of the American Revolution various local Irish mutual aid societies like the Hibernians and the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick held often competing events which, if they happened to intersect, sometimes devolved into brawls.  

After the United Irishman uprising of 1798 was crushed by the British imposing a harsh repression including the banning of the wearing o’ the Green, a new wave of Irish refugees flooded New York, Boston, and other eastern cities.  They inoculated the annual St. Patrick’s Day observances with a new political significance and wearing green (instead of the traditional Irish colors of blue and gold) became a protest against British rule in the homeland and a call to action to overthrow that rule.  

The Potato Famine unleashed yet another wave of immigration bringing throngs of displaced peasants to the already growing slums of the city. Competing Irish aid societies finally decided to unite behind a single, massive demonstration in New York in 1848.  The theme of independence for Ireland was mixed with an act of aggressive defiance by the now largely Catholic masses against the nativists from Tammany Hall who controlled the city government, the Know Nothings, and street gangs who harassed and bullied them. 

In 1858 the Fenian Brotherhood was organized in the United States in support the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), a secret oath society agitating for the establishment of a “democratic Irish republic.”  The St. Patrick’s Day parades in New York and other cities became powerful recruiting tools for the Fenians. Social events around the day annually raised thousands of dollars, much of it to support fantastic plots and buy arms.  On more than one occasion Fenian plots to attack Canada brought the U.S. and Britain perilously close to war, which, of course was the objective.  

By the second half of the 19th Century New York's St. Patrick's Day parades had become elaborate celebrations of Irish nationalism and a display of raw political power in the city.

The failure of the Easter Rebellion in 1916 in which labor leader James Connolly, fresh from several years in America as an IWW organizer, and an Irish-American unit of Hibernian Rifles were both involved, led to a fresh round of frenzied support for independence back home.  The campaign of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which led to the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922 and the Irish Civil War between the Free State government and republican rebels were both largely financed by Irish Americans.  Even after the establishment of the Republic in 1937, Irish-Americans continued to fund rebel groups aimed at uniting Ulster to the rest of the island, including support for Sein Fein and the Provisional IRA in their armed struggle through The Troubles.  All of this was reflected in the parades and other celebrations of the day which had become dominated by Rebel songs.

Traditional Irish music and step dancing were nearly eradicated by Britain's policy of cultural genocide but were preserved and nurtured by American clubs and societies like this mid-20th Century step dancing group.  Dancing academies are now staples of St. Patrick's day parades and Knights of Columbus corned beef and cabbage dinners. 

St. Patrick’s Day celebrations also were important displays of Irish culture.  Traditional Irish music and dance was so suppressed at home that both nearly disappeared.  Irish-Americans like Chicago’s Police Chief Francis O’Neill collected and preserved the songs and began schools to teach it and traditional Irish step dancing.  Both were re-introduced into Irish culture as a result of these efforts and put on display in St. Patrick’s Day parades, banquets, and concerts. The Irish also excelled at political organization in this country.  Unlike other ethnic groups with large concentrations like the Germans, they were able to create viable political organizations with alliances with other ethnic groups that allowed them to control many city governments for decades.  In Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley brought the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, previously a South Side neighborhood event, to the heart of the Loop and dyed the Chicago River green every year in a display of political power.  Politicians of all ethnicities jockeyed to be as close as possible to Hizonor in the front ranks of the parade.  

Hizzonor da Mayor, Richard J. Daley steps off with his blackthorn stick and green fedora at the head of the 1963 Chicago St. Patrick's Day joined by officials of the sponsoring Plumbers union, the Irish Consul General, Cardinal Alber Meyer (second from left} and actor Pat O'Brien to the Mayor's left and a bevy of politicians in the second row jockeying for position.  Then Republican Cook County States Attorney James P. Thompson can be spotted just over Daley's shoulder

By the late 20th Century St. Patrick’s Day had spread well beyond its ethnic roots.  Everyone is Irish on St. Paddy’s Day became a byword pushed by breweries, bars, and distilleries making the day one of the biggest party days of the year.  Green beer and vomiting teenagers have become new symbols of the holiday.  

St, Patrick himself--a Romanized Welshman captured and enslaved by Irish pirates who somehow escaped, became a priest, and returned to Christianize the land of his pagan captors.  Was it a noble mission, or perhaps revenge?

And what about St. Patrick?  Well, what about him!