Blast From The Past: My Problem With St. Patrick’s Day
St. Patrick’s Day is America’s favorite ethnic holiday. It is also the strangest. In a calendar crowded with Cinco de Mayo, Kwanzaa, and gay pride parades, St. Paddy’s is the one chance for the white, middle-class majority to dress garishly and get drunk while celebrating a history of suffering overcome.
No doubt, most St. Pat’s revelers have been motivated by nothing other than the desire to have a little fun. But it’s worth asking why this desire took the form it did. Many white Americans really are Irish, of course, but the reason so many white people of all ethnic backgrounds celebrate this one ethnic holiday rather than, say, Oktoberfest, goes deeper. It would be a little weird, not to say unseemly, for Americans of English or German descent to parade in the street celebrating their ethnic heritage. To do so would be like dancing in the end zone of colonial history. And so, because the Irish were actually the subjects of discrimination and oppression, Irishness has become the go-to white ethnicity.
St. Pat’s isn’t the only example of this cultural phenomenon. When Margaret Mitchell set out in Gone With the Wind to create a narrative of white suffering and triumph, she chose an Irish protagonist with green eyes and a green dress. Scarlett’s father, Gerald O’Hara, a proud Irishman who named his plantation ‘Tara’ after the ancient seat of the high kings of Ireland. This is a strikingly explicit ethnic background for a family meant to represent the overwhelmingly Protestant and Anglo Reconstruction- era South. But her unusual choice makes perfect sense. In order to tell a narrative of white suffering that would not seem laughable beside the injustices visited on enslaved blacks, Mitchell had to turn to the one group of whites that had been oppressed: the Irish. Thirty-million books, a Pulitzer Prize, and an iconic film later, a white southern lady had displaced Uncle Tom as the great American symbol of injustice suffered.
Being half Irish myself, I think there are many good reasons to celebrate St. Patty’s, not least Ireland’s impressive religious and literary heritage. But I think it is weird that one of the reasons the holiday exists is to give the privileged a chance to dress up in the drag of historical oppression.
Image by GoToVan 
Editor’s note: A perusal of our site usage today showed a huge spike in hits on this post from search engines. Matthew Schmitz was an author here many years ago, and this post first appeared back when this blog was known as “The League of Ordinary Gentlemen” on March 17, 2010. So I’ve re-posted it today, and you all can debate whether its ideas are still relevant and important today. Tá ar é!Report
Dan Savage has the right of it. Saint Patrick’s Day and Halloween are pretty much the cis-gender heterosexual equivalents of gay pride parades these days. Its a time when you can loose your inhibitions and get wild. In more Latin climates replace both with Carnival.
There is a really good bar called the Gingerman, you can get mead there, located near the heart of Saint Patrick day celebrations in New York City. On Saint Patrick’s Day they get a lot of clueless people asking for bud or miller rather than the good beers they usually serve.Report
Man, If Dan Savage really suggested that Halloween is a cis-gender heterosexual equivalent to anything, he knows a lot less about what’s up with the gays that I would have suspected.Report
Interesting question.
I would say the answer is no, but also yes.Report
I’m not sure I agree with this assessment. Italians, German Catholics, Easter Europeans…all were treated poorly in some way in America. I think St.Pat’s is so popular because Irish Americans have just been a lot more successful at positive branding. WWI & WWII really hurt the Germans. The Mafia really hurt Italians. The Irish just seem like fun-loving folks.Report
Well, they do now! But there was a time that it wasn’t a particularly great thing to be Irish in America. And if you can get really close with an Irish-American family you will be allowed to see past the gregariousness, wit, festivity, and the romance of beautiful rural Ireland. It will be tempered with a bitter taste of melancholy and maybe even some lingering resentment, perhaps in the form of a rationalization of the Troubles.Report
I’m going to quibble with this a bit. There was a lot of hostility towards Irish immigrants during the mid-19th century but the Irish had some considerable advantages that other immigrant groups did not. They spoke English and were quickly able to attach themselves to the Democratic political machines that ran most American cities. Their bloc voting opened up many opportunities in the form of government jobs that other immigrant groups lacked. Since they are the dominate group in the Roman Catholic Church, they had a powerful institution independent of the American government to help them against the worst abuses of Protestant America that other immigrant groups and African-Americans lacked. Things were rough but not as rough for others on the wrong side of American society.Report
I should also note that I’m 25% Irish. My family came here in the 1850s. When I say they seem fun-loving, I mean based on the positive branding. We’ve just had better luck than many groups and also no major negatives to associate with the ethnicity the way some other groups have had.Report
The Irish used to have a reputation of being great complainers filled with woe. There is a cartoon from the early 1960s about the unluckiest man in New York having an Irish psychologist who just laments about his problems and a Jewish bartender that gently nudges him not to be out on a night like this and drink milk instead.Report
I don’t think this persecution was mostly about being Irish in America; more about being Irish in the old country – the abuses of absentee landlords and the great famine outweighing snobbish treatment from the Anglo-Americans and “no Irish need apply” signs.
Which, there were plenty of other badly persecuted groups of white people who fled to the Americas, but I guess making the leads in Gone With The Wind, say, Doukhobors would have achieved the overcoming-persecution bit, but made the characters “too ethnic” – insufficiently anglophone and all.Report
Whatever you do, don’t steal the potatoes off another man’s plate.
[This is a raconteur’s joke…in other words, the beginning of a very true story.]Report
There is also the history of the potato famine, “A census taken in 1841 recorded a population of 8,175,124. A census immediately after the famine in 1851 counted 6,552,385, a drop of over 1.5 million in 10 years. The census commissioners estimated that at the normal rate of increase the population in 1851 should have been just over 9 million” This leading to emigration and republicanism, effecting much of the english speaking world.Report
As an Italian-American, I can say that there is also something to the fact that many Italians do not embrace their whiteness in part because whiteness was something that was at one time denied to them.
Let’s make no bones about it: I am undoubtedly a white person and enjoy much white privilege. I will not pretend otherwise. But there are many supposed elements of white American culture that are foreign to me: camping, hiking, golf, skiing. Some of that is economic but there is also something cultural there. Those aren’t things our Nonnas and Nonnos in the old country did. When we settled in NYC and Jersey City and Hoboken, those weren’t things we did. And any one with a vowel at the end of his name who attempted was often shut out.
If you ask many Italian-Americans about their background, they will often cite their Italian heritage before their whiteness. And not in quite the same way that many white people don’t claim whiteness.
I don’t know how this compares to the Irish-American experience. But when you got into the “club” — when you were more or less offered the full package of benefits that whiteness offered — I think greatly impacts these dynamics.Report
Are we sure that its popularity is not a dog-whistle manifestation of White Supremacy given that it’s a holiday that explicitly celebrates white people?Report
There’s another white group whose history of persecution puts the Irish to shame, but we’re not known for heavy drinking.Report
I’m in Boston. For me St. Pat’s day is “get home before sunset and don’t go outside cuz drunk douchebags will kick my ass” day. So anyway. Have fun everyone!Report
Too bad you can’t carry an “equalizer”.Report
Hey, evidently The Onion understand the true spirit of the holiday: http://www.theonion.com/video/boston-mayor-throws-out-first-punch-at-st-patricks-35535Report
How did it happen that often the best understandings of the zeitgeist come from: The Onion, Cracked, and current and former Daily Show cast members? Where did the rest of the media go wrong?Report
Bleugh. I’m sorry that is the case.Report
The first Saint Patrick’s Parade was actually run by Irish Protestants in New York City during the late 18th century.Report
This post is has been assigned the color green in the “State of the discussion” section.
Is that something you guys choose? or a happy coincidence?Report