Book Of Essays Looks At Great Irish Famine

Between 1845 and 1851, the dead and nearly dead lay in fields and along roadways in Ireland, dead of cholera and typhus; dead of hunger.

The potato, which adult men ate up to 40 of each day, was blighted. A fungus had attacked the crop and by the time the ensuing crisis passed, a million Irish died and 1.5 million emigrated.

From Belfast to Cork, officials of the U.S. government reported on the Great Irish Famine - and concluded there was money to be made from it.

An upcoming history edited by Gonzaga University’s Timothy Sarbaugh takes a new, often harsh look at the famine in relation to North America.

With poetry by Eastern Washington University’s James McAuley, the collection pulls together essays by 12 Irish, Canadian and U.S. historians.

There are surprises.

In his essay “A Moral Spectacle,” Sarbaugh reveals that although U.S. officials sympathized with the suffering, they also saw opportunities to exploit it.

Advisers to President James Polk predicted the blight could make Ireland a permanent market for American Indian corn, enrich U.S. businesses and push the United States ahead of England economically.

“Everyone perceives the benefits that will come to our country (due to the famine),” wrote one adviser.

So while New York altar boys and West Point cadets helped the Society of Friends (Quakers) raise nearly $1 million in private relief for Ireland, in Washington, Congress voted to do nothing. Polk commissioned two ships to deliver private relief, drew $100 from his own pocket, and then turned his attention elsewhere. He believed it was not the government’s role.

Such actions helped turn a series of crop failures into one of Europe’s greatest unnatural disasters, said Sarbaugh, an associate professor of history.

“Did it need to happen or be as devastating as it was? I don’t think so,” said Sarbaugh.

“The potato blight created the crisis. The human factor made it a tragedy.”

Sarbaugh does not dispute or diminish the fault of the British government for its disastrous laissez-faire policies and British landowners for their greed. (Half a million starving Irish were evicted from their homes for failing to pay rent in the ensuing 20 years, according to the New York Irish History Roundtable. And British landowners exported shiploads of grain and meat to Britain while their tenants were starving, reported the Irish Times.)

But Sarbaugh said little has been written on the culpability of the U.S. government for its laissez-faire attitude.

Irish leaders themselves, with no crisis administration to oversee relief and little infrastructure, also contributed to the debacle. Relief food sometimes sat on docks unable to reach the starving people. Irish merchants also priced other foodstuffs out of the poor’s reach, Sarbaugh said.

Six generations after those events, the historical essays also examine the legacy of the Irish famine for those who fled.

Kerby Miller, a historian at the University of Missouri at Columbia, studied 5,000 letters and concluded the Irish immigrant carried a “famine scar,” a permanent psychologic mark.

An example:

“Often homesick, burdened by guilt and frequently depressed, Murphy was unable to form close attachments to persons or places to replace the relationships which had been tragically sundered in his formative years,” he writes.

There were other legacies: The famine institutionalized Irish immigration to America (5 million arrived by 1920) and forever changed religion and politics in the United States.

“It created Irish America, some would say greater America,” Sarbaugh said.

It also created nationalism among Irish Americans, who unified behind a hatred for the British.

The Irish-born McAuley, director of the EWU Press, remembers studying the famine as a boy in Ireland.

“The Great Famine has something like the residual grief, anger and consciousness for Irish people as the Holocaust does for the Jewish people,” he said.

His poem “A Famine Field in Kildare” evokes the lingering grief. His memories evoke the anger.

“It was as much man-made as anything else.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

MEMO: “North America and the Great Irish Famine” will be published later this year by Greenwood Press.