Free Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics by Terry Golway Page B

the issue.” Prendergast’s expectations were dashed, and he would not survive the famine. His children emigrated to the United States. 5
    This sense of powerlessness in the face of disaster traumatized the Irish on both sides of the Atlantic. When faced with the ultimate sense of powerlessness—they could not feed themselves—they found government to be aloof, unsympathetic, and judgmental. They had expected more. A group of local relief administrators criticized the government’s response in a letter to Prime Minister John Russell in 1847, insisting that starvation “could have been easily prevented by a liberal policy on the part of Her Majesty’s government.” Whether or not the British could have done more to prevent mass starvation, whether they should have halted exports of food from the island while its population starved, remains a matter of academic debate all these years later. In a cultural sense, the argument is beside the point; the Irish were convinced that the authorities could have done more and did not. 6
    When the children and grandchildren of the Famine achieved power in the United States, they would hold onto it and keep it from their enemies, even if that meant defying what Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “Yankee proprieties.” Reformers and civic elites who sought to bring down urban machines and their immigrant constituents—whether through criminal prosecutions, outright disenfranchisement, or moralistic reform campaigns—unwittingly invoked in Irish-American politicians and their constituents Famine memories of powerlessness, of state power mobilized on behalf of the propertied and the privileged. 7
    From the perspective of New York politics and Tammany Hall, one assertion is inarguable: The Great Famine immigration marked the beginning of the end of old New York, a city governed by Anglo-Protestant patricians and mercantile elites. That is not to say nativists and old-stock families simply surrendered their cultural and political power once Famine ships began docking along Manhattan’s East Side waterfront. Quite the opposite. A powerful anti-immigrant movement capitalized on the fear and loathing of the starving Irish in the 1850s. But try though they might, the anti-immigrant campaigners in New York could not counter the power of sheer numbers, for the Famine marked a demographic tipping point in the struggle over power and identity between new Irish-Catholic immigrants and native-stock New Yorkers. The island’s population was 371,000 in 1845. It grew to 630,000 in ten years as the hunger took hold in Ireland. By the time the Famine wave receded in the mid-1850s, more than one in four New Yorkers was a native of Ireland, and 52 percent of the city’s residents were foreign-born. 8
    The new Irish, the starving Irish, would not have to storm Tammany Hall to demand respect. The door would be open upon their arrival.
    . . .
    The hunger did not affect all of Ireland, or all classes of Irish people, the same way. The island’s western counties, where traditional Gaelic culture stubbornly defied the forces of modernization and Anglicization, were hit especially hard. Until the Famine, they had been able to resist Victorian Britain’s moral reformers, who regarded their way of life as not simply premodern but morally inferior, requiring not a more equitable distribution of resources but reform of the peasantry’s character. A newspaper in Ulster, Ireland’s northernmost province, argued that the Famine did not affect the heavily Protestant areas of the island because “we are a painstaking, industrious, laborious people who desire to work and pay our just debts, and the blessing of the Almighty is upon our labour. If the people of the South had been equally industrious with those of the North, they would not have so much misery upon them.” 9
    The immediate cause of Ireland’s misery was Phytophthora infestans , a deadly fungus exported to Ireland from the New World, just as the