Ranting at the Politicians

From O'Hozho
To: The Salt Lake County Council

Dear Councilman,

My old computer is in the process of gasping its last byte of data and I am culling files in an attempt to prolong its misery… and yours. One of the old files I ran across is filled with correspondence (letters and emails) to Salt Lake County complaining of the omission of the Irish from any mention in various Salt Lake County publications most notably Welcoming the World: The History of Salt Lake County.

It is approaching 5 years since I appeared before the County Council to officially register the complaint below on behalf of the Utah Hibernian Society and the Irish families who helped build Salt Lake County. I ended that presentation with the hope that the oversights would be corrected and the insult redressed.

In the fall of 2004 I complained again that nothing had been done and I was summarily dismissed by Mayor Nancy Workman who said something to the effect: ‘I don’t know what he’s complaining about. We let him speak before the Council.’

What I said before the Council was the following:

Salt Lake County Council General Meeting 4:30 PM Tuesday March 16th, 2004


I want to thank the Salt Lake County Council for the opportunity of speaking today. I have duly noted and deeply appreciated the interest that some of you have shown the society through your attendance at the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade this last weekend. The Utah Hibernian Society is a non sectarian cultural organization founded to promote the study appreciation and dissemination of all things Irish including the arts, music, dance, poetry , theater, literature language and parades. The Society is open to all Utahans regardless of race, creed or place of national origin… making it unique among Utah’s ethnic cultural organizations. I am here this evening to note the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day and to register a complaint.

Over the last quarter of the 20th century, a large number of books, articles and educational materials have appeared celebrating the ethnic diversity of the State of Utah. To date no mention has been made of the considerable influence that the Irish have had on the settlement and development of this state and the Intermountain West. The reasons for the omission of the Irish are many, and are worth examining.

Until very recently, American history was written and taught from a distinctly white, Anglo Saxon point of view. It has only been since the Civil Rights movement in the 1960's that any attention was given to the long neglected histories of Utah’s ethnic minorities. Since that time, more than a dozen local histories have appeared, whose expressed purpose was to correct past oversights. The first serious local effort, The Peoples of Utah, focused on the populations from Europe who were brought to the state to work in Utah’s mines. Irish miners made up a large portion of foreign born mine labor in the 19th century and held leadership positions in the militant Western Federation of Miners (WFM). The Greek, Italian and Slavic workers who were imported to Utah at the turn of the 20th Century were brought in to undermine the power of this union. The WFM members regarded these new arrivals as “Scab” labor routinely employed as strike breakers. Their appearance threatened the hard earned gains that union had made over the previous decades. As a result, the new arrivals viewed the Irish as a very hostile segment of the English speaking majority. They did not recognize that the Irish themselves had been discriminated against, and the new arrivals confused the Irish with other hostile nativist and anti immigrant groups. As employment opportunities in the mines declined, many of the original Irish fled the state and the Irish population of Utah declined dramatically in the first two decades of the 20th century. The author of the “Peoples of Utah,” Helen Papanicholis made no effort to distinguish the Irish miners from the larger English population. As a result, no mention of the Irish appears in this first seminal work on the subject.

In the years that followed the publication of The Peoples of Utah, a number of other histories appeared which either enlarged upon these ethnic histories or focused on other minority populations. These include: Utah: An Hispanic History, Toil and Rage in a New Land: The Story of Utah’s Greeks, and The History of the Jews in Utah and Idaho.

The Other Utahns: Missing Stories, is a photographic essay celebrating Utah’s ethnic diversity. It includes American Indians, Japanese, Chinese, Greeks, Italians, Cubans, Hungarians, Poles, Mexicans, and Russians. There is no mention of the Irish. When prominent Irish do appear they are frequently mis-identified as being some other nationality. Many of Utah’s most prominent Irish families - including my own - are identified, mistakenly, as “Canadian.” Ignored by both traditional Anglo writers and the new ethnic revisionist historians, the Irish fell through the cracks.

One of the most egregious of these oversights is Welcoming the World: The History of Salt Lake County, funded and published by Salt Lake County. This publication also features the above named nationalities, as well as Germans, Basques, Croats, Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders. There is no mention of the Irish. The longstanding prominence and success of some Irish families in this valley (Kearns, Gallivan, Judge, Hogle, Ivers, McDonough, McCarthy, Fitzpatrick, and O’Brien to name a few) has obscured the discrimination and hardships suffered in the past by the vast majority of Utah’s Irish. Indeed, most Utahans today do not know the ethnic identity of some of Utah’s most prominent families, nor are they aware of the vociferous anti-Irish sentiment prevalent in Utah during the 19th century. In the 20th century, many writers continued to rely on materials that were stereotypical and racist in writing on the Irish in this state. Dr. Vincent Chang, of the University of Utah English Department -a scholar whose ethnic origins are as remote from the Irish as can be imagined - has documented the racist attitudes toward the Irish in the American Press and popular culture during the 19th century. I have duplicated some examples from Dr. Chang’s book: Joyce Race and Empire to illustrate how prevalent these attitudes were in the 19th century. Unfortunately these attitudes are not extinct. While the stereotypes of Steppin Fetchit, Amos and Andy, Charlie Chan and Tonto have been largely relegated to the past, the stereotypical depiction of the drunken Irishmen is very much with us to this day.

We are unquestionably in a unique situation here in Utah. Perhaps it is not surprising that a culture that is entirely abstemious would tend to pass judgment on one that is not. But the lack of understanding goes far beyond the question of alcohol. The Irish have been excluded from their rightful place in Utah history and most specifically the history of Salt Lake County. Like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man – they are ignored as if they were never here at all.