5. The View From Prindle's Head

5.  The View From Prindle’s Head

by

R.E. Prindle

 

Unintended Consequences 1

 

If one views life as a great adventure, the journey through which is a battle with adversity in which the challenge is to win those challenges and triumph over them, then one views life and history from a different point of view than religious pessimism.  The whole point of the nineteenth century struggle to understand how the mind works was to free it to deal those challenges with a clear mind.  By 1920 the foundation of the intellectual conditions had been formed.   They were and are not for the many but those whom the French writer Stendhal called ‘the happy few.’  Happy being a relative term.

As unrestricted immigration developed in nineteenth century America, Americans were woefully ignorant of immigration’ psychological  conditions.  Or, at least, those who weren’t were ignored.  They firmly believed that having escaped ‘Europe’s teeming shores’ and passing by the Statue of Liberty to Ellises sacred isle with the first step on holy American soil, the immigrant shed his past, passed through a door and became the apex of humanity, an American with an American past.

Unfortunately, that was a fantasy, a dream.  Rather the Italian remained an Italian, the Jew remained a Jew, the Chinaman remained a Chinaman, the Irish remained an Irisher although the characters of each were modified to meet the new environmental conditions.  But those conditions were colored by their nation of origin.  None overlapped on the others.  An Italian remained an Italian, the Jew remained a Jew.

The Irish, who were the first to arrive, I forgot to mention them in my previous essay, brought their history of conflict with the English with them.  They introduced themselves into an English culture and thus were enemies of the English, or what we call Americans.  The Irish being technically grafted onto the American stem were then called Irish-Americans.

A great many spoke only Erse, with all that that implies, and not English.  They landed in that hell hole, New York City, where they stoked the flames.  After centuries of conflict in Ireland they were born to deal with conditions in New York City.  Within a few years, very few, they had learned to use Tammany Hall to take control of the city displacing and subordinating the English inhabitants.  And they kept control until Jimmy Walker failed to keep the colors flying in the 1930s and control passed to the Jews who still have it.

As I said, the Irish remained the Irish.  In their vernacular they called the island of Ireland the Ould Sod and Manhattan, the New Island.  They were the first to use the US as a sanctuary from which to conduct war against England in Ireland, the Ould Sod.  The New Island.  Two Irish territories.  Danny Boy returned to Ireland to raise havoc.  If the English arrested them they claimed to be American citizens, which they were, and were merely deported to return again.

In America, richer than ever they could have been on the green but sterile Ould Sod, they furthered that terrible conflict.  In 1914 they were the only country of Europe, other than Switzerland,  to remain neutral while interfering with the English as much as possible.  From America, where they ran the shipyards at that time, they interfered with shipments of munitions to England.  In 1916 they managed the notorious Black Tom explosion in Jersey City which was enormous that destroyed tens of millions of dollars worth of munitions destined for England.  Read a billion dollars or more in today’s dollars.

They professed to love this country, which I’m sure they did, but it was an exclusively Irish country that they referred to and not the United States as a whole.  A few years later, just before Ireland obtained independence in 1923 from an England exhausted by the war, Eamon de Valera, soon to be the Ireland’s first Prime Minister, was rapturously received on his visit to the New Island, Manhattan.  No criticism was tolerated and he returned to Ireland bearing a few million dollars to further the cause.

So, to 1920 the Irish remained more Irish than American.  They had recreated an Ireland on the Hudson.

They used their base in the US as a means to further their interests on the Ould Sod.  While obeying American laws on the domestic level they yet maintained a dual citizenship in their own minds and actions.  There was no Melting Pot as far as they were concerned.

Now, as a disclaimer, I have no animus against the Irish or any of the nationalities I will be dealing with.  My main point is and will be that psychological realities were never acknowledged and have been historically rejected, that is, denied.  Nor do I necessarily blame Americans for their ignorance, which is nevertheless palpable.  The mind was only being liberated for the happy few and sound psychology could not be expected to be observed.

History, is however, history.  That history has been either falsified or distorted to satisfy other psychological needs.  It is time to rewrite history to portray the reality rather than the fantasy.

Continue to 6. Unintended Consequences  part 2.