Social Unacceptance

“Irishmen…are not valuable as farm laborers, not knowing our ways, soil or climate, and it is natural for them to always do the wrong thing when they can. Besides telling them what they must do, it is necessary to go ahead of them and tell them what they must not do. The result is that comparatively little is done in farming. The land looks worse every year”--“Walks and Talks” (139)

“It is said here, that there is hardly an Irishman so poor as not to own a small fee simple whereon to plant fruit trees and vines, and make a garden; in fact, his very nature seems changed here by force of the example set him—not only by his wealthy magnate employers, but by the constant, well directed, tidy industry of the people generally—so that the pig in the shanty and the puddle before the door, is no longer the Celtic badge in Canandaigua”--T.M., “A Visit to Canandaigua” (244)

Besides the tension between farmers and their laborers by virtue of paid employment, we sometimes encounter an additional layer of invective by virtue of the laborer’s ethnic identity. In the two passages here, agricultural issues are embedded within a wider anti-Irish discrimination that was common during the 1800s, especially when large-scale immigration to America followed the Great Famine of 1845-52. The Genesee Farmer was filled with complaints about the haplessness of Irish laborers, jokes about apocryphal Irishmen named “Pat,” or occasionally—as we see in the second excerpt—astonishment that the “very nature” of Irish immigrants ever could be changed.

Xenophobia, a fear of strangers from other countries or cultures, has intersected with agriculture in ways that isn't always recognized. “Transient hands” or a “gang of hands” coming into some region for the harvest season were a necessary workforce but not members of the community--even when farming alongside of them (“Premium”; “Hoed”). Ethnic groups with large representation among farmworkers were viewed in a very negative and harsh light; their work was never seen as good enough, especially compared to farm owners and their modern machinery. Irish, Black, Mexican, and Central American people weren’t accepted in areas outside of farms, either, so by their “very nature” they were considered fortunate to have any work at all.

Images like Frederick Opper's "King of A-Shantee" often gave Irish a simian appearance--supposedly due to their genetic connetions to Africa--and depicted them as slovenly.

Henry David Thoreau carefully differentiated his spartan life from the poverty of farm laborer John Field, yet his cabin was constructed from boards of an Irish shanty.

Dorothea Lange's 1938 photograph of a Mexican laborer's house in California's Imperial Valley was one of many New Deal era images critical of farmworkers' living conditions.

Utility sinks in a typically stark farm labor camp, Steuben County (ca. 1970s). Its crew chief was George Houston, who was known to keep two fierce dobermans and carried a pistol.

Even the intolerable living conditions of farm laborers were held against them, as if they had chosen to live in squalor. In the “Baker Farm” chapter of Walden (1854), tiny home pioneer Henry David Thoreau followed a mental journey that’s still recognizable today. Caught in a thunderstorm, he drops by a decrepit shanty occupied by the family of an Irish laborer named John Field, an “honest, hard-working, but shiftless man” who never seems to get ahead in life. Thoreau carefully notes a leaking roof, a wife with “round greasy face and bare breast,” “several children,” and chickens sheltering indoors; he tries “to help him with my experience” and advice, to no avail. Returning to the walk, his own leisure appears “for an instant trivial to me who had been sent to school and college,” but then with “a rainbow over my shoulder” he pivots to the Good Genius of affirmation: “Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures.” The brief episode has confirmed that his life and that of John Field are incommensurable.

Xenophobia is experienced as fear of another world, structuring even such intimate encounters as those with the people who feed us. The migrant farmworkers have been touching our food, and yet we wouldn’t ever trade places with them. How could the least powerful class be so frightening? For comparison, consider a modern-day refugee camp: the political and economic forces that have driven thousands to this place are fearsome, beyond individual control. Even a photograph or just thinking about these others reveals that we’re implicated in the same history.

Works Consulted

-- “Hoed Crops--Clean Culture.” The Genesee Farmer 19.7 (July 1858): 207-208. Courtesy of Internet Archive

-- “Premium Farm of the Empire State.” The Genesee Farmer 19.5 (May 1858): 137-138. Courtesy of Internet Archive

-- T.M. “A Visit to Canandaigua.” The Genesee Farmer 21.8 (Aug. 1860): 243-244. Courtesy of Internet Archive

-- Thoreau, Henry D. Walden; or, Life in the Woods. 1854. Available at Project Gutenberg

-- “Walks and Talks on the Farm--No. 5.” The Genesee Farmer 25.5 (May 1864): 137-140. Courtesy of Internet Archive