Great parade yesterday up Fifth
Avenue and past Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.
Cardinal Dolan was the Grand Marshal.
Previous Grand Marshals include Governor Al Smith, (first Catholic to
run for President of the United States)1925; Mayor Jimmy Walker (1932); Mayor
Robert Wagner (1954); Governor Hugh Carey (1976); Cardinal John J. O’Connor
(1996); Maureen O’Hara (1999); and Cardinal Edward Egan (2002). There was some controversy because for the
first time in parade history a LGBT group, Out@NBCUniversal marched under their
own banner. (It would be naïve—at the
least—to think this was the first time gays marched in the parade.) While openly gay participation in the past
has been blocked, Grand Marshal Cardinal Dolan made a point of saying that he
thought it a wise decision to make the parade more “inclusive” and that he
welcomed everyone. The Krazies, of
course, are furious but then anger is their mother’s milk.
I only watched the first half
hour or so of the parade, but one curious factoid I heard implied it (wasn’t
actually said) that this parade has always been a Catholic celebration. The panel of NBC commentators were remarking
on the history of the parade which originally was in lower Manhattan. (In the eighteenth century today’s midtown
site of the parade was nothing more than open fields and “truck gardens” that
supplied the city with food.) One of the
commentators, admittedly I don’t remember who, remarked that this was because
the Old Saint Patrick’s Cathedral was in Greenwich Village. Two problems.
The Old Saint Pat’s is not in the Village but on Mulberry Street in what
would become Little Italy and is now Chinatown.
But the more egregious mistake is that while the parade dates back to
1762, the Cathedral was built only in 1809-1815. You see, despite the implication—and the
common historical misperception—the parade was not originally a Catholic
sponsored event. To the contrary: those
who marched in the first parade of 1762 were all Protestants. And such would have been the case for the
first twenty or more years—it was a Protestant event. In fact it was at least predominately a
Protestant event well into the 19th century.
The first Saint Patrick’s Day
parade in New York was comprised of Irish soldiers in the British Army. Until 1778 Catholics were prohibited from
joining the army (and their commissioning as officers was even later). In fact, while all other churches and
religions, even Judaism, were legally tolerated, it was illegal to be a
Catholic in New York until the 1777 State Constitution that marked independence
from Great Britain.
The 1737 Boston Saint
Patrick’s Day Parade, generally considered the first in the colonies—and thus
the oldest American Parade to honor Ireland’s national saint, was also
comprised of Irish Protestants who had immigrated to Massachusetts. Irish nationalism in the 18th
century—and the Saint Patrick Day Parades were celebrations of Irish Identity
and Nationalism within the British Empire—was not a Catholic phenomenon but a
Protestant one. The Catholics had been
so beaten down by the Penal Laws, and especially so in Ireland after the 1688
victory of William of Orange over the Catholic James II, in the British Empire
that they were a political non-entity. The
principal advocates of Irish Nationalism from William Molyneaux to Jonathan
Swift to Henry Grattan to Samuel Nielson to Wolfe Tone to Robert Emmet were all
Protestants as would later be Charles Stewart Parnell, and literary figures W.B
Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Seán
O’Casey. And the artist and indomitable
Irish revolutionary, Baroness Markievicz, who advised her female admirers to:
“Dress suitably in short skirts and strong boots, leave your jewels in the bank
and buy a revolver,” was Protestant until she was in her 50’s when she was
received into the Catholic Church.
Two of the first four Presidents of Ireland,
Douglas Hyde and Erskine Childers were Protestants. By no means has Irish Nationalism been a
exclusively—or even predominately—Catholic phenomenon.
In those pre-Revolutionary
(and Protestant) days in America, Saint Patrick’s Day was marked by the Irish
in the larger colonial cities such as New York by dinners in the more elegant
taverns such as Bolton and Sigel’s, now known as Fraunces Tavern. For a day such as St. Patrick’s Day they
would feast on oysters, lobster, turtle soup, cod, duck, goose, venison, and
smoked hams. Meats would be eaten
roasted, or potted, or cooked in pasties—pies and hot-pockets. Winter vegetables would include turnip,
parsnips, carrots, squashes and winter cabbage. Apples and pears conserved from the previous
autumn would be pricey but available and a wide variety of summer fruits would
have been put up into jams that might be served as is or used as fillings for
pies. Hard cider was the most common
drink, but ales and beers would be common enough as well as rum imported from
Jamaica and home-distilled whiskies.
Alcoholic beverages were drunk with no thought of moderation, especially
for celebrations like today’s feast.
Desserts would include a variety of pies, sweetmeats (candied fruits),
nuts, and boiled puddings such as whitepot, figgy pudding, or plum duff. There were also such puddings as flummery,
syllabub, and blancmange. Celebrants
would sit down to dinner midafternoon and the feast would last into the night
or as long as the alcohol held out.
It was only in the 1820’s
that Catholic Irish began to migrate to New York in significant numbers and the
floodgates opened with the Great Famine after 1846. The second half of the nineteenth century and
the first three decades of the twentieth were the high-water mark of Catholic
Irish immigration. The “established
Irish,” Protestant and Catholic, did not particularly welcome the immigrants
who were of much lower social and educational status. The Catholics were embarrassed by their
immigrant co-religionists and the Protestants disowned them completely thinking
them to be superstitious savages. But the immigrants were quick to organize
themselves in an effort to better themselves by mutual help. Among their first acts was to organize a
separate Saint Patrick’s Day Parade which they had done by 1858. Immigrant Irish participation in the Northern
cause of the American Civil War not only united the Irish among themselves but
gave them a certain political clout in New York and other Northern cities. By the end of the Civil War the New York
Parade was firmly under the control of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, an
immigrant association formed to fight the prejudices against (Irish) immigrants
that had been strong in the decade immediately before the Civil War. From that
time on the New York Saint Patrick’s Day Parade has been firmly in the hands of
Irish Catholics, yet it has always been a civic parade and not a religious
procession. Never in its history has it
been a religious procession and while there was an active policy of excluding
groups identified with the LGBT movement these forty years and more since the
gay liberation movement has appeared, the exclusion of LGBT marchers or groups
certainly can’t be argued on religious grounds.
