In 1855 my great-grandfather, James McGuire, arrived in New York from Ireland.
It was in the waning years of what has been euphemistically called the “Potato Famine.”
The “Famine” was, in reality, an exercise in what would be known today as ethnic cleansing.
Although the potatoes rotted in the ground year after year, there was more than enough other crops to feed the population.
Nevertheless, the British Government and their estate landlords in Ireland exported the produce and left the Irish population to starve.
Approximately one million Irish starved to death.
As an inducement to get the Irish tenant farmers off the land and out of the country, the landlords paid the ship passage for the tenants to emigrate to the United States and Canada.
Another million joined in this Irish diaspora.
The ships became known as “coffin” ships because the health and sanitary conditions were so deplorable that almost half of the passengers died enroute.
Donald Trump would have categorized Ireland, at that time, as a “shithole.”
After his arrival in New York, my great grandfather, a shoemaker, married, started a family and relocated to Syracuse in 1870 with my great-grandmother and their first born son.
It was here that my grandfather and the remainder of his siblings were born.
In 1881 tragedy struck the family.
My great-uncle, John Francis McGuire drowned in the canal.
My great-grandfather sank into an alcohol fueled depression and was never able to work again.
My grandfather, Charles McGuire, and his older brother, James K., were forced to leave school and work to support the family.
Charles, at the age of nineteen, opened his own insurance agency which did business in Syracuse for almost seventy-five years.
His older brother, James K., would be elected Mayor of Syracuse three times beginning in 1895 at the age of twenty-six.
He remains the youngest Mayor of Syracuse to this day.
James K. McGuire would, during his lifetime, establish and publish a newspaper, be a candidate for Governor of New York, author two books, Chair the New York State Democratic Party, become an influential leader in national politics and the Irish independence movement.
Together, my grandfather and great-uncle were able to send their younger brother and sister to college at Notre Dame and St. Mary’s College in South Bend, Indiana.
In today’s world and in Trump’s prevailing view, it is likely that they would have not been Americans because they came from a country that he would view as a “shithole.”
Fifty years after this ethnic cleansing, what remained was still “a shithole.”
James K. McGuire traveled to Ireland many times during his life to aid the forces seeking independence from England.
One of the leaders in that cause, John Redmond, described Ireland at that time, writing,
“Dublin desperately needed prosperity. Ireland’s largest city and former capital ranked as the greatest urban disgrace in the United Kingdom. The census in 1911 listed Dublin’s population as slightly more than 300,000. The working class made up more than two-thirds of this number. A government report on Dublin housing conditions showed that 45 percent of the working class lived in tenement housing. Dwellings built for one family often housed several, usually with one family to a room. Dublin has more than twenty-thousand one- room tenement buildings the highest percentage of any city in Britain or Ireland. A large number of these places held as many as seven or eight people to a room. The most egregious example of overcrowding showed ninety-eight people living in a single house.”
My great-uncle visiting a few years later wrote,
“The writer has visited all the cities of America and many foreign cities. Of the large town seen, beyond a doubt the capital of Ireland is the poorest, the most squalid and miserable. The only interesting thing about Dublin are the ruins of its former greatness, the cemeteries, parks and decaying structures. There is scarcely a ripple in the Liffey aside from some boats from a brewery…”
He went on to describe Sligo as having,
“10,000 inhabitants old and poor the remnants of a stricken race. Sligo has nothing to show at the end of 900 years but the melancholy ruins of a once flourishing town, her aged men and women and their rags. Long since most of the stalwart youth have departed for foreign shores.”
Out of this British bred horror came immigrants to America who would become bankers, educators, clergy, writers, artists, musicians, captains’ of industry, public officials and even a President of the United States.
In Donald Trump’s world, my grandfather, great-uncle and those leaders and contributors might never have added to the culture, history or richness of what is America because they came from a “Shithole.”