By all accounts, he wasn’t an easy man, my grandfather. He pushed hard, asked a lot, expected excellence - or at least excellent effort - from all around him. But, also by all accounts, he didn’t have the easiest beginnings, so his idiosyncrasies can at least be understood, if not justified. Sadly, I never met him; he died in 1972, the year before my birth.
Joseph Henry Norton, Jr., was born in 1904 in St. Paul, Minnesota, to Joseph Henry Norton, Sr., a first-generation Irish immigrant, and and Mary Mullaney, who immigrated in 1886. Joseph, Sr., was born in 1878, married in 1903, and died in 1912 of tuberculosis.
Seeking more opportunity, Mary went off to Fargo, North Dakota, leaving her only son in the care of her parents, Edward and Mary Ellen Mullaney. Edward was a city street engineer and ran horse-drawn carriages for the city, so young Joe earned his keep in the stables when not in school.
By then, for over half a century - since the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1849 - Irish Americans faced a deluge of nativist, fear-bound discrimination borne of fever-dream conspiracy theories. They were called “Black Irish,” a term of uncertain origin but with certain intent to demean and dehumanize. They struggled to get good jobs, with offers often carrying the caveat “No Irish Need Apply.” Irish were popularly and publicly caricatured as sub-human beasts, prone to violence, criminality, and incessant drunkenness. The xenophobic (and aptly-named) “Know Nothings” were certain an Irish Catholic papal conspiracy existed to establish a new Vatican in Cincinnati, Ohio (see page 413). The Irish were often seen as little more than garbage.
Young Joe was fortunate at least to live at the time in St. Paul, a city that had seen Irish immigrants for decades and they were more tolerated and accepted in the city. But, as he recounted to my late uncle, he felt nativist, anti-Irish derision when he left the community, with many looking down their noses at him and his ancestry, sneering, taunting, name calling. Nonetheless, Joe worked hard - like most immigrants - and was able eventually to attend and work himself through Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota, and later join the ranks of traveling insurance salesman, then executive.
Like his parents and grandparents - and like so many before and since - Joe suffered from simple-minded, fear-based, outright bigotry. There’s nothing logical about this type of sentiment, nothing fact-based, insightful, intelligent about labeling vast swaths of humanity based on the actions of a few. And yet, it has been a lived reality for American society since our founding, and continues to be thanks to little (primarily) men who lack the courage and intellect to discern societal nuance and inherent human goodness, choosing instead to hurl simplistic, vulgar, and childish insults in hopes of obfuscating their own very public shortcomings and catching a vote or poll boost by arousing the base fear of otherness so common in our country.
A few days ago, our president - who seldom refrains from being shocking, cruel, childish - took things to a new low, lashing out viciously at the Somali community of Minnesota (just after doing the same to Afghans), calling them “garbage” and insisting they should go “back to where they came from,” including US citizens and Representative Ilhan Omar. It was gutterball low from a man who’s spent his life in the sewers of demeaning behavior and rhetoric, it was perversely praised by VP Vance (whose wife is the child of Indian immigrants), it provoked predictable silence from Republicans, and - while shocking to hear - this infantile, ignorant outburst was nothing new for our country. We’re a nation of immigrants prone to xenophobia, quick to fear and almost-wantonly ignorant of our own individual and collective histories: Histories that, if remembered, remind us of the universality of our stories, whether we’re white or black, Irish or Somali or Afghan or Mexican or even Wampanoag, that we all once were the other, coming to a new place to build a better life, a new tomorrow, a brighter future.
Is there garbage in America? Indeed, but it’s not in Minnesota or Bellingham, but spewing from Pennsylvania Avenue and through our country. Garbage day can’t come soon enough.
I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty---to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy. [sic]
- Abraham Lincoln, letter, September 27, 1841
