June 19, 2013 • 21 mins
In the mid-1800s, the poorest people in Ireland ate almost nothing but potatoes. Other crops were for selling. So when a blight cut a swath through the potato crop, the impact was severe, and politics played a significant role in the tragedy.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Honey from and I'm Tracy be Wilson. So Tracy,
we're going to continue, yes, the story we started last time.
We're going to pick up on the the Irish potato
(00:22):
famine and to recap just a little bit in the
mid eighteen hundreds. The social and political climate that we
talked about in the previous episode had led Ireland to
depend really heavily on the potato as a food crop.
The poorest people in Ireland ate almost nothing but potatoes,
and anything that was anything else that was being grown
on a farm wasn't really being raised to eat. It
(00:44):
was being raised to sell to pay the rent. So
potatoes were filling bellies and everything else was paying for
the land that you were living on. So when a
blite cut just a huge swath through the potato crop
in eighty five and almost wiped it out in highrely
in eighteen forty six, the impact on Ireland was severe.
(01:04):
So in this episode we're going to look at how
this intersection of politics and farming unfolded. So in eighteen
forty six, when the blight was in full swing. The
British government's response was minimal. In the government's less a
fair view and that of many landowners who had holdings
in Ireland, all of the obvious relief measures like providing
(01:26):
food or subsidies were counterproductive. They would threaten free enterprise
and cause the Irish to become dependent upon government handouts.
The government's desire not to influence free enterprise also meant
that it didn't want to meddle in other business affairs,
like the practice of exporting grain out of Ireland and
into England. Instead, it was pretty much business as usual,
(01:48):
so food exporters in Ireland, many of whom were owned
by people living in England, just kept exporting food as normal.
So when the potato crops died, Irish farmers kept selling
all their other crops to pay the rent. The choice
was one of starvation or eviction. Uh the people who
owned the farms would then export the other crops out
(02:09):
of Ireland, So throughout the famine, Ireland continued exporting grains, rabbits, butter, fish, onions,
honey and other foods, along with nonfood items like woolen leathers,
so they were sending food away while they were starving
to death. So weather stopping these exports and distributing this
food to Irish farmers would have stopped the famine is
(02:29):
a hotly contested subject. Some scholars argue that the potato
made up so much of the Irish food supply that
no amount of other food grown there could have possibly
filled that gap. But regardless, shipping food out of Ireland
while people were starving looked really bad. There were riots
and ports cities in response to the shiploads of food
(02:51):
that were living leaving Ireland bound for England. River boats
and ports were appointed military guards. And really, even if
keeping the food in Ireland would have been a feudal effort,
this continued export was really deeply damaging to the relationship
between England and Ireland. People scavenged what they could eat
(03:11):
and they sold their belongings to try to pay for food.
Even in coastal areas where fish were plentiful, the fish
were generally in water that was too deep and treacherous
for people to reach in their small boats with ordinary nts.
That winter, which is the winter of eighteen forty six,
also saw one of the worst blizzards in Ireland's history,
with snow reaching the roof lines of people's huts. By
(03:33):
eighteen forty seven, it had become clear that this was
not just a temporary situation that was going to be
relieved by the next year's harvest. Even though the blight
did disappear that year. The eight forty seven crop was healthy,
but not enough had been planted in the spring to
sustain everyone. People had resorted to eating the potatoes they
would have normally reserved for replanting, and many were so
(03:55):
weakened by hunger and illness that they weren't able to
get their crops in the ground. While many people wanted
to plant something other than potatoes, at this point, seeds
for new crops were often beyond their means, so they
planted what they could get, which was mostly potatoes. Britain
opened soup kitchens to help get food to needy people,
and the death toll did start to drop a little bit,
(04:15):
but the kitchens didn't last for very long. Parliament enacted
the Irish Poor Law Extension Act on June eighty seven,
which once again moved the British government away from providing
direct aid to the Irish. Under this act, it was
up to the Irish landlords to support their impoverished tenants.
Government soup kitchens were scheduled to be closed and they
(04:38):
had only existed for about six months, and the public
works programs that were meant to support the Irish were
shut down. The Poor Law Extension Act also made it
a lot harder for people to enter one of Britain's workhouses,
which at this point was a last refuge for the
destitute farmers. Britain had created the system of workhouses in
eighteen thirty eight. There were a hundred and thirty of them,
(05:01):
which could accommodate about a hundred thousand people. Once they
arrived at a workhouse, families were divided up and giving
given separate housing for women and men, and they wore uniforms,
they weren't allowed to leave the building, and they worked
for ten hour days. The youngest children would get school
lessons and older children would get training on how to
work in a factory. These workhouses were dirty and demoralizing,
(05:24):
and illnesses spread really quickly in such tight quarters. And
apart from all of this, the whole idea of going
to a workhouse was just an extreme humiliation which made
people really reluctant to do it. But even so, conditions
were so bad in Ireland the workhouses were quickly strained
at the breaking point. The government implemented stricter and stricter
(05:45):
rules about who could go to a workhouse in a
in an attempt to stem the tide, and under the
new Poor Laws, men had to give up any other
means of making a living if they wanted to enter
a workhouse. So two point six million Irish people went
to the institutions during the famine, so they were hugely
vastly overcrowded. Conditions were, on top of being overcrowded, just
(06:07):
very dirty and difficult, and more than two hundred thousand
people died in the workhouses that were meant to help them.
By eighteen forty seven. The problem was actually money. Thanks
to the healthy but very small potato crop, there was
plenty of food, but nobody had money to buy it
or to pay the rent on the land. Even the
(06:28):
British government was having financial problems because it had been
hit by a banking crisis. Landlords who didn't want to
be saddled with supporting their tenants as was required under
the Poor Laws, or didn't have the money to do
so because it's had It's had a trickle up effect.
People who couldn't pay their rent meant that the landlords
also had no money. A lot of them chose to
(06:49):
evict people who couldn't pay the rent. About half a
million Irish people were evicted during the famine. Often the
male head of the household would go to jail for
non payment of his rent, and the rest of family
would just be left homeless. Many families, once they got
a notice of their impending eviction, chose to flee rather
than standing trial for this reason, or landlords would pay
(07:12):
for their tenants to be transported to British North America,
primarily Quebec Canada, on ships that were so poorly made, overcrowded,
and disease written that they were actually nicknamed coffin chips.
Following eighteen forty seven's healthy but small harvest, many people
were hopeful that Ireland had turned a corner. You know.
People kept thinking that this was just a temporary thing
(07:34):
and that one more good harvest would would fix the problem.
But people had spent the very last of their money
getting a potato crop into the ground to support themselves
for the following year, and then in again thanks to
wet weather conditions. The blight came back and uh the English,
not understanding why the Irish had planted potatoes instead of
(07:57):
something else, demanded that the Irish pay for their own relief,
so taxes were actually increased on farmers and landlords. For
Irish farmers, this was really the last straw, and immigration
out of Ireland began in earnest. People had been immigrating
from Ireland in the years before the famine, so immigrating
was not a new thing. In particular, young men had
(08:20):
gone to United States to work as manual labors, and
American companies would advertise for workers in Irish cities. In
the years before the famine. Between eighteen fifteen and eighteen
forty five, nearly a million Irish people had gone to America.
For the sake of comparison, that's about half as many
as left Ireland in the ten years between eighteen forty
(08:42):
five and eighteen fifty five, which are thought of as
the famine years. But the immigration during the famine was different,
both in scale and just in sheer awfulness. On the
coffin ships to Canada, the trip could take up to
three months. The people aboard were so sick by the
time they arrived. The quarantine facility in Quebec ran out
(09:04):
of room, leading to a backlog that kept the passengers
on newly arrived ships from being able to disembark, so
the ships would just sit there in port with sick
and dying and deceased people aboard. Eventually, quarantine and inspection
procedures were abandoned and the passengers were allowed to go
on their way, meaning that the Irish people arriving at
(09:24):
various cities in Canada were extremely ill, They were homeless,
and they were destitute. So many sick people arrived in
Quebec that there was a typhus epidemic in Canada, which
came directly from the influx of immigrants from Ireland. In
eighteen forty seven, about a hundred thousand people sailed from
Ireland to Canada, and about twenty percent of them died
from disease or malnutrition. Those who could afford it went
(09:48):
instead to the United States, mostly to the port cities
of New York, Boston, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, where
for the most part they faced illness, poverty, discrimination and bigotry,
and intense competition for unskilled jobs. And in New York,
Irish common who built them out of their money in
exchange for a filthy place to stay. Yeah, basically, New
(10:10):
York had been, of course, one of the most common
ports of entry for people immigrating from Ireland, so people
who were getting off the boats during the blight would
be greeted by what seemed to be a friendly face
who spoke their language, and that would in fact be
a person who was going to steal all their money.
Not so delightful. No, there's a point at some at
some point in my outline. Previously there was just and
(10:32):
did you think it was going to stop getting worse?
Because it's just going to get worse. So the United
States was also not really on board with the idea
of becoming home to a bunch of really sick Irish immigrants,
so fairs to the United States from Ireland became way
more expensive, and ports along the East Coast started requiring
(10:53):
bonds from the captains of the ship to guarantee that
their passages were not going to become dependent on the
government to live. And it wasn't just a matter of
jacking affairs. The US law had laws regulating the number
of passengers a ship could hold and the ship's accommodations.
They were way more strict and more strictly enforced than
British laws, which meant that the voyage was more expensive
(11:16):
to begin with. So you were more likely to survive
the ship on a on a ship that was going
to America because of these laws than a ship going
to Canada, but it also cost a lot more. It
was much harder to get on those ships. The people
who had enough money to flee but not enough money
to get to the United States or Canada would instead
(11:37):
try to immigrate to England, with Liverpool, Glasgow and South
Wales being common destinations. But this trip, while it was
definitely a whole lot shorter, wasn't necessarily safer. There was
one ship that arrived in liver in Liverpool with seventy
two dead aboard after the captain battoned the hatches and
a storm and the people inside the deeply overcrowded ships.
(11:59):
Suffolk aided and while the hope was that at least
in England people wouldn't starve, Irish immigrants quickly overwhelmed the cities.
In Liverpool, for example, Irish immigrants more than doubled the
population of the city and exhausted the relief services. On
June twenty one, eighteen forty seven, in an attempt to
relieve Liverpool of just this insurmountable population explosion, the British
(12:23):
government passed a law that allowed Irish people to be
deported back to Ireland. In general, what would happen is
these people would be abandoned on the docks once they
were returned to Ireland, where like we've said before, they
had no home and no money. Similar laws were enacted
in other English cities that had a big influx of
Irish immigrants. So even after the blight disappeared, the famine
(12:48):
had so completely changed the political and ethnic landscape in Ireland, England,
and even much in North America. The American immigrant population
became overwhelmingly Irish really quickly, and non Irish Americans, who
associated Irish people with poverty and disease, shiftlessness, and still
pretty distrusted Catholicism, carried a lot of anti Irish prejudice.
(13:12):
Deep anti Irish and anti Catholic sentiment remained until the
Civil War, when the tide started to turn a little
as Irish fighting units proved themselves to be both brave
and dependable and Irish laborers filled a need for workers.
After the war was over, and eventually Irish Catholics found
that they could influence local politics by voting. Irish Catholics
(13:33):
made their way into public office and started influencing public policy,
which made life for Irish immigrants a little easier in
the United States. Back in Ireland, during the Blights aftermath,
the economy was still in dire straits. Landowners were deeply
in debt, and many sold their land just to get
out from under it. This lieutenant farmers who had been
(13:55):
working that land homeless. Ireland's recovery continued to just be
really slow after the famine was gone um, both because
of the sudden population drop and the consequent drop in
how much farm labor was available uh and the economic
fallout from the famine. It's hard to make precise estimates
(14:16):
of exactly how bad the final death toll was. Census
records at the time weren't super precise, but the most
commonly cited statistics are that one million people died. Most
didn't die of starvation, but of diseases like relapsing fever, typhus, dysentery,
and cholera, hunger, made people more susceptible, and poverty and
overcrowning cause these diseases to spread rapidly. Another about two
(14:40):
million people left Ireland as are a direct result of
the famine, with most of them heading to England, Canada
or the United States. The population was about eight point
four million people in Ireland in eighteen forty four. That
had fallen to six point six million in eighteen fifty one,
and in the end that the years thought of as
(15:02):
the Famine years I saw a drop in the Irish
population by twenty and the population actually continued to drop
in the aftermath, so that when Ireland gained independence in
its population was actually half of what it was before
the famine began. Debate about how to interpret the government's
(15:24):
response to the famine continues today. On the one hand,
is the nationalist review that the government could have made
better choices and is pretty much responsible for the huge
death toll. The revisionist view is more sympathetic to the
government and the landlords, and it takes the opposite stance
and the most extreme national nationalist view, this famine wasn't
(15:47):
really a famine, it was genocide. That's not that doesn't
gain a lot of traction in the world of academia.
But it is a view that a lot of people
take that because a lot of the policy was so
anti Irish that what was happening was the deliberate extermination
of Irish people through the tool of hunger. Because of
(16:07):
the famine and the blight was actually identified what this
disease had actually been in May of as a probably
now extinct strain of uh Phytopthora infestants, which is native
to South America and Mexico, had almost certainly came to
Ireland aboard ships from Mexico having contaminated other crops, and
(16:31):
it completely changed their history forever. It did it and
consequently the history of other countries as well, right and
it's it became sort of the hallmark of more recent
Irish history. Like Iron, Ireland has had a lot of
unhappy events in its history um and the potato famine
(16:52):
is cited as one that just had a deep and
long lasting effect on everything about Ireland, and there are
there's a whole body of literature that draws directly from
the famin Um. When you talk to people who live
in the United States who have Irish family, a lot
of people will say that's when my grandparents came to
(17:13):
the United States, or that's when my great grandparents came
to the United States. And yet a lot of the
education about it, it begins and ends with potatoes and
they died. Yeah, it's pretty quick. I mean, we really
don't get that much in depth in it. Well, and
some of that is because some of the classroom discussions
(17:33):
on the famine are in sort of the late elementary
and middle school years, uh, and it's, you know, getting
into all the political complex complexity surrounding it is maybe
not quite appropriate for that age level. But even so, considering,
you know, you and I live in the United States,
considering what a huge effect the famine had on the
demographics of the United States and politics and religion and
(17:55):
all of that kind of thing, it seems a little
weird that there's not a more through uh discussion of
it later on in the later school years. Do you
also have more listener mail for us? This listener mail
is from Vivian and it's another about the Hendenburg. Vivian says,
(18:19):
I really enjoyed your podcast on the Hendenburg because since
I was a child, I've always loved the story of
the Hendburg, which sounds a little odd to say, considering
the whole disaster. I'm just gonna pigure minded ease. I
also found many strange and disastrous things fascinating as a child,
so I do not think you should feel odd about that.
So back to the letter. During light reading from years
(18:42):
ago that I now can't remember, someone pointed towards the
Hendenburg disaster as a catalyst for World War two. I
was wondering if you guys found any connections about this, um,
And the answer is really probably not. UM. There was
definitely a really big investigation into Handenberg to rule out sabotage,
since because it was a German airship with the note
(19:06):
swastikas on it, right, it seemed like a pretty prime
target or attack by anti German or anti Nazi groups. Uh.
The idea that it was sabotage or a deliberate attack
seems like a pretty believable scenario. UM. But even after
Vivian's question, when I went to look again to see
if I could find any connections between those two things,
not really from any reputable source. There are a couple
(19:28):
of kind of I'm sure there are theories and historical
theorists that talk about it as a potential element for
some kind of conspiracy theory ideas about it. Um, but
the Hannenberg went down about two years before the war started,
and the investigation didn't turn up evidence of sabotage or
any kind of deliberate attack. And while there were definitely
many factors that played into the start of World War two,
(19:51):
um Hitler's invasion of other nations. I think it gets
like the big Yeah, that the biggest part, But I
guess share think, yeah, where the world came from. By comparison,
the explosion of the Hainburgh is a much smaller tail
in history. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
(20:13):
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(20:36):
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Honey from and I'm Tracy be Wilson. So Tracy,
we're going to continue, yes, the story we started last time.
We're going to pick up on the the Irish potato
(00:22):
famine and to recap just a little bit in the
mid eighteen hundreds. The social and political climate that we
talked about in the previous episode had led Ireland to
depend really heavily on the potato as a food crop.
The poorest people in Ireland ate almost nothing but potatoes,
and anything that was anything else that was being grown
on a farm wasn't really being raised to eat. It
(00:44):
was being raised to sell to pay the rent. So
potatoes were filling bellies and everything else was paying for
the land that you were living on. So when a
blite cut just a huge swath through the potato crop
in eighty five and almost wiped it out in highrely
in eighteen forty six, the impact on Ireland was severe.
(01:04):
So in this episode we're going to look at how
this intersection of politics and farming unfolded. So in eighteen
forty six, when the blight was in full swing. The
British government's response was minimal. In the government's less a
fair view and that of many landowners who had holdings
in Ireland, all of the obvious relief measures like providing
(01:26):
food or subsidies were counterproductive. They would threaten free enterprise
and cause the Irish to become dependent upon government handouts.
The government's desire not to influence free enterprise also meant
that it didn't want to meddle in other business affairs,
like the practice of exporting grain out of Ireland and
into England. Instead, it was pretty much business as usual,
(01:48):
so food exporters in Ireland, many of whom were owned
by people living in England, just kept exporting food as normal.
So when the potato crops died, Irish farmers kept selling
all their other crops to pay the rent. The choice
was one of starvation or eviction. Uh the people who
owned the farms would then export the other crops out
(02:09):
of Ireland, So throughout the famine, Ireland continued exporting grains, rabbits, butter, fish, onions,
honey and other foods, along with nonfood items like woolen leathers,
so they were sending food away while they were starving
to death. So weather stopping these exports and distributing this
food to Irish farmers would have stopped the famine is
(02:29):
a hotly contested subject. Some scholars argue that the potato
made up so much of the Irish food supply that
no amount of other food grown there could have possibly
filled that gap. But regardless, shipping food out of Ireland
while people were starving looked really bad. There were riots
and ports cities in response to the shiploads of food
(02:51):
that were living leaving Ireland bound for England. River boats
and ports were appointed military guards. And really, even if
keeping the food in Ireland would have been a feudal effort,
this continued export was really deeply damaging to the relationship
between England and Ireland. People scavenged what they could eat
(03:11):
and they sold their belongings to try to pay for food.
Even in coastal areas where fish were plentiful, the fish
were generally in water that was too deep and treacherous
for people to reach in their small boats with ordinary nts.
That winter, which is the winter of eighteen forty six,
also saw one of the worst blizzards in Ireland's history,
with snow reaching the roof lines of people's huts. By
(03:33):
eighteen forty seven, it had become clear that this was
not just a temporary situation that was going to be
relieved by the next year's harvest. Even though the blight
did disappear that year. The eight forty seven crop was healthy,
but not enough had been planted in the spring to
sustain everyone. People had resorted to eating the potatoes they
would have normally reserved for replanting, and many were so
(03:55):
weakened by hunger and illness that they weren't able to
get their crops in the ground. While many people wanted
to plant something other than potatoes, at this point, seeds
for new crops were often beyond their means, so they
planted what they could get, which was mostly potatoes. Britain
opened soup kitchens to help get food to needy people,
and the death toll did start to drop a little bit,
(04:15):
but the kitchens didn't last for very long. Parliament enacted
the Irish Poor Law Extension Act on June eighty seven,
which once again moved the British government away from providing
direct aid to the Irish. Under this act, it was
up to the Irish landlords to support their impoverished tenants.
Government soup kitchens were scheduled to be closed and they
(04:38):
had only existed for about six months, and the public
works programs that were meant to support the Irish were
shut down. The Poor Law Extension Act also made it
a lot harder for people to enter one of Britain's workhouses,
which at this point was a last refuge for the
destitute farmers. Britain had created the system of workhouses in
eighteen thirty eight. There were a hundred and thirty of them,
(05:01):
which could accommodate about a hundred thousand people. Once they
arrived at a workhouse, families were divided up and giving
given separate housing for women and men, and they wore uniforms,
they weren't allowed to leave the building, and they worked
for ten hour days. The youngest children would get school
lessons and older children would get training on how to
work in a factory. These workhouses were dirty and demoralizing,
(05:24):
and illnesses spread really quickly in such tight quarters. And
apart from all of this, the whole idea of going
to a workhouse was just an extreme humiliation which made
people really reluctant to do it. But even so, conditions
were so bad in Ireland the workhouses were quickly strained
at the breaking point. The government implemented stricter and stricter
(05:45):
rules about who could go to a workhouse in a
in an attempt to stem the tide, and under the
new Poor Laws, men had to give up any other
means of making a living if they wanted to enter
a workhouse. So two point six million Irish people went
to the institutions during the famine, so they were hugely
vastly overcrowded. Conditions were, on top of being overcrowded, just
(06:07):
very dirty and difficult, and more than two hundred thousand
people died in the workhouses that were meant to help them.
By eighteen forty seven. The problem was actually money. Thanks
to the healthy but very small potato crop, there was
plenty of food, but nobody had money to buy it
or to pay the rent on the land. Even the
(06:28):
British government was having financial problems because it had been
hit by a banking crisis. Landlords who didn't want to
be saddled with supporting their tenants as was required under
the Poor Laws, or didn't have the money to do
so because it's had It's had a trickle up effect.
People who couldn't pay their rent meant that the landlords
also had no money. A lot of them chose to
(06:49):
evict people who couldn't pay the rent. About half a
million Irish people were evicted during the famine. Often the
male head of the household would go to jail for
non payment of his rent, and the rest of family
would just be left homeless. Many families, once they got
a notice of their impending eviction, chose to flee rather
than standing trial for this reason, or landlords would pay
(07:12):
for their tenants to be transported to British North America,
primarily Quebec Canada, on ships that were so poorly made, overcrowded,
and disease written that they were actually nicknamed coffin chips.
Following eighteen forty seven's healthy but small harvest, many people
were hopeful that Ireland had turned a corner. You know.
People kept thinking that this was just a temporary thing
(07:34):
and that one more good harvest would would fix the problem.
But people had spent the very last of their money
getting a potato crop into the ground to support themselves
for the following year, and then in again thanks to
wet weather conditions. The blight came back and uh the English,
not understanding why the Irish had planted potatoes instead of
(07:57):
something else, demanded that the Irish pay for their own relief,
so taxes were actually increased on farmers and landlords. For
Irish farmers, this was really the last straw, and immigration
out of Ireland began in earnest. People had been immigrating
from Ireland in the years before the famine, so immigrating
was not a new thing. In particular, young men had
(08:20):
gone to United States to work as manual labors, and
American companies would advertise for workers in Irish cities. In
the years before the famine. Between eighteen fifteen and eighteen
forty five, nearly a million Irish people had gone to America.
For the sake of comparison, that's about half as many
as left Ireland in the ten years between eighteen forty
(08:42):
five and eighteen fifty five, which are thought of as
the famine years. But the immigration during the famine was different,
both in scale and just in sheer awfulness. On the
coffin ships to Canada, the trip could take up to
three months. The people aboard were so sick by the
time they arrived. The quarantine facility in Quebec ran out
(09:04):
of room, leading to a backlog that kept the passengers
on newly arrived ships from being able to disembark, so
the ships would just sit there in port with sick
and dying and deceased people aboard. Eventually, quarantine and inspection
procedures were abandoned and the passengers were allowed to go
on their way, meaning that the Irish people arriving at
(09:24):
various cities in Canada were extremely ill, They were homeless,
and they were destitute. So many sick people arrived in
Quebec that there was a typhus epidemic in Canada, which
came directly from the influx of immigrants from Ireland. In
eighteen forty seven, about a hundred thousand people sailed from
Ireland to Canada, and about twenty percent of them died
from disease or malnutrition. Those who could afford it went
(09:48):
instead to the United States, mostly to the port cities
of New York, Boston, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, where
for the most part they faced illness, poverty, discrimination and bigotry,
and intense competition for unskilled jobs. And in New York,
Irish common who built them out of their money in
exchange for a filthy place to stay. Yeah, basically, New
(10:10):
York had been, of course, one of the most common
ports of entry for people immigrating from Ireland, so people
who were getting off the boats during the blight would
be greeted by what seemed to be a friendly face
who spoke their language, and that would in fact be
a person who was going to steal all their money.
Not so delightful. No, there's a point at some at
some point in my outline. Previously there was just and
(10:32):
did you think it was going to stop getting worse?
Because it's just going to get worse. So the United
States was also not really on board with the idea
of becoming home to a bunch of really sick Irish immigrants,
so fairs to the United States from Ireland became way
more expensive, and ports along the East Coast started requiring
(10:53):
bonds from the captains of the ship to guarantee that
their passages were not going to become dependent on the
government to live. And it wasn't just a matter of
jacking affairs. The US law had laws regulating the number
of passengers a ship could hold and the ship's accommodations.
They were way more strict and more strictly enforced than
British laws, which meant that the voyage was more expensive
(11:16):
to begin with. So you were more likely to survive
the ship on a on a ship that was going
to America because of these laws than a ship going
to Canada, but it also cost a lot more. It
was much harder to get on those ships. The people
who had enough money to flee but not enough money
to get to the United States or Canada would instead
(11:37):
try to immigrate to England, with Liverpool, Glasgow and South
Wales being common destinations. But this trip, while it was
definitely a whole lot shorter, wasn't necessarily safer. There was
one ship that arrived in liver in Liverpool with seventy
two dead aboard after the captain battoned the hatches and
a storm and the people inside the deeply overcrowded ships.
(11:59):
Suffolk aided and while the hope was that at least
in England people wouldn't starve, Irish immigrants quickly overwhelmed the cities.
In Liverpool, for example, Irish immigrants more than doubled the
population of the city and exhausted the relief services. On
June twenty one, eighteen forty seven, in an attempt to
relieve Liverpool of just this insurmountable population explosion, the British
(12:23):
government passed a law that allowed Irish people to be
deported back to Ireland. In general, what would happen is
these people would be abandoned on the docks once they
were returned to Ireland, where like we've said before, they
had no home and no money. Similar laws were enacted
in other English cities that had a big influx of
Irish immigrants. So even after the blight disappeared, the famine
(12:48):
had so completely changed the political and ethnic landscape in Ireland, England,
and even much in North America. The American immigrant population
became overwhelmingly Irish really quickly, and non Irish Americans, who
associated Irish people with poverty and disease, shiftlessness, and still
pretty distrusted Catholicism, carried a lot of anti Irish prejudice.
(13:12):
Deep anti Irish and anti Catholic sentiment remained until the
Civil War, when the tide started to turn a little
as Irish fighting units proved themselves to be both brave
and dependable and Irish laborers filled a need for workers.
After the war was over, and eventually Irish Catholics found
that they could influence local politics by voting. Irish Catholics
(13:33):
made their way into public office and started influencing public policy,
which made life for Irish immigrants a little easier in
the United States. Back in Ireland, during the Blights aftermath,
the economy was still in dire straits. Landowners were deeply
in debt, and many sold their land just to get
out from under it. This lieutenant farmers who had been
(13:55):
working that land homeless. Ireland's recovery continued to just be
really slow after the famine was gone um, both because
of the sudden population drop and the consequent drop in
how much farm labor was available uh and the economic
fallout from the famine. It's hard to make precise estimates
(14:16):
of exactly how bad the final death toll was. Census
records at the time weren't super precise, but the most
commonly cited statistics are that one million people died. Most
didn't die of starvation, but of diseases like relapsing fever, typhus, dysentery,
and cholera, hunger, made people more susceptible, and poverty and
overcrowning cause these diseases to spread rapidly. Another about two
(14:40):
million people left Ireland as are a direct result of
the famine, with most of them heading to England, Canada
or the United States. The population was about eight point
four million people in Ireland in eighteen forty four. That
had fallen to six point six million in eighteen fifty one,
and in the end that the years thought of as
(15:02):
the Famine years I saw a drop in the Irish
population by twenty and the population actually continued to drop
in the aftermath, so that when Ireland gained independence in
its population was actually half of what it was before
the famine began. Debate about how to interpret the government's
(15:24):
response to the famine continues today. On the one hand,
is the nationalist review that the government could have made
better choices and is pretty much responsible for the huge
death toll. The revisionist view is more sympathetic to the
government and the landlords, and it takes the opposite stance
and the most extreme national nationalist view, this famine wasn't
(15:47):
really a famine, it was genocide. That's not that doesn't
gain a lot of traction in the world of academia.
But it is a view that a lot of people
take that because a lot of the policy was so
anti Irish that what was happening was the deliberate extermination
of Irish people through the tool of hunger. Because of
(16:07):
the famine and the blight was actually identified what this
disease had actually been in May of as a probably
now extinct strain of uh Phytopthora infestants, which is native
to South America and Mexico, had almost certainly came to
Ireland aboard ships from Mexico having contaminated other crops, and
(16:31):
it completely changed their history forever. It did it and
consequently the history of other countries as well, right and
it's it became sort of the hallmark of more recent
Irish history. Like Iron, Ireland has had a lot of
unhappy events in its history um and the potato famine
(16:52):
is cited as one that just had a deep and
long lasting effect on everything about Ireland, and there are
there's a whole body of literature that draws directly from
the famin Um. When you talk to people who live
in the United States who have Irish family, a lot
of people will say that's when my grandparents came to
(17:13):
the United States, or that's when my great grandparents came
to the United States. And yet a lot of the
education about it, it begins and ends with potatoes and
they died. Yeah, it's pretty quick. I mean, we really
don't get that much in depth in it. Well, and
some of that is because some of the classroom discussions
(17:33):
on the famine are in sort of the late elementary
and middle school years, uh, and it's, you know, getting
into all the political complex complexity surrounding it is maybe
not quite appropriate for that age level. But even so, considering,
you know, you and I live in the United States,
considering what a huge effect the famine had on the
demographics of the United States and politics and religion and
(17:55):
all of that kind of thing, it seems a little
weird that there's not a more through uh discussion of
it later on in the later school years. Do you
also have more listener mail for us? This listener mail
is from Vivian and it's another about the Hendenburg. Vivian says,
(18:19):
I really enjoyed your podcast on the Hendenburg because since
I was a child, I've always loved the story of
the Hendburg, which sounds a little odd to say, considering
the whole disaster. I'm just gonna pigure minded ease. I
also found many strange and disastrous things fascinating as a child,
so I do not think you should feel odd about that.
So back to the letter. During light reading from years
(18:42):
ago that I now can't remember, someone pointed towards the
Hendenburg disaster as a catalyst for World War two. I
was wondering if you guys found any connections about this, um,
And the answer is really probably not. UM. There was
definitely a really big investigation into Handenberg to rule out sabotage,
since because it was a German airship with the note
(19:06):
swastikas on it, right, it seemed like a pretty prime
target or attack by anti German or anti Nazi groups. Uh.
The idea that it was sabotage or a deliberate attack
seems like a pretty believable scenario. UM. But even after
Vivian's question, when I went to look again to see
if I could find any connections between those two things,
not really from any reputable source. There are a couple
(19:28):
of kind of I'm sure there are theories and historical
theorists that talk about it as a potential element for
some kind of conspiracy theory ideas about it. Um, but
the Hannenberg went down about two years before the war started,
and the investigation didn't turn up evidence of sabotage or
any kind of deliberate attack. And while there were definitely
many factors that played into the start of World War two,
(19:51):
um Hitler's invasion of other nations. I think it gets
like the big Yeah, that the biggest part, But I
guess share think, yeah, where the world came from. By comparison,
the explosion of the Hainburgh is a much smaller tail
in history. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
(20:13):
We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com, slash history
class Stuff, and on Twitter at Miston History. We are
on Tumbler at Miston History dot tumbler dot com, and
we have a pinboard on Pinterest. If you would like
to learn a little more about the subject we've talked
about today, you can go to our website and put
the word famine in the search bar. You will find
the article how famine Works. You can learn a lot
(20:36):
more about this and all sorts of other events in
history at our website, which is how stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, how
stuff works dot com. Audible dot com is the leading
(21:00):
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