The Irish Potato Famine: An Unnatural Disaster, Pt. 1

The history lesson kids often get on the Irish Potato Famine could be summed up as "a blight destroyed the potato crops, and a lot of people starved or moved away." Most kids ask, "Why didn't they eat something else?" Good question.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class from how
Stuffworks dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
tracybe Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Molly, Can I tell
you a story? It was a little when I was little,
we learned a history lesson about the Irish potato famine,

(00:23):
and it was basically summed up as all the potatoes
died and a lot of people either starved or moved away. Right,
That was sort of summing up. That's pretty much the
way I was taught about it as well. Right, So
my little kid question was, well, how come they didn't
eat something else? I think a lot of little kids
asked that question, right, And so now grown up me

(00:45):
kind of looks back at little kid me, And until
I learned the whole story, I was like that that
is a very privileged question, right, because we were a
pretty modest family, and we did grow all of our
own vegetables, but we grew a whole lot more than
just potatoes, and we also generally had enough food to eat. Uh.

(01:06):
But it turns out, why didn't they eat something else?
Is a really really good question about the Irish potato
famine And that's what we're going to talk about for
the next two episodes. This is a popular request We've
got in a lot of times. I actually ran into
Katie and Sarah over the weekend and they said they

(01:26):
had also been asked to talk about it very often,
and that they didn't have the heart to do it
because it's not exactly like a fun, jolly joy ride. No,
it's one of those things where it's clear from the
beginning that it's not a jolly joy ride because about
a million people died and about two million people left
their homes and immigrated elsewhere. But it's way worse than

(01:50):
just that. Yeah, there's definitely a lot of suffering to
the story, so I know that going in, yes, And
it's also one that requires a fair amount of background
to understand why it is that we got to this
point that everyone was only eating potatoes. Um. So this
is going to be a two part episode, and the
first is going to really set the stage for many

(02:10):
of the layers of what went terribly wrong here, and
then the second episode will get into how all of
that played out in the history of Ireland. So we're
talking about the mid eighteen hundreds in Ireland. Catholics were
really deeply disenfranchised in this point in Irish history. Ireland
had been part of Britain since eighteen hundred under the

(02:33):
British Act of Union, and under this Act, Ireland was
granted representation in Parliament, but Catholics were not allowed to
be members of Parliament, and Catholics were the overwhelming majority
of the population of Ireland. So while Ireland technically had
representation in Parliament the majority of its its population, we're

(02:54):
not really represented right. And there had been a number
of laws in place restricting very basic aspects of life
for Catholics, like owning property and having jobs, and some
of these dated back to the sixteen hundreds when Irish
Catholics sided with James the Second in his battle with
William of Orange for the British throne. So lots of
very old rules and laws and prejudices that were affecting

(03:18):
these people in a very real way well, and things
that we really take for granted by like being allowed
to get a job, ye, Catholics were not allowed to do.
Most of these laws had been repealed in eighty nine,
which is also when Catholics were allowed to become members
of Parliament, but by that point anti Catholic bigotry was

(03:38):
really deeply entrenched in the Irish culture, and a lot
of those past social norms about what people were allowed
to do and how they were allowed to practice their
religion had been extremely slow to change. So while maybe
things were legal now, it's still was not really easy
people to do things like get jobs in in property.

(03:59):
In Ireland this point was also extremely deeply impoverished as
a nation. Only about one quarter of the population was literate,
and in a theme we've discussed another podcast, modernization had
really stripped a lot of the working people there of
their livelihoods. The linen and wool industries, for example, have
been industrialized, and so the people that made a living

(04:19):
in those trades suddenly could no longer find work. In
rural areas, large families were living in tiny mud cabins
that didn't have windows or chimneys, and most of them
were subsistence farmers. None virtually none of them owned the
land that they were farming. For the most part, they
were overwhelmingly Catholic tenants who were paying their rent to

(04:41):
overwhelmingly Protestant absentee landlords who for the most part, we're
living in England not in Ireland, and many of these
Irish families weren't paying their rent directly to their landlords,
so there was a level of complexity to it. Much
of the land had been parceled out through a middleman system,
which had been in place since the seventeen hundreds. So
a Protestant middleman would rent a sizeable piece of land

(05:04):
from the landowners, subdivide it, and then rent that out
to tenants, and the tenants paid the middleman, and the
middleman paid the landowner, and so that inflated the rent,
and to raise their profits, middlemen would divide the land
into smaller and smaller parcels and raise rent at the
same time. So by eighteen forty five, half of these
little farms were on five acres or less, and pretty

(05:26):
much everybody had less than ten acres, like, they were
all really pretty small for a farm. So to add
just another layer of ugliness to this whole situation, a
lot of these tenants were renting land that their families
had previously owned but had been confiscated from them following
Cromwell's invasion of Ireland in the seventeenth century. So you

(05:48):
have people who really are pretty poor in terms of
how much money they have living on a tiny amount
of land, paying inflated rent to people who own land
that their own families used to own and don't anymore.
Already very uplifting story, I know, we'll just leave that
settle for a minute. Uh. And there were some communal

(06:08):
aspects to this setup. People often bartered instead of using money,
and those who couldn't afford land would often find work
with tenant families and these labors would help with chores
and help bring in the harvest in exchange for being
able to build their own cottage and plant their own
little garden plot. And this brings us to the potatoes.
Potatoes really thrived in the Irish soil and climate. It

(06:32):
was a reliable and pretty muttious food staple. Um it
although you know, potatoes get a lot of flak nowadays
nowadays for their high carbohydrates and all that kind of stuff.
But very starchy food. But they have lots of itam
and see lots of other nutrients. And so people who
were living largely on potatoes a lot of times really
were better nourished than people who were living mostly on

(06:54):
say bread. Um. So the introduction of the potato had
led the Irish pot elation to double between seventeen eighty
and eighteen forty five, so more people meant that they
needed to grow more food, and as the supply of
arable land got used up, farms were getting smaller and
smaller to accommodate this increase in the population, and of

(07:16):
course smaller and smaller farms made it harder for farmers
to grow enough food to feed their families. So doing
this had required potatoes, which had a much larger yield
than any other food crop. With a good harvest and
a cultivated plot of land, a family of six could
subsist for a year on an acre of potatoes, including
potato scraps that they could feed their animals, and they

(07:37):
would take three times as much land to grow the
same amount of grain, so enough grain to feed that
same family would take a longer land. So people were
planning potatoes because that was the only way they could
get enough food. Any Other land they rented was being
used to keep animals or to grow crops, and those
were grown to sell so that they could pay rent,
rather than eating and providing them for their families. Right,

(08:00):
So potatoes were for eating and everything else was to sell.
Thanks to this combination of factors, by forty five, sixty
of the Irish food supply was potatoes, and the poorest
people in Ireland were living almost exclusively on potatoes. And
most people were also planting the same variety of potatoes,
which were called lumpers, and they gave a really high yield,

(08:22):
but they weren't as nutritious as some other varieties. They
plant around March and harvest round September or October, and
then they could bury the harvested potatoes into pits where
they keep until around July of the following year. So
this meant that July and August were really rough and
lean months, even in the best of times. And it
also meant that diseases were really likely to spread easily

(08:44):
because everyone was planting the same stream of potato. Yeah,
there wasn't a lot of diversity to resist pathogens that
came around. This also meant that life for farmers in
Ireland had some periods of intensely hard work during planting
and harvest sting, and some spans of relative leisure in between.
The potatoes didn't involve they didn't require tons of upkeep

(09:08):
um and so even when people were farming other stuff.
A lot of times they had a life that balanced
hard work with periods of rest. Unfortunately, in many places
of the world that we're not Ireland, people viewed this
as laziness and idleness and shiftlessness, and that may have
contributed to some of the reluctance to send help once
help was really needed here. Uh. So to characterize the

(09:31):
start of the problems involving the potatoes, the Irish potato famine,
which is what it's called in the rest of the world,
but in Ireland it's called the Great Hunger or on
Gorth the Moore or the bad Life droo uh started
in a forty five when a blight destroyed part of
the potato crop. The blight hit potatoes in other parts

(09:52):
of the world too, and it had economic effects in
other areas as well, but really, nowhere else in the
world was relying as much on potatoes as Ireland was,
so while the effects were much more wide reaching in
terms of the food supply, Ireland was really hit the hardest.
And this blight started by attacking the leaves and stems,

(10:13):
causing them to turn black and rot, and the potatoes
would look edible when they were dug out of the ground,
but within days they'd turned slimy and black. The initial
response from the government was actually kind of on the ball.
The Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, sent a commission to
evaluate what was going on that October, and the commissioner
came back with the report that Ireland was probably going

(10:35):
to lose half of its potato crop. The scientific community
pretty quickly concluded that some kind of disease was to blame,
but the people whose lives really depended on those potatoes,
as we said before, not a very educated community, blamed
everything from static electricity to fumes from the newly built railroads.
And this was by far not the first potato blight

(10:56):
that had ever happened in history. Crops had failed certainly
before this, but even a whole season of crops had
failed before. But Ireland had never seen anything on this scale,
and it had never encountered two years of light in
a row, which you can imagine was really devastating. So
when Prime Minister Peel made some efforts to send relief,
because everybody was kind of expecting this to be a

(11:18):
temporary thing that would resolve itself with the next year's harvest,
um it wasn't a huge governmental response. The general consensus
was sort of things would be back to normal. This
was gonna be a short lived, difficult period that would
resolve itself in another season. But unfortunately, in eighteen forty

(11:39):
six the blight returned, and to sort of add insult
to injury, it was actually much worse the second year.
Thanks to the wet weather conditions and the fact that
diseased potatoes had been used as seed, It's spread farther
and faster than it had in its initial incarnation, so
people didn't have enough to eat and they didn't have
enough to feed the animals, and hunger related illnesses like

(12:01):
typhoid and cholera started to spread. And since people have
been getting most of their vitamin SEA from potatoes, scurvy
also became a problem. The British government did a couple
of things to try to help. Prime Minister Peel pushed
through a repeal of the Corn Laws. These were laws
that were meant to protect British grain growers from foreign
competition by imposing really high tariffs on imported grain. So

(12:24):
by reducing the grain supply, the Corn Laws caused British
grain growers to be able to get a higher price
for their crops. Repealing the corn laws was supposed to
bring more grain into Ireland and drive prices down, but
Ireland and the Irish people didn't really have enough money
to buy the grain, even at the lower prices that spring.

(12:47):
Prime Minister Peel, without going through Parliament, bought maze from
the US to be distributed as food. Maze was cheap,
but it also needed to be milmed to be edible,
and there weren't enough mills to actually handle it. On
top of that, maze is a very sturdy grain that
needed more processing than other grains, so the mills that
already were not numerous enough to process it were streamed

(13:08):
even more because it took more time to process the
amount that they could handle. Once it was milled into meal,
the maze was going to be sold at the rate
of a penny per pound, but just like with the
imported grain, a lot of people who really needed it
just could not afford to buy it. Um This corn
meal was also a lot different from the potatoes that

(13:29):
the Irish were used to eating, both in terms of
nutrition and digesting it, and so diarrhea and scurvy became
really common complaints among the people who were managing to
buy this corn meal to eat. Additionally, the British grain
industry was really angry over both the repeal of the
corn laws and the import of maze. The Conservative government

(13:50):
started to falter and Prime Minister Peel resigned on June
twenty nine eighty. The new Liberal government, also known as
the Whig Party came into power, and it really followed
the principle of lais affair, which was basically leave alone
and it's going to work itself out. The Liberal government
was really reluctant to make decisions that would affect private enterprise,

(14:12):
so once Prime Minister Peel was out of office, the
British government did not do a lot to intervene in
the blight. There were no big influxes of food or
monetary relief coming from the government. This is a concept
that probably seems seems incomprehensible to the years of a
modern audience in the world, where disasters lead to immediate

(14:32):
efforts at relief, But that's not what the ideology was
like in the mid nineteenth century, and there were private
fundraising efforts internationally, notably in major cities in the US
and India. Quakers led fundraising efforts, and the Choctaw Indians
recently relocated during the Trail of Tears actually sent a
donation as well. So while there was some international response

(14:53):
and some relief on the part of private citizens, it
still just was not enough. Under the new Prime Minister
John Russell, famine policy fell to Charles Edward Trevillion, who
was the Assistant Secretary of the British Treasury. He had
been involved in the famine response during Peals administration, but
now he was basically running the show. He ordered an

(15:15):
end to the sale of Maze, and he rejected an
incoming shipment of it, saying that he was going to
try to prevent the Irish from becoming dependent on government handouts.
Apart from the laz A Fair principles under which the
Whig Party was operating uh Travillion himself had a belief
in divine providence, which also influenced his hands off approach

(15:36):
to the whole situation. In the famine, everyone was sort
of working under the assumption that private citizens were going
to step up and provide relief, and that Ireland could
use its tax revenue to fund public works projects that
would employ Irish farmers. The farmer's income would be taxed,
and that tax money would fund more projects and a
cycle that would pull Ireland up out of poverty. But

(15:58):
the Irish government didn't really have enough need to start with.
People's wages were too low for income tax to keep
up with the need for government spending, and also really
too low for people to actually meet their own daily needs.
So in addition to they weren't making enough money to
buy things, their wages were not enough too for the
tax revenue to be adequip for the government. So what

(16:18):
happened instead was that public works projects were flooded with
way more workers than they could possibly use or pay.
And so that's where we're gonna pause on this part
of the story. Uh So we're leaving at eighteen forty six.
Ireland situation is extremely dire and Britain has taken a
largely handsoff approach to mitigating this crisis. So in the

(16:41):
next part of this episode, we're going to pick up
in eighteen forty six and eighteen forty seven and and
tell how the rest of the the famine unfolded in
Irish history. Do you also have a bit of listener
mail to treat us with? I knew. This is from
Mike and it is about our kind of recent episode

(17:02):
about the Hindenburg, And Mike says, just some comments on
your podcast concerning the Hindenburg. You seem surprised that there
would be a smoking room in this very dangerous environment.
This everyone's smoked, and if they had made a Zeppelin
non smoking, it would have been very difficult to get
anyone to buy a ticket. Been a pas there. Yeah,
we are aware that everyone's smoked, but it still seems

(17:25):
ridiculous to allow smoking in a dangerously flammable That's all
it is. I mean, I certainly know every smoke, but
that thing of like, you know, this is really flammable,
let's put a fire room in it. Yeah, yeah, I know.
Past hosts have done an episode on the Radium Girls
before and how people were really not aware that radium
was killing people. Yeah, and people weren't so really aware

(17:47):
that smoking was killing people there, but they were aware
that smoking was fire and that that hydrogen was vastly flammable. Yeah,
that's why it's surprising. Yeah, that's why that's where that
But it's true, no one would have ever gone near
it into of passenger bookings. Smoking was a multi day trip.
So back to the letter, there are a lot of

(18:08):
connections between Zeppelin's and the world of Philately. I'm a
stamp collector. In the U. S. Post Office issued a
step of three stamps exclusively for mail on the graph
Zeppelin Round the World flight. The total face value of
the stamps was four dollars and fifty five cents, an
incredible sum. In the middle of the depression, almost no
one bought the stamps, and today a set sums for

(18:29):
about hundred dollars. By the way, a crash cover from
the Handenburg sells for twenty thousand to twenty five thousand dollars.
The graf Zeppelin, by the way, was never used in wartime.
It was scratched during World War Two. A good picture
of the smoking room on the Handenburg may be seen
in the movie The Handenburg Start starring George C. Scott.

(18:49):
The film's not completely accurate. The pianos there on the
last voyage, although from what you said it wasn't taken
long on the flight. Also, it says that Hugo Eckner
was on board to try to talk to the US
government and a selling Germany hydrogen. I don't know if
this is true or not. So thank you Ma for
sending us that letter. Yeah, the stamp stuff is super
interested and I I did not read that Hugo Eckner

(19:13):
was on board to try to talk the US into anything,
but more he was just sort of there for German
procedural reasons. But that could have been one of the
things that came up. So thank you so much for
writing to us, Mike. If you would like to write
to us, you can at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash history
class stuff, and on Twitter at missed in History. You

(19:35):
can find our tumbler at miss in history dot tumbler
dot com, and we have a board on Pinterest. If
you would like to learn a little more about some
of the other ways that things have gone very very
wrong in history, you can go to our website and
put the word worst decisions in our search bar. You'll
find an article called ten of the worst Decisions Ever made.
This particular event is not on it, but it could

(19:57):
probably have a place in there. There are so many
bad decisions in the history of the world that fitting
only ten in is a little bit of an injustice. Yes,
and as we'll talk about in the next episode. There
is some debate about exactly what the bad decisions were
um in the context of the famine, so we will
be back at our next episode with more on the

(20:19):
potato famine. And you can learn about a whole lot
of awesome stuff at our website, which is how Stuff
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