Yeet the Rich
If a billionaire donates money to a good cause, does that make them a good person? Hosts Emily Walsh and Daniel Moss are two married millennials who learned about financial crises by living through them, and now they’re diving into the wild world of the uber rich. They discuss financial crimes, the breakdown of the American dream, and why funding a museum doesn’t necessarily make you a good person. They get into the old timey rich, like the Rockafeller family, and current events, like why you might not want to shop at Walmart. Each week they’ll dive into a new wealthy person, give you the rundown on their lives, whatever “good things” they’ve done in the past, and why they might be a bummer.
Yeet the Rich
The Irish Potato Famine Part Five: It’s Bad!
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We are finally wrapping up our series on the Irish Potato Famine! We get into the third year of crop failures and the mass exodus of the Irish to ports unknown. People were desperate enough to leave on ships without shoes, without food or water sometimes, to Liverpool, North America and beyond.
The famine didn't end with a big resolution or solution, it unfortunately faded out over time and many people continued to suffer for years. And while the English may not have intentionally killed 1.2 million Irish people, they certainly made choices that caused needless death.
Sources: The Graves are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People by John Kelly
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But don't be ashamed if you get confused when you talk to your friends or you watch the news. They try to tell you where it all went wrong. Now you don't need to or you just sing this song. Rich people stacking the dick. Rich people with big bad chicks. Rich people to have a ball. Rich people with hey everybody and welcome to Eat the Rich.
SPEAKER_03I am Emily Walsh and I am here with my co-host and husband, Danny Moss.
SPEAKER_02That's me, Tudly Totally.
SPEAKER_03Tootly totally.
SPEAKER_02I really once again did not come up with a thing to say before moments before. And it's interesting because I've been doing this for over two years.
SPEAKER_03And sometimes you're like, add a bra b and sometimes you're like, what is a podcast? And it's it's a wild rise.
SPEAKER_02You just like to keep them keep keep everybody on their toes.
SPEAKER_03Are keeping me on my toes. I have been on my toes for 12 years. They're very strong. Um yeah. So let's let's wrap up this.
SPEAKER_02It doesn't, it happens, it's fun, nice ending. No. Everybody's doing okay. No. All the people that died came back to life? No. Magic potatoes. No. Sadness. More sadness to come. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Yeah. Um, I'm gonna be drinking whiskey again. Yes. The bread picked up.
SPEAKER_02I'm gonna I'm what's it called? Rawdogging life.
SPEAKER_03What's that? It is what when you raw dog a flight. Yeah, that's what it's like.
SPEAKER_02Which I don't love as a phrase.
SPEAKER_03No, I hate it at all. I hate that you said it. But yeah.
SPEAKER_02I'm just trying to uh get in touch with the the manosphere.
SPEAKER_03I feel like we don't talk to them enough. And we we we're going two different paths.
SPEAKER_02They need help, is what I'm saying.
SPEAKER_03Not for me. That is not my job.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no, fair.
SPEAKER_03That is not my job. But yeah, you you drank with the young fellows this weekend. Yeah, and flew uh real close to the sun. So close to the sun.
SPEAKER_02I I haven't been that drunk in a very long time.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, you sent me a text that was like, I'm having a good time, but also do you love me?
SPEAKER_02I don't recall that.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, you it's I was a little worried, but I was like, I checked your location and your little circle was because I don't remember reading the answer either.
SPEAKER_02Oh, it said I love you. Oh, good, oh good, okay. What a monster.
SPEAKER_03Pretty sure he sent up you a picture of Frankie and said, Have they have fun? That's nice. Yeah, I'm nice.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. But uh yeah, you you flew a little too close to the sun. Yeah. That might be me next week because I'm going to the other half of that bachelor bachelorette party.
SPEAKER_02If you want to send me cryptic texts. Well, I'm sure I will.
SPEAKER_03Feel free. I'm sure I will. Longest time I'm gonna be away from the Frankster since she was born.
SPEAKER_02So I'm gonna sleep. We're just gonna swap stories about how much we love you the whole time.
SPEAKER_03That sounds nice. Yeah. She's gonna be like, uh? You're gonna be like, yeah. Uh uh. It's a bad yeah.
SPEAKER_02But uh our baby is uh has learned the Sims language. Yes.
SPEAKER_03She sounds like uh if the adults on Troy Brown were children. Just a lot of emphatic talking. Very emphatic. Where she's saying nothing other than Oh, she also so she says data a lot with you.
SPEAKER_02She says mama a lot with me in a in a way that is desperate.
SPEAKER_01Just bring her to me.
SPEAKER_02I don't like you. And I want mama, is kind of how she says it.
SPEAKER_03It's the subtext. She is in a new phase where literally no one can hold a candle to me. No.
SPEAKER_02Which is which makes sense. It's more stressful than I thought. Uh I hear you.
SPEAKER_03You like think it's gonna be fun, yeah. But she's like a she's like a stalker.
SPEAKER_02Like she's like a super. She does know where you sleep.
SPEAKER_03She knows where I sleep.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And she doesn't let me sleep. No. And I live in fear. And she's has no concept of personal space. No. It's a good thing she doesn't know how to use cameras. Not yet. Not yet. She uses she's that's actually not true. She's taking a selfie on my phone. But yeah, she's she's asleep. It is Monday night for all those uh people.
SPEAKER_02I decided to check the monitor to make sure that was still true. Because we don't like to lie to you.
SPEAKER_03But she's sleeping. We each had I had a morning coffee and a night coffee. I had two morning coffee. Night coffee. Night coffee. Night coffee. Night late.
SPEAKER_02Night in shining armor. That's a different later.
SPEAKER_03A little worried about falling asleep later, but not that worried because we're tired. But yeah, this is um we're gonna wrap it up. I promise. This is the end.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03It might be another two-hour episode, but this is the end.
SPEAKER_02Uh we'll see whether my uh uh reluctance to drink whiskey maintains. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Honestly, um I was gonna lie to you. I was gonna say not as many haunting anecdotes, and then like two popped into my head, and I was like, never mind.
SPEAKER_02Um you teed up the last episode with some real ominous stuff.
SPEAKER_03So girl, we're gonna start ominous, we're gonna end ominous. But yeah, we're wrapping it up. So we've had uh 46 and 47, 18 version. Uh 18, 46, so 18, 47.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_03We're the two big, big old blight years.
SPEAKER_01Big bad years.
SPEAKER_03And we're we're coming up on the next year, and the Dublin newspapers are saying things aren't looking so good.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So I'm just proud of them for still printing the newspaper.
SPEAKER_03Getting up every day and putting one foot in front of the other.
SPEAKER_02You know, they just, you know, pamphlets. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03They love paper products. But yeah, the um a very large amount of people are realizing it might be time to check out of this death hotel. Okay. It might be time to move. Yeah. It might be time to go. So in 1846, the first year of this famine, 116,000 people left Ireland. But in 1847, 365,000 left 215 to North America, 150,000 to Britain. Wow. There were people that had literally never traveled five miles in their lives going to America.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's kind of nuts that they were just like, I gotta get way out of here. That's how bad it is. I mean, to be honest, I would have been pretty mad at the British. I think it would have been like either I'm gonna go there and like poop in their mailbox, or I'm going all of all the way across the world.
SPEAKER_03Pooping in their mailbox is honestly closer than I think you intended to be on what happens. Okay, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's fun.
SPEAKER_03Uh, it was getting rough. There was uh the Times, the newspaper printed a Celtic Irishman will be as rare in Connemara as the red Indian on the shore of Manhattan. So basically, like, hey, used to be your home. They won't be there anymore.
SPEAKER_02They're getting out of here.
SPEAKER_03And some people were really excited. For some reason, we know who Oscar Wilde's mom is, Miss Jane Elgy, and she was very happy to see the Gaelic-speaking peasants and their language leave, saying, No new light of thought has flashed through the Irish language for a thousand years. Okay, Oscar Wilde. She's just being a bee. I don't know. I didn't look up any further who she was. Why we care?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, not really uh uh not really taking a pulse of what's going on in the world. She's a bee. Get them out of here. Just being a bee. I don't care that so many of them died.
SPEAKER_03Nope. Uh landlords are also very happy to see people starting to leave because for every person that was gone, it would lower their personal poor rate. Because remember the taxes, they're expecting them to pay the money. Oh, to be a land of the monies, because they have to give some of the monies away.
SPEAKER_02I don't like giving them monies away.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, but also people are dying. Everybody who leaves, they also can consolidate their land. So they're getting bigger parcels of land and they're not having to pay as many taxes.
SPEAKER_02A lot of the people that are leaving are these small landowners.
SPEAKER_03Yes. Yes. Yes. Uh, and um, some people, like Stewart and Kincaid, who were estate agents, advised landlords to start offering their poorer tenants free passage to Canada, calling them dead weight. One landowner calculated are we doing phrasing?
SPEAKER_02You gotta work on that, guys.
SPEAKER_03Oh, a lot of people are calling them dead weight, and they are dead and they weigh very little because they're hungry. Yeah. Uh and dead. Um weighs seven pounds. That's what they say. Oh. Uh, so one of the landowners calculated that it would be half the cost he was paying for his tenants to be in the local workhouse as it was to charter ships himself. So people are packing up their their tenants. Um, and the people who couldn't afford Transcontinental Passage sent their tenants to Liverpool. They were like, just go to Britain. That's at least far away from here. And some other wealthy people were just giving out tickets on the docks. They were approaching teenagers and workhouses, being like, Do you want to leave? What up?
SPEAKER_01Do you want to stop being a burden?
SPEAKER_03Like, oh God, you could have just spent that money making it so that they weren't so reliant on potatoes. Yeah. Other people who didn't have landlords started appealing to their families if they had any elsewhere. Some of them literally saying, like, don't let us die of hunger. Can you please help me get to where you are? There's at least some potatoes there. And some villages lost up to a third of their population in the spring of 1847. Wow. Only one in three Irishmen born in Ireland around 1831. So people who were like 15 and 20 at this time would die in Ireland of old age. Wow.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_03One in three.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03People wanted to leave so badly or needed to leave so badly. Some of them left without luggage, money, shoes. Some of them left out of ports that weren't used very much on ships that weren't very safe. Some of them left without any food when you needed eight weeks of preserv provisions to survive the passage.
SPEAKER_02Oh boy.
SPEAKER_03Most people had to go east first in order to go west to Liverpool, which they thought was a bad omen. And Liverpool itself was a city full of vices that had direct passage to the United States and was usually the cheapest way to the North America for the Irish. And the quickest passage to Liverpool was 11 hours, but it usually took between 20 hours and four days just to get to Liverpool.
unknownOh man.
SPEAKER_03Um, so this moment, uh, I did look up my own family. Oh, okay. I spent about an hour on a free trial of Ancestry.com and I learned that my great-grandparents on my dad's side, his maternal grandparents. Okay. So my dad's mom's parents.
SPEAKER_01Sure.
SPEAKER_03Uh John Horan, Horan, Horan and Mary Kennedy emigrated to America in 1847.
SPEAKER_01Kennedy.
SPEAKER_03So this year.
SPEAKER_01Wait, this year. 1847. To get probably because of potatoes. Well, they came from Cork, so probably. Okay, well, welcome.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. And his dad's side came in 1860, so not that far later.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, okay.
SPEAKER_03Um, and then my mom's grandparents on her mom's side came in 1903 and her dad's side around the same time as well. So uh yeah, so it seems like I do have at least two uh ancestors. Are they ancestors in the 1800s? Family members? Yeah, whatever generation.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think ancestors is right. Yeah, there are there are I was gonna call him Kin, but I think Kin is alive.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, there are people that I'm related to that emigrated during the famine from Ireland. So you got potato sadness in your blood. I have potato sadness in my blood. That's how I was gonna say it.
SPEAKER_02I thought maybe that makes sense. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Wow. That's my next tattoo, just a sweeping potato.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah. You were like really on board with that. Oh, I was trying to decide whether I had potato sadness in my blood.
SPEAKER_03We could, I still have I got 13 more days of ancestry.com if you want to find out.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Do you think that is that a category that you can look up on the Ancestry?
SPEAKER_03You just like a potato sadness. Well, it's gonna take a while for us to get to there because my family, there's like three generations away from this famine. Your family has about 19 generations between now and then.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, because I don't I don't know when that came over. Those crazy kids.
SPEAKER_03Well, I'm also just your family's young. Yeah, they get more frequent generations.
SPEAKER_02Ah, that makes sense. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, we took we took gaps.
SPEAKER_02You took a leap year.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, we took some leap years.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03But anywhozo.
SPEAKER_02I guess gap year.
SPEAKER_03I said what I said.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03But don't feel too bad for Liverpool in this influx because they were that's where the market was that was manipulating the Irish prices. Oh, okay. So they reap what they sow. They reap what they sow. Yeah. Which is not much.
SPEAKER_02Um there's no pea in this liver pool. Sorry. I'm so sorry. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03So Melville said of all the seaports in the world, Liverpool perhaps most abounds in all the variety of land sharks, land rats, and other vermin, which makes the helpless their prey. You don't want land sharks.
SPEAKER_02Street sharks, maybe, because they kind of are vigilante justice crime fighters, I think.
SPEAKER_03But land sharks.
SPEAKER_02Land sharks, no good. Not so good. Not good.
SPEAKER_03Basically, um, men would wait by the dock. They called them runners, and some of them were fully just gang members, like the gang of 40 thieves and um Alibaba? Yeah. Yeah, definitely. It was Alibaba. Same. That's what I'm talking about. Uh, and small farm owners with a little bit of money would arrive, and people could pretty much just help them out and earn a 7.5% commission by helping them buy their translated passage passage. They could earn a little bit of commission from an innkeeper by taking them there to stay.
SPEAKER_02Okay. So that was like that was some of them shady.
SPEAKER_03But but for the poor who didn't speak English but just spoke Gaelic and were very Irish or very Irish, they were very Irish, but also innocent and illiterate, the three other I words, uh, they could be completely tricked. Some of them were sold children's tickets or cancel tickets. Sometimes they would be sold a ticket to a ship that would be delayed three or four weeks and they'd run out of their money staying at a boarding house. Like they were fully being bamboozled.
SPEAKER_02Which also is maybe why half of those people stayed in Liverpool.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Because they couldn't they literally couldn't get anywhere else. Um, and before the famine, Liverpool had a higher municipal death rate than London. So people dying, just for record of death, basically, 36 per thousand versus London's 22 per thousand. But it got even worse, obviously, with the famine. Yeah. Um, but the Irish immigrants who showed up there, described by a doctor in Liverpool, were the quote least clean in their habits, the most apathetic about everything that befalls them. Screw you, dude. And the most resistant to being removed to hospital.
SPEAKER_02You you you're the worst, my guy. Yeah, no, I mean they there's probably a reason why they don't trust institutions because the institutions that they knew completely turned over. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Um, they also they had these cellars, like basements um that used to be where dock workers had lived, and they were like gross and horrible. So they closed them six years ago. Uh, but then they were like, wait, all these people are here.
SPEAKER_02You know what we got these stanky cellars, filthy basements. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03So they reopened them and they crammed them full of people and typhus. So that's fun. Yeah, sure.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02Oh, golly, we've got this extra typhus to just, you know, toss in the basement.
SPEAKER_03So cemeteries were so crowded that, quote, the dead are taken by relatives at all hours of the day and sometimes at night in coffins, sometimes nailed, sometimes not. And if the gates happen to be closed, corpses are put over the walls. So they're just flopping bodies around. Oh, past I mean, that's yeah. I told you not good.
SPEAKER_01Not good.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, by late spring, out of the 250,000 people in Liverpool, there were 60,000 cases of dis of fever, 40,000 of dysentery, 60,000 of diarrhea, and 7,000 dead by the end of a year. The removal act was supposed to expedite the deportation of the Irish paupers, but they couldn't get government funds or a ban on Irish immigration. And they said that the scum of Ireland come to Liverpool and die in thousands is true, but whose fault is that? They're kind of just like, sorry, bud. Yeah. You reap what you sow. So going to Liverpool in general was kind of a uh rude awakening for a lot of Irish people. Um, before they went, most of them had a lot of pride in their town or their region where they came from, in the Irish storytelling, in poets, all these sorts of things. They had their pride, they they had uh self-worth.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03And they the Irish kind of there's a concept that he talks a lot about in the book where like an Irishman knows that any quality of man can be outmatched by life, which is like you know, you're not like a bad person if something bad happens to you, you're not a good person if good things happen. Like it's your life is you know life be life.
SPEAKER_02Life do be life.
SPEAKER_03Sometimes you get outmatched.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03So that's kind of their outlook on this whole situation. But then they were shown what they called the Liverpool mirror. Like they were looked upon themselves in a different light because everyone in Liverpool made fun of their rags and their clothing. People would shy away from them, look away from them. They just spent years of being in the middle of a famine. Literally. That was a little made worse by the the this town. Yeah. No, it was bad. They were very rude. So when they went to buy their tickets, the fare would could change by the hour. They would go check and see what it was that day, they would get their fare. Then they'd have to go to a medical tent where the entire exam was sticking out your tongue.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Because apparently a lot of infectious diseases show up on your tongue. But that was it. And uh some people maybe they had their buddy go stick out their tongue for them. Right. Because there's no IDs, there's no checking. They already bought the ticket. Yeah. So uh the vibe on the ships was was kind of fun at first. People would play music on the decks, and people in rowboats would try to deliver latecomers to the boat, and there's kind of like a send-off type of vibe.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. But the actual experience the dancing scene and and Titanic.
SPEAKER_03Yes, exactly. Literally, Ireland is that scene, and that's all you need to know. Just kidding.
SPEAKER_02Uh probably not. They were pretty sad.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. But so of the journey, uh, the Irish peasantry, having spent the winter of 1847 dying in public work stitches, under carts, on public streets, and in snowfields, would spend the summer dying across 3,000 miles of ocean. In 1847, the death rate on vessels on the Liverpool to Canada route was over 15%. On the Cork to Canada route, over 18%. So that's almost one in five people dying on the way there.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_03The boats were part of the Canadian timber trade, so lumber.
SPEAKER_04Okay.
SPEAKER_03Uh, and basically they weren't in the market to move people, they just wanted to monetize their empty westward voyage.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_03Because they were bringing timber to the UK. So they were like, we got room. Boats. Might as well shove people on it.
SPEAKER_02Are there beds? Not a one.
SPEAKER_03No. Basically, they put people in the cargo holds. They would build these temporary decks and they would not uh caulk them. So they were like unsealed floors without any like permanent structure, and they were torn up for storage on the way back. So they were just like filthy. They weren't sealed, they were just like dirty.
SPEAKER_02They kept trying to stack them like lumber. It didn't work.
SPEAKER_03Didn't work. People turns out are not lumber. Not lumber. But hey, once they die, they do stack them.
SPEAKER_02Oh no. Sorry. I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_03I'm sorry. I am sorry. I have to, I have to just push through. Yeah, fair. This is awful. Like I'm not happy. I'm just trying to zip-zap-zop my way through, you know?
SPEAKER_02You're doing great. Thanks. They're not. No. No. No.
SPEAKER_03So at the time, I think this is kind of interesting. By US law, they required uh every passenger on your boat have 14 square feet of space. So not like assigned to them. It wasn't like this is your cabin, but you need to take the amount of passengers times it by 14.
SPEAKER_02It's like an occupancy, like a room occupancy but for boat.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. So US ships, in order to land in the United States, you needed 14 feet of space. But Germans and uh the British both had 10 feet of space.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_03So they less space.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so they put them on the boat. And then when they got there, they were like, it's fine if we land.
SPEAKER_03No, those boats had to go to Canada for the most part. Oh, okay. If they didn't have 14. Canada is British. Canada's a colony. Right. America's not anymore. Right. British is. British is. Canada is British. I'm doing great.
SPEAKER_01You are doing great.
SPEAKER_03But also, German ships were might have been 10 feet, but at least German law, for one week uh of being on the boat, a person needed to be portioned two pounds of beef, one pound of bacon, five pounds of dried bread, and three and a half pounds of dried vegetables.
SPEAKER_04Okay.
SPEAKER_03But the British only had to give people seven pounds of bread stuffs, some type of bread.
SPEAKER_02Oh, and the thing about boat bread is that often it molds.
SPEAKER_03Boat bread be moldy.
SPEAKER_02Boat bread do be moldy. Also, like it's also hard tack, so it's just like are they and their teeth are probably not.
SPEAKER_03There's nowhere to poop. Are they pooping? I don't know. They're just eating bread. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Is there water? Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Other than for sale.
SPEAKER_01There's salty water.
SPEAKER_03Oh, that's not good.
SPEAKER_01That's not good.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. So normally immigration would just kind of stop in the winter. People wouldn't cross over in the winter.
SPEAKER_02But not this year. On the deck. No blankies.
SPEAKER_03No blankies. Not great.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you're gonna want some blankies.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03So they kept going through the winter because things were that rough. But some boats would show up with over a hundred people dead on the boat. Some had crew that wouldn't bring out the bodies without being paid more, and one boat, the captain, had to move all the bodies himself because no one else would. Wow. Sometimes people were locked in a hold because they got the fever at sea. And some of these passengers were held at gunpoint in these holds.
SPEAKER_02Oh. This is not a pleasant uh this is not just like a nice little sale.
SPEAKER_03No. There was an the 1842 Passenger Act was supposed to make things a little nicer, but it was inadequate and it was not enforced. But it was still bad enough in Ireland that the motto was kind of anywhere but here. Like it's kind of like Corona, anywhere but ordinary, but not.
SPEAKER_02Find your beach, guys. Find your beach.
SPEAKER_03And it's not Irish. Irish is not Ireland's not known for their beaches.
SPEAKER_02Is a beach.
SPEAKER_03So 98,000 of the emigrants would go to Canada, which was incredibly overwhelming for Canada.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Because they just didn't have they weren't ready for that many people. And uh they also were upset that they were getting the low Irish. Come on, you know.
SPEAKER_02Everybody again, they're not they've just been down for years.
SPEAKER_03They're human beings. Nobody really remembers that. Uh so on April 16th in 1847, Le Canadienne, a newspaper, was like, hey guys, they're coming. Like on a big scale, like, get ready. Yeah. And in St. Lawrence, which was a small island, they would have to spend two weeks in fever sheds when they got there to make sure they weren't sick.
SPEAKER_02Good old fever sheds.
SPEAKER_03And every ship that arrived had several dead and many cases of fever. So they had twice as many sick people than they had hospital beds by May. And they had ships waiting for two miles down the river. Some of them waiting three weeks to dock. Like it was they had so many boats. So they had to put up hospital tents, but the person who sent the tents forgot to send the floors, so they're just on the cold ground in the hospital tent. People were dying of typhus and dysentery. There were no bathrooms again. So there was just like waste down in the brush.
SPEAKER_02That doesn't help the infection problem.
SPEAKER_03Well, they also only had two staff members, two people, two doctors in the month of May for almost 2,000 sick people.
SPEAKER_02That feels like an oversight, huh?
SPEAKER_03Yeah. At one point there were a 14-person staff, but 12 of them got sick, and the Canadian government was offering nurses less than what they made in Quebec City to go to an island full of poop and death. So of course they were not going.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, they were like, you gotta Quebec yourself before you wreck yourself.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, they were like, hey, you can make, you know, 10 pounds in Quebec City or 8 and probably die. And be on a poop island. Not a poop island. Yeah, no, it was bad. Yeah. It was bad. The hospital shed slept two to three people in bed. People were often laying in their own excrement, and some of them would go without water for 12 hours because there's literally two staff members. And the daily deaths for the 2,000 people in the tents were up to 40 people a day.
SPEAKER_02Dehydration way higher when you're pooping your brains out as well.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, no, they need water all day. They need water all the time. They also did not remove healthy people from the ships while they were in that three-week queue. So that probably caused more illness. Yeah. Um, the two-week quarantine was also shortened, so then everyone ended up sick once they left quarantine. German immigrants would travel through mostly healthy, but the Irish would leave over 5,000 dead on the island by the end of the year. Quebec City was about 30 miles upriver and also got a large swell of the immigrant Irish. And by July, by July, they also had 40 deaths a day, most from typhus. The hospitals and the sheds there were so overcrowded that they petitioned Montreal for an empty army barracks just to have more beds. Their harbor was full of sick people, people crying in the streets, people covered in excrement, oozing with sores, calling out for deaf to take them.
SPEAKER_02Emily, I think it might be sad.
SPEAKER_03It's bad. Yeah. It's a really sad story. Sad. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02No, it's really bad. We're gonna find a silly mess around. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe we just redo the Beanie Babies episode.
SPEAKER_03We're just gonna become a different podcast for a couple weeks. Somebody, uh, Tacey at the housewarming was like, I just want you guys to do an Irish famine podcast. Like, I'm learning so much about my people. And I'm like, this is taking a lot out of me.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_03But uh, I'm glad we're getting we're all learning something.
SPEAKER_02I'm glad that there are people that are stoked.
SPEAKER_03I don't think she's like stoked. She just like likes the you know, anyway. Knowledge is at one point a mob tore down fever sheds near the hospital, and in one church parish, 60 people died in a week from typhus. Montreal, which was another 880 miles upriver, was a more appealing destination, and they could uh accommodate large river steamers. So the areas of passengers on those boats were packed very tightly. And someone said when he went on the boat to inspect the boat that the smell struck him like an object. Like it was rough. Yeah. Uh and Montreal, they wanted, they were trying to be prepared, and typhus basically took over immediately, despite having just had their streets cleaned and they closed all their cheap lodging houses to try to like minimize like big groups of people staying in the same place.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Um, the mayor of Montreal complained to the Queen of quote, whole cargoes of human beings in a state of destitution and every stage of disease has proved a grievous burden on the residents. And the Queen was like, Thank you for your letter. Did nothing.
SPEAKER_02Oh, the Queen.
SPEAKER_03In the last week of July, 267 immigrants died just in Montreal, and they had fever sheds upriver from the city's water supply. No. People were very upset about that, but the mayor's response was that the river was already where most people dump their garbage. So, how were a few thousand immigrants making the router that much worse?
SPEAKER_01Which honestly, I don't know.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I don't swim there, and you shouldn't either. Whatever happened with the Canadian river uh where the mayor was gonna swim in it for the Olympics, did that happen?
SPEAKER_03It wasn't Canada, it was Canada.
SPEAKER_02It was France.
SPEAKER_03It was France, but and I think they did, but I don't know.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, then people were like not a Summer Olympics person.
SPEAKER_03I know that's a uh hot topic. I know that's a touchy subject for a lot, but I'm a winter gal.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, okay. As I'm learning, more people are winter uh gals. No, no, really?
SPEAKER_03Everyone I talked to is like summer for life, so I don't know. Tell us in the comments, I guess. Um that summer also had a heat wave, which of course makes they can't catch a weather break.
SPEAKER_02Literally can't break a heat wave or a blizzard.
SPEAKER_03Three feet of snow, yeah. So some some nights this summer up to 50 people are dying a night in Montreal. Typhus killed most, but some took their own lives. Two brothers threw themselves into the river and were upset when they rescued, they were rescued. They were like, we just want to die. Like, why won't you let us die? Like that it is bleak. 6,000 people died of typhus in Montreal total, including the mayor, eight priests, and 17 nuns. The Irish were bringing the disease along the entire river, and the farmers there didn't want to hire them out of fear. So now Canada was having a rough time as well. They had gotten 10,000 pounds from London and they had given themselves 50,000 to immigrant relief, like to help people, but they were running out of money to do any of this. And other than the famine itself and the Crimean War, the Irish travel to Canada was the cause of the greatest British mortality in the Victorian era. Wow. Yeah. Wow. So by October, 20,000 people in Canada were dead. They felt that the UK had been callous, but worse were the landlords who had offloaded their quote dead weight. And out of the hundred thousand Irish that came that year, only about 5,000 actually had their passage paid for by their landlords, but that had been very publicized. So Canada is like they're all being offloaded.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03Um, but an example of one of the boats, they arrived with eight dead, 22 dying, and 377 alive. But of those 377, 99% would have to be supported by charity. So they're just like, it's not their fault. Yeah. But it it's a rough boat to get to your port to be like, what are we doing here?
SPEAKER_02Like, yeah.
SPEAKER_03Meanwhile, in America.
SPEAKER_02Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_03Ever heard of it?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I have. I feel like it's not gonna go great for them there either.
SPEAKER_03No, it means it's not gonna nothing goes good for anybody in the story. Okay. Have you not? Right, right, right. Nobody's happy, except for maybe the queen, who keeps getting all those nice letters. So, meanwhile, in America, uh, New York City was one of the ports that rarely was iced over. So they also were at capacity all winter. Got it. The papers predicted that it would be the most influx of people in history, and some papers were trying to be optimistic in New York, saying the men would likely be of health, energy, and some capital, uh, which was not true. But others were worried. And in Lower Manhattan, a group of New Yorkers were upset and threatening an injunction because the city had a plan to limit all disembarkations to a single dock, so have everybody get off at one dock, and that would just kind of ruin that neighborhood, just because any type of person, that many people getting off the boat. So that was like a relatively reasonable thing to be upset about. But um, there were already plenty of Irish people in New York City. One assessment claiming that in 1816, 40 years earlier or 30 years earlier, as many of 25,000 people out of a hundred thousand were Irish.
SPEAKER_01Wow, okay.
SPEAKER_03So it's not like who are these people showing up, but um, but many of the Irish that were already there were middle class and were Protestant. So this is a different group. Um, this wave of people, um, many of them were Catholic, many of them were kind of rough and tumble, and this is kind of the time of like the five points gang. So uh Gangs of New York, is that the movie? Yeah, gangs. This is Gangs of New York time. Got it. Uh very Irish, very angry, very uh yeah, angry, yeah, basically. But uh the two institutions that would welcome the Irish were the Catholic Church and Tammany Hall. Hey, we've heard of that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03When they arrived, there was not a Statue of Liberty yet, which feels crazy.
SPEAKER_04Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_03But they would sail past Staten Island, which also, funnily enough, looked beautiful. Um at that time, you from the water you saw weeping willows and giant estates. It was looked like a nice place to be. Um, so they they were happy to come to America, but the uh again, the British ships are the worst ships, just for emphasis. Out of uh a thousand people, the mortality rate for British ships was 30 people per thousand compared to nine per thousand on American and eight per thousand on German. Okay. So British boats are the worst boats.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. How many people were on some of these boats?
SPEAKER_03Like most of them, it seems like were hundreds, but some of them it it really vastly um yeah.
SPEAKER_01Big boat, little boat.
SPEAKER_03Big boat, little boat. That's what they say. Common phrase when you're talking about immigration. There's a big boat, there's a little boat.
SPEAKER_02Lots of people on it, some of them less than a boat.
SPEAKER_03Little boats still can have lots of people. Yeah, it's crazy. Uh, so typhus spread because all caps here, there were two visiting days during your 30-day quarantine.
SPEAKER_02That seems kind of to defeat the purpose of quarantine.
SPEAKER_03The entire purpose. Yeah, they literally were like, Yeah, no, it's 30 days is a long time. Why don't you have your whole family come visit you on this quarantine island and pick up this disease? Um, so between the visiting days, the crew members who did not need to quarantine, and then many wealthy people who paid to not quarantine. Sure. Uh, by December, New York City had lost uh almost 1,400 people to typhus. Wow. However, as many, that is a lot of people, yeah, but they did have less immigration because of this 10-foot, 14-foot rule. So just for comparison, New York City lost 1,400 people in December from Typhus, but Montreal at that same time lost 3,000 and was only one-seventh the size of New York.
SPEAKER_01Got it.
SPEAKER_03So way more impactful, way more of their population. Um, in New York City, when they landed, the docks were also full of predators, similarly to Liverpool, people who were employed by the boarding houses. Some of them would just grab people or grab their luggage and be like, stay in here.
SPEAKER_02Like, okay.
SPEAKER_03Literally, they were like, There were some bullies that bullied you into living here. Um, a lot of houses would also lie about their rates. So when they were checking out, they would steal their luggage and be like, you can't leave because you didn't pay us the rate. And they were like, That's not why you said it would cost. And they would also overcharge them for railway tickets. They'd be like, I'll help you buy your train ticket. It's one million dollars. Uh, there was also a bondsman, which was a whole if different type of predator because in the 1824 Passenger Act, it said that ship captains had to post bond of up to $300 for every passenger that would become a ward of the city within two years of arrival. So for a fee, a per person, a bondsman, somewhere between 10 cents to a dollar, the bondsman took over that responsibility, which was risky, but usually the bondsman bought the bond, like bought the potential debt, and then had a friend in city hall that kind of made it go.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, sure.
SPEAKER_03So uh, and if they did end up in a bondsman's care, they would end up in their own personal poorhouse or in unheeded tenements. So, not great. There were there was a family called the Trescott's, and they were passenger brokers. And so they did this type of thing, and they brought in seven to eight thousand people a year, but they had their own poor house that was terrible, and people said that they were feeding them black meal and refuse grease. Oh, so like nope, garbage and oil, and I'm not even sure what that is. And the trust they were like, hey, trustcots, do better, and they were like, We're doing great. Why don't you visit our poor house? And you can see, and they did visit, and they were like, This is bad.
SPEAKER_02Hauntingly bad. Yeah, no, they were like Where are you getting all this old grease from?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, they were literally feeling them, feeding them grease and the remains of diseased pigs and lambs. So the New York State legislature would eventually create some immigrant reforms to protect the quote to quote, protect the newcomer from being robbed, to facilitate his passage through the city, to aid him with good advice, and in case of the most urgent necessity, to furnish him with a small amount of money. And by 1855, so almost 10 years later, there was an established landing point for all the ships at Castle Garden, and there were agents staged in Albany to protect westbound immigrants from fraud as well. And they had built municipal almshouses to replace the private poor workhouses. So there was slightly things were slightly improving. And again, they were deterring people with this 14 square foot law, but they still had 1.8 million people emigrate through New York from 1847 to 1851. So they obviously weren't keeping everybody out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, but in Black 47, 1847, they called Black 47, New York only got about 53,000 Germans and about the same amount of Irish. But in that same year, 98 Irish, 98,000 Irish landed in Canada. So and in 1848, the next year they got 189,000 immigrants and 98,000 of those were Irish. So got it. A lot of people. Yes. But not as many as Canada. Yeah. But I also keep forgetting that Canada in this moment is a uh territory of Great Britain. Like it's part of the United Kingdom.
SPEAKER_02Going to a different part of the same place, kind of.
SPEAKER_03Kind of, but not really. Yeah. So in July 1847, uh New York was having one of those really stinky New York summers. I can't imagine it smelled less like pea in 1847.
SPEAKER_02No, probably a little, at least these years a little more.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. It was hot enough that people were dragging their mattresses and sleeping outside, and frequent downpours and thunderstorms would wash trash and occasionally a baby pig into the Hudson River. Oh. Wilbur. Confused about where those baby pigs were, but sometimes they're going into the river. Yeah. Uh and in some of the poorer Irish wards, people were boiling animal remains, and so it would smell like wet dog, cat, and rat, which is maybe the worst combination of smells.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's a pretty bad perfume.
SPEAKER_03I can come up with. Yeah. And people were starting to post notices in newspapers trying to find their families. So here's an example of one. Uh, and it would be the names are in all caps and then the rest, but it's William Burns and his wife, Mary Grady, who sailed from Limerick on the first or second of April last for New York. Their daughter, who left Ireland in the middle of April last and landed in Baltimore, is anxious to hear from them. So it's just like trying to find their people. Yeah. Um, most famine immigrants would come with nothing but the clothes on their back and a willingness to do the hardest and worst paid work. But they had trouble even finding that work. A lot of the women were mocked, calling Biddy, calling them Biddy after a joke about a woman named Biddy Nutley, who I don't know who that is. But basically, they all the jokes were about how they were bad domestic workers, and the jokes were like reflecting how poor they were. They'd be like, Biddy doesn't know how to answer the door because she never had a door. Like just really shitty. Yeah. Uh and and ads for domestic labor would say things like, Women, women wanted to do general housework, any country or color except Irish. So they're having trouble. Um, the Irish American, which was a newspaper, claimed that at least half of the mechanics in the city, skilled workers, so mechanics, woodworkers, carpenters, um, were Irish, which was a very generous, inaccurate claim. But it was born out of insecurity, and they wanted to prove that the Irish weren't just ditch diggers. But they would end up doing a lot of manual labor, like they became longshermen, quarrymen, blastmen, and rockmen. So all the big things plus the word man. Um and they worked hard, but it was a very different type of work because their work ethic, the the very Irish, the Gaelic, the villagers, yeah, they they just didn't work as much. The British had been complaining about their work ethic for years, but they were used to having market days off, fairs, wakes, funerals, all sorts of things. And they learned in America that they would only have Sundays off. So that was a different uh vibe. Still happy to be here, still happy to eat, but yeah, different vibe.
SPEAKER_02Different vibe. Uh and also, again, years of no matter how hard you worked, there was not enough food. Not enough food.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So it's kind of like, what are you gonna there's a certain certain level of fatalism that I bet seeped into society.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. So the famine Irish would never make it much further than the dock they arrived at. Um, so the wards surrounding the um the docks, the first, second, third, and sixth were very, very Irish. And there was a place called the Brewery in Five Points, which was a boarding house that housed about a thousand of the poorest people. And there was a mile-long garbage dump that ran from 1st to 20th Street. And it was just rough. And the Archbishop Hughes, who was in America, feared that they had just moved their hardship to the other side of the ocean. He said, It is truth, it is but truth to say that the Irish sellers and garrets of New York are as awful as the hobbles from which many of the Irish were exterminated. So it's just still bad.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Um, between 1847 and 1851, 848,000 Irish people would move to New York, which was twice the population of 1845 New York City. Wow. So, like so many.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And in 1847, they would be a fourth of the Brooklyn population as well, which is a different city at this time. Uh I thought this was funny, but I Um I don't know. I think it's funny, but the these Irish immigrants were, quote, distinguished by qualities that tend to make men interesting rather than prosperous.
SPEAKER_02Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_03Like, sure, you know, they're they're here for a good time. Yeah. Telling stories.
SPEAKER_02They're interesting, but not wealthy.
SPEAKER_03Not wealthy. Yeah. But New York City was quite prejudicial towards the famine Irish. The publisher of The Nation wrote they were not taught punctuality, soberness, cleanliness, or other minor morals. So people just don't like them.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I mean We're not good with people that have been through really bad hardship. And uh, you know, the the Dust Bowl folks moving out to California. We didn't, we were not kind.
SPEAKER_03I mean, uh little known fact, I believe it was New York, America in general, turned Anne Frank away.
SPEAKER_02Right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Goodbye.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So sorry. Yeah, we could do better. We could do better. We could do better.
SPEAKER_03We could always do better. We could do better right now.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03This isn't quite the episode. I'm gonna find the dumbest heist, the silliest event. Yeah. I gotta uh I gotta change it up for my own.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Is there some sort of bubblegum scam that we that we have?
SPEAKER_03What's going on with the Pez factory? Yeah. What's going on? Who invented Pez?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I bet they were up to no good.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, we're gonna um Yeah. So New York Protestant Irish, so the Irish that were already there that were Protestants started calling themselves Ulster Irish or Scotch Irish because they just wanted to uh excuse me, differentiate themselves. And the racist scientists that always pop up in a story like this started claiming that the Irish had the wrong head shape, the wrong face shape, the wrong skull bumps. They begrudgingly had to call them Caucasian because they were, right? But they decided to create seven subcategories of white people, and Irish was one of the lowest. By 1870, the Irish were 20% of the population of New York City, and the rest of the city felt like they were being dragged along by them. So John Hughes, who was the archbishops I was discussing before of New York, he was a Roman Catholic gladiator. He was a big, he was a Roman Catholic guy, but he stopped trying to. So at that time, Catholic churches in America were um accommodating, basically. They were like um trying to look more Protestant, trying to assimilate. And he was like, We're done. We're gonna be Catholic. Like, we're we're done. And during his reign, um, New York State also became the first of the states to prohibit teaching religion at schools because he was like separation, church and state. Um, the Catholic Church in general, just for reference, because I didn't know this, was kind of more symbolic in the life of many Irish immigrants. Um, a lot of them knew barely knew the sacraments or holy days and didn't attend church. But the idea of being Catholic was um resistance to the English Protestant church. Oh, interesting.
SPEAKER_02So still like a core part of their identity, but maybe they weren't.
SPEAKER_03But not necessarily because of religion. Right. Yeah. Right. Depends on the person, obviously. But it wasn't that they were all these incredibly devout Catholics. It was just that they were like, we are Catholic because you guys are Protestant. Yeah. We're definitely Catholic. Because they were all coming to New York, Hughes helped build a new Catholic homeland, including 114 new churches, two new Catholic colleges, one of them being Fordham. Okay, the first Catholic hospital, a newspaper, a temperance society, St. Patrick's Cathedral, and many, many Catholic schools. He taught them, quote, the dangers of godless public education, mixed marriages, which by mixed marriages he means Catholic and Protestant, nativism and red republicanism, but they also learned how to be Americans. At Sunday Mass, the faithful were encouraged to develop industry, punctuality, sobriety, thrift, and self-control. The Anglo-Saxon virtues that the British nation builders wanted to foster in Ireland. The Sunday homilies also helped the immigrants see how and where they fit into the American story. Like the pilgrims, the first European Americans, the Irish came to the United States in search of religious liberty. Proud, tough, and street smart Irish New York was also inward-looking, parochial, frequently intolerant, sometimes violent, and very politically astute. That's just from the book. Summed it up real good. Yeah. The other guy, other than Hughes and the church that played a very important role in their immigration was a Scotch-Irish Protestant named William Marcy Tweed. Oh. He led Tammany Hall, which at the time. Boss Tweed. Boss Tweed, you might say. You might say. He led Tammany Hall, which at the time controlled 8,000 jobs, and it would eventually control 30,000 jobs. His personal wealth at the time raged somewhere, they were never able to nail it down, between 30 and 200 million dollars in dollars at that time. Not our dollars. In their dollars. That's some trash. He probably could have saved Ireland single-handedly?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Question mark?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03But let's not dwell on that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. He wasn't really a charity kid.
SPEAKER_03No. No. No. So the Irish at this point saw government as brutal and oppressive and an instrument in their suffering, which is incredibly valid. But a lot of New Yorkers, uh Republicans and progressives, thought that government could be an instrument of progress. So that created a tricky dichotomy. The other issue was that the Irish saw slavery as an American issue. And even though they were coming over around the time of the Civil War, they were like, hey, we just avoided dying an incredibly miserable death.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Why would we go die for you?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Which, you know, we just got here. We just got here. It's not us.
SPEAKER_03We just got here. Yeah. Uh, and the Catholic Church actually endorsed kind of staying out of it. Um, so that just kind of created another reason of like other issues and a rift. Yeah. Yeah. Um, progressives would view Irish as violent and as willing to sell their vote to the highest bidder. But the thing is, Tammany was the only machine or group that was helping them, providing food and rent in emergencies, a meal on holidays, and a government job. They would often be intermediaries in immigration issues, getting people out of jail or helping naturalize them. And in the 1840s, the Irish just wanted to work, but by the 1850s, many of them were saloon keepers, policemen, and firemen, and very entwined in the politics of New York.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. When you when you don't have anything at all, uh somebody that's willing to give you a little goes a long way.
SPEAKER_03Goes a long way.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03The Irish in the 19th century would be more than one-fifth of the vote in New York, and these men, these voters, did not think that the p potato famine had been Providence, which is what the moralist said, an act of God. Right. Um, a young Irelander, a guy named John Mitchell, who would write a book called The Last Conquest of Ireland, perhaps, in parentheses, uh, wrote this book. A lot of the claims he made were not true.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_03Um, such as the amount of perhaps they were. Perhaps they would become true. Um, no, I mean he he was pro-Ireland and anti-government, and uh the vibe was correct, but the facts were not true. Um he said that the amount of corn imported was to distract the amount of corn exported. And while they did eventually import more than they exported, um he was he like again why. He sensationalized a bunch of uh he said that Trevelyan, who we hate, uh who is very bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he said that he brought Irish children to a government lab and gave them typhus poison on purpose. Oh, okay. So it's just like not a thing. Um but overall the general accusation of the book ran rang very true to them, uh being that the Almighty indeed sent the potato blight, but England sent the famine. So they're like, sure, God hurt the potatoes. Yeah, we didn't all have to die. Right. This was not what needed to happen.
SPEAKER_02Which is true.
SPEAKER_03A hundred percent. Um, and it seemed as if the English plan, including requiring people to give up everything but a quarter acre in order to qualify for relief, was just uh systematic genocide. And in order to restructure their economy and society, they were able to create these large commercial English farms by kicking everybody off. And the idea of calling it a genocide for the Irish was more satisfying than talking about the combination of incompetence, bureaucracy, bureaucracy, stupidity, and bad policy.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Because those things felt too small for how many people had died. They wanted a big word. And the British were like, yeah, that word is Providence. And they were like, nope, it's genocide.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03So uh the other thing that the Irish liked about his book is that it he completely ignored any failings of any Catholic farmers and landlords who evicted people, uh, any Catholics who charged famine prices for corn, or when the Catholic-dominated relief committees helped based on patronage instead of need.
SPEAKER_02So he was they were like they were like, ignore the we don't want to look bad.
SPEAKER_03The Irish were starting to feel like exiles, and um, but many of them did become soldiers. The Union Army alone trained 150,000 Irish recruits. Wow. And at one point they decided to use that training to attack Canada.
SPEAKER_02Well, they're up there.
SPEAKER_03Well, in 1866, they attacked from America, but they were like, Canada's the closest UK-owned land. Oh, sure. We're going to attack Canada.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Uh, neither went very well. The first time they did it in 1866, 600 troops went across the border near Buffalo, but they ran out of food and had to retreat home. The second attack in 1870 was even sillier because the invaders went across the border but had no money to get home and had to write to Tweed to get back to New York. Okay, boss. Hey, boss. We're stuck. We're in Canada. We're in Canada now.
SPEAKER_02We roughed them up real good though.
SPEAKER_03We showed them who's boss, boss.
SPEAKER_02I don't know why I gave them that accent.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that accent's in no way correct, but that's okay. So that summer, uh, summer of 1847, it seemed as if the blight was reappearing. Oh. People in Cork panicked and started yelling about how it had come back, but somebody finally went and looked at the potatoes and they were not spotted nor black. Okay. The problem was every time somebody saw a normal potato blemish or a wilted leaf, they were having PTSD.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that does make sense. It's like just wasn't enough rain this weekend. Yeah. They're like, oh god, no. It's all going down. Very understandable.
SPEAKER_03Incredibly understandable. But finally, in August, there was good weather, and many fields were blooming and were healthy, and the blight finally vanished because of the hot and dry weather. Some potatoes are gonna have a tough time in the coming years. It's not a thousand percent over, but they're gonna have an okay, okay time this year.
SPEAKER_04Okay.
SPEAKER_03The good weather was helping reduce both the blight and the fever, and the soup kitchens were helping to reduce the starvation.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, there you go.
SPEAKER_03Because after 18 months, the British finally realized that food shouldn't be a teaching tool, and they fed people.
SPEAKER_02There we go.
SPEAKER_03Who knew? Took a while to figure it out.
SPEAKER_02But finally learned to drink a new type of beverage, charity. Because the British like tea.
SPEAKER_03They should pair it with some humble pie, but they won't. No. So at the height of the soup kitchens, uh, 2,000 kitchens were feeding over three million people a day. So they were really getting that soup out.
SPEAKER_02Hey, y'all. Good job.
SPEAKER_03Good job. However, they're gonna close on August 15th. Come on.
SPEAKER_02Just for the day?
SPEAKER_03Just take one day off. Get your own soup today. No, um, they were just like, God damn it. There's a fly on the podcast. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Uh we don't like it.
SPEAKER_03We don't care for it. Uh no, they just were like, we're done helping. We helped enough. We hate helping. Um, and unfortunately, while the potato crop was healthy, it was less than a quarter of its normal size.
SPEAKER_01Oh.
SPEAKER_03Because remember, everybody was like, why would we plant death potatoes? Right. Turns out they should have planted them.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_03Uh the new poor law was supposed to replace the 700,000 public works jobs. But would landlords actually hire workers to keep them off the relief rolls when they could just lower their own poor rate by evicting their tenants instead?
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah, because they learned this new trick. And now they're like, let's just all use the same trick. And then you're like, but then there's no workers in Ireland, so what do we do now?
SPEAKER_03What do we do now? Oh, wait, they're all gone.
SPEAKER_02They're all gone.
SPEAKER_03So all they knew was that the new poor law was going to be incredibly expensive. In 17, uh, in September 1846, they paid about 21,000 pounds, but by 1747, or by September of 1847, it was 121,000 pounds. Okay, yeah. And December was 160.
SPEAKER_02But also years of famine.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. And few landlords and farmers were actually planning to expand their labor force with people wandering the streets yelling, won't your honor give us work? They literally just wanted to get paid to do anything.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And some warned of a class war. If the common people had no means of earning their food, they would seize it by force. Uh, in Britain, they weren't that worried because they were not in Ireland.
SPEAKER_02If they were in Britain, yeah.
SPEAKER_03I hate that. The total value of the 1847 Irish crops exported was 40 million pounds. And the prime minister was like, that's enough to employ people. We gave that money to somebody in Ireland, so everybody's gonna be fine.
SPEAKER_02Oh, the old trickle-down economics.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and if they can't get jobs, they should just eat their rent crops or sell them. Uh, then they had what someone called a famine in money. Oh. Because people, uh, the markets started tanking because people had bought corn thinking it would be about 25 pounds a share that April, but the price fell up to about 10. And also, not related but bad timing, the railway bubble burst. The market burst on railroads, got it, and those shares decreased very quickly. So the money markets are bad.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, nobody's nobody's catching a break.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, but John Russell, the prime minister, was committed to the new poor law because he really was hoping it was gonna stop all this emigration. Liverpool is having a rough time. They had corpses in their streets, fever in their cellars, and many, many people looking for jobs that couldn't find them. 26,000 people went to Glasgow, Scotland in one month. Wow. And the people there were pretty pet, pretty pissed. Yeah. They were like, they're gonna take our jobs and threaten our Protestant moral character. Which they might try to take your jobs, but only because they don't have jobs.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. They could use some jobs and some food.
SPEAKER_03So at this point, unfortunately, after only two years of famine, large numbers of people in the UK now subscribe to the moralist ideas, moral-ish, moralist, yeah, moral-ish, ish, moralist ideas of Trevalian that Ireland must learn to help herself, even if there was a high human toll. So they're now just saying, Yeah, we're we're out, yeah. Shops closed.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we've we've stopped caring about you.
SPEAKER_03No room at the inn.
SPEAKER_02Oof. He gave out way too many of those books. You know, he's just giving out way too many of those books.
SPEAKER_03Our friend Mr. Twistleton, we haven't heard from him in a while, uh, who was the Irish poor law commissioner at the time, he told a parliamentary inquiry there are many individuals of even superior minds who now seem to me to have steeled their hearts entirely to the suffering of the people of Ireland. They justify it to themselves by thinking that it would be going contrary to the provisions of nature to give any assistance to the destitute in that country. It is said that the law of nature is that those persons should die and that you should leave them alone. There is thus a sort of philosophical color given to the theory or idea that a person who permits the destitute Irish to die from want of food is acting in conformity with the system of nature. So basically, they've just decided they're done.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And that, like, if you are fine with other people dying, uh then you're you're morally proper.
SPEAKER_03You're correct, because God wanted them to die, and if you interfere, you're bad.
SPEAKER_02Sure. It just feels I I love it when people are like, oh man, God says I don't have to do anything.
SPEAKER_03Yes! Yes. It's like when people make fun of Catholics and they're like, I can do whatever I want, and then just say ten yeah, Mary's like sick. Like, I can say that mass starvation is Providence and just chill.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and then I talk to the king, and the king's like, Your pardon, and I'm like, thanks, king.
SPEAKER_03There's no king, there's a queen. Alright. Victoria. So there were many British towns like the town of Rochdale that had an aggressive anti-pauper policy and deported many of the Irish poor, including a 12-year-old fever patient who recovered but then was sent home to Manchester, Liverpool, and then back to Dublin. He and his 13-year-old brother were deported after their parents and sisters died, and then the 12-year-old died on the open deck passage of the ship.
SPEAKER_02On the way back to where they had fled.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. He was like lame, he couldn't walk very well.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And they were like, We're gonna put him in the warmest spot because he's a little sad sick boy, and uh he was there for like a day, and then other people got called and pushed him out. Sure. And then he died. Yikes. Yeah. It's just not good. Yeah, it's just bad. It's just really bad. This is how bad things are.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and also like just ever okay, okay. Everybody out there in the world that's listening to this podcast. Just remember the next time something happens where there there is famine or hardship or food, food scarcity that is not that it's just caused by something uncontrollable. That the the the knockoff effects of all of this stuff cost way more than like just helping them when they're in need. Like just get them through the rough period. It and then we don't have to deal with massive don't want to flee their homes.
SPEAKER_03No, for the most part.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. For the most part. For the most part. But it's just uh, you know, generations of pain because we were like, well, we can't help them. It's like you could have just helped them.
SPEAKER_03You definitely could have just helped them. And by the fall, the British were getting to be okay with the mass evictions as well. They were a dirty business, but they had to happen. Trevelyan said that he felt like dependence on government was disappearing, and a voice was declaring, we are able to help ourselves. We will no longer be dependent on the precarious assistance received from other lands. But that is in no way true. Starvation is fully reappearing. In Mayo, people were foraging for seagull eggs on jagged cliffs. They had to have soldiers protecting the local food depots. Death was going up, and a vicar in Mayo said, with all our exertions, death are increasing, deaths are increasing tenfold. Fever in all its forms is surrounding us, our wretched funds are expended. I entreat, I implore in the name of him, be merciful. But the British government had lost about a million pounds in two months from the railroad bubble bursting. So Mr. Wood, Trevelyan's little buddy, said this must be the end of it. In the present state of the money market, wait.
SPEAKER_02So more people are gonna have to die in Ireland because they made bad railroad investments.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_02Love that.
SPEAKER_03Correct. Uh in the present state of the money market and depression in all of our manufacturing towns, further assistance to Ireland was out of the question. She must keep herself somehow or other. Where the people refuse to work or so, they must starve.
SPEAKER_02No.
SPEAKER_03So they're just saying the quiet part out loud now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh many people also just stopped paying their poor rate. By October 31st of that year, there was almost uh there was over 850,000 pounds that were uncollected. And some of the people trying to collect these fees were attacked, hit with rocks, shot, killed. Twistleton was now the director of an independent Irish poor law commission and was supposed to be collecting enough taxes to feed the Irish poor, but he simply couldn't. Um, he did try to stop the collusion between the workhouse guardians who set the local tax rates and the middle class who were supposed to pay them. So he shut down several workhouses and replaced them with professional government administrators, but it did not do much. And at this point, many people genuinely could not pay it. Like it started with they maybe could have genuinely just can't do it. Um, London hesitated to get involved, but they did send a second Queen's letter, the letter that appealed for public help. But the year before they had gotten $116,000. Pounds and this year they only got about 20. Trevelyan finally, finally came to Ireland in person for the first time since the famine started. And he was like, Oh, it seems bad still.
SPEAKER_02Still pretty bad.
SPEAKER_03So he said that uh distressed unions, which were areas servicing a specific workhouse. So a union was one workhouse, so a small, small region, um, could qualify for government assistance after they made a good faith effort to get the poor rate, but only 22 of these unions qualified. And he also asked the workhouses to clear out the very old, the very young, the infirm, and the widows and put them on outdoor relief because he thought if the workhouses only took able-bodied people, those people would think twice about actually going in because they'd be like, we don't need to go to a workhouse. Um, but he also out loud acknowledged that thousands would die again without relief.
SPEAKER_02It's just maybe don't like take control of a whole country and a whole people and then like reap all of the benefits of taking control of the whole uh you know country and people and then leave them to die when when they are having a hard time, you're like, oh well, that's not my responsibility. That feels like your problem. It feels like your problem. God and stuff. Am I right?
SPEAKER_03Am I right? So their fears about class warfare were correct.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And the mass evictions that fall brought out the gunmen. Uh, several proprietors, several lords, and some bailiffs were assassinated. There was a movement towards tenants' rights, and Irish property owners started living in fear. Some getting letters saying your grave has already been dug and started going everywhere armed.
SPEAKER_02That's a that's a pretty intense threat. I like it.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Uh Vissery Clarendon told, he was a guy in Ireland, told Downing Street, told the prime minister, that they would need help to maintain order. And a week later was like, Could you send us 300,000 guns? And Russell was basically like, no. Okay, so so Clarendon was like, the violence is anarchy. We need help because it's anarchy. And Russell was like, No, it's not arbitrary or anarchy. Um, the landlords were turning out 50 people at a time to avoid paying their poor rate and burning the houses down.
SPEAKER_02So the violence seems pretty normal. Quite a cause, a cause and effect here.
SPEAKER_03Which is weird that he's like, because there's a reasonable cause, we're not going to help you. But he was like, I'm not basically whatever their version of the National Guard, he's like, that's for anarchy, not for you.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I am actually a little surprised because you know, a lot of times with stuff like this, they're like, Well, we won't give you food, but we will give you guns.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, no, they didn't either.
SPEAKER_02Neither guns. Not even guns.
SPEAKER_03The one thing that John Russell tried to do was pass a new landlord tenant bill that would actually have been pretty good if it had made it. It was going to help prevent preemptory evictions and compensate tenants who made any improvements to their lands, but that did not even get to a vote. But what did pass, very similar to what you were kind of saying, was a new crime bill. Uh-huh. Yep, there it is. Mantate mandating that communities had to take on costs of any extra policing in their community, and also that the failure to assist in murder investigations was a crime. Okay, are you ready for your last haunting anecdote? Oh, so more sad facts. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02But I've been feeling a little too up. Let's let's let's knock it right back down.
SPEAKER_03So on New Year's Eve of 47, a night that is normally celebratory in some way, shape, or form. Yeah. John Costello and his family, including three young children, were evicted and they watched a wrecking crew demolish their home. He hadn't even had a conversation with his landlord in nine years. The last thing the landlord having said to him was, I would rather feed goats than ye.
SPEAKER_02Oh, wow.
SPEAKER_03That night after their home was torn down, which they were like, Can you just do it tomorrow? And they were like, No. Yeah, they were like, No. Uh so that night they had to sleep in a hollow potato field, and as they tried to fall asleep, it began snowing. And two of the three children would be dead in weeks.
SPEAKER_02Oh god.
SPEAKER_03Okay. But in London, people celebrated and gave very little thought to Ireland. Because the crop in eighty eighteen forty-seven wasn't blighted, so they were done thinking about Ireland. The Irish were learning to help themselves. Oh God.
SPEAKER_02I just don't Okay. Somebody can't pay rent. You kick them out and you tear down the house. What's the point?
SPEAKER_03Of tearing down the house? Yeah. To make farmland, to consolidate the farmland. Right. You can't have houses on farmland.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, but they didn't have anybody to plant the potatoes.
SPEAKER_03Doesn't matter.
SPEAKER_02Okay. I don't like them.
SPEAKER_01You shouldn't. They're bad.
SPEAKER_03They're simply bad. So um we're kind of getting to the wrapping it up of it all.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Um, the the first two years were the worst two years, and there is not really a um tied up with a bow ending to this because it's hard to dig yourself out of famine.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_03Um, all of these horrible trends persisted into the middle of the 1850s, and things were made much worse by the extended poor law of 1847 because it made eviction an efficient way to make their poor rate go lower. And something called the Gregory Gregory Clause made the process easier to evict them and was, quote, the perfect engine for the slaughter and expatriatism expatriation of the people. The eviction rate rose in 1847 to night 1851, it rose a thousand percent.
SPEAKER_02Yikes. Yikes.
SPEAKER_03A thousand percent.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Yeah. In early 1848, the workhouse population went from the 75,000 of the soup kitchen summer to 120 and then 150,000. And by June, a million people were being helped, 850,000 with outdoor relief, and the rest in workhouses. But that didn't even count the people who were arrested on purpose because the Irish jails served better food than the workhouses. The prison system was actually built to hold about 5,000 people and held 13,000 that year. Oof. The taxes that point were claiming half of every pound, and the landlords truly couldn't pay at this point. And by July, there was a season of rebellion across Europe, and William Smith O'Brien and Thomas Meager, who were part of the Young Irelanders, went to the countryside trying to raise an arm, raise an army, but everybody was very tired.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_03They brought 118 people into battle all over Miss McCormick's cabbage garden, but they were quickly taken by police. The August of 1848 led to more blight in Ulster and the West and thousands more evicted. And the Clare district of Kilrush had so many evictions that the population went from 82,000 to 60,000. Wow. The good landlords are going to bad, and the bad are going to the worst extremes of cruelty and tyranny. He said. Thousands of people were literally crowbarred out of their homes and turned out to the streets to die from famine and disease. The British government officially stopped helping in late summer of 47. They did give 156,000 pounds in 1848 and 114 in 1849, but that was basically throwing a rock into a pond. It did very little.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Because of all the small farmers that were evicted and the new encumbered state estates act, which eased rules on the sale of Irish property, this all would bring in large-scale commercial farming. Moralists thought that the blight was Providence, and the landlords took this as an opportunity to get rid of their deadweight tenants and turn their properties into lucrative commercial farms. The bulk of all of the like landowners were British or Protestant Irish or like Yeah, a lot of them were absentee and British and they weren't Gaelic Irish heritage folks.
SPEAKER_02And you know, whether or not genocide is exactly the right word, this that feels more genocide. That feels more like you're you're trying to wipe away an entire culture, but specifically financially, you're like, it's not because you hate them, it's because you're like, oh, I can take an advantage of them, and no one seems to care if I do.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Farming profits would grow eventually in the 1850s, and some would say that that was a pretty quick recovery. And by the beginning of World War I, 11.1 million of Ireland's 20 million acres again were owned by Irish proprietors. And like before the famine, many of them were small farmers, but it didn't last for very long, and it wasn't a particularly exciting victory. Um to sum it all up, the relief policies of the British may not have been intentionally malicious, but they did produce hundreds of thousands of needless deaths. And for decades, the Irish wouldn't be able to say English without adding goddamn her.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Uh or England, rather, without saying goddamn her. But that is the end of our story.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_03It uh yeah. 1.2 million died, two million left.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Ireland was changed forever.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03England was at fault. I very much agree with uh the not necessarily God, but something brought the blight. England brought the famine. Right, right. Um again, I for I forgot to mention it uh this episode, but our our main source for this was The Graves Are Walking, The Great Famine and The Saga of the Irish People by John Kelly. Um, Irish history is expansive and long, and I could talk about it for a very long time. I do think I'm gonna eventually tell the story of the Molly McGuire's, which is a labor movement of Irish immigrants in America. Um, but not next.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no. I'm probably gonna do a series at some point digging a little deeper into like actually digging into Tammany Hall. We we've brushed up against it a lot, but it's you know, I think that'd be an interesting yeah thing to learn about.
SPEAKER_03For sure. And uh, if you want a visual of what it looked like when they came over, Gaines of New York is a wild movie with uh Daniel Day Lewis and Leonardo DiCaprio, it's a vibe. Yeah. I watched it recently for the first time, it's a vibe. Okay. I don't really know how I feel about it, but uh visually interesting. Okay. Uh if it's accurate. I say this, and now I'm like, is that a fantasy? Yeah. Uh yeah, I don't know how to wrap it up other than sad.
SPEAKER_01Sad. Sad.
SPEAKER_03So many more evictions than I realized. Yeah. All the cabins, they basically burned down and they were like, you're done.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and like a lot more dogs in the story than I thought. Yeah, a lot of a lot of not good dogs. Coffin ships. Coffin ships. Um yeah, beware of famine, everybody. You know? Just a hot take. Just watch out. Because the thing is, you know, blights uh you may not be able to control. You may have been able to foresee some of it, but the famine is uh caused by people.
SPEAKER_03So yeah. Yeah. This is just one of those stories of just absolute justification of cruelty through any means necessary and uh selfishness to an extreme degree and self-preservation and the ability to not think about people that write aren't right in front of your face. Yeah, yeah. And then once they get in front of your face, just complaining that they want to take jobs and have the audacity to want to eat.
SPEAKER_02Such a narrow reading of religion to justify needless deaths. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Um, but yeah, I'm gonna pick a different topic. Yeah, because I would like tablets.
SPEAKER_02The publicum heist is gonna be really cool.
SPEAKER_03I just I get really stressed that I want to like not be serious because that's not the like, I don't know. I want to be reverent, but at the same time, I'm trying to make this like an enjoyable commute. Yeah, and it's it's rough. It's just it's a rough, it's rough.
SPEAKER_02But if you want to, if you if you're into this podcast for some righteous indignation, I feel like this is kid had that in spades, you know.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, no, full of that, full of that. But yeah, I got eczema this week. This stressed me out. I got hives from this. Uh, those aren't the same thing, but I did get hives, maybe from this. I don't know. Hard to say.
SPEAKER_02Life is lifing. Life is, you know, life is acting upon us. Life is acting upon us.
SPEAKER_03Um, but yeah, next week's your turn. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Live it up.
SPEAKER_02Just a couple of third-degree burns. No big deal.
SPEAKER_03Go off, queen. Uh yeah. Please uh listen, tell your friends, leave a review, do all those things. Welcome to Germany. We have a weirdly significant amount of German listeners later.
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah. Hi, welcome.
SPEAKER_03Welcome, Germany. Uh, but yeah, we we do enjoy making this podcast, even though we are always very sleepy these days.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Um day we will have sleep.
SPEAKER_03One day we'll get ahead.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03But we love you.
SPEAKER_02Yep.
SPEAKER_03We'll talk to you next week.
SPEAKER_02Talk to you next week.
SPEAKER_03Thanks for listening. And a big thanks to Carsi Bland for the theme music. You can follow the podcast everywhere at EatTheRich Pod. You can email us your suggestions for future episodes at eatherich pod at gmail. You can follow me at thefunnywalsh, and you can follow Danny at DMoss315. See you next week.