Raise a St. Patrick’s Day glass to Wild Bill Donovan, the greatest Irish American – IOTW Report

Raise a St. Patrick’s Day glass to Wild Bill Donovan, the greatest Irish American

Wa Ex: The Feast of Saint Patrick is subdued this year due to the coronavirus pandemic. Touchstone events such as New York’s parade were wisely postponed for the first time since 1762.

March 17th is a bigger deal in America than in Ireland. There was no doubt whom the Irish were back home, known and persecuted for their Catholic faith, Celtic ethnicity, Gaelic language (spoken out “beyond the Pale”) and rebel tendencies.

In the United States, it’s different. English-speaking white Christians unlike most immigrants, Irish Catholics could assimilate as much or as little as they wished into Anglo-Saxon Protestant America, the predominant culture.

Scots-Irish Presbyterians, an alien planter class which displaced Catholic farmers in 17th-century Ulster, became hard to distinguish from WASPs here in the U.S. But most Irish-Catholics chose to proudy and defiantly remain a bit apart from the mainstream.

Irish-Americans had early successes. Charles Carroll signed the Declaration of Independence. Daniel Carroll signed the Constitution. John Carroll became America’s first bishop and founded Georgetown University. (Ours is a common last name, and they are not relations of mine.)

Impoverished refugees fleeing the Great Hunger of the 1840s—a potato blight made worse through inhumane British policies—changed, through no fault of their own, the status of Irish-Americans. But they had refused to “take the soup” offered by Protestants in return for renouncing Catholicism during the famine, and were in no mood to kowtow to anyone here either. more here

7 Comments on Raise a St. Patrick’s Day glass to Wild Bill Donovan, the greatest Irish American

  1. …given what the OSS turned into in recent days it’s tough to be grateful, but that wasn’t Mr. Donovan’s fault…

    ..also, they never talk about how crappy White people were treated by Democrats, either. My Irish ancestors were treated in ways that would have made a sharecropper go “DAYUM, that’s harsh!”, and my German ancestors were attacked so viciously at the onset of WWI thanks to the demonization of Preogressive Democrat Wilson that Great Gramps changed the spelling of the family NAME to try to ameliorate SOME of the nasty, even physical, attacks on his kids (which was not uncommon in that era. We didn’t live here then, but Cincinnati is a case study on changing German spellings during a time of Democrat-induced hatred.

    …but anyway, Wild Bill was the right man at the right time. I can’t raise a glass to him because I’m an alcoholic who hasn’t raised a glass in 30 years because of it (that Irish ancestry, I suppose), but those who can, SHOULD, IF they can find a bar open or even purchase a bottle of booze during this time of Democrats causing baseless panic because they’re STILL pissed that Hillary didn’t win…

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  2. What a great article and worthy of the time spent reading it. MJA, don’t know how you found this but very happy you shared it. What a fascinating life he led. So much packed into one lifetime. Many thanks for sharing. HAPPY SAINT PATRICK’S DAY!

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