(HOST) St. Patrick’s Day turns many non-Irish green with envy. Commentator Bill Mares is no exception.
(MARES) To prepare for this St. Patrick’s Day, I’ve just spanned two millennia of Irish history, in a literary sense. First, I listened again to a tape of Thomas Cahill’s rollicking, celebratory history of How the Irish Saved Civilization, in which his prose borders on poetry.
Cahill makes the case that, when Europe was falling beneath the pillaging assaults of barbarian invaders, a small band of monks retreated to the rocky isle west of Britain and with pen and vellum made Ireland the safe-house for Western learning, until the curtain of darkness began to lift four centuries later.
The central figure was, of course, St. Patrick, the Roman slave who became, in Cahill’s view, the first genuine missionary, who ventured beyond the Empire’s protection to bring Celtic heathen to Christ.
My second slice of Ireland comes from Vermonter Vincent Feeney, author, professor, and, 40 years ago, immigrant from California. His delightful book, Finnegans, Slaters and Stonepeggers, A History of the Irish in Vermont, doesn’t share Cahill’s cosmic confidence, but it is no less a labor of love.
Of the book’s origin he said, "I knew there was a huge gap in our understanding of Vermont’s past, which dealt with ‘ethnic’ history." When he retired, he decided to make this study of the Irish role his contribution. "Someone else will have to do the story of the French, Jews, Welsh, Italians and a few others in Vermont," he said.
He has written a book of facts and folklore, of work and play, religion and politics in the Green Mountain State. He describes how the Vermont Irish, as elsewhere, won the badge of citizenship during their Civil War service.
He relates how, as they struggled against Yankee bigotry in many places, they found themselves a social elite in cities like Burlington and Rutland. He tells of how the Irish and French fought for control of the Catholic Church in Vermont. He describes the period of 1900 to 1950 as the golden age of the Irish in Vermont, when they created a "parallel society" of schools, hospitals, and social hierarchy.
I asked Vince what were two signal contributions of the Irish to Vermont. First, he said it was the Irish muscle that helped power Vermont’s mini-industrial revolution on the railroads and in the slate and marble quarries in the the mid-19th Century. Second, it was their political support of the working class in Vermont’s cities, which made the cities more liberal than the rural countryside.
My favorite Vermont Irish story is also political. In 1954, Democrat Bob Branon gamely ran for governor, although Vermont had not elected a Democratic governor in almost 100 years. One evening, while campaigning at a church supper in Fairfield, he seemed to be making progress. But when he asked two women, who were dishing out the apple pie, if they could support him, one said, "Oh, no we couldn’t do that. We’ve been Vermonters all our lives."