Plus ça change--
(but sometimes they do change, within strict limits)
I've spoken occasionally in the past of the still-extant oral tradition in New England mill towns, the not-entirely forgotten history of inter-European ethnic rivalries and violence that once made these quaint brick neighborhoods in the northeast such violent and unquiet places to live and work, and how studying these, even haphazardly, has given me insights into the economic rivalries that underpinned historical xenophobia, and how they are patterns that are carried out in different ways in the present - not new things at all, even before discovering Orcinus etc.
I'm also currently working on a long post debunking a certain common historical fallacy, a photo essay providing some object proof of my argument (which of course will convince some not at all, just as reading the actual texts of 15th century scientific debates didn't convince some of my classmates in college that they were severely misinformed re the past certainty of a flat earth) but at least it will be counterexamples for the logical members of the reality-based community. In the course of tracking down one of the names involved, I dowsed up totally coincidentally a story relating to a different name on my list, about which I knew nothing of note. It's highly relevant to that future post, but given the way people tend to go on as if Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, "English Only" propositions agitation and the rest of our xenophobic demogoguery and reactionism were a new phenomenon and their appeal to many today a sign of a new and unprecedented sinfulness among society, I'm going to post this section on its own. It's an extract from one of the government living history projects that I dowsed up on a genealogy site: I'm not sure of the date of the interview but it has to be from the New Deal, going on internal evidence.
"In Manchester, it was in those parts of the city where only Irish people lived, especially what was called l'Irlande, all around Park common which was called la commune d'Irlande, that we found plenty of trouble. Our family was then living in the 'Squog section of West Manchester, and the shortest way to St. Augustine's church, the only French church at that time, was over Granite St. bridge, across Elm St., up Lake Avenues through the Commune d'Irlande and up Spruce St. to the corner of Beech where the church was located. Well, sir, we couldn't pass there without having our Sunday clothes ruined by filthy swill thrown at us from yards and alleys. Rocks flew also, and many of us youngsters received painful beatings from young Irish-Americans who were nearly always armed with sticks. The only way for us to save our clothes and our skins was to go to church by making a long detour and approaching St. Augustine's from the east instead of from the west as we would have naturally done if there had been no enemies on the way. No, we didn't fight back, because we were afraid of having trouble with the law. Being strangers, we didn't know how it would turn out for us. The first Greeks who came to Manchester weren't so timid. Welcomed as we had been by the Irish, they thought they hadn't come from far-off Greece to be chased away without some resistance. They paid back with interest everything they received from the residents of the district. Often they were arrested but just as soon acquitted after they had proved that they had acted in self-defense. The Irish hated Chief of police Healy for that, though he was an Irishman himself, but he was a just man and a fine chief who made Manchester the orderly city it is. Anyway, the [Greeks?] did so well that the commune d'Irlande is now called thecommune des Grecs where people may pass without being insulted or beaten up.
"Some years later, French Canadian grown-ups were treated more decently. There were too many of us then and we weren't so bashful about defending ourselves. Irish boys alone remained mischievous. Armed with sticks and stones, they often chased French Canadian boys through streets and back yards, even into homes where the attacking "army" didn't always dare to follow. But the worst blow struck at us was the killing of Jean-Baptiste Blanchette, a member of the French Band of which he was then the leader and a fine fellow if there ever was one.
"On the night of September 309 1880, Blanchette and four friends, who also belonged to the band, were talking quietly about the Fanfare and its leadership, in French, of course, on Amherst St., near the corner of Vine. The friends were Georges Laurence, Edouard Harrington, Joseph Desjardins and Frank Manseau. Blanchette, called John Blanchard by the English-speaking people, had met them at the Excelsior House, Concord St., where he owned a lager beer parlor, his other place being at 34 Amherst St. All five walked to Amherst St. where they continued their conversation. It was a little after 11 o'clock.
"Three Irish young men--no need of mentioning their names-came out of another beer parlor located nearby, on the same street. They, like many others, hated to hear French spoken and called on the five "frogs" to "talk United States". They rushed the French Canadians as they passed them. The three attackers were drunk. Blanchette pushed them away, One of the three came back at Jean-Baptiste who met him once more, and the assailant, either struck or pushed, fell on the sidewalk. A large, round beer bottle, containing a small quantity of hard liquor, was broken in the fall. The man was now furious. He got back to his feet, seized the upper part of the broken bottle and holding it by the neck, he threw it and it struck Blanchette on the left side of the throat. Blanchette had run into the street and there he fell. The jagged edge of the broken bottle had made a wound one inch deep and two inches long and cut the jugular vein. Blanchette was soon bathing in his blood which was coming out so fast nobody could stop the flow.
"Quickly, Harrington and Laurence picked up their friend and carried him to his room over the saloon. They laid him down on the floor where another pool of blood was soon formed. There was now a wide, sticky red trail leading from the street, onto the sidewalk and the stairs and into the room. A piece of glass, the pointed end sticking out, was still in the wound. It was removed and one of Blanchette's companions held his hand over the gaping hole, trying to stop the constant flow of blood. Officer John Cassidy, later deputy chief, was patrolling his beat when a woman shouted to him from an open window that a man was dying upstairs. Officer Cassidy went to the bloody man’s room then called his captain and he soon arrived on the scene with four doctors who did all they could but couldn't save the terribly wounded man. He died twenty minutes after being hit, having lost all his blood.
"The news spread like wild fire around the usually quiet city. The next morning, at 7 o'clock, hundreds of French Canadians stood near the corner of Vine and Amherst Streets.
"The bloody spot was still there and staring at it, they said: 'This is where three Irishmen killed Jean Blanchette last night.' The crowd was excited and you could hear a low grumbling, but there was no other demonstration. They held themselves as they had done whenever they had been made to suffer. Only this was worse and could hardly be believed. A man had been killed by a "frog" hater. Those hundreds of men could have cried as if Blanchette had been the near relative of all of them while they kept looking at that awful red spot which nobody had thought of cleaning up. The Irish lads were arrested and locked up in cells at the police station. Two were charged with being drunk and fined, being held afterward as witnesses. The bottle-thrower who admitted throwing the top half of the beer bottle but insisted he didn't know where it landed, was accused of murder. At the January term of Superior Court, he was sentenced to five years in prison. He served his sentence and died a few months after coming out. He was only 18 years old at the time of the tragedy; his father and mother were dead and he lived here with an uncle. He had worked in the mills but had been idle for some time.
"Jean-Baptiste Blanchette was 23 years of age and had come to Manchester thirteen years before. He had worked for the Amoskeag in a weave room, then in the Langdon mill. Later, though still a young man, he had saved up enough money to run two small lager beer parlors where French Canadians liked to gather and talk of the things that interested them. They had no social clubs at the time. Blanchette wasn't married. He roomed with the family of Alexandre Boucher and boarded at 22 Concord St. His body was laid out at the home of his good friend, M. Harrington, 51 Pearl St. The funeral took place at St. Augustine's church on Sunday morning, October 2nd, at 9 o'clock. As early as 7 o'clock, there was a large crowd of French Canadians in front of the Harrington home. At half past eight the long funeral procession started its march to the church.
"The French weekly, Echo des Canadiens, wrote nice things about Jean Blanchette, and that was quite natural. But the Daily Union calling him John Blanchard, praised him even more. In the story of the murder, it described John as a 'genial and pleasant fellow' and, in its edition of Mondays Oct. 3rd,--here is the clipping--after relating the details of the funeral, it says: 'The large number of friends of the deceased who turned out to show their respect shows plainly the esteem in which he was generally regarded. Blanchard was popular, well liked by all who knew him. It is the general opinion that he had no enemies and that he was upright in all his dealings.' The Union called the killing a 'terrible and bloody tragedy.'
"Only a few hours before Blanchette met his death, I had visited him at his room. I was terribly shocked when I heard what had happened. He was a very dear friend of mine, always cheerful, quiet, minding his own business, kind to everybody. I asked myself how anyone could have struck him down in this awful manner just because he was talking to fellow-countrymen in the language that was most natural to him, his mother tongue. I can't understand now, after almost sixty years.
"That tragic episode of 1880 brought much grief to the French Canadian colony and, compared to it, the mean things that had been done to us seemed very small indeed. Feeling ran high among us, but not one of us thought of a avenging our murdered friend. As always, we suffered in silence with the hope that some day, our right to live peacefully in America would be recognized. We had so much confidence in God and in this adopted country of ours.[...]
There's a lot interesting to be written about this that I don't have time for now - just to point out the fact that Blanchette/Blanchard was assimilated, was a productive member of society, by the standards of then no less than now; to point out the Catholic-on-Catholic ethnic violence that was more of a problem on a daily basis than the Protestant-vs-Catholic or Orthodox-vs-Catholic conflicts, which is never talked about anywhere but explains why there are four RC churches within two miles of each other - two Irish, two French, each within a couple blocks of each other - which mystified my family when we moved here ("It must be such a deeply, profoundly religious town!") and the bitter fights over merging them decades ago due to lack of parishoners and funds enough to support them all (it happened anyway due to the Diocesesan scandal, with much less furor, just a couple years ago) and I have to say that based on my readings of the newspapers of the time, when I worked in the periodicals archives at the library, as well as my own experience in the neighborhoods here, that I don't think the French citizens were quite as passive as the narrator paints themselves to have been, even though the English paper did like to contrast them against the less-acceptable Irish immigrants, because of the police reports and because of boasting about giving hell that has remained.
Ironically enough after I dowsed this up, I had someone complaining at me about the fact that there is now Spanish on menus etc in stores in our town - I've heard the descendents of these same French-Canadian millworkers go from complaining about the discrimination against the French which still does undeniably if more subtly exist, to complaining about foreigners of all sorts "taking over" the gas stations and convenience stores, and not speaking United States English...even when their own grandmothers don't, either. Plus c'est la même chose.
I had no idea of this history, when I chanced to take this photo. But I did know something about the feuds, and the Know-Nothing mob that tried to burn down a church, and the complaints of immigrant violence by the "respectable" Anglo press of the day, because I once had to research an old murder case as it unfolded in the papers of a century ago. I've worked in this vicinity, and it goes from fancy to seedy and back again within blocks, erratically: the corner where the killing took place is just over from City Hall and down from the quaint shops next to the Palace Theatre, there's an adult store on one side of the alley, and an old brick building that was a scary mostly-boarded up place with a constant string of Dibbler enterprises on the ground floor until this past year, when a total renovation/restoration was begun by I believe a new owner, and that place Albee's I mentioned with the no-grilled-cheese policy which was replaced by the beautiful shiny tacqueria is in this area; there was as I recall a stabbing at a club that's on the same block now a few years ago, and just as with a shooting between bikers at a different seedy bar a few years ago, everyone complained that the city was going to hell in handbasket, what were we coming to in this day and age? But afaik, it was just stupid drunk teens just as the other was stupid drunk bikers - not over the "crime" of speaking a non-English language in public.
Which, really, is an improvement.
--Which is also not to say that it couldn't be fanned back to 1880 levels, even here, necessarily, either.
But maybe not. One can hope, and try.
The Federal Writers' Project
I've spoken occasionally in the past of the still-extant oral tradition in New England mill towns, the not-entirely forgotten history of inter-European ethnic rivalries and violence that once made these quaint brick neighborhoods in the northeast such violent and unquiet places to live and work, and how studying these, even haphazardly, has given me insights into the economic rivalries that underpinned historical xenophobia, and how they are patterns that are carried out in different ways in the present - not new things at all, even before discovering Orcinus etc.
I'm also currently working on a long post debunking a certain common historical fallacy, a photo essay providing some object proof of my argument (which of course will convince some not at all, just as reading the actual texts of 15th century scientific debates didn't convince some of my classmates in college that they were severely misinformed re the past certainty of a flat earth) but at least it will be counterexamples for the logical members of the reality-based community. In the course of tracking down one of the names involved, I dowsed up totally coincidentally a story relating to a different name on my list, about which I knew nothing of note. It's highly relevant to that future post, but given the way people tend to go on as if Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, "English Only" propositions agitation and the rest of our xenophobic demogoguery and reactionism were a new phenomenon and their appeal to many today a sign of a new and unprecedented sinfulness among society, I'm going to post this section on its own. It's an extract from one of the government living history projects that I dowsed up on a genealogy site: I'm not sure of the date of the interview but it has to be from the New Deal, going on internal evidence.
"In Manchester, it was in those parts of the city where only Irish people lived, especially what was called l'Irlande, all around Park common which was called la commune d'Irlande, that we found plenty of trouble. Our family was then living in the 'Squog section of West Manchester, and the shortest way to St. Augustine's church, the only French church at that time, was over Granite St. bridge, across Elm St., up Lake Avenues through the Commune d'Irlande and up Spruce St. to the corner of Beech where the church was located. Well, sir, we couldn't pass there without having our Sunday clothes ruined by filthy swill thrown at us from yards and alleys. Rocks flew also, and many of us youngsters received painful beatings from young Irish-Americans who were nearly always armed with sticks. The only way for us to save our clothes and our skins was to go to church by making a long detour and approaching St. Augustine's from the east instead of from the west as we would have naturally done if there had been no enemies on the way. No, we didn't fight back, because we were afraid of having trouble with the law. Being strangers, we didn't know how it would turn out for us. The first Greeks who came to Manchester weren't so timid. Welcomed as we had been by the Irish, they thought they hadn't come from far-off Greece to be chased away without some resistance. They paid back with interest everything they received from the residents of the district. Often they were arrested but just as soon acquitted after they had proved that they had acted in self-defense. The Irish hated Chief of police Healy for that, though he was an Irishman himself, but he was a just man and a fine chief who made Manchester the orderly city it is. Anyway, the [Greeks?] did so well that the commune d'Irlande is now called thecommune des Grecs where people may pass without being insulted or beaten up.
"Some years later, French Canadian grown-ups were treated more decently. There were too many of us then and we weren't so bashful about defending ourselves. Irish boys alone remained mischievous. Armed with sticks and stones, they often chased French Canadian boys through streets and back yards, even into homes where the attacking "army" didn't always dare to follow. But the worst blow struck at us was the killing of Jean-Baptiste Blanchette, a member of the French Band of which he was then the leader and a fine fellow if there ever was one.
"On the night of September 309 1880, Blanchette and four friends, who also belonged to the band, were talking quietly about the Fanfare and its leadership, in French, of course, on Amherst St., near the corner of Vine. The friends were Georges Laurence, Edouard Harrington, Joseph Desjardins and Frank Manseau. Blanchette, called John Blanchard by the English-speaking people, had met them at the Excelsior House, Concord St., where he owned a lager beer parlor, his other place being at 34 Amherst St. All five walked to Amherst St. where they continued their conversation. It was a little after 11 o'clock.
"Three Irish young men--no need of mentioning their names-came out of another beer parlor located nearby, on the same street. They, like many others, hated to hear French spoken and called on the five "frogs" to "talk United States". They rushed the French Canadians as they passed them. The three attackers were drunk. Blanchette pushed them away, One of the three came back at Jean-Baptiste who met him once more, and the assailant, either struck or pushed, fell on the sidewalk. A large, round beer bottle, containing a small quantity of hard liquor, was broken in the fall. The man was now furious. He got back to his feet, seized the upper part of the broken bottle and holding it by the neck, he threw it and it struck Blanchette on the left side of the throat. Blanchette had run into the street and there he fell. The jagged edge of the broken bottle had made a wound one inch deep and two inches long and cut the jugular vein. Blanchette was soon bathing in his blood which was coming out so fast nobody could stop the flow.
"Quickly, Harrington and Laurence picked up their friend and carried him to his room over the saloon. They laid him down on the floor where another pool of blood was soon formed. There was now a wide, sticky red trail leading from the street, onto the sidewalk and the stairs and into the room. A piece of glass, the pointed end sticking out, was still in the wound. It was removed and one of Blanchette's companions held his hand over the gaping hole, trying to stop the constant flow of blood. Officer John Cassidy, later deputy chief, was patrolling his beat when a woman shouted to him from an open window that a man was dying upstairs. Officer Cassidy went to the bloody man’s room then called his captain and he soon arrived on the scene with four doctors who did all they could but couldn't save the terribly wounded man. He died twenty minutes after being hit, having lost all his blood.
"The news spread like wild fire around the usually quiet city. The next morning, at 7 o'clock, hundreds of French Canadians stood near the corner of Vine and Amherst Streets.
"The bloody spot was still there and staring at it, they said: 'This is where three Irishmen killed Jean Blanchette last night.' The crowd was excited and you could hear a low grumbling, but there was no other demonstration. They held themselves as they had done whenever they had been made to suffer. Only this was worse and could hardly be believed. A man had been killed by a "frog" hater. Those hundreds of men could have cried as if Blanchette had been the near relative of all of them while they kept looking at that awful red spot which nobody had thought of cleaning up. The Irish lads were arrested and locked up in cells at the police station. Two were charged with being drunk and fined, being held afterward as witnesses. The bottle-thrower who admitted throwing the top half of the beer bottle but insisted he didn't know where it landed, was accused of murder. At the January term of Superior Court, he was sentenced to five years in prison. He served his sentence and died a few months after coming out. He was only 18 years old at the time of the tragedy; his father and mother were dead and he lived here with an uncle. He had worked in the mills but had been idle for some time.
"Jean-Baptiste Blanchette was 23 years of age and had come to Manchester thirteen years before. He had worked for the Amoskeag in a weave room, then in the Langdon mill. Later, though still a young man, he had saved up enough money to run two small lager beer parlors where French Canadians liked to gather and talk of the things that interested them. They had no social clubs at the time. Blanchette wasn't married. He roomed with the family of Alexandre Boucher and boarded at 22 Concord St. His body was laid out at the home of his good friend, M. Harrington, 51 Pearl St. The funeral took place at St. Augustine's church on Sunday morning, October 2nd, at 9 o'clock. As early as 7 o'clock, there was a large crowd of French Canadians in front of the Harrington home. At half past eight the long funeral procession started its march to the church.
"The French weekly, Echo des Canadiens, wrote nice things about Jean Blanchette, and that was quite natural. But the Daily Union calling him John Blanchard, praised him even more. In the story of the murder, it described John as a 'genial and pleasant fellow' and, in its edition of Mondays Oct. 3rd,--here is the clipping--after relating the details of the funeral, it says: 'The large number of friends of the deceased who turned out to show their respect shows plainly the esteem in which he was generally regarded. Blanchard was popular, well liked by all who knew him. It is the general opinion that he had no enemies and that he was upright in all his dealings.' The Union called the killing a 'terrible and bloody tragedy.'
"Only a few hours before Blanchette met his death, I had visited him at his room. I was terribly shocked when I heard what had happened. He was a very dear friend of mine, always cheerful, quiet, minding his own business, kind to everybody. I asked myself how anyone could have struck him down in this awful manner just because he was talking to fellow-countrymen in the language that was most natural to him, his mother tongue. I can't understand now, after almost sixty years.
"That tragic episode of 1880 brought much grief to the French Canadian colony and, compared to it, the mean things that had been done to us seemed very small indeed. Feeling ran high among us, but not one of us thought of a avenging our murdered friend. As always, we suffered in silence with the hope that some day, our right to live peacefully in America would be recognized. We had so much confidence in God and in this adopted country of ours.[...]
There's a lot interesting to be written about this that I don't have time for now - just to point out the fact that Blanchette/Blanchard was assimilated, was a productive member of society, by the standards of then no less than now; to point out the Catholic-on-Catholic ethnic violence that was more of a problem on a daily basis than the Protestant-vs-Catholic or Orthodox-vs-Catholic conflicts, which is never talked about anywhere but explains why there are four RC churches within two miles of each other - two Irish, two French, each within a couple blocks of each other - which mystified my family when we moved here ("It must be such a deeply, profoundly religious town!") and the bitter fights over merging them decades ago due to lack of parishoners and funds enough to support them all (it happened anyway due to the Diocesesan scandal, with much less furor, just a couple years ago) and I have to say that based on my readings of the newspapers of the time, when I worked in the periodicals archives at the library, as well as my own experience in the neighborhoods here, that I don't think the French citizens were quite as passive as the narrator paints themselves to have been, even though the English paper did like to contrast them against the less-acceptable Irish immigrants, because of the police reports and because of boasting about giving hell that has remained.
Ironically enough after I dowsed this up, I had someone complaining at me about the fact that there is now Spanish on menus etc in stores in our town - I've heard the descendents of these same French-Canadian millworkers go from complaining about the discrimination against the French which still does undeniably if more subtly exist, to complaining about foreigners of all sorts "taking over" the gas stations and convenience stores, and not speaking United States English...even when their own grandmothers don't, either. Plus c'est la même chose.
I had no idea of this history, when I chanced to take this photo. But I did know something about the feuds, and the Know-Nothing mob that tried to burn down a church, and the complaints of immigrant violence by the "respectable" Anglo press of the day, because I once had to research an old murder case as it unfolded in the papers of a century ago. I've worked in this vicinity, and it goes from fancy to seedy and back again within blocks, erratically: the corner where the killing took place is just over from City Hall and down from the quaint shops next to the Palace Theatre, there's an adult store on one side of the alley, and an old brick building that was a scary mostly-boarded up place with a constant string of Dibbler enterprises on the ground floor until this past year, when a total renovation/restoration was begun by I believe a new owner, and that place Albee's I mentioned with the no-grilled-cheese policy which was replaced by the beautiful shiny tacqueria is in this area; there was as I recall a stabbing at a club that's on the same block now a few years ago, and just as with a shooting between bikers at a different seedy bar a few years ago, everyone complained that the city was going to hell in handbasket, what were we coming to in this day and age? But afaik, it was just stupid drunk teens just as the other was stupid drunk bikers - not over the "crime" of speaking a non-English language in public.
Which, really, is an improvement.
--Which is also not to say that it couldn't be fanned back to 1880 levels, even here, necessarily, either.
But maybe not. One can hope, and try.
The Federal Writers' Project