Wolfe Tone was born in 1763 in St Bride's Street, just behind Dublin Castle, and thirty-five years later he died in the Provost's Prison in the same neighborhood. His mother was the daughter of a captain in the West India trade; his father was a coach-maker. He was not a proletarian, but nor was he far from it. He was the oldest of sixteen children. His mother converted to Protestantism when he was eight years old. The children had a 'wild spirit of adventure.' Three died taking up arms against England, a fourth served in Dutch navy and later with the Americans in the war of 1812, a fifth dabbled in espionage for the French and died of yellow fever in Santo Domingo. ...
In August 1791 as the slaves in Haiti revolted, Wolfe Tone published An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland, which joined half a dozen others in the age of manifestoes - Paine, Sièyes, Equiano, Wollstonecraft, Spence, Thelwall--expressing a new prose, a new politics, a new class, and new thinking with a lucidity arising from its purpose which was the destruction of an odious regime and iniquitous civilization. Couldn't they only get rid of capitalism, while they were at it?
In Ireland then the poor people were Catholic by and large, while the powerful were ascendant Protestants. Wolfe Tone therefore addressed the Protestants of Ireland calling for the extension of the franchise. The grounding of the argument for Catholic liberty was this: "Are we not men, as ye are, stamped with the image of our maker, walking erect, beholding the same light, breathing the same air as Protestants. Hath not a Catholic hands; hath not a Catholic eyes, dimensions, organs, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt by the same weapons, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter, as a Protestant is. If ye prick us, do we not bleed? If ye tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if ye injure us, shall we not revenge?" Catholics were not to be excluded from "the communion of our natural rights."
(MG) One of the self-reinforcing aspects of racism, I believe, is the latent fear of the racists that those they and their forebears have treated so cruelly, murdered, raped, pillaged, and plundered, will one day rise up, seeking revenge.
(MG) Also at play is projection -- projecting onto the weak ones being exploited a cruelty and indifference that is a mirror reflection of the cruelty and indifference of the racists and exploiters. Evil is as evil is. Evil sees as evil does. The U.S. citizen's knee jerk fear at the thought of a nuclear weapon being exploded in our midst, by a "terrorist organization", or a "rouge nation" stems from a scrupulous understanding that ours is the only nation to have ever dropped the bomb on another. God forbid they get a bomb of their own. They might seek vengeance (we would).
The main fear of the Protestants was "the resumption of Catholic forfeitures; and of course setting the property of the kingdom afloat." He argued that the old dispossessed families were "in penury and ignorance at the spade and the plough." The Catholic middle class, since repeal of Penal Laws, had become tenants and merchants, and would join the Protestant interest against such confusion. Tone replaced Edmund Burke's son as agent of the Dublin Catholic Committee. "It is wonderful with what zeal, spirit, activity and secrecy all things are conducted," he wrote of this period of intense, happy organizing.
Inspired by the French Revolution he helped form the United Irishmen, Catholic and Presbyterian alike. With the English declaration of war (1793) against France and its revolutionary principles, the full weight of repression fell on the United Irish--prison, banning of the Volunteers, outlawing of conventions. The United Irish were driven underground, and Wolfe Tone into exile.
He turned flight into a glorious mission to enlist French help, a revolutionary embassy, sponsored by Catholics in Dublin and Presbyterians in Belfast. Before leaving he ascended Cave Hill with spectacular views over Belfast and much of Ulster (on a clear day) and swore with his comrades of the United Irishmen "never to desist in our efforts until we had subverted the authority of England over our country, and asserted our independence." This is part of his answer to the question, "what should I wish to live for?"
...
In Ireland Wolfe Tone had written favorably of the American bill of rights. Classical republicanism provided the rhetoric of opposition--the good of the commonweal, restraint on private interest, civic virtue. The republic was a dispensation to replace monarchy, as one mode of production might replace another to "establish a system of just and rational liberty on the ruins of the thrones and despots of Europe." He saw the struggle in America as the same as that in Ireland, aristocracy of wealth against democracy of the people. He associated with the Irish around the democratic newspaper, Aurora.
In August 1795 he landed in Wilmington with six hundred books. He lived in West Chester whose Ancient Order of Hibernians division still carries his name. It is the hometown of Bayard Rustin, the gay Afro Am quaker who organized the 1963 March on Washington ("my activism [sprang] from the concept of a single human family and the belief that all members of that family are equal"), as well as the outstanding Marine Corps general, Smedley Butler--"I was a racketeer for capitalism." Westchester had fifty houses, court house, gaol, and Catholic Church. Then they moved to Downingstown. It was a sweltering summer. Yellow fever had carried off a tenth of the Philadelphia population a year or two earlier.
His first impression of the people of Philadelphia, "a churlish, unsocial race, totally absorbed in making money," was unimproved by further impressions. "I do believe from my very soul that Washington is a very honest man But he is a high-flying aristocrat." Washington and his allies pursued policies "to bring in more dollars to the chests of the Mercantile Peerage of America." He wrote his friend, Thomas Russell, that "the directors of the banks went round and insinuated pretty plainly that those who refused [to heed their wishes] should remember their discounts," and Washington did. Tone loathed America, and its "abominable selfishness of spirit." Americans were "the most disgusting race, eaten up with all the vice of commerce and that vilest of all pride, the pride of the purse."
(MG) not the kind of thing one typically learns in the American Educational System of Indoctrination. Surprising how little has changed to this day. Not so surprising that an avid reader, persecuted by the authorities ruling over the Irish would see it for what it was. An "abominable selfishness of spirit" is much in evidence today in America. Not amongst the poor, but assuredly running rampant among the elites.
His strictures against America are all but all omitted in the Life which his son published in two volumes in Washington D.C. in 1826. This deprived Irish Americans with the important hesitations, if not warnings, to the American embrace. "I bless God I am no American," he wrote to Russell. (Bayard Rustin said something similar:"I fought for many years against being American--in my speech, in my manners, everything.") Poor Tone was tormented by the thought that his daughter might have to marry one.
Thus, American capitalism was not to live for. What about the multiculture? As for the middle ground or frontier where red, white, and black mixed, he called it "the back." He was given an introduction to judge Edwards of Philadelphia who possessed of huge tracts of land requiring settlers, and was recruiting Irish. He wrote Russell after his banker dissuaded him from his first idea, "As I have no great talent for the tomahawk, I have therefore given up going into the woods." In Armagh the Orange Order led a campaign of terror which succeeded in large-scale dispossession of Catholic peasants, comparable to Sharon's action on the West Bank and the dispossession of the Palestinians or to the militia in the Ohio River valley responsible for the massacres of the Shawnee. The 'frontier' is a terror zone. Wolfe Tone saw this clearly in Ireland, as with bated breath he studied the rise of the Defenders, but not in Pennsylvania. No evidence has yet been found of his relations with Volney, or Cobbett, or exiles from Haiti.
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(MG) Wolfe Tone's insightful critiques were echoed 140 years later so eloquently by Langston Hughes:
Let America Be America Again, from A New Song (1938)
- Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
- Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed —
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
- O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
- I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek —
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
- For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay —
Except the dream that's almost dead today.
- O, let America be America again —
The land that never has been yet —
And yet must be — the land where every man is free.
- Sure, call me any ugly name you choose —
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
- O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath —
America will be!
- Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain —
All, all the stretch of these great green states —
And make America again!
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