Anti-Irish Bias Taints ‘Ragtime’

The Times’ theater critic Laurie Winer, in her rave review of the musical “Ragtime,” based on E.L. Doctorow’s novel of the same name, writes that the work is “so rich and heart-rending you are likely to spend all three hours fighting back tears” (“An American Dream,” Calendar, June 17). Her only quibble seemed to be that the tale of the Jewish immigrant, Tateh, remained “stubbornly generic.”

As a person of Irish ancestry, I sat watching my ethnic group, the demonstrably Irish American firemen of the Emerald Isle Firehouse (lest we miss the point), the moral beasts of the piece--violent, thuggish bigots whose Neanderthal tactics precipitate the central tragedy of the story--thinking this must be how black people felt when they first watched in horror “Birth of a Nation.”

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What makes the depiction of the Irish as bad as the iconography of the minstrel show is that Doctorow falls into the same trap that he is purportedly condemning, in this case the anti-Irish prejudice so beloved to Anglo-Saxon mythology, the same mythology that kept black people down and out for two centuries.

One of the presuppositions of civil rights is that unless we are all safe from racial and ethnic hatred and bigotry, no one is. Unless gays are safe, women are not; unless Jews are safe, children are not. How deeply and irrevocably do we understand the bottom line?

Yes, there are stupid, bigoted Irish; there are also stupid, bigoted Germans and Swedes and Scots and Asians and, God forbid, Anglo-Saxons. Bigotry focuses on the worst behavior of a group, which is always there if you look for it.

In the early 1900s, the time of “Ragtime,” the anti-women, anti-black, anti-Semitic (and frequently anti-Catholic) institutions, laws and traditions of the United States were home-grown. Irish Catholics did not set up Jim Crow laws any more than they invented the “blue laws.” Irish Catholics did not populate the Ku Klux Klan. Despite obstacles, they were the most educated group in the country by World War I, according to a University of Chicago study. They were the mainstay of the teachers in the public schools. They were, and remain, more liberal on race matters than the population in general; many African Americans have Irish ancestry, including Jesse Jackson and Alice Walker and the late Martin Luther King Jr. and Billie Holiday.

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And, just as there was an Emma Goldman in the time of “Ragtime,” there also was labor leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who ran the American Communist Party for 30 years; Mother Jones, the great champion of social justice; and Margaret (Higgins) Sanger, who would found Planned Parenthood. The Irish, more than most, were social agitators with a proud history in the formation of labor unions.

The problem with publicly sanctioned bigotry against any group is that the very images that invoke fear and loathing in the viewer essentially inform real-life laws and practices, frequently resulting in bloodshed. The mythology inherent in bigotry essentially makes the statement that these people--in this case, the Irish--are incapable of governing themselves or anybody else.

When “Ragtime” plays in London, as it surely will, its unfortunate stereotypes will only add to the suffering in the north of Ireland--because the insult in question seems to offer justification for cultural oppression.

The way we tell our stories can bring us together as a community or divide us. All groups share responsibility for our societal ills, most particularly for our bigotry. We are in this together.