STRESEMANN

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Gustav Stresemann (1878-1929) was the son of a well-to-do restauranteur. He worked in the family business and studied hard. After attending the Andreas Real Gymnasium in Berlin, Stresemann studied literature, philosophy, and political economy at Berlin and Leipzig. During these student days, he discovered that he had powers of leadership as well as a capacity for literary attainment. He wrote critical essays on Thomas More’s Utopia  and historical pieces on Bismarck  and Napoleon, and acted as spokesman for his student association. His doctoral dissertation was an  economic investigation of the Berlin beer trade,   assessing the pressures of big business capitalism on the independent middle class of Berlin.

Stresemann entered the real world of commerce in 1901 at the age of twenty-two as a clerk in the Association of German Chocolate Manufacturers in Dresden. A year later he took over the business management of the local branch of the Manufacturers Alliance, an association of entrepreneurs. With his organizing talent and his persuasiveness, he increased the number of members in the alliance from 180 in 1902 to 1,000 in 1904 and to approximately 5,000 in 1912. Although he represented capital, Stresemann nonetheless supported the idea, novel at the time, that management should accept labor’s right to organize and should recognize its representatives as official negotiators of collective bargaining demands.

Always convinced of the relationship between economics and politics, however, Stresemann sought elective office. In 1906 he was elected to a seat on the town council of Dresden, which he held until 1912; in 1907 he won election to the Reichstag. In 1917 he was elected leader of the National Liberal Party.

While in Dresden, Stresemann married Käthe Kleefeld; they had two sons. One of Stresemann’s biographers remarks that his devotion to his wife was «the axis on which his whole life turned [so that he was free to fling] his entire intellect and energy, his almost superhuman powers of concentration, into his one concern, politics»
Stresemann passionately supported Germanic policy both before and during World War I. He believed in force, in authority, in discipline. He argued as early as 1907 for the creation of a strong navy, seeing in it the instrument by which to extend and protect German overseas trade; in 1916, he supported unrestricted submarine warfare; he helped to defeat the government of Bethmann-Hollweg which he thought too temperate; he opposed the Treaty of Versailles.

Dismayed, however, to discover Germany’s true military position in the fall of 1918, Stresemann found his ideas of the world changing. Disillusioned with an imperial government that believed in force yet did not possess adequate force, and indeed realizing that the policy of force and conquest in itself is ultimately ruinous, he began to see the world as a jigsaw of political and commercial interrelationships, each nation an individual piece in the puzzle and each fitting into another.

A month after the armistice of November 11, 1918, Stresemann formed the German People’s Party, was elected to the national assembly which gathered at Weimar in 1919 to frame a new constitution, was elected to the new Reichstag in 1920 and spent the next three years in opposition. From August 13 to November 23, 1923, Stresemann was chancellor of a coalition government. In his short-lived ministry he dealt firmly with insurrection in Saxony, restored order in Bavaria after Hitler’s Putsch failed, ended the passive resistance of Germans in the Ruhr to the French occupying forces, and began the work of stabilizing Germany’s currency.

In 1924 Stresemann’s successor chose him as his secretary of foreign affairs, an office he was to fill with such distinction under four governments that he was called the greatest master of German foreign policy since Bismarck. He enjoyed immediate success with the acceptance of the Dawes Plan, which restructured reparations on the basis of Germany’s ability to pay. With his note of February 9, 1925, he took the initiative in arriving at a rapprochement with the Western Allies, especially with France, in guaranteeing the maintenance of the boundaries established at Versailles. After careful preparation for a conference, Gustav Stresemann, Aristide Briand, and Austen Chamberlain, along with representatives of the other four nations involved, met at Locarno, Switzerland, to draw up mutual security pacts. The three were a study in contrasts: Chamberlain, tall, elegant, monocled, schoolmasterish, cool; Briand, slightly stooped, hair disheveled, moustached, informal, amused; Stresemann, stiffly erect, bald head reflecting the light, cautiously formal. But they shared a common goal: to provide general security so that political and economic stability could be achieved.

After initialing the Locarno Pact on October 16, Stresemann hurried home to insure its acceptance by the government. In a speech broadcast to the nation on November 3, 1925, he appealed for support, saying: «Locarno may be interpreted as signifying that the States of Europe at last realize that they cannot go on making war upon each other without being involved in common ruin.»

As another part of his peace offensive, Stresemann signed a rapprochement with Russia, called the Treaty of Berlin, in April of 1926. And, following an unsuccessful trip to Geneva in March, he finally saw on September 8, 1926, the unanimous acceptance of Germany’s admission into the League of Nations.

Despite his health, which declined rapidly after the Christmas of 1927, and against medical advice, Stresemann retained his position as German foreign minister. In 1929 at The Hague, he accepted the Young Plan which named June 30, 1930, as the final date for the evacuation of the Ruhr.

Stresemann did not live to see that evacuation. The victim of a stroke, he died in Berlin in October of 1929.

The Cold War: Introduction

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The Cold War was the most important political and diplomatic issue of the early postwar period. The main Cold War enemies were the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold war got its name because both sides were afraid of fighting each other directly. In such a “hot war,” nuclear weapons might destroy everything. So, instead, they fought each other indirectly. They played havoc with conflicts in different parts of the world. They also used words as weapons. They threatened and denounced each other. Or they tried to make each other look foolish.

The term “Cold War” was first used in 1947 by Bernard Baruch, senior advisor to Harry Truman, the 33rd president of the United States, in reference to the frequently occurring and exacerbating crises between the United States and the former Soviet Union, despite having fought side-by-side against Nazi Germany in the Second World War.

Dating the end of the Cold War requires dating its begining, and defining what it was about. By one reaconing, the Cold War began in the 1945-1948 timeframe, and ended in 1989, having been a dispute over the division of Europe. By another account, the Cold War began in 1917 with the Bolshevik Revolution, and ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, having been a conflict between Bolshevism and Democracy.

The Cold War grew out of longstanding conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States that developed after the Russian Revolution of 1917. The Soviet Communist Party under V.I. Lenin considered itself the spearhead of an international movement that would replace the existing political orders in the West, and indeed throughout the world.

The Cold War can be said to have begun in 1917, with the emergence in Russia of a revolutionary Bolshevik regime devoted to spreading communism throughout the industrialized world. For Vladimir Lenin, the leader of that revolution, such gains were imperative. As he wrote in his August 1918 Open Letter to the American Workers, “We are now, as it were, in a besieged fortress, waiting for the other detachments of the world socialist revolution to come to our relief.”

Western governments generally understood communism to be an international movement whose adherents foreswore all national allegiance in favor of transnational communism, but in practice received their orders from and were loyal to Moscow. In 1918, the United States joined briefly and unenthusiastically in an unsuccessful Allied attempt to topple the revolutionary Soviet regime. Suspicion and hostility thus characterized relations between the Soviets and the West long before the Second World War made them reluctant allies in the struggle against Nazi Germany.

The United States and Great Britain fought against the Bolsheviks, unsuccessfully, between 1918 and 1920. In 1918 American troops participated in the Allied intervention in Russia on behalf of anti-Bolshevik forces. In the two decades thereafter, Soviet attitudes towards the West oscillated wildly. American diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union did not come until 1933. Even then, suspicions persisted. During World War II, however, the two countries found themselves allied and downplayed their differences to counter the Nazi threat.

The Cold War was a decades-long struggle for global supremacy that pitted the capitalist United States against the communist Soviet Union. Although there are some disagreements as to when the Cold War began, it is generally conceded that mid- to late-1945 marks the time when relations between Moscow and Washington began deteriorating. This deterioration ignited the early Cold War and set the stage for a dynamic struggle that often assumed mythological overtones of good versus evil.

At the close of World War II, the Soviet Union stood firmly entrenched in Eastern Europe, intent upon installing governments there that would pay allegiance to the Kremlin. It also sought to expand its security zone even further into North Korea, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Similarly, the United States established a security zone of its own that comprised Western Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. From the long view of history, it is clear that both sides were jockeying for a way to secure their futures from the threat of another world war, but it was the threat that each side perceived from the other that allowed for the development of mutual suspicion. It was this mutual suspicion, augmented by profound distrust and misunderstanding that would ultimately fuel the entire conflict.

Over the years, leaders on both sides changed. Yet the Cold War continued. It was the major force in world politics for most of the second half of the twentieth century. Historians disagree about how long the Cold War lasted. A few believe it ended when the United States and the Soviet Union improved relations during the nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies. Others believe it ended when the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989, or when the Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991.

For the first few years of the early Cold War (between 1945 and 1948), the conflict was more political than military. Both sides squabbled with each other at the UN, sought closer relations with nations that were not committed to either side, and articulated their differing visions of a postwar world. By 1950, however, certain factors had made the Cold War an increasingly militarized struggle. The communist takeover in China, the pronouncement of the Truman Doctrine, the advent of a Soviet nuclear weapon, tensions over occupied Germany, the outbreak of the Korean War, and the formulation of the Warsaw Pact and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as rival alliances had all enhanced the Cold War’s military dimension. U.S. foreign policy reflected this transition when it adopted a position that sought to “contain” the Soviet Union from further expansion. By and large, through a variety of incarnations, the containment policy would remain the central strategic vision of U.S. foreign policy from 1952 until the ultimate demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Successive American presidents and successive Soviet premiers tried to manage the Cold War in different ways, and the history of their interactions reveals the delicate balance-of-power that needed to be maintained between both superpowers. Dwight Eisenhower campaigned as a hard-line Cold Warrior and spoke of “rolling back” the Soviet empire, but when given a chance to dislodge Hungary from the Soviet sphere-of-influence in 1956, he declined. The death of Stalin in 1953 prefaced a brief thaw in East-West relations, but Nikita Kruschev also found it more politically expedient to take a hard line with the United States than to speak of cooperation.

The United States and the Soviet Union were the only two superpowers following the Second World War. The fact that, by the 1950s, each possessed nuclear weapons and the means of delivering such weapons on their enemies, added a dangerous aspect to the Cold War. The Cold War world was separated into three groups. The United States led the West. This group included countries with democratic political systems. The Soviet Union led the East. This group included countries with communist political systems. The non-aligned group included countries that did not want to be tied to either the West or the East.

By 1960, both sides had invested huge amounts of money in nuclear weapons, both as an attempt to maintain parity with each other’s stockpiles, but also because the idea of deterring conflict through “mutually assured destruction” had come to be regarded as vital to the national interest of both. As nuclear weapons became more prolific, both nations sought to position missile systems in ever closer proximity to each other’s borders. One such attempt by the Soviet government in 1962 precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis, arguably the closest that the world has ever come to a large-scale nuclear exchange between two countries.

It was also in the early 1960s that American containment policy shifted from heavy reliance on nuclear weapons to more conventional notions of warfare in pursuit of a more “flexible response” to the spread of communism. Although originally articulated by President Kennedy, it was in 1965 that President Johnson showcased the idea of flexible response when he made the initial decision to commit American combat troops to South Vietnam. American thinking had come to regard Southeast Asia as vital to its national security, and President Johnson made clear his intention to insure South Vietnam’s territorial and political integrity “whatever the cost or whatever the challenge.”

The United States ultimately fought a bloody and costly war in Vietnam that poisoned U.S. politics and wreaked havoc with its economy. The Nixon administration inherited the conflict in 1969, and although it tried to improve relations with the Soviets through detente – and even took the unprecedented step of establishing diplomatic relations with Communist China – neither development was able to bring about decisive change on the Vietnamese battlefield. The United States abandoned the fight in 1973 under the guise of a peace agreement that left South Vietnam emasculated and vulnerable.

Although Nixon continued to negotiate with the Soviets and to court Maoist China, the Soviet Union and the United States continued to subvert one another’s interests around the globe in spite of detente’s high-minded rhetoric. Leonid Brezhnev had been installed as Soviet premier in 1964 as Kruschev’s replacement, and while he too desired friendlier relations with the United States on certain issues (particularly agriculture), genuinely meaningful cooperation remained elusive.

By the end of the 1970s, however, the chance for an extended thaw had utterly vanished. Jimmy Carter had been elected president in 1976, and although he was able to hammer out a second arms limitation agreement with Brezhnev, the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan significantly soured U.S.-Soviet relations. Seeking to place a greater emphasis on human rights in his foreign policy, Carter angrily denounced the incursion and began to adopt an increasingly hard line with the Soviets. The following year, Americans overwhelmingly elected a president who spoke of waging the Cold War with even greater intensity than had any of his predecessors, and Ronald Reagan made good on his promises by dramatically increasing military budgets in the early 1980s.

Nonetheless, by 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev had replaced Brezhnev in Moscow, and he quickly perceived that drastic changes to the Soviet system were necessary if the USSR. was to survive as a state. He instituted a series of liberal reforms known as perestroika, and he seemed genuinely interested in more relations with the West, known as glasnost. Although President Reagan continued to use bellicose language with respect to the Soviet Union (as when he labeled it an “evil empire”), the Gorbachev-Reagan relationship was personally warm and the two leaders were able to decrease tensions substantially by the time Reagan left the White House in 1989.

Despite improved East-West relations, however, Gorbachev’s reforms were unable to prevent the collapse of a system that had grown rigid and unworkable. By most measures, the Soviet economy had failed to grow at all since the late 1970s and much of the country’s populace had grown weary of the aged Communist hierarchy. In 1989 the spontaneous destruction of the Berlin Wall signaled the end of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, and two years later the Soviet government itself fell from power.

The DoD Cold War Recognition Certificate was approved for service during the “Cold War era” from 02 September 1945 to 26 December 1991. By this account, after 45 years of protracted conflict and constant tension, the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is, upon reflection, a rather tendentious reading of history, since it takes the central conflict of the Cold War to have been the struggle between the two competing social systems, which could only end with one or the other being consigned to the ash heap of history.

President Bush presented the Medal of Freedom award to former President Ronald Reagan at a ceremony in the East Room on January 13, 1993. President Bush said that Reagan” … helped make ours not only a safer but far better world in which to live. And you yourself said it best. In fact, you saw it coming. We recall your stirring words to the British Parliament. Here were the words: “the march of freedom and democracy . . . will leave Marxist-Leninism on the ashheap of history.” Few people believe more in liberty’s inevitable triumph than Ronald Reagan. None, none was more a prophet in his time. Ronald Reagan rebuilt our military; not only that, he restored its morale.”

During the Cold War 325 Americans died as a result of hostile action; More than 200 airmen were killed by Communist air defenses, and more than 40 American intelligence aircraft were shot down, killing 64 Cryptologists and 40 crew members. Countless other Americans had their lives disrupted through military service in support of the Cold War.

 

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Roosevelt’s first war…on the Depression

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By late winter 1933, the nation had already endured more than three years of economic depression. Statistics revealing the depth of the Great Depression were staggering. More than 11,000 of 24,000 banks had failed, destroying the savings of depositors. Millions of people were out of work and seeking jobs; additional millions were working at jobs that barely provided subsistence. Currency values dropped as the deflationary spiral continued to tighten and farm markets continued to erode.

During the previous summer the Democratic Party had unveiled a generalized plan for economic recovery in its platform. They called their platform a “contract” and set forth in it a series of provisions to remedy the economic disaster. Although frequently lacking specifics, the platform addressed a wide range of issues: among them were agricultural relief, Prohibition, unemployment, and old age insurance. While not followed very closely by Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, the platform did indicate that election of the Democratic candidate would result in unprecedented governmental growth to deal with the problems pressing on the nation. Roosevelt set about to prepare the nation to accept expansion of federal power. Roosevelt recognized that the programs he was about to introduce for congressional legislative action to relieve the dire effects of the Great Depression were unprecedented in peacetime.

In his 1933 inaugural address Roosevelt stated: “Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form. That is why our constitutional system has proved itself the most superbly enduring political mechanism the modern world has produced. It has met every stress of vast expansion of territory, of foreign wars, of bitter internal strife, of world relations.” Yet, at the same time, he was prepared to recommend measures that he knew could succeed only with strong public pressure in support of extraordinary federal powers to deal with “extraordinary needs.”

The first document featured with this article is the speech given on Inauguration Day in March 1933. It is particularly memorable for its attack on the psychology of the Great Depression. Less memorable but more enduring is the justification that Roosevelt planned to use to expand the power of the federal government to achieve his legislative objectives and thereby ease the effects of the Great Depression. Woven throughout his inaugural address was his plan. He aimed to declare war on the Great Depression and needed all the executive latitude possible in order to wage that war. For in addition to his famous statement “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he also said “I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis — broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”

Resources

Graham, Otis L., Jr. An Encore for Reform: The Old Progressives and the New Deal. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Leuchtenburg, William. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940. New York: Harper and Row, 1963.

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The Consequences of the Great Depression

Though the U.S. economy had gone into depression six months earlier, the Great Depression may be said to have begun with a catastrophic collapse of stock-market prices on the New York Stock Exchange in October 1929. During the next three years stock prices in the United States continued to fall, until by late 1932 they had dropped to only about 20 percent of their value in 1929. Besides ruining many thousands of individual investors, this precipitous decline in the value of assets greatly strained banks and other financial institutions, particularly those holding stocks in their portfolios. Many banks were consequently forced into insolvency; by 1933, 11,000 of the United States’ 25,000 banks had failed. The failure of so many banks, combined with a general and nationwide loss of confidence in the economy, led to much-reduced levels of spending and demand and hence of production, thus aggravating the downward spiral. The result was drastically falling output and drastically rising unemployment; by 1932, U.S. manufacturing output had fallen to 54 percent of its 1929 level, and unemployment had risen to between 12 and 15 million workers, or 25-30 percent of the work force.

The Great Depression began in the United States but quickly turned into a worldwide economic slump owing to the special and intimate relationships that had been forged between the United States and European economies after World War I. The United States had emerged from the war as the major creditor and financier of postwar Europe, whose national economies had been greatly weakened by the war itself, by war debts, and, in the case of Germany and other defeated nations, by the need to pay war reparations. So once the American economy slumped and the flow of American investment credits to Europe dried up, prosperity tended to collapse there as well. The Depression hit hardest those nations that were most deeply indebted to the United States, i.e., Germany and Great Britain. In Germany, unemployment rose sharply beginning in late 1929, and by early 1932 it had reached 6 million workers, or 25 percent of the work force. Britain was less severely affected, but its industrial and export sectors remained seriously depressed until World War II. Many other countries had been affected by the slump by 1931.

Almost all nations sought to protect their domestic production by imposing tariffs, raising existing ones, and setting quotas on foreign imports. The effect of these restrictive measures was to greatly reduce the volume of international trade: by 1932 the total value of world trade had fallen by more than half as country after country took measures against the importation of foreign goods.

The Great Depression had important consequences in the political sphere. In the United States, economic distress led to the election of the Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidency in late 1932. Roosevelt introduced a number of major changes in the structure of the American economy, using increased government regulation and massive public-works projects to promote a recovery. But despite this active intervention, mass unemployment and economic stagnation continued, though on a somewhat reduced scale, with about 15 percent of the work force still unemployed in 1939 at the outbreak of World War II. After that, unemployment dropped rapidly as American factories were flooded with orders from overseas for armaments and munitions. The depression ended completely soon after the United States’ entry into World War II in 1941. In Europe, the Great Depression strengthened extremist forces and lowered the prestige of liberal democracy. In Germany, economic distress directly contributed to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. The Nazis’ public-works projects and their rapid expansion of munitions production ended the Depression there by 1936.

At least in part, the Great Depression was caused by underlying weaknesses and imbalances within the U.S. economy that had been obscured by the boom psychology and speculative euphoria of the 1920s. The Depression exposed those weaknesses, as it did the inability of the nation’s political and financial institutions to cope with the vicious downward economic cycle that had set in by 1930. Prior to the Great Depression, governments traditionally took little or no action in times of business downturn, relying instead on impersonal market forces to achieve the necessary economic correction. But market forces alone proved unable to achieve the desired recovery in the early years of the Great Depression, and this painful discovery eventually inspired some fundamental changes in the United States’ economic structure. After the Great Depression, government action, whether in the form of taxation, industrial regulation, public works, social insurance, social-welfare services, or deficit spending, came to assume a principal role in ensuring economic stability in most industrial nations with market economies.

Big Brother had come to stay.

United Irishmen

The Society of United Irishmen was founded in Belfast in 1791 through the inspiration of a certain young Dublin lawyer named Theobald Wolfe Tone. He was invited to Ulster on the strength of the publication of his short pamphlet entitled “An argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland”. It is sometimes forgotten that Ulster Presbyterians also suffered from religious discrimination, (though less severely), and had absorbed republican ideas from the American and French revolutions.

Sligo Potato Famine 1845-6 (4)

A Poor Law had been introduced to Ireland in July 1838 which involved the division of the country into 130 “unions” consisting of a group of electoral divisions made up of a number of townlands. Sligo Union comprised 23 divisions and –as a principal town- had a workhouse. This was administered by the Board of Guardians, local men of property. Sligo had 39 such men on the committee. Soon, almost the entire local governance of the emergency was to fall on their shoulders.

The workhouse was financed by the local poor rates on the principle that “property should pay for poverty,” and to force landlords to take full responsibility for the management of their estates, an act was passed making landlords liable to pay poor rates on land valued at under £4 per annum.

Individuals could not enter the workhouse, but paupers entered in whole family units. Once inside, however, sexes were strictly segregated and set to work breaking rock into gravel. The food offered –as Charles Dickens was to famously point out in the contemporary account of Oliver Twist- was of poor quality and of limited range.

In the event, the Government moved with astonishing speed. During the Autumn of 1845, Prime Minister Peel had been apprised of the situation and by November, he had already quietly arranged for the purchase of £100,000 worth of American maize (designated “Indian meal”) to offset the feared famine. He also established Randolph Routh as the chairman of a temporary Relief Commission in January 1846, to advise the Government and to coordinate the efforts of the various local relief committees. These local groups were made up not only of local landlords but also clergymen, magistrates and large-scale farmers. Their task was to purchase and resell the maize at official depots (such as the ports of Sligo and Westport). They were financed by raising local subscriptions which were matched by a government grant, pound for pound. At this stage, the measures taken seemed, indeed, very prompt. Their adequacy was about to be put to the test.

“The progress of decay increases. In the month of February a greater quantity of potatoes rotted than in the previous two months. Letting the potatoes remain undug in the ground was the best way of preserving them…The small farmers (those who pay £4 to£6 annual rent) expect their supply…will be exhausted by the middle of May…The supply of cottier tenants or labourers is now nearly consumed. The impoverished condition and squalid misery of this class of the people of the county has not yet arrived at any extraordinary degree of distress but there is an apprehension of famine that in itself is frightening…Between 16 March and 20 May the farmers will afford to the labourers full employment in tilling the ground… From 20 May to 10 September public works will be the best means of preventing famine. The poorer the ground the sounder were the potatoes. In the mountainous districts where the potatoes were planted in a peat soil, disease made less progress than in in the more cultivated parts of the country.”

Friday 13th March 1846 Engineer’s Report
Corran, Leyny & Coolavin (Parishes in Sligo) RLFC 3/1/724

The promised Indian Meal had arrived in Sligo in March 1846 but did not go on sale until May. The delay was a further cause of local tensions, which were building steadily. The first demonstrations were quite seemly: a hundred men were reported to have marched through the streets of Sligo Town with loaves of bread fixed on poles. When the local guardians promised to give them both work and increased wages, they quietly dispersed.
But the murmurs of the working people began to rise. Scurrilous ballads were secretly printed and began to be sold off in penny sheets at the local fairs; some of the gentry –such as Edward Cooper- reported the receipt of threatening letters. Here’s the concluding resolutions of a Public Meeting held in Sligo towards the end of April 1846 insisting on the sale of the Indian meal.
That from want of employment, consequent on so many being discharged from the merchants’ provision yards, corn stores etc, as well as from the high price of food, that the labouring classes in Sligo town are in a sad state of want and destitution. That an application be made without delay to the Commissioners to put the Indian meal now warehoused there on the market at a moderate rate which will have the effect of lowering the price of potatoes, oatmeal and other food. That a public meeting be called by the Mayor, of aldermen, magistrates of the Petty Sessions, chairman of the Board nof Guardians, Poor Law Guardians, clergymen and other such intelligent gentlemen and merchants as he may approve of, for the purpose of relieving the esisting distress in this town and neighbourhood.”
Wednesday 22nd April 1846 Resolutions of a Public Meeting

By May 1846, Co. Sligo had joined 17 other counties in request for public woks projects.
The partial failure of the 1845 harvest had been followed by a sharp rise in unemployment. The Town and Harbour Commissioners of Sligo appointed a committee and they duly reported that some 2400 were unemployed –a dangerous percentage.
In January 1846, O’Hara was planning public road projects and was to add many workers to his estate staff through the summer. An August issue of the Sligo Journal noted that O’Hara had employed over 300 men, daily, during the previous six months and had provided liberal amounts of oatmeal for them.
O’Hara’s laudable energy showed what could be accomplished by well-meaning men who had the means and inclination to counter the rising panic. The general situation was somewhat different, however. Legislation had been introduced by March 1846 preparing the ground for relief works. Mostly this work comprised the repair and construction of roads. The money for these projects was to be raised locally and nationally: half a Treasury grant (to be repaid by the local area) and half a free grant. The distressed area had to first make application to the Lord Lieutenant, which was then forwarded to the Relief Commissioners and the Board of Works. Upon approval the application was sent to the County Surveyor for inspection, returned to the Board of Works for their comments and then recommended back to the Lord Lieutenant who then made direct application to the Treasury Department. It was a tedious and bureaucratic procedure which created frustrating delays.
To make matters somewhat worse, the local relief committees had to choose to whom they would give work tickets. It was often the case that a local landlord would be on the Relief Committee and choose those of his own tenants who owed rent.
The labourers would earn less than shilling a day.
Across North Connacht, during the summer of 1846, the number of those employed each day rose from 7000 in June to almost 98,000 by mid-August. On 21st July 1846 the Treasury announced that all the public works were to be curtailed in the expectation that the coming harvest would render them unnecessary.
Father James of Bunninadden encountered the problem of living in a rural area with an absentee landlord
We…beg most respectfully to inform you of the state of extreme destitution of many of the poorer classed in these districts in which there is no resident landed proprietor and consequently but little employment can be obtained by the able-bodied labourer, nor has any public work been as yet undertaken altho’ applied for long since and no relief committee has been formed that we are aware of for the barony of Corran in which these parishes are situated…[We] implore some immediate relief from the funds in your hands or a supply of Indian meal from the depot at Sligo.
Draft Reply: Forward list of subscriptions however small… and a grant in aid will be recommended. Indian meal can be purchased at Sligo Depot by any duly constituted relief committee.
Sunday 14th June Memorial of James Henry PP, John Finn CC and 29 parishioners of the parishes of Cloonoghill, Kilturra and Kilshavey to the Relief Commission RLFC 3/1/3271

The Catch-22 situation at Bunninadden was that without resident landlords, Father James’ local efforts were without official sanction. As they continued to lobby for support in subsequent weeks they were curtly reminded that “There are vacancies in Boyle workhouse and also in Sligo Workhouse. There is a constabulary depot in Ballymote already.” It was a chilling reminder that the only official provision remaining was to be treated as destitute or as criminal.
This situation was far from being unusual. John Armstrong, a Justice of the Peace at Tubbercurry, became a vocal advocate of the rights of the poor. During this period he wrote angry missives almost daily, demanding support.
Extreme distress prevails in the upper half barony of Leyny, containing a population of 7,500. The funds are only £190 and no public works have commenced. The committee fears that the extreme destitution will compel them to dole out a considerable portion of our small means without being able to exact work in return.
This radical suggestion provoked an immediate response by return of post:
Under no circumstance can gratuitous relief be sanctioned except for the infirm poor and then only in the event of there not being any vacancies in the workhouse. Employment must be provided and the commissioners cannot conceive that any part of the country is in such a state as not to present a variety of small public works of utility, suitable both for males and females.
Thursday 25th June John Armstrong JP to the Relief Commission RLFC 3/1/3585/
Draft Reply 27th June

Sligo Potato Famine 1845 (3)

Why was the famine in West Ireland not foreseen? Why were there no structures for support already in place?

The major reason for the devastation caused by the failure of the potato crops was the lack of alternative resources. Father James (see post below) had pointed out the invidiousness of exporting those alternatives, and the Sligo Champion noted the dependency of a whole class of people upon one foodstuff.

But even earlier in 1845, before the blight had arrived, a Royal Commission had made this description of the working class inhabitants of the County Sligo area:

It would be impossible adequately to describe the privations which they (the Irish labourer and his family) habitually and silently endure… in many districts their only food is the potato, their only beverage water… their cabins are seldom a protection against the weather… a bed or a blanket is a rare luxury… and nearly in all their pig and a manure heap constitute their only property.

Royal Commission: February 1845

Earlier still, as reported in the Census of 1841, housing was divided into four classes – the lowest class consisted of windowless mud cabins of a single room. Nearly half of the families living in the countryside were found to be living in the lowest class of housing.

Perhaps the evidence supplied by John McMahon –a wealthy farmer in Limerick- to the Committee on Agriculture in 1833 suggests what contemporary life may have been like in the villages and farmsteads of County Sligo:

Do the peasantry eat wheaten bread at all? Never except two days in the year.
What are those days? Christmas Day and Easter Sunday.
What do they live upon? Potatoes and milk.
Nothing else? Nothing else.
How is the labourer worse off than he was? In not having work. Many have told me they would be the happiest people that there could be in the world if they could have work six months in the year at eightpence a day.
Have all those labourers little patches of land of their own? Yes.
How much? Generally an acre.
What do they pay? The fortunate man will have to pay from £5 to £8 a year but will have
to sell his pig to pay his rent.
Do they all wear shoes and stockings? They do, most of them, but boys of 15 or 16 years you may see not wearing a shoe or a stocking.
In the hilly or mountain districts is that the case? In the mountain districts there are great numbers of them bare legged, men and women.

Committee on Agriculture, 1833

The scene was set: the fragile balance between poverty and destitution depended upon the success of the potato crop.

And the crop failed.

Sligo: Potato Famine 1845 (2)

An unknown disease had attacked the potato crops in the Eastern United States, ruining the harvests during the years 1843 and 1844. The likelihood is that some diseased potatoes from these crops were shipped to a few European ports. The Potato Blight had a devastating effect on the economy and the people of Ireland over the next six years, but it was hardly noticed at first. The initial stages of the disease were first reported in Sligo by the Autumn of 1845.

One or two Anglo-Irish agriculturalists had spotted the strain during the spring and summer of 1845, identifying the tell-tale signs of “finely sprinkled soot” upon the leaves and stalk, the rapid decomposition of the potato and the pungent odour, but the spring harvest had been unusually good and, at least at first, optimism prevailed.

The County Inspector had been duly warned, however, of possible trouble ahead, and in this early account (20th September 1845), J.S.Stewart, a sub-Inspector at Tubbercurry, reports back his findings to Captain Lawson, the County Inspector at Sligo.

“There has been a small failure in a few instances but it is of a very trifling nature. The general opinion in the country is that there has not been so good a crop of potatoes for some years.”
20th September 1845. J.S.Stewart, Tubbercurry Constabulary Report
RLFC2/ Z. 13210

Stewart’s optimism was profoundly misplaced. Just over a month later, Pilsworth Whelan Esquire, who was serving as the Residential Magistrate, wrote in great detail to Richard Pennefather.

“Ten days back the tops rapidly faded and dried, particularly on high ground and soon after small patches of brown colour appeared on the potatoes…These progressively spread on the outsides of the potato, the part affected became tainted and rotten as the disease advanced and if in this state the crop was put into a pit, both good and bad became alike rotten. The farmers put the diseased potatoes aside and only pitted the sound ones. The potato disease is universal throughout this district…. The alarm amongst all classes is considerable and at the requisition of Mr Cooper of Markrea Castle, a meeting of the principal gentry of the county took place today at the Meldan Hotel in the town of Sligo…It was admitted by all that the disease was universal.”

Thursday 23rd October 1845. Pilsworth Whelan RM to Richard Pennefather
RLFC.2/Z.14316

Whelan’s notes are significant. He notes the progressive nature of the disease and its contagiousness. He also indicates a local swing of perception –in just four weeks- from a general optimism to a universal despondency. As befitted his important position in a county town, he was among the very first to call for some measure of government intervention. As his letter continued, he shrewdly pointed out two factors that were to become pivotal as the situation worsened: the fluctuation in the price of potatoes –or rather the risk of a price inflation- and the possibility of the substitution of oatmeal.

Whelan also mentions the proactive stance of “Mr Cooper of Markrea Castle”. Edward Cooper was a landowner of considerable means and a large estate which to this day-even as a hotel, Markrea Castle is pretty impressive- bears testimony to his local prominence. He was one of the leading “movers and shakers” in the Collooney area, and his input into the unfolding catastrophe was also to prove significant.

Whelan feels bound to point out, finally in his letter, that “The actual loss in the potato crop is not yet material.” The “Not yet,” here, while true enough, was to sound ominous within days.

The Parish Priest at Bunnimadden, (Bunnanadden, near Tobercurry) James Henry, wrote to the Sligo Champion on Monday 17th November 1845 in far less dispassionate tone.

“We regret we must confirm the rumour of a very general failure of the potato crop in this county…one third of the crop is entirely lost…From all quarters the accounts are most disheartening and yet the grain is leaving the country as fast as it can be exported, in order to enable the tenants to meet the demands of the landlords. All this is very distressing…”

A new thought begins to surface in Father James’s letter, which was to gather momentum as the disaster unfolded: that the economic crisis lay at the mercy of a political rationale. That is, the grain which could have afforded relief was bound for export. The landlords had a legal right to their own property, of course, but, in many instances, they had interests and estates in England and their “legal right” derived from an English government. Whilst many landlords –like Cooper above- attempted to meet the problem head-on, many did not understand the local situation at all. The problem of “absentee landlords” was to accentuate the distress of local tenants who felt disempowered, unrepresented and at the mercy of the local agents. As for the agents, their very jobs depended on their ability to force the demands of the landlords. Father James’s terms “disheartening” and “distressing” intimate that a legal right was not the same as a moral one.

“I attended the meeting of the Poor Law Guardians of the Sligo Union. They are of the opinion that the central part of the county will not have a sufficient supply of potatoes for the winter and spring. …The necessity of organizing committees in particular districts [deferred until]…absolutely necessary [since it may]… unsettle the minds of the people.”

Thursday 27th November 1845. Francis Knox Gore to Sir Thomas Freemantle
RLFC 2/Z.16838

Even as the extent of the crisis began to be realised, the leaders of the town seemed unwilling to take positive action. Knox Gore’s fear was that the formation of relief committees might worry the locals unduly. Perhaps this was the last gasp of an optimism that the situation might turn itself around. Clearly he anticipated what was later actualized: the development of food banks and resource centres to prevent absolute destitution.

His letter continued with the useful suggestion that mills at strategic points across the county might be used for the conversion of potatoes into farina (potato meal) to ensure minimum loss. The processing of the potatoes in this way would be unpopular (farina was used for cattle and pigs) but it was edible and it stemmed the wastage of good potatoes mixed with the bad.

A final piece written during that first Autumn of the Potato Famine summarized the rapid spread of difficulties in the Sligo region and suggested methods of redress:

“That the potato disease has prevailed and continues to progress… that numbers of the poorest classes, totally dependent on their conacre potato crops which have particularly suffered, must be driven to the markets for food which it will be impossible for them to purchase unless afforded early, special and continued employment …that depots or stores of provisions should be established to supply food on reasonable terms…that we apprehend the worst results unless prompt and adequate measures be adopted…”

Wednesday 10th December 1845. Resolution of Sligo Board of Guardians
RLFC 2/ Z.17842

After only four months, the recognition is made that it would be the poorest who would suffer, and that to counterbalance that, relief work projects would need to be put in hand to ensure that they were able to pay for their own subsistence. The report also stipulates that -whether or not it unsettled people,- the setting up of district food stores was now urgent and essential. All in all, the resolution calls for an intensive government intervention of “prompt and adequate measures”.

What could not be foreseen at this stage was how bad things were about to get.

Sligo: Potato Famine 1845 (1)

Between 1847 and 1851 over 30,000 people emigrated through the port of Sligo. On the Quayside, overlooking the Garavogue River, is a sculpted memorial to the emigrants. This is one of a suite of three sculptures commissioned by the Sligo Famine Commemoration Committee to honour the victims of the Great Famine. A plaque in the background, headed ‘Letter to America, January 2, 1850′ tells one family’s sad story:

“I am now, I may say, alone in the world. All my brothers and sisters are dead and children but yourself… We are all ejected out of Mr. Enright’s ground… The times was so bad and all Ireland in such a state of poverty that no person could pay rent. My only hope now rests with you, as I am without one shilling and as I said before I must either beg or go to the poorhouse… I remain your affectionate father, Owen Larkin. Be sure answer this by return of post.”

The reminders of that “day of visitation” are still to be seen here and there. The ruins of famine villages still stand on the windswept hills of the Ox Mountains, County Sligo, in mute testimony to a denuded population. The story of “The Great Hunger” (An Gorta Mór) which attended the failure of successive potato crops has often been told. It is –quite rightly- part of the History syllabus of the Irish educational system, much as it is mandatory for all Polish schoolchildren to visit Auschwitz. The past must be revisited, no matter how painful the journey, if its lessons are to be properly learnt.

The intention here is to emphasize the particular story of the Sligo area and to reflect on several letters and reports written during the first year of the crisis. Sligo is near where my family presently lives, and so that gave us the chance to talk to local people whose families have lived here for many generations and who carry family memories of those days. It was a local farmer, for example, (Kenneth Higgins of Skreen) who pointed out to me the ruins of that “famine village” on the Western face of the Ox Mountains near where he lives and works.

Sligo town itself was shielded from the worst depredations of the famine. It was in the surrounding countryside that the worst of hunger and disease was felt. The town had its Workhouse, true, but it had also the docks where the imported foodstuffs would enter the country and the food stores were also here by the dockside, (near where the modern Famine memorial now stands). The markets, major county businesses, banks and churches all had their power bases in Sligo town, so perhaps it is little wonder, reading the minutes of the Methodist Church from 1845 to 1851 that so little mention is made of the catastrophic events in surrounding areas

(Note: Thanks to Rev. Stephen Taylor, Sligo Methodist Church for this observation).

I’ll be developing this in future posts.

The Bitchiness of Historians (The Case of Herodotus)

Historians have always been bitchy towards one another. It just seems to go with the territory. They are touchy, quick to take offence, or apt to chuck cold water, wet blankets and trenchant abuse on one another in ample doses. Of course, some do operate under that wise axiom: “Rubbish not, lest thou be rubbished” whilst others keep their heads so far beneath the parapet that they become lost in their own ruts forever, failing to notice the whine of crossfire.