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Why the presumption that Protestant practice today indicates Scotch Irish/Ulster origins 300 years ago?

The lede includes

"In contrast to Ireland, surveys since the 1970s have shown consistent majorities or pluralities of Americans who self-identify as being of Irish ancestry as also self-identifying as being Protestant,[8][9] and are actually mostly Scotch-Irish,[10][11] the American descendants of the Ulster Protestants (mostly Ulster Scots) who emigrated from Ireland to the United States beginning in the 18th century.[12][13]"

Apologies if this was already covered in previous threads, and I tried wading through the cited material but it did not seem to support the conclusion. It seems more likely that in a nation that always was and remains today a society with an enormous Protestant majority, that over centuries families with Catholic origins would by necessity have to convert to Protestantism in order to marry or, even more likely, Catholics who intermarried with Protestants raised their children in the predominant faith in the society - Protestantism - which relegated their descendants to that faith to the current day. Of course there would be many exceptions, particularly in insular communities where Catholics were a majority or at least a large minority, but in the broader society it would be the minority faith that would likely conform, not the other way around. Therefore, there is no basis to assume modern Americans who identify as Irish origin being of the subset of Scotch Irish merely by their current religious practice.--Shoreranger (talk) 14:54, 26 July 2019 (UTC)

@Shoreranger: The preceding two sections cover much of this. "It seems more likely that in a nation that always was and remains today a society with an enormous Protestant majority, that over centuries families with Catholic origins would by necessity have to convert to Protestantism in order to marry or, even more likely, Catholics who intermarried with Protestants raised their children in the predominant faith in the society - Protestantism - which relegated their descendants to that faith to the current day." Why does it seem likely at all that Irish Catholics would necessarily have had to convert to Protestant denominations in order to get married?

Seven of the Thirteen Colonies (Virginia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, South Carolina, Georgia) enacted laws prohibiting settlement by Catholics of any national background and only four had no laws excluding Catholics from the right to freedom of religion, and because of this, the Catholic population in the Thirteen Colonies almost exclusively settled in Maryland and Pennsylvania (two of the colonies that had enacted religious toleration laws). More importantly, the Catholic population of the Thirteen Colonies probably did not exceed 1 percent of the population by the time of the American Revolutionary War and the majority of the Catholic population in the Thirteen Colonies came from countries other than Ireland, so even though some percentage of the 20,000 pre-1800 Irish Catholic population converted to Protestant churches, it was minute as compared with the mass migration of 230,000 Protestants from Ireland from 1717 to 1775 and the 500,000 Protestants from Ireland from 1814 to 1845 (in addition to their descendants).

Also, why does it seem more likely that Catholics who intermarried with Protestants raised their children as Protestants? As per Book IV, Part I, Title VII, Chapter VI of the 1983 Code of Canon Law, interfaith marriages by Catholics to non-Catholic Christians are prohibited without express dispensation by a competent authority (e.g. a local ordinary) and cannot be granted unless "the Catholic party is to declare that he or she is prepared to remove dangers of defecting from the faith and is to make a sincere promise to do all in his or her power so that all offspring are baptized and brought up in the Catholic Church." This is why the assumption that it is more likely that Catholics who intermarried with Protestants historically raised their children as Protestants is not well-founded; if anything, the opposite is more likely (i.e. that children from historical Catholic-Protestant intermarriages probably remained Catholic).

However, the larger issue is that Catholic-Protestant intermarriages were not particularly common in either the United States or Ireland until well into the 20th century (and it remains uncommon in the parts of Ireland where the Protestant population was historically and currently is concentrated i.e. Ulster). While in Ireland this can be attributed to the history of religious sectarianism and the explicit ban of Catholic-Protestant intermarriages by the Penal Laws, in the United States this is due more to the absence of residential proximity of Irish Catholics and Ulster Protestants to each other due to their historic migration patterns once in the United States. While the Ulster Protestants arrived in port cities such as Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, they largely moved to the frontier regions of the United States after arriving and while the United States expanded westward, while the Irish Catholics generally remained in the port cities and their surrounding metropolitan areas). Additionally, the large-scale migrations of Ulster Protestants and Irish Catholics to the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries did not occur simultaneously, and immigration from Ireland to the Thirteen Colonies was minimal until the 18th century. This all amounts to why it is in fact probable that most Americans who self-identify as being of Irish ancestry and who self-identify as Protestant are actually mostly Scotch-Irish. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 23:15, 26 July 2019 (UTC)

I think there are facts being applied incorrectly here.

"Seven of the Thirteen Colonies (Virginia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, South Carolina, Georgia) enacted laws prohibiting settlement by Catholics of any national background and only four had no laws excluding Catholics from the right to freedom of religion, and because of this, the Catholic population in the Thirteen Colonies almost exclusively settled in Maryland and Pennsylvania (two of the colonies that had enacted religious toleration laws)." There are a few presumptions about presumptions here. For one thing, it presumes that immigrants who were baptized as Catholics wanted or expected to practice their religion in their new location, and there is no evidence for that. There were no parishes and no clergy in the colonies without religious tolerance laws, so whether baptized Catholics wanted to or not they couldn't practice their faith in any formal fashion, so of course all of the *practicing" Catholics are in the colonies with religious tolerance laws, there is no way to account for any other kind anywhere else.

"...so even though some percentage of the 20,000 pre-1800 Irish Catholic population converted to Protestant churches, it was minute as compared with the mass migration of 230,000 Protestants from Ireland from 1717 to 1775 and the 500,000 Protestants from Ireland from 1814 to 1845 (in addition to their descendants)." The use of the term "converted" may be problematic here, and I apologize if it was I who instigated the confusion when I dashed off my post. "Converted" implies some sort of formal denial of one faith in favor of accepting through some process another faith - this is not what I was suggesting. Rather, in the absence of opportunity to practice the Catholic faith, if they even wanted to, Catholics (or those who might be able to claim to be Catholics by birth but not practice) were not identifiable as such, and by virtue of being on the relative edge of civilization Protestant authorities, if they were even involved in the marriage process of any given union, didn't or couldn't verify the religious bona fides of a potential Catholic anyway. Couples just got married in most instances in most communities in the colonies. If there was no reason to suspect someone of "papism" then there was no reason to prohibit a marriage, and if there were no opportunities for public demonstrations of faith in most colonies - even if Catholics by birth wanted to - then there was no real reason to suspect Catholic heritage in most colonies. Even if Catholics by birth didn't "convert" to Protestantism they were still marrying into Protestant families who didn't know of didn't care about any Catholic heritage of the spouse, without any formal conversion process because they were presumed Protestant or no one cared.

"Also, why does it seem more likely that Catholics who intermarried with Protestants raised their children as Protestants?" Simply put, as per the preceding, we are talking about Catholics by birth who lived and worked in colonies where they had no opportunity to practice Catholicism, and they likely didn't care or didn't want to. They married Protestants and their children were not raised Catholic.

"As per Book IV, Part I, Title VII, Chapter VI of the 1983 Code of Canon Law, interfaith marriages by Catholics to non-Catholic Christians are prohibited without express dispensation by a competent authority (e.g. a local ordinary) and cannot be granted unless "the Catholic party is to declare that he or she is prepared to remove dangers of defecting from the faith and is to make a sincere promise to do all in his or her power so that all offspring are baptized and brought up in the Catholic Church." This is why the assumption that it is more likely that Catholics who intermarried with Protestants historically raised their children as Protestants is not well-founded; if anything, the opposite is more likely (i.e. that children from historical Catholic-Protestant intermarriages probably remained Catholic)." That's all well and good, if we are talking about practicing Catholics, which we established was an effective impossibility in most colonies anyway. The "Catholic party" is not going to declare anything, because they likely don't want to be identified as a Catholic, if they ever did. In the colonies it would be hard to prove or disprove either way, and by the second generation of an immigrant family with no opportunity to practice their faith even if the parents wanted to, the children are Americans with no exposure to Catholic community and have assimilated into mainstream culture, likely including attending Protestant services and for all intents and purposes are Protestant despite the faith of their forbears.

"However, the larger issue is that Catholic-Protestant intermarriages were not particularly common in either the United States or Ireland until well into the 20th century (and it remains uncommon in the parts of Ireland where the Protestant population was historically and currently is concentrated i.e. Ulster). While in Ireland this can be attributed to the history of religious sectarianism and the explicit ban of Catholic-Protestant intermarriages by the Penal Laws, in the United States this is due more to the absence of residential proximity of Irish Catholics and Ulster Protestants to each other due to their historic migration patterns once in the United States." Let's accept all this as true, it still doesn't mean that Irish with Catholic heritage of some kind aren't marrying Protestants in large numbers, it only makes a case that they weren't marrying Irish Protestants, which is not really the point. The point is that the pool of potential marriage partners for Irish immigrants with Catholic heritage and their progeny was largely made up of Protestants, if there is no *requirement* that the Catholic heritage was professed or discoverable, and there is good reason to believe that - *especially* in order to marry - in many cases those who could be considered Catholic despite no ability to practice their faith in the colonies or even lack of any interest in maintaining their faith or Catholic identity simply just married Protestants.

In all, by virtue of geometrical growth, while the number of 18th Irish immigrants from the southern three provinces of Ireland may have been small compared to the numbers in the 19th century, just by virtue of the extra increase time they have reproduced to create a significant portion of those who can claim Irish heritage in the United States, as can all those who immigrated from Ulster in the 18th century. At any rate, current profession of Protestant faith in the US in no way precludes heritage from the southern three provinces of Ireland, based on anything I have seen here. Shoreranger (talk) 15:34, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

Most of the lead and the entire colonial history section of this article needs to be rewritten. And to answer CommonKnowledgeCreator's question about why I haven't made any edits yet - it's because this page has already been heavily edited, and I came here to reach a consensus before making any major changes. But before we can even agree on a revised version, we need to agree on the sources. And before we agree on what sources we're using, we need to answer a fundamental question about the Scotch-Irish: Are they or are they not a distinct ethnicity? If the Scotch-Irish are a separate ethnic category, then there shouldn't be any significant amount of space dedicated to them here; they have their own page on Wikipedia where that information can go. However, if they aren't a separate ethnicity, then clearly the Scotch-Irish page needs to be merged with this page.

What makes the lead of this article particularly weird, even for an ethnic page on Wikipedia, is that instead of summarizing the content of this entry, the editor seems to be making an argument that the majority of people who claim Irish ancestry in America aren't actually Irish, but are instead "Scotch-Irish". And the entire basis for this argument seems to be rooted in the fact that a majority (or plurality, depending on the source) of Americans claiming Irish ancestry are Protestant, not Catholic. And it is assumed that these Protestants are descended from colonial settlers, and are therefore 'Scotch-Irish'.

Now I've already explained why this argument is groundless, but I'll do it again. For one, it's based on the fact that a good three quarters of people claiming Irish ancestry in the South are Protestant, while under 40% of Irish Americans from the non-South are Protestant. It was argued in Carroll's research that, because these Southern Protestants are located where the Scotch-Irish settled, then they must be Scotch-Irish descendants (a dubious argument, but it's not our job to interpret sources). So here's the thing: that 73% Protestant figure is a percentage of the people claiming Irish ancestry down South. Since the South isn't as populated as other regions of the country (especially relative to the Northeast), that 73% figure is actually roughly equal to the 30-40% figure for non-Southern Protestants, in terms of the actual number of people claiming Protestant affiliations. Which means, if we were to total the number of Irish-American Protestants in this country, only about half of them are located in regions where the Scotch-Irish settled. And if we are basing ancestry on regional location and/or religion, then it's clearly the case that combining the non-Southern Protestants with the Catholics and secular Irish Americans produces a solid majority for Irish Americans, not Scotch-Irish Americans.

The lead clearly needs to be changed so that it's a proper summary of what this article is actually about, instead of what it is right now, which is a cheap attempt to inflate artificially the number of Scotch-Irish Americans.

In addition, the Colonial/Early National section also needs to discuss what this entry is actually about, and it isn't the Scotch-Irish. And we can do this by avoiding the Scotch-Irish subject entirely and focusing on the colonials and early nationals with confirmed Irish ancestry, such as Thomas Dongan, 2nd Earl of Limerick, one of the first governors of the colonial province of New York, and James Hoban, the architect of the White House (and I would like to know why Hoban isn't already mentioned in the history section?)

So, decide quickly what you want to do. Because if there's no agreement soon, I'm going to start by trimming the lead so that it reads like this:

"Irish Americans (Irish: Gael-Mheiriceánaigh) are an ethnic group comprising Americans who have full or partial ancestry from Ireland. About 33 million Americans — 10.1% of the total population — self-identified as being of Irish ancestry in the 2017 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau.[1] This compares with a population of 6.6 million on the island of Ireland."

And then I'll figure out the rest.Jonathan f1 (talk) 02:24, 27 August 2019 (UTC)

I agree. The discussion of Scotch-Irish numbers belongs in the Scotch-Irish page or perhaps as a paragraph in the article. It's very clumsily placed in the introduction.203.54.34.171 (talk) 04:57, 27 August 2019 (UTC)

I completely forgot about this article.

Anyway, it's been a while, and since there have been no serious objections, I am going to cut the aforementioned material out of the lead.

I also want to correct an error I made previously: The Southeast is actually the most populated region of the US, for the first time in history, largely due to mass migrations of Northerners in recent decades. Which makes it even more problematic to draw conclusions about someone's ancestry on the basis of geography, as CommonKnowledgeCreator has been doing. Another thing CKC has been doing is making untenable claims about the "Ulster Scots" participating in "Westward expansion" while Irish Catholics remained in the metropolitan Northeast. This alone should disqualify him from editing this article, as no serious historian of this genre doubts the Irish Catholic presence in the Midwest and West (see, for example, Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in the West, 1845-1910). Irish Catholic migration out of the Northeast was common enough in the 19th Century that the term "two boat Irish" emerged to describe emigrants out of Ireland who took one boat across the Atlantic, and then made a second journey West.

It is equally problematic to assume that Scots-Irish descendants grew to outnumber Irish Catholic descendants "by virtue of geometric growth." For one, a large number of the Ulster settlers did not take up permanent residence in the colonies and the United States; a significant number ended up back in Northern Ireland, so assume that has many as half of those 18th Century estimates were return migrants. Secondly, most of the Scots-Irish settlers, unlike 19th Century Irish Catholic emigrants, did not travel in family units; most settlers were men, vastly outnumbered by other ethnic groups, and a majority were intermarrying with colonists of non-Scots-Irish stock by the early national period. So even if it's true that there's an under-count in the Scots-Irish population (and there probably is, but there are probably underestimates in all major ancestries), it's also true that most of the descendants of 18th Century Ulster Protestants are Americans with only negligible Scots-Irish ancestry. Contrast that with Irish Catholics, who arrived in large family units, who were known for producing large extended families, and who weren't practicing inter-ethnic marriage on a wide scale until after the Second World War, and it becomes logical to assume that the majority of Americans claiming Irish ancestry are descended from Irish Catholics, not 18th Century Protestants.

And finally, CKC and others don't fully grasp the scale of religious conversions that have taken place in recent decades, especially converts from the Catholic faith. This is due in small part to Catholic-Protestant bridge movements like the Charismatic Renewal (how my grandmother became an Evangelical) and in large part due to intermarriage (a crucial indicator of assimilation) and all of the bad press the Catholic Church has been receiving. As far as a reliable source to support the intermarriage claim, I recommend Reginald Byron's study "Irish America", which is probably the most comprehensive social history of 20th Century Irish Americans. In it Byron shatters two commonly held myths: the myth that Irish Americans all stayed in the Northeast, and the myth that they are more likely to marry other Catholic ethnics. Byron published evidence which shows there are Irish Americans in every region of the country, and that an Irish American Catholic is more likely to marry someone of a Protestant faith than a co-religionist.Jonathan f1 (talk) 16:19, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

@Jonathan f1: "For one, a large number...18th Century Protestants." Jay Dolan's The American Catholic Experience states the exact opposite on pages 86 and 129 as referenced in the current revision of the article. "And finally, CKC and others don't fully grasp the scale of religious conversions that have taken place in recent decades, especially converts from the Catholic faith." The Pew Research Center research from 2015 also cited in the current revision of the article indicates that no such mass conversions from Catholic churches to Protestant churches have been occurring since the 1960s but Catholic secularization instead. Byron's study is based on interviews rather than quantitative research, and outside of the conversions during the Second Great Awakening from the Carroll article (which also does not state quantitatively how frequent said conversions were and were occurring when the majority of immigrants from Ireland to the United States were Protestant rather than Catholic as per the "Irish" and "Scotch-Irish" entries entry in the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups cited in the current revision of the article), you have provided no quantitative evidence to indicate that religious conversions by Irish Catholics to Protestant churches occurred on a mass scale in the 19th or 20th centuries.

"It is equally problematic to assume that Scots-Irish descendants grew to outnumber Irish Catholic descendants 'by virtue of geometric growth.'" I made no such demographic assertion; that was made by Shoreranger. However, as the article now reflects, the timeline indicated by the actual historical record related to that population growth would be more applicable to the Protestant migrations rather than the Catholic ones as per the references on U.S. fertility rates in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries and the "Irish" and "Scotch-Irish" entries in the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups also cited in the current revision of the article.

"Another thing CKC has been doing is making untenable claims about the 'Ulster Scots' participating in 'Westward expansion' while Irish Catholics remained in the metropolitan Northeast. This alone should disqualify him from editing this article, as no serious historian of this genre doubts the Irish Catholic presence in the Midwest and West (see, for example, Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in the West, 1845-1910)." I did not and do not dispute that westward migration by Irish Catholics occurred; however, as the "Irish" entry in the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups states of the Irish immigrants in the latter half of the 19th century (when immigration from Ireland to the United States had transitioned to being majority Catholic), "The majority of Irish immigrants remained in the Northeast" (Blessing 530). Jay Dolan also notes this in The American Catholic Experience and in The Irish Americans: A History. (Dolan 1985 p. 137 & Dolan 2008 pp. 85–86) All I am disputing is that you have not indicated that those who self-identify as being of Irish ancestry and as being Protestant are converts for the reasons I have already stated. I am not an expert in this subject matter, but I don't need to be to simply look something up. As for people who are, such as Jay Dolan, the explicit text of what they have written explicitly refutes your highly selective understanding of the historical record. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 04:15, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

• Blessing, Patrick J. (1980). "Irish". In Thernstrom, Stephan (ed.). Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p. 530. ISBN 978-0674375123.
• Dolan, Jay P. (1985). The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Doubleday. p. 137. ISBN 978-0385152068.
• Dolan, Jay P. (2008). The Irish Americans: A History. New York: Bloomsbury Press. pp. 85–86. ISBN 978-1596914193. — Preceding unsigned comment added by CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk • contribs) 01:06, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

@Jonathan f1: "Byron published evidence which shows there are Irish Americans in every region of the country, and that an Irish American Catholic is more likely to marry someone of a Protestant faith than a co-religionist." Likewise, the Pew Research Center research from 2015 cited in the current revision of the article explicitly states that interdenominational marriage among Christians has remained flat since the 1960s and it is not the norm that Catholic and Protestant Americans intermarry, and Dolan notes in The American Catholic Experience that Catholic-Protestant intermarriage was not the norm in either the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries either on pages 80 and 228 which are also cited in the current revision of the article. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 12:17, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

Oh for Christ's sake, can some other editor weigh in here so I'm not running in circles with @CommonKnowledgeCreator??

Let me just say this.

One, the content regarding "fertility rates" will be removed from this article, as it is completely inappropriate, irrelevant to the subject of the article and the quality of its information, and, plainly, unencyclopedic. On no other ancestry article do we find any space dedicated to fertility rate comparisons between the subject group and other ethnic groups. It appears in this article because, as I previously implied, you [CKC] and a small group of editors decided to use this article as a promotional page for Scots-Irish Americans, who have nowhere near the kind of numbers you'd like to imagine. You're not here to improve the quality of this article (which is exceptionally low at this point), but rather to POV push your belief (or desire) that there's some invisible mass of "Scots-Irish" Americans who are unaccounted for in ancestry surveys. And you're approaching this by trying to claim a majority of "Irish Americans" as not-really-Irish on the basis of religion.

Ironically, unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, none of the aforementioned sources you cite support your view or are suited for an encyclopedia article on this subject. Pew Research, for example, says nothing about "Irish Americans". The word "Irish" isn't mentioned once in that report because ancestry wasn't even the focus of their study. This alone disqualifies this source.

You seem to believe that every American Catholic in this country has Irish ancestry, which is a pseudo-historical and absurd supposition. There are Italian-American Catholics, Polish-American Catholics, French Canadian-American Catholics, and Hispanic-American Catholics, to name a few. Pew Research said nothing about the marriage habits of Irish-American Catholics (or any other ancestry group) since 1960 because they don't study that. Even accepting the PR report, there could be a high rate of intermarriage between Irish-American Catholics and Protestant Americans and it could still be true that intermarriage between Protestants and Catholics has been generally flat, since Irish Americans account for only a minority of American Catholics, even a minority of white American Catholics. Furthermore, considering Hispanic-American Catholics with white American Catholics will skew the results, since a significant number of Hispanic Americans are Catholic and an equally significant number live in relatively isolated ethnic communities, while white American Catholics have been fully assimilated for several decades (to say the least). Of course Pew didn't "skew" any results because Pew was only interested in quantifying turnover rates between different US religious denominations, not whether certain groups of Catholics and Protestants were intermarrying.

Byron's study expanded on research published since the 1980s, for example "The Twilight of Ethnicity of American Catholics of European Ancestry" by Richard Alba. Alba reported that up to 40% of white American Catholics intermarried with white Protestants during the post-World War 2 years. That's a significant amount of intermarriage happening well before the 1960 date in the Pew Research report. It also isn't entirely clear if you understand what you mean when you say "quantitative research". Byron took a random sample of Irish Americans, which is the same methodology used by all demographers, statisticians, ecologists and political pollsters. It's the same method used in that Pew Research report you cited, with the only difference being that Pew Research didn't do any random sampling of "Irish Americans" for reasons already mentioned.

More importantly, Reginald Byron was an anthropologist who specialized in migration, and in particular 19th Century emigration from Ireland to the US and Canada. His last monograph, Irish America, was published by Oxford University Press. Thus, this reference meets source criteria for history articles/sections as sanctioned by Wikipedia. It is not your job to evaluate whether or not the methods used by a legit source are suspect or rigorous to your standards. If you can't find an appropriate RS that meets Wiki reference criteria (and specifically mentions the marriage patterns of Irish Catholic Americans and Protestant Americans), I am also removing any content supported by the Pew Research reference and any other reference that fails to meet source requirements. It is astounding that you even thought for a second that this Pew Research report was a suitable source for an article on Irish Americans.

Secondly, I don't care what Nolan has to say about the 18th and 19th Century. You continue to edit this article with information challenging the origins of contemporary Irish Americans who identify as Protestant, and you therefore need to find sourcing that addresses more contemporary social patterns within this group. Your view of Irish Americans as an ethnic minority all huddled together in insular communities on the Northeast and rabidly anti-Protestant is out of date by a good 70 years.

And finally, this,

"I did not and do not dispute that westward migration by Irish Catholics occurred; however, as the "Irish" entry in the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups states of the Irish immigrants in the latter half of the 19th century (when immigration from Ireland to the United States had transitioned to being majority Catholic), "The majority of Irish immigrants remained in the Northeast" (Blessing 530)."

is another nonsense argument. With the exception of Scandinavian settlers, who were instantly drawn to the American Midwest, ALL ethnic groups were heavily concentrated in the Northeast and in coastal areas. To say that "the majority of Irish immigrants remained in the Northeast" is to imply that this pattern was something unique to Irish immigrants. In reality, westward migration was dangerous and costly, and not many Americans or American immigrants were up to it. Irish Catholics had a significant presence in the Midwest, in the Montana territory and in California. There is no reason to say "but most were concentrated in the Northeast" when this statement applies to virtually every other group at the time.Jonathan f1 (talk) 03:32, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

@Jonathan f1: "One, the content regarding 'fertility rates' will be removed from this article, as it is completely inappropriate, irrelevant to the subject of the article and the quality of its information, and, plainly, unencyclopedic. You're not here to improve the quality of this article (which is exceptionally low at this point), but rather to POV push your belief (or desire) that there's some invisible mass of 'Scots-Irish' Americans who are unaccounted for in ancestry surveys. And you're approaching this by trying to claim a majority of "Irish Americans" as not-really-Irish on the basis of religion." This seems to be your personal interpretation of what constitutes encyclopedic content since you don't refer to the WP:Writing better articles or any other Manual of Style article. The reason the data on fertility rates was included and is appropriate is because you have consistently claimed throughout this dispute that Irish Catholic immigrants have had more descendants to the United States than Ulster Protestants. If fertility rates were higher in the United States when immigration from Ireland to the United States was primarily Protestant (because it occurred before the demographic transitions initiated by the Industrial Revolution away from an agricultural economy), then it is entirely relevant to explaining why most Americans of Irish ancestry who self-identify as Protestant are more likely descendants of Ulster Protestants rather than Irish Catholic converts.

As the encyclopedias cited in the current revision of the article state, there were approximately 400,000 people in the United States of Irish birth or ancestry in the United States in 1790 which was approximately 10 percent of the population, while the Catholic population as a whole grew from 25,000 to 50,000 from the end of the American Revolutionary War to 1800 and never accounted for more than 1 percent of the population, and Irish Catholics did not constitute a majority of the colonial Catholic population. Also, this occurred mostly before the Second Great Awakening, which is the only period you have cited any source with direct quotations as there having been any mass conversions by Irish Catholics to Protestant churches. I am not attempting to make any claims but only collect quantitative information. As far as I can tell, the only person within this dispute pushing any POV is you since you have continually neglected to provide any direct quotations to verify that the sources you are supposedly citing about Irish immigration or intermarriage in fact state what you claim they do. The only time that you have, in the case of the Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan quote from earlier, you neglected to include the text directly following the quote which demonstrated that what you asserted about Irish immigration to the Western Hemisphere was false.

"You seem to believe that every American Catholic in this country has Irish ancestry, which is a pseudo-historical and absurd supposition. There are Italian-American Catholics, Polish-American Catholics, French Canadian-American Catholics, and Hispanic-American Catholics, to name a few." I have never stated that every American Catholic in this country is of Irish ancestry or even suggested that throughout this dispute. In fact, I'm the editor who added to the current revision of the article the various references from Jay Dolan's The American Catholic Experience and other sources that demonstrate that the majority of the American Catholic population is descended from various ethnicities some of which you identify (ironically enough since you "don't care what [Dolan] has to say about the 18th and 19th Century"; the period when these groups began immigrating to the United States).

"It is not your job to evaluate whether or not the methods used by a legit source are suspect or rigorous to your standards." All I am insisting on is quantitative information with a direct quotation and a page number, which you have not provided from Byron or Alba to verify that this is in fact what either of them actually said so there's no reason for me or anyone else to take the claims you've made seriously about intermarriage or migration (which is not my standard but the WP:Verifiability standard). The reason the Pew Research Center statistics are cited is because you have claimed that I "don't fully grasp the scale of religious conversions that have taken place in recent decades, especially converts from the Catholic faith" and have not provided any direct quotation with a page number to verify this claim, while the Pew research about the Catholic population in the United States in general (which the Irish Catholic population is a subset of) has not indicated that any mass conversions have been occurring but secularization. Until you actually provide such quotations there is no defensible reason to remove the Pew references.

"Your view of Irish Americans as an ethnic minority all huddled together in insular communities on the Northeast and rabidly anti-Protestant is out of date by a good 70 years." This is not a viewpoint espoused by me or any of the scholars I have cited. What the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups and Jay Dolan stated in his books is that the majority of Irish immigrants in the latter half of the 19th century remained in the Northeast (and Dolan's Irish Americans: A History was published in 2008). However, neither Dolan nor the Harvard Encyclopedia entries state that all Irish immigrants remained in the Northeast. Their data comes from the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service which, as far as I can tell, are the most authoritative sources for immigration statistics to the United States. "With the exception of Scandinavian settlers, who were instantly drawn to the American Midwest, ALL ethnic groups were heavily concentrated in the Northeast and in coastal areas. To say that 'the majority of Irish immigrants remained in the Northeast' is to imply that this pattern was something unique to Irish immigrants. In reality, westward migration was dangerous and costly, and not many Americans or American immigrants were up to it." Dolan states on pages 137 and 138 of The American Catholic Experience that German immigrants to the United States during the same time period made this migration to the American interior and that by 1850, half of all the German immigrants lived in the North Central region. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 17:39, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

That is just not how this works. This is not a process where I say something that you don't agree with and then you set out to dispute me by adding controversial content to the article. This is not about you and I; it's about the readership. Before you go on editing this article with controversial material you need to come here first and reach a consensus on whether or not your edits are i) improving the quality of the article; ii) helpful to readership in understanding the subject; and iii) supported by reliable secondary sources consistent with Wiki standards. The content on fertility rates and the corresponding references fail all three tests. So again I would ask other editors to get involved in this as you and I are clearly at an impasse.

On page 284 of Irish America, "A Socioscape of Irish America", Byron drew on several studies that analyzed marriage patterns of Irish Catholic Americans and wrote,

"A rigorously constructed random sample of Catholic Americans compiled by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) in Chicago, enumerating over 2,000 people, was analyzed by Richard Alba and Ronald Kessler for the indications it could give on inter-ethnic marriage patterns. The conclusions we might draw from their analysis do not support the idea that substracting the Protestant fraction from the Irish-ancestry category would necessarily produce a radically different pattern of relativities for the remaining Catholics. Alba and Kessler found that Irish Catholics were marrying people of English background at more than 8 percent above the expected rate, while they married people of German, Italian, and Polish ancestry with a frequency of about 3 percent below the mathematically modeled expected rate. As a whole, Irish Catholics were selecting against Germans, Italians, and Poles, who are predominately fellow Catholics, and selecting for the predominately Protestant English. Alba and Kessler express the view that 'Irish Catholics are drawn toward marriage to others from the British Isles, whether Catholic or Protestant.' This would include, of course, the Scots."

He goes on to say,

"Further substantiation comes from Ruby Jo Reeves Kennedy's classic notes on marriage patterns in New Haven over the years from 1870 to 1950. She found that the Irish, who as in Albany were overwhelmingly Catholic, preferred British-stock partners (who were overwhelmingly Protestant) over the more numerous Catholics. If anything, these studies by Kennedy, and Alba and Kessler, suggest an even stronger preference among Irish Catholics for English-ancestry spouses, than the aggregated choices for all people of Irish ancestry given by Lieberson and Waters."

Having satisfied your request, I would ask if this source is reliable? Yes - it was written by an anthropologist with research expertise in migration - specifically emigration from Ireland to North America - and published by Oxford University Press. Is it a secondary source? Yes - it's a review of several studies published by other researchers over the course of several decades. Is it on topic? Yes - it's an analysis of data for Irish Catholic inter-ethnic marriages with proper statistical controls in place.

Your sources, on the other hand, fail reliability tests in every respect. For one, they're not even secondary sources. Two, they are all off-topic. The Pew Research report had nothing whatsoever to do with the marriage practices of Americans who report Irish Catholic ancestry, but was rather a broad analysis of inter-denominational marriages over a certain period. You said that "I have never stated that every American Catholic in this country is of Irish ancestry", but one wonders why you'd cite the PR report in the first place? Anyone reading that section would be led to believe that a certain editor on Wikipedia thinks "Catholic American" must be a synonym for "Irish American". Regarding the paper on fertility rates - this, too, had nothing to do with the Scots-Irish and Irish Catholics or comparing Scots-Irish fertility rates to Irish Catholic rates. Right now I'm inclined to argue that your edits on intermarriages and fertility rates are POV and OR violations and should be immediately deleted from the article.

" Dolan states on pages 137 and 138 of The American Catholic Experience that German immigrants to the United States during the same time period made this migration to the American interior and that by 1850, half of all the German immigrants lived in the North Central region."

Yes I am aware of this and have been for a while. But you miss the broader point. These two groups were the exception among immigrants, not the rule. The majority of American immigrants settled on the coasts, and in particular the Northeast Coast. Even the majority of native-born Americans stayed on the coast and didn't venture West. I would recommend you familiarize yourself with this subject by randomly googling phrases like "the Irish in Iowa"; "the Irish in Montana"; "the Irish in California", etc, and see if any scholarship pops up. Irish Catholics had a substantial presence in the developing Midwest and West and were central players in the labor movements and politics that were emerging in these regions, especially in so-called boomtowns and burgeoning industrial centers. To diminish their involvement by writing things like "most were concentrated in the Northeast" is misleading because it lends the impression that these areas were common destinations for other groups, and they simply weren't.

There's a troubling pattern to your edits and I would ask that you cease making them until other editors get involved here. Your fixation on fertility rates, inter-ethnic marriages, your tendency to use restrictive language when describing the Irish presence outside of the Northeast, coupled with several double-whammy OR and POV violations, suggest to me that you are keen on using this page as a promotional vehicle for the Scots-Irish without any interest in the actual subject of the article. Editors have been blocked from editing articles on here for much less.Jonathan f1 (talk) 06:39, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

@Jonathan f1: "Having satisfied your request ... deleted from the article. ... Your fixation on fertility ... subject of the article." The reference that you have cited is sufficient to me to indicate that the Pew Research Center articles that I added are worthy of removal (which I will do myself). However, if you just quoted directly with specified page numbers for everything that you have stated throughout this dispute to begin with rather than continually making suppositions and assertions about intermarriage, conversion, and fertility rates yourself, this dispute would never have continued for this long. I am not, as you suggest, using this article as a promotional vehicle for what you call the "Scots-Irish myth". The subject of the article is Irish Americans, whom the majority of people who self-identify as being also self-identify as being Protestant according to the Carroll article (which originated this dispute as far as I can tell).

I am just trying to reestablish in the article that Ulster Protestant migration to the United States did in fact occur, on the scale that the sources I have cited have stated that it did, and during a time period when fertility rates in the United States were higher than they would become subsequently (due to the country having a pre-industrialized agricultural economy that Ulster Protestant immigrants from before 1830 who were typically farm laborers that migrated in family groups – according to Jay Dolan's The American Catholic Experience – would have been part of). You have continually made assertions that they don't even exist, which would be an NPOV violation because you have provided no sources that have superseded the ones that I have added that indicate that they do in fact exist (which is the actual requirement as per WP:Reliable sources, not the age of the source), while you have stated that you simply don't care what certain sources I've cited explicitly state just because they don't come to the conclusion you assert is true (like you've stated about Jay Dolan's books, even though I've noted his research directly contradicts assertions that you've made, and you have provided no research that indicates that his research has been superseded).

If you find a troubling pattern to my edits then I won't make any more until other editors weigh in, but you seem not to appreciate how offensive it is to attempt to erase the entire history of a group of people (which I find troubling and I would hope is more troubling to other editors). By contrast, I have never stated in this dispute that conversion by Irish Catholics to Protestant churches did not occur or that Protestant-Catholic intermarriage in the United States did not occur, merely that both were not the norm historically, cite sources for the latter that indicate as much while insisting that you provide actual quantitative evidence for the former.

I do not have a "fixation" on any of these quantitative measurements. I simply just insist on them to more clearly demonstrate the actual migration and population history as part of a simple and not unreasonable standard that all editors actually use direct quotations and specified page numbers so that the assertions that are made can actually be verified by others in line with the WP:Verifiability guidelines. As a side note, I would have no objection to merging this article with the Scotch-Irish Americans article as the sources I have cited do not indicate Catholic and Protestant migrations from Ireland to the United States were ever mutually exclusive (in contrast to a previous comment that I made), as well as the fact that most Americans of Ulster Protestant ancestry cite their ancestry as being "Irish" rather than "Scotch-Irish".

"I would recommend you familiarize yourself with this subject by randomly googling phrases like 'the Irish in Iowa'; 'the Irish in Montana'; 'the Irish in California', etc, and see if any scholarship pops up." Michael Glazier's Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, which I own a copy of and have already familiarized myself to some degree, has an entry on every single state and a fair number of major cities, and I have intended to summarize the migration statistics cited in it in separate subsections for each of the four broad regions of the United States within the immigration section. I also own copies of Kerby Miller's Emigrants and Exiles and Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan as well as books on the local histories of every U.S. state and intend to go through them for as much local detail on their individual settlement as well (and have already done so for most of Dolan's The Irish Americans: A History), and would be willing to purchase additional books for the same purpose. However, I would recommend that you not give advice to someone else about how to become more familiar with a topic that you don't appear to be any more of an expert in than the other person is (as I would reiterate is evidenced by the fact that you simply refuse to acknowledge when assertions that you make are directly contradicted by reliable sources that you simply choose not to acknowledge as such). -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 02:35, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

A lot, if not most, of your edits involve something to do with claiming this Protestant "majority" (which is really a plurality on most surveys) as Scots-Irish, which, by logical extension, implies the majority of self-identifying Irish Americans are Scots-Irish. In no reputable source do we find any support for this hypothesis. Only in Jim Webb's book do we find such a confident estimation (30+ million Scots-Irish), but Jim Webb is as far away from a reputable historical source as the Earth is to the nearest exoplanet.

"However, if you just quoted directly with specified page numbers for everything that you have stated throughout this dispute to begin with rather than continually making suppositions and assertions about intermarriage, conversion, and fertility rates yourself, this dispute would never have continued for this long."

But I'm not the one making the edits. I called for the removal of that content on the grounds that the sources were insufficient according to the standards of this site. I also said that I don't find comparisons of fertility rates between ethnic groups or content related to inter-ethnic marriage patterns to be useful contributions to this article, or indeed any other article on a particular ancestry group. Your sources were no good with or without the Byron reference, and I only quoted him because you kept pressing the issue. My original position, and one which I still maintain, is that speculation as to the origins of these "Irish-American Protestants" should be left out of the article. While Byron is a reliable secondary source, he is by no means a definitive one, and even less certain are those sources which claim a Scots-Irish origin for these Protestants. The Carroll paper, which you keep referencing, speculated to origins on the basis of geography (assuming that because ~75% of Protestant Irish Americans live in the Deep South, they must be Scots-Irish), but his own table shows that Irish-American Protestants are about evenly split between the South and the rest of the country. Michael Carroll doesn't even take the Scots-Irish label seriously (read some of the interviews he gave to press outlets following the publication of his religious monograph).

"I am just trying to reestablish in the article that Ulster Protestant migration to the United States did in fact occur, on the scale that the sources I have cited have stated that it did, and during a time period when fertility rates in the United States were higher than they would become subsequently (due to the country having a pre-industrialized agricultural economy that Ulster Protestant immigrants from before 1830 who were typically farm laborers that migrated in family groups"

Of course it occurred. But I know of no scholarly consensus which endorses the view that these Ulster Protestants came in "family groups". In fact, scholars of the "Irish diaspora" in North America believe there were three important differences between the colonial emigrants from Ireland and the emigrants who migrated during the post-Famine years. Religion is the obvious one: earlier arrivals were mostly Protestant; later emigrants mostly Catholic and from the south of Ireland. The second difference is the proportion of females who participated in these migrations: earlier waves (18th - early 19th C.) were disproportionately male, while later waves (post-Famine) saw more gender parity (more "family groups"). In Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan (Miller et al.) page 4 reads,

"Perhaps two-thirds of these early immigrants were males, and before the American Revolution a large number emigrated as indentured servants."

Other sources speak with a greater degree of confidence on the abundance of males among the colonial settlers from Ulster, also noting that a significant minority were return migrants (migrants who stayed in the colonies temporarily and then permanently returned to Northern Ireland).

The third, and perhaps most salient, contrast between the Protestant and Catholic Irish is the rate at which both groups assimilated. It seems to be generally agreed that the colonial arrivals assimilated rather quickly. There were, to be precise, Ulster Protestant settlements in colonial America, most notably in the colonies of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and various frontier settlements. But these were not particularly insular communities (at least relative to the Irish Catholic communities established by 19th Century immigrants), and by the time the Revolutionary War had ended most of the Scots-Irish were absorbed into the new American mainstream. That is, by the time Catholic emigration from Ireland came to a high pitch, there was no such thing as a "Scots-Irish" ethnic group in the US, and thus no such thing as a "Scots-Irish" fertility rate for this period. That paper you cited never mentioned one either, and for good reason.Jonathan f1 (talk) 11:08, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

@Jonathan f1: Reviewed your reference to Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan. Miller et. al also state that "...the approximately four hundred thousand emigrants from Ireland who settled in North America between the late 1600s and the end of the Napoleonic [Wars] in 1815. Perhaps two-thirds of these were Presbyterians, with the rest more or less evenly divided between Catholics and other Protestants". Miller et. al note the same numbers from the same period on page 7 but also that "By 1790 the Irish-born and their descendants constituted between an eighth (New York) and a fourth (Pennsylvania) of the white inhabitants of the Middle Atlantic states, from a sixth (Maryland and Virginia) to more than a fourth (South Carolina and Georgia) of those in the South, between a fourth to a third in Kentucky and Tennessee, and a substantial minority even in northern New England." I consider these references sufficient for reversion at your discretion. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 01:10, 10 October 2020 (UTC)

"I consider these references sufficient for reversion at your discretion."

What exactly are you reverting?Jonathan f1 (talk) 01:18, 10 October 2020 (UTC)

@Jonathan f1: I mean that we can remove whatever I've added that you know to not be consistent with more contemporary research and have references that indicate as much. Or alternatively, if you'd like to start a new talk page section instead where we can start a discussion to formulate a draft of a new immigration section to simply replace the current one where we can pool as much statistical information that better delineates the migrations quantitatively with subsections for the different time periods (i.e. the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries unless different periods are preferable) and regional variations in the migration to the United States (i.e. the four U.S. Census Bureau regions), as well as any other quantitative information to explain patterns in the migrations (e.g. conditions in Ireland motivating migration from the particular time period, sex ratios during different periods in the migrations, religious demographics in the migrations, occupational statistics among immigrants, return migration statistics, and so on).

Like I said before, I would be more than willing to lend assistance in purchasing and reviewing texts to collect quantitative information to help reduce workload. I can also provide a list of all of the books that I currently own that could be of use for the project. I also live in Massachusetts and have a library card at the Boston Public Library. Although its catalogue and mine may be dated, it may be worth reviewing them at the very least for comparison if you or others know of newer texts that have superseded the information in the older ones. Contrary to what you may think of me, I share your concerns about the readership and do not believe that this is a personal dispute between you and myself. I also sincerely believe that it would be a great public service to provide greater common knowledge of immigration by one of the larger ancestry groups to the United States in light of the greater salience of immigration policy to American politics in recent years, but also simply for American citizens who live in the middle of the country who don't have access to a library catalogue of the size of the Boston Public Library's and who do not have the financial means of purchasing books or the time to read them themselves but who still wish to know more about their ancestry. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 02:21, 10 October 2020 (UTC)

Yes, I'd be happy to work with you on cleaning this page up. Can't do it myself (it's a lot of work and don't really have much time for this).

"Contrary to what you may think of me, I share your concerns about the readership and do not believe that this is a personal dispute between you and myself."

It appears I was wrong about your intentions and probably should've assumed good faith. This article has been the target of so much edit warring and vandalism throughout its lifespan (see edit history) that it's rather discouraging to editors who genuinely want to improve it. I also agree that this subject is worth the effort.

Okay, so I'm interested in seeing what sources you're working with. I also think you and I should take some time to establish the knowns and unknowns of Irish-American immigrant history. This way we can figure out which topics require us to present different scholarly views (multiple sources), and which ones are generally agreed upon (where one or two sources will suffice).Jonathan f1 (talk) 02:39, 10 October 2020 (UTC)

Hello :@Jonathan f1: and @CommonKnowledgeCreator:. If I am not mistaken, you both agree that the majority of immigrants that came from Ireland to what is now the Unites States (to the Thirteen Colonies) before 1800 (especially from the late 1600s to mind 1700s) were Protestant. I am unclear on why (or whether at all) there is disagreement on whether they were (or tended to be of Scottish/British descent). As far as I know, there is no evidence that mass/large-scale conversion to Protestantism occurred in Ireland (among the native Irish) in the 17th and early 18th centuries. It seems likely that many-most of the Protestant settlers from Ireland were descended from British migrants, especially since many came from Ulster (where a fairly large number of Lowland Scottish and Northern English Protestants had settled) and nearby areas, as well as the fact that, according to Miller, as CommonKnowledgeCreator cited above, two thirds of the those that came from Ireland were Presbyterian, the dominant church in much of Scotland (with half of the remaining third belonging to other Protestant sects). One would expect the remaining Catholic half of the one third of the Irish immigrants (one sixth) to have been of Native Irish (Native Gaelic) descent (or predominantly so), but the Protestant majority of the settlers from Ireland would seemingly likely have been descended from the Protestant British (especially Scottish/North English) settlers to Ireland (or at least mainly so, i.e. perhaps some also being of mixed origin). As mentioned, I know of no mass/large-scale conversion events in Ireland in which large numbers of Native Irish adopted Protestantism in Northern Ireland/elsewhere in Ireland (at least not until the 19th Century - after which, I believe, intermarriage between Irish Catholics and Protestants also may have become somewhat somewhat common in Northern Ireland - though seemingly still not very common, as it remains uncommon today). Anyway, I hope my comment is not redundant (i.e. addressing an issue that has already been hashed out and/or agreed upon). My apologies if it is. Skllagyook (talk) 12:48, 10 October 2020 (UTC)

@Skllagyook:The disagreement was over the origins of contemporary Irish Americans who also self-identify as Protestant - not colonial emigrants from Ireland to British America. It seems to be generally agreed that the majority of settlers from Ireland in colonial America had British roots. In Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan, Miller et al. write that the majority of early Irish immigrants "had only been in Ireland for a short period". That reads like an obvious reference to their Scottish/British roots (although I would caution against using the word "British" to describe 18th Century Scots, as "British" meant specifically "English" in the 1700s.).

However, in The Irish in the South 1815 -1877, D.T. Gleeson cites Miller and claims that 100,000 Irish Catholics migrated to the New World in the 18th Century and were for the most part unchurched converts to Protestantism. I'm going to have to check Gleeson's reference and compare that to Miller's latest work. If it is true that 400,000 Irish came to the New World throughout the 18th Century, then 300,000 with Scottish/Borderland origins certainly qualifies as "most" (75%, to be exact). But 100,000 Irish Catholics converting to Protestantism in colonial America is no small matter.

As far as the origins of contemporary IA Protestants are concerned, I think @CommonKnowledgeCreator: and myself both agree that such speculation is best left out of the article.Jonathan f1 (talk) 15:40, 10 October 2020 (UTC)

Just to chime in here; I am not as well versed in this history as Johnathan is, I find it bizarre that the half of those early Irish immigrants would claim to be from a none ulster background, considering there was no real large foothold of ulster-scots in those regions of Ireland ie Munster, leinster ect it doesn't seem likely they would be of scots-Irish ancestry, I wish there was some algorithm we could run to determine how many of these people had Irish surnames versus ulster scots surnames pulling from old records, one can dream. Based on what I've seen so far a large amount of these early American settlers seem to bare Irish surnames, if the narrative was true this wouldn't be the case. The bias push on here from ulshhtir scats for ludicrous numbers of scots Irish ancestry is not accurate in the slightest it just wouldn't be possible for such a small group of people to accumulate such a large ancestry in such a short period of time and no legitimate historian has ever suggested that and 90% of Irish Americans don't identify as scots Irish, the massive amount of Irish who emigrated to America in the 1820-1840s-1860s is obviously where most Irish Americans get their ancestry from. Those who are protestant their ancestors were mostly catholic native Irish similar to the protestants of German heritage, they're also mostly Baptists. I'm wondering when the edit will be done it desperately needs it there are so many bad sources and pov, I agree with Johnathan's view of mass conversion of Irish Catholics to Protestantism over the last few decades, if I get him right. I look forward to reading future edits seems it will be very interesting indeed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Patrick Mcdermott25 (talk • contribs) 03:17, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

Removal of the Scots-Irish in the Irish American section.

Giving that the majority of Protestant-Irish are descended from Scottish and English planters it would be best to remove them from the page entirely or at least link to the Scots-Irish section, and leave it at that, which already has its own page. Granted out of the 27 million who identify as Protestant a few million of those must be catholic converts. Self Identified Irish does not mean actually of Irish ancestry, it's pertinent to put the actual statistic of actual Irish Americans. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.77.141.27 (talk) 03:58, 4 November 2019 (UTC)

This whole article is riddled with bias and half truths being misapplied to give the false propaganda notion that Irish Americans are not actually Irish but scots-Irish There is no reason to conclude that out of the 40+ million Irish Americans who the majority are protestant somehow indicates they were scots-Irish as many have pointed out on here the sources provided don't support or even allude to that conclusion. Born fighting is not a accurate source no legitimate historian considers it as such, the author is not even a professional historian, he's what historians who study the period seriously call a ancestor worshiper. These Irish had some 200 years to convert to Protestantism, further more they represented the largest group with millions emigrating to America. Even those in Ulster who emigrated during this time were mostly native Irish Catholics. It needs to be re-written and the scots stuff removed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.43.147.189 (talk) 04:15, 18 November 2019 (UTC); additional edits: — Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.43.37.92 (talk) 14:15, 22 December 2019 (UTC), — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.77.4.191 (talk) 02:11, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

The Irish had a very similar migration pattern to German Americans who make up a slightly bigger majority than the Irish with slightly higher numbers immigrating around the same time, half of those are protestant yet most of the German Americans ancestors were catholic. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Patrick Mcdermott25 (talk • contribs) 22:46, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

As for the 4 million scots irish themselves a better term for the so called scots-Irish might be Irelander's as used by J. P. Mallory, as most of them had no Scottish ancestry at all, some were native and converts and others were of french ancestry whos ancestors had never set foot in Northern Britain, Even those with supposedly Scottish ancestry where in fact ultimately of Anglo-saxon ancestry from England into the lowlands of Scotland, Modern identity notwithstanding David Hackett Fischer uses the term Anglo-Irish or borders to describe them — Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.43.37.92 (talk) 14:11, 22 December 2019 (UTC)

Mostly correct. Jim Webb is indeed mocked as an ancestor worshiper by professional scholars of this genre, so under no scenario does "Born Fighting" qualify as a reliable source. The only article BF should be cited on is Webb's bio.Jonathan f1 (talk) 14:28, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

@Jonathan f1: Explicit text from Albion's Seed: "Some preferred to be called Anglo-Irish, a label that was more commonly applied to them than Scotch-Irish during the eighteenth century." (Fischer 618) Title of section is "Borderlands to the Backcountry: The Flight from North Britain". Nope. Mostly misleading and a mischaracterization of Fischer.

• Fischer, David Hackett (1989). Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. Oxford University Press. p. 618. ISBN 978-0195069051. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 04:23, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

Let me expand that. Under no scenario does Albion's Seed qualify as an RS on any history article.

While AS has more of a scholarly veneer than Born Fighting, it promotes the same cultural reductionist nonsense as Webb. The belief that cultures are transmitted across continents and then handed down intact for generations (or centuries) just isn't taken seriously by social historians or cultural anthropologists. Fischer himself admitted that his work was on the fringe of his field (and this was in the late 80s, which raises another issue with AS - it's a dated source). It was another one of those "historians have got it all wrong!" books.

No, "Anglo-Irish" was not a preferred term for Ulster Protestant settlers. This is Fischer's preferred term because Fischer had to manipulate the evidence so that his Albion's Seed remained strictly Albion. The preferred term for the so-called "Scots-Irish" in 18th Century British America was simply "Irish" (see Miller's Scots-Irish Myths and Irish Identities in 18th Century America).Jonathan f1 (talk) 23:14, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

@Jonathan f1: I didn't say "Anglo-Irish" was the preferred term for the Ulster Protestant settlers; the unsigned commenter did. I'm simply pointing out that the unsigned comment was a mischaracterization of Fischer because I've read the text itself and cannot find where the commenter states suggests that Fischer indicates that "Anglo-Irish" is his preferred term. As for whether Albion's Seed is a reliable source, WP:Reliable sources doesn't state that a source is unreliable simply because it is old. More importantly, whether it promotes cultural reductionism is irrelevant; the population and migration statistics in Albion's Seed as far as I can tell aren't disputed or have been superseded. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 02:21, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

@Jonathan f1: Just as importantly, if Fischer recanted his previous work, you must provide a direct quotation in full context where Fischer explicitly did this. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 02:36, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

He did not "recant his work" and I don't need to support my statement with any quote from Fischer because I am confident Albion's Seed does not qualify as an RS for historical subjects on Wikipedia. For one, Wiki discourages the use of dated sources in history articles, and a 1989 book qualifies as dated -- 3 decades is about 300 years in scholarly publishing. How often is Albion's Seed cited by contemporary historians? Not very I would imagine. This book wasn't even respected by historians when Fischer published it. Fischer even went so far as to make ad hominem attacks on the ancestries of his colleagues (referring to them as Jews from Continental Europe who write history from a dogmatic multicultural POV -- another crank who thinks everyone else but him is dogmatic).

So we've got a dated source here promoting views that most historians reject. Like Webb, Fischer tried describing the political and social behaviors of his contemporaries as some legacy inheritance handed down by 17th and 18th Century settlers from Britain, just as Webb made similarly absurd claims about the Scots-Irish. Historian Michael Newton of the University of North Carolina described Webb's Born Fighting as, "an example of what happens when a writer (without a proper grasp of history or the historical method) exploits Scotland and its people for his own political ends." Scholar Jack P. Greene, a contemporary of Fischer, described Albion's Seed as "unhistorical". Both books make reductionist arguments about American culture which most scholars reject.Jonathan f1 (talk) 04:18, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

Table Irish immigration to the United States (1820–1975)

Data in Table on "Irish immigration to the United States (1820–1975) gives a sum of 4,720,427---but actually sums to 4,780,427 Probably just a typo but should be checked to see that the entries by decade are correct. TwelveGreat (talk) 21:40, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Updated Census Map

I noticed that a lot of hyphenated-American ethnic groups (i.e. German-American, Italian-American, Polish-American, etc.) each have an updated map to reflect shifting census changes for the 2021 US Census. Why hasn’t there been one for Irish-Americans yet, and can we expect to see one soon? Wiscipidier (talk) 01:49, 16 June 2021 (UTC)Wiscipidier

Maps

In the 5th Map down, the sentence saying that "States (shown) in full blue have a higher percentage of Protestants than the national average" is obviously Wrong, as it omits the deep South, which is the most heavily Protestant region in the U.S.... Furthermore, that same sentence contradicts the one by Map #4 just above it, which correctly marks the heavily Catholic states - and claims that they're mostly the same states as shown in Map #5....In summary, Map #5 needs correcting to say that states marked in full GREEN have a higher percentage of Protestants.... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.163.243.166 (talk) 19:00, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

Irish surnames and slave ownership

Every few months or so I check up on this page to see if it's improved, and every time it's the same situation: some parts are better, others are worse, much of it is the same. In addition to several NPOV violations and the use of dated and/or non-academic and questionable sources, the biggest problem with this article is its readability: it reads as if it was edited by dozens of different people who did not even make an attempt to collaborate with other editors before making changes (which is fine, for the most part, except it's not supposed to be obvious, and the content should always be reliably sourced, especially if it's controversial).

I would recommend rewriting whole sections and maybe even the entire article, but also to reach a consensus on sourcing and what topics this article should cover before making any major changes. Before doing that however, this line right here needs to go immediately:

"Although, native Irish names and surnames are pretty common among the African American people, who are mostly Protestant, this is due to the two communities intermarrying. These intermarriages took place mostly in the 19th century, as members of both communities were treated as second class citizens in the United States."

I really don't know how to go about unwinding this disaster, but a few points I would stress:

• Firstly and most importantly, this line is not reliably sourced. Rather than an academic scholar, whoever wrote this statement sourced it to a dilettante journalist writing for a non-academic, non-historical publication.
• Secondly, it's a false equivalence comparing the social position of Irish immigrants to African Americans. African Americans weren't "second class citizens" when large numbers of Irish started coming to the US - they weren't even citizens at all, and had no legal rights or protections. In speaking about anti-Irish discrimination, historian Tim Meagher made the point that, "It would be ridiculous or even obscene to compare this religious tension and hostility [to Irish immigrants) to the brutal oppression endured by African or even Asian Americans." (see page 221 -222 in the first link below).
• Thirdly, the clause "African American people, who are mostly Protestant" is an example of a reoccurring problem throughout this article. The point's been made over and over and over again that Irish Americans, at least in popular imagination, are associated with Catholicism. On the other hand, there are reliable sources which say this isn't even true anymore, as most people identifying as "Irish American" today are either Protestant or secular (this has been discussed in other editorial disputes on this page).
• And finally, the statement is factually incorrect. While there is evidence of intermarriage between Irish Americans and African Americans and non-whites (Asians mostly) during the antebellum, there is no reliable source that says interracial marriage was ever common in the first place, or a large enough phenomenon to account for the number of Irish surnames present among contemporary African Americans (the Irish were overrepresented as African American or Asian American spouses, when you consider interracial marriages as a phenomenon of the antebellum, but the phenomenon itself was not generally common) . In fact, throughout the 19th Century, Irish-American men gained a reputation for anti-black racism, and thus most of these intermarriages would have been between African American men and Irish women (where the Irish name would not have been passed down). Meagher wrote a chapter about this in his textbook The Columbia Guide to Irish American History (read part two chapter four here [1], starting on page 214). On page 222 Meagher writes, "All the evidence suggests that Irish men or more often women were vastly overrepresented among white spouses and lovers of African or Asian Americans, for example."

And if that's not bad enough, the Irish historian Liam Hogan performed a relatively recent analysis of Irish surnames and slave ownership, and here's what he found:

539 unique Irish surnames are on the 1850 slave owning census, who collectively owned 99,129 slaves in 17 states. On the 1860 census, the collective ownership for these names increased to 115,894 slaves (a 16.9% increase) [2]. It'd be preposterous to suggest that anywhere approaching even half these numbers for marriages between Irish-American men and African-American women.

Liam Hogan excluded common Irish names that have ambiguous origins (and are thus not always reliably Irish), so this is surely an undercount in the number of Irish-American slaveowners for the period. On the other hand, the statement in question says nothing about ancestry or genealogy or anything of the sort - it's a statement about Irish surnames and African Americans (it may very well be true that many of the names on Liam's list belonged to people who had small amounts of distant Irish ancestry, for example, rather than immigrants or second generation Irish Americans).

In other words, the reason why some African Americans have Irish surnames is simply because a number of them are descended from slaves who were owned by white masters who had Irish names. There is no dancing around this.

Whoever wrote that article has a comic book-level understanding of this history and should've never been used as a source anywhere in this article. Please remove it.Jonathan f1 (talk) 21:05, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

Very much agree - seems like complete white-washing to me, and one of the provided sources is completely inadequate and talks about wealthy Scottish colonials as if they were interchangeable with poor Irish immigrants. Staggeringly ignorant. There have always been big racial tensions between Irish immigrant and established black populations - The New York City draft riots are a testament to this.--SinoDevonian (talk) 19:44, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

Outside opinion; We need to be careful not to diminish the struggles of Irish immigrants when they came to America. This could turn into a more biased article. For example saying Irish were the same status as established British Americans, or diminishing the economic, ethnic, religious, or political struggles. In the mid-1800s when most Irish started immigrating to America, the only people given any type of opportunity, were white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, men who owned land, (known as WASP's), most of the Irish didn't fit into any of these categories except perhaps white (although debatable for the time period) and neither did the Italians, Chinese or Native Americans. Another point is that; Irish surnames for black people, came in a multitude of ways. One; before the 1850s mass migration of Irish to America, there was a small number of Irish people, who participated in the British Empires slave trade, these Irish were mostly protestant, and mostly from Uster where the British plantation system had the biggest effect. Second there was a good amount of intermixing as most Irish settled in eastern coastal cities such New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, where free blacks before and after the civil war settled and where slavery did not exists. Three; a large portion Irish who came over to America before the 1850s were indentured servants (similar to how most Irish arrived in Australia) and naturally mixed with blacks and people who were treated as second class citizens. So we should be careful in how we change or rephrase this article. America's history is not so black and white (pun intended)! 2603:7000:3B40:B500:A156:FF01:78FF:47CA (talk) 01:18, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

To the IP: Irish people, regardless of religion, were always classified as 'White' mind you - just like how today most Irish-descended people are going to be included in the "WASP" category in today's American racial politics (virtually no one save for overly proud Irish-Americans think of it any other way. It is especially ironic to me as a Catholic Englishman of Irish descent that most Irish-descended Americans are Prots these days!). I find the claim of White Irish people intermixing with recently freed African-Americans and their descendants to be fanciful at best, and doubtless part of some ethnic mythologizing (which America is great at - see Columbus) - and unless we can find reliable sources that it was the norm or acceptable for White Irish people to intermarry with Black Americans, then I simply do not believe it to have any basis of truth, anecdotes and rare exceptions aside.

Just a quip - there was certainly going to be different societal attitudes between the Scots-Irish and the Indigenous Catholic Irish. Many Scots-Irish became slave owners in the Southern US. It is best not to conflate these groups at every level.--SinoDevonian (talk) 12:41, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

The article defines "Irish Americans" as "Americans with full or partial ancestry from Ireland." That includes Protestants. It includes Americans who may have distant Irish ancestry (18th Century) but nevertheless still identify with it. It does not limit the scope of the article to "Catholic" or "ethnic" Irish-Americans.

The discrimination section needs more nuance and needs to specify which of these "Irish-Americans" suffered such prejudice. Statements like "anti-Irish prejudice was rampant in the US" is a broad sweeping statement, currently unsourced, and certainly controversial. As far as 'racialization' goes (Celts vs Saxons) - the position of the Irish was far more ambiguous than this article makes it seem. Sources are available if anyone wants to improve this section. Jonathan f1 (talk) 10:14, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

Are you seriously disputing that there was discrimination against Irish or Irish-Americans, in the US? Bastun^{Ėġáḍβáś₮ŭŃ!} 12:57, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

No, of course not. The discrimination of the Irish in the US is a historical fact and I know of no historian who's ever disputed it.

What is in dispute, however, is the nature and extent of this prejudice and what, if any, economic or political impact it had on the average immigrant's life. I will remind you that we are dealing with a period from roughly the 17th to 20th Century, and potentially as many as 8 million immigrants. Some chronology is in order (when did this phenomenon peak?), regional nuance (where did it occur and where were most Irish settled?), and who were the targets ('the Irish' is too broad -what we want to do is specify immigrants by period, region, class, religion etc).

Surely no one here actually believes that every single immigrant that's ever come from Ireland has suffered discrimination at every period of history and in every region of the US? That's as pseudo-historical as disputing it altogether. Jonathan f1 (talk) 14:29, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

Since this is a separate topic, I will start a new thread. Jonathan f1 (talk) 15:25, 6 May 2023 (UTC)