John Zmirak argues (below the fold) that the primitive, Irish dominated social system and education of the nineteenth century in places like New York City was actually quite efficient at promoting proper behavior and assisting people in prudent ways, something conspicuously lacking in our fancy, therapeutic bureaucracy. (And it also did a commendable job educating incoming Jewish immigrants, giving the lie to Identity politics' claim that students must be taught by those who are of the same ethnic background as they.) We no longer, as Marvin Olasky makes perfectly clear in his wonderful book
The Tragedy of American Compassion, make the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor. That's paternalist. It might have worked, but we don't do that anymore. Instead we get situations
like this in East Point, Georgia, where 30,000 people show up for Section 8 housing vochers and riot police have to come in force and scores are injured, mainly from dehydration.
Zmirak
writes:
Indeed, as scholar William Stern showed in a famous City Journal article, "How Dagger John Saved New York's Irish,"
the rough-and-tumble, intensely moralistic Catholic social welfare and
education system did a far better job than today's pricey therapeutic
bureaucracy of stemming and reversing social pathology - and on a much
more massive scale. Privately funded and staffed mostly by religious,
this system took the broken remnants of Irish society that floated
westward during the Potato Famine and remade them into mostly solid
citizens, who soon took over cities such as Boston and New York. If an
immigrant wanted a job, he would have to prove to a nosy priest or nun
that he was not a drunkard; girls who wished to find work as maids would
need to keep their clothes on. It was thus that prelates like New
York's Archbishop John Hughes rooted out the alcoholism and prostitution
that had run rampant among the starving refugees.
This is paternalism at its best.
Zmirak
and I are both reactionary Catholic types who have been mentored by the
same man, Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn.
Zmirak currently is the writer-in-residence at Thomas More College in
Merrimack, NH, near where I wasted massive amounts of time with a high
school girlfriend in the early 1980s. Some of my students at the
boarding school, where I have been teaching English for 13 years, have
gone on there.
Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn and John Zmirak.
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