Tea at Trianon: The Disappearing Irish

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, December 23, 2021

The Disappearing Irish

From The Washington Examiner:

Over 7,000 people lived at 97 Orchard Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side between 1863 and 1935. The five-story tenement building housed mostly immigrant families from Italy, Germany, and Ireland, with names such as Baldizzi, Rogarshevsky, and Moore.

Tired of constantly updating the small apartments with each new domestic advance (first indoor plumbing, then gas, then electricity), the owner boarded up the top four floors in 1935 and just rented out the bottom floor to businesses, creating a sort of time capsule of the residential units.

In 1988, the building was then turned into the Tenement Museum, where visitors could tour apartments made to look as they were when immigrant families lived there. Researchers took great care in identifying the actual families that lived in each apartment so that museum staff could tell the real stories of the people that lived there.

In 2017, the museum bought a second building up the street, enabling staff to incorporate the stories of the Chinese and Puerto Rican families that lived there. At no point could researchers identify a black family who lived in either tenement, however, and that became a huge problem in 2020 after the killing of George Floyd.

The Tenement Museum initially issued a statement supporting Black Lives Matter, acknowledging that “black people have lived in the area we now know as the Lower East Side since the 1640s.” But this was not nearly enough.

A second statement was issued claiming that “white supremacy and anti-blackness are central to American history and its violent present.” “Part of that violence,” the statement continued, “is an institutional practice of omitting and erasing black voices and perspectives.”

In other words, the Tenement Museum was forced to say that by not pretending black families had lived in its buildings, the organization was committing violent acts of white supremacy. (Read more.)