Sometime during the hottest weeks of this past summer, an editorial contributor to the Roslindale Transcript named Don Hubbard cheerfully mentioned that, as he walks down Centre Street in West Roxbury, he:
even like[s] walking past the Theodore Parker statue on Centre Street so I can look at his statue and swear at him. Of course he can't hear me because after all, I am just cursing out a statue, plus he is in hell now. For all his bigotry against the Irish, Theodore Parker must not have been a very busy person.
This gratuitously mean-spirited comment drew a rebuttal from a reader, who attempted to defend Parker’s honor and that of the church. I did not see her letter, but it seems she suggested his comment was an expression of religious intolerance, because it drew an even more hostile counter-rebuttal from him, much of it aimed against Parker again.
Let me quote a few of the passages. Hubbard writes:
This is the same Theodore Parker who once arrogantly advocated that Irish immigrants be consigned to concentration camps for 31 years because, “certainly it would take all this time to clean a paddy on the outside… To clean him inwardly would be like picking all the sands of the Sahara.
And…
The reader believes that speaking out against injustice “has everything to do with democracy and freedom of expression.” So in that vein I am speaking out against injustice, since Parker spoke so perversely in favor of injustice; more specifically, I condemn the bigotry and intolerance and fascist thought of Theodore Parker.
And it goes on…
Was Theodore Parker ahead of his time? Yes, years before Hitler published Mein Kampf and before Pol Pot placed his citizens into killing fields or before Milosevic conducted his first campaign of ethnic cleansing, Parker advocated placing Irish immigrants into concentration camps. …A minister such as Parker giving credence to hate certainly created miserable conditions for Irish immigrants and increased their misery geometrically. The “No Irish Need Apply” signs? Parker helped write each one. He caused many people to suffer, just like the ministers in the South who belonged to the Klan.
And finally…
Sorry Ms. Reader, … but Theodore Parker is not deserving of your defense. If you support Parker, at most you can only give a kinder, gentler facade to his bedrock beliefs. Trust me, in the end, if you face up to it, his fascism will not disappear. Then you are faced with either the truth about him or smug hypocrisy….
Where does one begin defending our beloved Parker—and our church—against such an alarming diatribe? At the same time, it raises disturbing questions, does it not? Did Parker ever hold such views? What is the truth about him that Hubbard claims to know? The thing that really got to me was that quote, the quote about how you could never really clean an Irishman.
So I began trying to track down the real history and the real words of Parker that may have planted the seeds of Hubbard’s bitter conviction.
Well, I found history. I found words. I found words I wished I had not found. Scattered among what remains an inspired and inspiring range of writings, I found things, mostly in letters to peers and confidantes, which throw new light on the man, Theodore Parker.
Let me say right away that fascist thought was utterly alien to Parker, except as something to be reviled and destroyed. There is nothing to suggest he ever wanted the suffering or oppression of anyone, much less publicly advocated for it, even for those whose misuse of power most enraged him.
Hubbard made a lot of things up, irresponsibly publishing patent falsehoods. However, there is not nothing to what he said, and so we must wrestle with it. If we will carry forward the good in Parker’s legacy, we must do what he asked himself to do when he was considering whether he had the guts to be the preacher he wanted to be:
Can you seek for what is true, and not be blinded by the opinions of any sect (even your own, I would add) … and tell that truth you learn, even when it is unpopular and hated?
I wanted Parker’s own words to brace us for the truth-seeking and truth-telling that would be necessary here, even if it led to a diminishment of Parker’s own reputation. He was not a saint; to make him into a saintly icon, to imagine he was always pure and noble, would be childish. He was a complicated, brilliant, intense, and flawed human being. He was a visionary, yes, but he did not always have clear sight.
What Parker is most guilty of is a deeply paternalistic sense of superiority—racial and class superiority, religious superiority, moral superiority. It shows up at times as astonishingly condescending attitudes toward certain populations, even as he advocates for an improvement in their conditions. And it shows up other times in disturbing theories of cultural and racial hierarchy.
I want to try to speak to Parker’s views of the Irish, to the extent I have been able to uncover the issues. I don’t expect anything I have discovered, or anything I or anyone could say, would soften Don Hubbard’s determination to reduce Parker to a bigot who used his influence to increase the misery of the Irish in Boston. So this effort is not so much to deflect his attacks, but rather to inform ourselves.
Between 1845 and 1855, nearly two million destitute Irish immigrated to America, the majority of them to the coastal cities of Boston, New York and Philadelphia. Perhaps as many as 100,000 Irish entered Boston in 1850 alone. Many traveled to the US on the infamous “coffin ships.” These ships were insured so as to be more profitable to their owners sunk than afloat, and they transported their human cargo in the vilest conditions. Those who survived the journey often arrived in Boston carrying diseases such as typhoid, cholera, and dysentery.
Once in the city, they filled squalid ghettos and gained a reputation for being barely civilized—illiterate, unclean, unruly, given to drink. They took the worst and most dangerous jobs and were treated as expendable labor, their lives less valuable than those of slaves.
While the Irish reputation did have some historical basis, it soon developed a life of its own among the American-born citizens of Boston, hardening into an impenetrable and pervasive racial prejudice. The notion that the Irish were less than fully human was widely espoused. Insulting references to them appeared often in journalism and speech among polite company.
Parker’s feelings about the Irish were extremely ambivalent. On the one hand, among his speeches and letters one finds indications that he was alarmed by their desperation and desired a better life for them under the banner of freedom.
Parker was senior editor and frequent contributor to the Massachusetts Quarterly Review, a publication directed to the liberal Christian audience in Boston and containing articles on religious and social matters of the day. In June 1850, feeling a responsibility to educate its readership about the droves of Irish immigrants flooding the city, the Quarterly Review presented a 33-page article titled “The Causes of the Present Condition of Ireland.” In it, Ireland’s long struggle against English rule is laid out. The systematic oppression of the Celtic peoples through the penal code, and the potato famine disaster, are identified as catalysts of the mass immigration. The article is written with unequivocal sympathy for Ireland’s most downtrodden people.
Parker spoke regularly to the hardship of “the perishing classes,” and he did not hold back concern for any group that suffered in social deprivation.
On the other hand, in his letters one also finds derogatory comments about “the Paddy,” in which Parker indulges all the condescending stereotypes that were commonly held in his society. Don Hubbard includes such a quote in his editorial—about how it would take 21 years to clean a Paddy on the outside, but that you will never be able to get him clean on the inside. In these comments to a friend, Parker does not recommend concentration camps, as Hubbard claims. Rather “quarantine” is the term Parker uses: “We made a great mistake in attracting them here and allowing them to vote with less than 21 years of quarantine.”
The quote can be found in the book, Theodore Parker: A Biography, by Octavius Brooks Frothingham. Because Frothingham does not present the whole letter but only a small part of it, it’s hard to know whether Parker was concerned that the Irish were a public health threat or simply unready to participate in American democracy. The fact that he conflates these two things is part of what makes his remark offensive.
But this brings us to another dimension of Parker’s antipathy. Parker fiercely believed, in principle, that all people living in the United States should be full voting citizens and should be able to participate in the democratic process, regardless of race, class, religion, or country of origin. He writes to one friend, “I am glad the Catholics have the same rights as the Protestants. If they did not, I would contend for them as I now do for the Negroes.”
However, Parker’s principled ideals about citizenship were sorely tested. In 1850, the Fugitive Slave Law was under intense debate in Congress. Under this law, Northerners would be required to round up and turn over men and women who had managed to escape slavery, to be returned to their Southern “owners.” The abolition of slavery and the demise of the Fugitive Slave Law was Parker’s most intense cause. Because liberty of body and mind were, to Parker, divinely given, inalienable rights, he saw slavery as the greatest abomination against God and nature, and the most corrupting force in democratic society.
Most Boston Unitarian clergy refused to oppose the legislation. Some even supported it as a constitutional obligation, arguing that it was the only way to "save the Union." Some argued that catching fugitive slaves was sanctioned by scripture. But Parker proclaimed that the law violated Christian ideals and threatened all free institutions. He preached and rallied against it, calling for open defiance.
Parker knew his conservative peers, and he would have anticipated the problem that their public leadership would present. What he probably could not have anticipated, and what rapidly arose as a new threat to defeating the Fugitive Slave Act, were the swelling ranks of Irish, rallied by their clerical leaders. The Irish vote was a new factor in American politics. They had real capacity and determination to sway this and other legislation.
The tension between free blacks and poor Irish was essentially economic—both were vying for access to the margin of unskilled labor. Preserving the Southern institution of slavery, and stemming the influx of free black men and women into the North, was in the interest of the Irish population. At the same time, the Irish Catholic clergy equated abolitionist agitation with radicalism, which they feared might eventually be directed against the Roman Catholic Church. For their own reasons, they argued for strict obedience to the law and faithful observance of all parts of the United States Constitution, including its guarantee of slavery.
Parker wrote at this time:
I think, after slavery, Catholicism is the most dangerous institution in America, and deplore the growth of its churches. I know the power of an embodied class of men, with unity of sentiment and unity of idea, and when the sentiments are what we see and know today, and the men are governed by such rulers, I think there is a danger.
Parker’s anxiety about the Irish Catholic factor, whether real or imagined, was realized when the Fugitive Slave Act was indeed passed into law. The abolitionist effort had to strive even harder, the roiling debate around slavery intensified, and Parker’s activism began to move from the podium to the streets.
He served as minister at large to fugitive slaves in Boston. He was an executive leader of the Vigilance Committee, the most active Boston organization providing fugitive slaves with material support, legal aid, and help in eluding capture.
In 1850, Parker protected, in his own home, the fugitive Ellen Craft, who was a member of his congregation. In time, he helped her to escape to Canada. In 1854, Parker and other members of the Vigilance Committee agitated on behalf of the captured fugitive Anthony Burns. Parker was indicted by a grand jury for obstructing a federal marshal. But Parker, Burns, and the abolitionist cause carried enough popular support to cause pandemonium to break out. In the end, Burns was still extradited back to Virginia, but Parker’s case was dismissed on a technicality.
In this turbulent era in Parker’s Boston, we hear echoes of our own time:
• The hostile reaction of established society to the perceived threat of immigrants.
• The competition for unskilled jobs that feeds racial prejudice and hostile political movements among different alienated populations.
• Religious groups lobbying for the passage of laws on the basis of religious faith and scripture, thus clouding church-state separation.
Such issues were moral conundrums then and now.
Through all this churning social change and challenge, we can see how Parker may have been moved to advocate both for the Irish and against them. In one context he saw them as victims of oppression, and in another as perpetrators of it, or as a threat civil society. The record of his reflections and attitudes, whether private or public, reveals the complexity of his world and his efforts to “seek the eternal right” in the midst of it—something that was not always clear.
His thoughts were always in formation, never fixed, and they inevitably contained contradictions, intense feelings of love and hate, erroneous threads that in the course of time would be disproved. He confessed things to friends that never appear in his speeches.
Discovering incongruities between some of Parker’s private writings and his public discourses might lead one to consider him a hypocrite. But I speculate that he understood his responsibility as a public speaker of significant influence and strove to use that influence righteously. Community leaders will have ungenerous thoughts in private. It’s what they say publicly that matters most—something Don Hubbard might take into consideration. Thus far, I have found no record that Parker ever tried to publicly rally hatred or action against the Irish as a population.
As for Parker’s “bedrock beliefs,” those beliefs that did not change with his moods or with the conditions of his society, I believe the public record solidly shows his commitment to universal rights and privileges for all people. I don’t believe he would have worked himself to death (quite literally) speaking out relentlessly against injustice and inequity if he was not fundamentally committed to that vision.
Hubbard challenges us to face the truth of Theodore Parker, and I agree that we should accept this challenge. If we take it upon ourselves to learn the true range of his ideas and theories, his attitudes and private prejudices, we will have to confront a mutli-layered and sometimes questionable legacy, some layers worthy of our own passion, others requiring our critical awareness and rejection.
Let us not shy away from this challenge, but carry our inheritance with honor, humility, and responsibility.
May it be so.