As unlikely as it seems today, at one time the Irish were considered to be the absolute scourge of the City of Boston. The corridors of power throughout the city were filled with the Brahmin establishment — descendants of the English who had settled Eastern Massachusetts and had founded Boston, and had dominated every aspect of the upper echelons of society. The Irish were savages, barely human, and, worst of all, Catholic. But there were a lot of the freckle-faced bastards, and there was no stopping them from celebrating the holy day of their national saint, St. Patrick, and thus bringing the city to a halt, since all those Irish worked in every menial, yet critical, job in the city. So, the blue-blooded, Protestant old-money elite did the only thing they could do: invent their own holiday to justify the day off and, hopefully, subvert the bog-trotters at their own game. Just about anything that they could have come up with to commemorate would have sufficed, but they got lucky that there was a marginally noteworthy event from the Revolutionary War that happened on March 17, 1776: it turned out to be the day the British troops quit Boston after holding the city under siege for almost a full year. Since that particular anniversary had the local cred of celebrating the Patriots, which is always good for something in Massachusetts, the Lodges and the Cabots declared “Evacuation Day” as an official state holiday in 1901. Years later, in 1938, even though the Irish had by that time even elected their own kind to the office of mayor, the holiday became more specific to Suffolk County (basically the City of Boston plus the surrounding suburbs of Revere, Winthrop, and Chelsea. It’s also a school holiday in the cities of Cambridge and Somerville), while the rest of the state gave in to the leprechauns, green beer, and parades of Irish-American clubs.
Local historian J. L. Bell posts today about the events of that day in March, 1776 with a first-hand account from someone who was probably attached to George Washington’s army, headquartered in Cambridge, describing the “wretched fleet” of small transports and a trio of men-o-wars as they looked at first to be heading toward some of the islands in Boston Harbor, but then sailed away. They joined the main British force which held New York and successfully so until the end of the Revolutionary War. New York has its own Evacuation Day holiday in late November, which has absolutely nothing to do with the Irish or Saint Patrick’s Day.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
That’s hysterical! I did not know that about Boston. Although St. Patrick’s Day is also huge in New York and Philly, other cities with considerable ethnic Catholic populations. (My mom lived in the Polish Catholic section of Philly, my dad in the German Catholic section.)
Oddly, St. Patrick’s Day is also huge in Southern California, which strikes me as odd since the population here is neither especially Irish nor especially Catholic. Here, it’s more an excuse to get schnockered than anything else. We have a larger Hispanic population, with the result that Cinco de Mayo (Ben and I call it Cinco de Drinko) is as big here as St. Paddy’s Day is back East.
Evacuation Day. Hee. I would so totally take that personally if I were an Irish Catholic Bostonian.
It was meant to be taken personally. It was the Olde Tyme equivalent of saying “Fuck you!” to the Irish
I have a funny joke about evacuation, but you sort of beat me to it.