Nativism, xenophobia and the villainization of immigrants is alive and well in the United States in 2025.

Sadly, this unfortunate reality is no surprise to anyone familiar with the history of this country. Fear mongering and scapegoating of the millions of peoples from across the world who have come here over the last 250 years is a constant.

This weekend, the streets of downtown Syracuse will be filled with revelers dressed in green taking in the city’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade .

Based on the fervor, the enthusiasm, and the size of the crowds, it seems as if the day provides a small respite from the atomization and polarization that characterizes so much of American life today.

This common heritage somehow bridges the divide, if for just one day.

The fact that everyone seems to have a little Irish in them on St. Patrick’s Day is a testament to how far the Irish have come in America.

Locally, the first Irish settler in the area, Patrick Riley, arrived in Salt Point (Salina) in the spring of 1793, a year before Onondaga County was even formed.

Like the thousands that would follow over the next century, Riley boiled salt. Later, they came as laborers to build the Erie and Oswego Canals. The success of the canals brought more Irish immigrants to the region, and many of them found work in the booming salt industry as coopers, rakers, and boilers.

Irish immigration to the country and the region exploded after the Great Potato Famine, which ravaged Ireland from 1845 to 1852. Though the catalyst for the famine was a fungus that decimated the potato crop on which so many Irish depended, the scope of the tragedy was a byproduct of more than a century of draconian British colonial polices against the Irish people.

This combination of economic opportunity and the hope of freedom led nearly 1.5 million Irish to emigrate to America between 1845 and 1855 alone.

They brought a deep pride for their aggrieved homeland with them.

By the early 1840s, parades and banquets honoring St. Patrick were a regular part of the Salt City’s civic and social calendar.

By 1855, March 17 had been a day of celebration and good cheer for thousands of Syracusans of Irish descent for well over three decades.

Yet, as Syracuse’s sizable and ever-expanding Irish population set to prepare for their annual celebration in 1855, Patrick H. Agan, the editor of the Syracuse Standard , a newspaper owned by Moses Summers, an Irish immigrant himself who settled in Syracuse in 1841, found it necessary to offer his readers a timely tale and exhortation.

After a concise history of the origins of the holiday (the celebration of St. Patrick’s birthday, March 17, 387 C.E.), Agan offered an insightful description of the city’s rancorous political climate, which he feared might warrant a cancellation of the annual festivities.

By way of contrast, Mr. Agan noted that although technically a religious holiday for Catholic’s celebrating Ireland’s patron saint, St. Patrick’s Day, especially in the United States, had come to be celebrated by even Protestant Irish as a “national festival, without any reference to its religious character.”

Considering the sordid and bloody history between these groups, Agan saw this as a welcome, if unexpected, development capable of happening only America.

Much of that ethnic pride and camaraderie amongst the many “exiles of Erin,” as Agan referred to his fellow Irishmen in America, sprang from the long struggle against England to forge an independent Irish Republic, much like their American cousins had done decades earlier.

The nationalist sentiments many brought with them to the United States were strengthened by their shared experiences as immigrants and the challenges they faced.

Like nearly every other immigrant group that has come to the United States, the Irish in the first half of the 19th century faced widespread prejudice and discrimination.

Echoing these sentiments in 1852, three years before Agan’s editorial, Robert McCarthy, son of Thomas McCarthy, one of Onondaga County’s pioneer Irish settlers, and brother of Dennis McCarthy, a future U.S. Congressman, reminded a large crowd assembled at Syracuse’s Globe Hotel, “Irishmen were present at the signing of the declaration, and their names are theron recorded. They were in our battle fields and their bones whiten on our plains.”

Yet, these historical realities did little to dampen the growing nativist sentiments developing in 1850s America, as millions fled Europe seeking refuge across the Atlantic.

These Irish immigrants found a country, and a region, coming apart at the seams over slavery.

Characterized by extreme polarization, violence, and rising nativist sentiments, the tempestuous nature of American politics proved to be challenging environment for these new arrivals as both sides of the widening divide looked to use them to further their own political ends.

In this crucible of conflict and vitriol, the situation for many Irish immigrants across the country and here in Central New York became increasingly dangerous.

Following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, the country’s two major parties, the Democrats and the Whigs, began to factionalize.

The political fallout was felt as far away as Onondaga County, where an “Anti-Nebraska” convention met in August. In January 1855, hordes of pro-slavery “border ruffians” were spilling into Kansas, laying the groundwork for a violent confrontation that erupted in 1856 known as “Bleeding Kansas.”

This fractionalization ultimately led to the creation of the new Republican Party, a motley coalition made up of free-soilers, anti-slavery advocates, anti-Catholic and nativist voters.

By the time Patrick Agan penned his editorial lamenting the “excited state of public feeling at the present time” that he presumed would “cause the celebration to be omitted this year,” Central New York, long a hive of political activity and frequent host of state-wide political party conventions, had become a fertile ground for the young American Party.

Started as a secret society in 1849 dedicated to anti-immigration and anti-Catholicism, members denied the group’s existence.

The “Know-Nothing’s,” became the first electorally successful third-party in the United States making a case that immigration was bad for native-born American laborers and for American democracy.

This message found a receptive audience in Central New York.

On February 13, 1855, just about a month before St. Patrick’s Day, 1,700 delegates to the New York State Council of Know Nothings convened in Syracuse’s Corinthian Hall. Among their policy proposals was a constitutional amendment to ban anyone from voting “unless he be by birth a citizen of the United States.”

A few weeks later, the Know-Nothing’s in Syracuse suffered a stinging electoral defeat that fed their conspiratorial ideas about election tampering, though it was much welcomed by Patick Agan.

Such was the “excited state of public feeling” he referred to. In this climate, he believed that the usual “public procession or evening banquet” did not seem safe.

“Americans,” he continued, “who in former years, were eager to sing the praises of Erin’s Isle and make public demonstrations of sympathy for her exiled sons and daughters…are now as eager to join the fanatical cry of down with the Irish, and proscription to Catholics.”

Agan concluded his sorrowful epistle with a message as instructive to his contemporaries as it is to posterity, “The excitement will soon calm down and pass off to the region of bigotry and intolerance where it originated. It is probable that effigies of St. Patrick, with the usual ornaments of codfish and potatoes, will be found suspended in various parts of the city, and perhaps even the liberty pole will be prostituted to this insult upon Irish citizens - We advise Irishmen to pay no attention to such insults. Let the effigies hang until they are taken down by Americans in shame.”

As it turned out, in a situation relatable to current inhabitants of Syracuse, the weather was “gloomy and the streets not overcrowded with people or teams.”

That did not stop what Agan reported was the lamentable sight of several “short-haired exiles of Erin who had undergone the pickling process,” in one city’s many “whiskey mills” from staggering around the streets.

170 years later, bigotry and intolerance have yet to pass off to the region where they originated.

Agan’s final sentence echoed more high-minded sentiments that have also failed to materialize. “And above all, let every Irishman refrain from intoxicating drinks, which have done more to debase and degrade the Irish people than all the persecution of England, or the Know-Nothingism of America.”

R obert Searing’s weekly articles are supported by the William G. Pomeroy Public History Media Series. To learn more about the William G. Pomeroy Foundation’s work to promote public history, visit wgpfoundation.org.