Irvin S. Cobb

“ No, ladies and gentlemen, the lost Irish tribes of the South are not lost; they are not lost any more than the “wild geese” that flew across the Channel from Ireland were lost. They are not lost any more than the McMahons who went to France, or the O’Donnells who went to Spain, or the Simon Bolivars and the O’Higgins who went to South America, or the O’Farrells and the O’Briens who went to Cuba. For their Irish blood is of the strain that cannot be extinguished and it lives to-day, thank God, in the attributes and the habits and the customs and the traditions of the Southern people. ”

“ I believe as firmly as I believe anything on earth that for that veneration, for that love of heroism and for that joying in the ideals of its soil, the South is indebted mainly to the Irish blood that courses through the veins of its sons and of its daughters. ”

“ It was the north of France that produced and yet produces those men who have harnessed the forces of nature, who have made the earth tremble to the pulse-beat of their factories, who took the ore from the earth and the coal from the hillsides, and with them wrought out the great steel industries of that country; but it was out of the south of France that there came its marvelous fiction writers and minstrel-bards, its greatest poets and its greatest dreamers ”

“ The children of the pioneers of Kentucky, almost without exception, learned their first lessons in log cabins under the teachings of that strange but gifted race of men, the wandering Irish schoolmasters, who founded the old field schools of the South and to whom the South is largely indebted for the seeds of its culture. ”

“ Irishmen from Kentucky, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland bore the brunt of the western campaigns in 1812 against the British. Irishmen from Kentucky fell thick at the disastrous battles of the Thames, and the Raison, and their Irish bones to-day rest in that ground sanctifying it and making of it an American shrine of patriotism. It was the hand of a Kentucky Irishman, Colonel Richard Johnson, afterwards Vice-President of the United States, that slew the great Tecumseh. ”

“ What is true of Kentucky is to a greater or less degree true of the rest of the South. It was an Irish Virginian, Patrick Henry, who sounded the first keynote of the American Revolution, and who at the risk of his life, by his words paved the way for the Declaration of Independence. The South Carolina Irishman, John C. Calhoun, first raised the slogan of Nullification, and it was another Irishman, Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, who swore by the Eternal to hang him higher than Haman if he carried out his plan. ”

“ The records show that nearly three-fourths of that dauntless little band who under the leadership of George Rogers Clark, an Irishman, waded through the floods to take Vincennes and thereby won all the great northwest territory away from the British and gave to the American colonies what to-day is the richest part of the United States, where Irishmen—not Scotch-Irish, nor English-Irish, but plain Irish-Irish men who were rebels and patriots by instinct and born adventurers by reason of the blood which ran in their veins. ”

“ I had three great grandfathers, two of them Irish and one of them Scotch, who were Revolutionary soldiers, and I had a father who was a Confederate soldier. And of these facts, too, I am quite proud, for I find that my strain, being Irish, is always intent either on trying to run the government or trying to pull it down.
You Irish-descended people of the Northern States are proud of Shields, the son of an Irish emigrant, who, if my memory serves me aright, helped to direct the destinies of three American commonwealths and was United States Senator from all three. ”

“ The north of Ireland, as we all know, has fathered the great business men of that little island, and the great manufacturers and the great theologians, many of them; and, regretful to say, it has also produced a spawn of human beings who, in the face of the fact that in every other land where men have equal opportunities, the Irishman has won his way to the front and has held his own with prince and potentate, yet cling to the theory that in Ireland, of all the spots of the world, the Irishman is not capable of governing himself. ”

“ The names of the Poid Milanaise and the Lombards and the Venetians of northern Italy are synonymous with frugality in domestic affairs and energy in commercial pursuits, but it is down in the tip of the toe of the Latin boot that we find the Italian who loves the hardest and sings the loudest and fights for the very love of the fighting. ”

“ It was felt that such loyalty should be rewarded, so the incoming administration created a Department of Street Cleaning—an institution hitherto unknown in that community—to consist of a boss or foreman, and a staff. Quite naturally the job of foreman went to a white man, but upon the worthy colored person was conferred the honor of being the Staff. ”