“I am sorry to find that England is right about the lower class of Irish,” wrote George Templeton Strong, the influential New York lawyer and diarist, a pillar of the city’s Episcopalian elite. “They are brutal, base, cruel cowards.” Further, he saw them as subhuman, as he recorded in his private notes—“creatures that crawl and eat dirt and poison every community they infest.” He wanted them gone from the country.
