Photo of the Day: Irish Famine Monument, Cambridge MA

Some monuments—notably, those honoring Confederate heroes—are built in a relatively short period of time. Others—including this one, which I photographed on a trip to Boston and its surrounding area in 2008—are erected far later.

The Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s resulted in an estimated 1 million deaths and another million who emigrated to escape starvation, disease and grinding poverty. But those statistics don’t even begin to convey the trauma suffered by those who endured it. It affected the destinies of two countries—Ireland, which could never forget that a blight affected their potatoes but their British overlords produced the starvation; and the United States, where the Irish became the prototypical immigrant group.

For more than a century, the memory of that catastrophe was an open wound, best left to be forgotten by those who lived through it and their descendants. But in time, as the Irish carved out their niche in the United States, they not only began to probe the causes and effects of the famine, but also sought to commemorate it in tangible form, as in statuary.

Canbridge's Irish Famine Monument, located on Cambridge Common and cast by Maurice Carron, shows a family torn apart by the Great Hunger. It was dedicated in 1997, on the 150^th anniversary of the deadliest year of the famine, by Irish President Mary Robinson.

Carved on the memorial’s base is the central lesson learned about this massive tragedy: “"Never again should a people starve in a world of plenty."

Quote of the Day (Pat Moynihan, Summarizing British Reactions to Past and More Recent Famines)

“I really did feel I was talking to Sir Charles Trevelyan 122 years ago, assuming all was well in Connaught, that the new potato crop was coming along nicely, and that in any event the Irish always were a bit disorganized.”—Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then assistant to the President for Urban Affairs in the Nixon administration, describing a meeting with a British official who claimed the malnutrition producing famine in Biafra was only 5 or 10 percentage points above normal, quoted in Sam Roberts, “Papers Show Moynihan in Full Voice Under Nixon,” The New York Times, July 3, 2010

You might think that it was mostly by academic training that the late Senator Moynihan possessed a long memory. But the tart voice coming out of the memo quoted above could only come from an Irishman with total recall for historical wrongs.

Moynihan’s sometimes vaguely Anglophilia manner (enhanced by a stint as a Fulbright Scholar at the London School of Economics in the early 1950s, as well as by a donnish air) could sometimes put people off. But anger over the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, at least on this one occasion, led him to burst out more like a former denizen of Hell’s Kitchen than Harvard Yard.

The bureaucrat Charles Trevelyan—father of the British civil service, and, in the late 1840s, the treasury administrator with primary responsibility for Irish famine relief—is the dominating sensibility—obtuse, hidebound by economic ideology—of Cecil Woodham-Smith’s great history of the Potato Famine, The Great Hunger.

The identity of the British official of the late 1960s who provoked Moynihan’s outburst is unclear from the Times article, but I certainly believe his type existed.

After all, that long blindness on the part of many British government officials persists into our own time. After all, it took the 12-year, $295 million inquiry by Lord Saville before a Conservative Party government finally admitted that government troops had fired without provocation on Ulster Catholics in a 1972 civil-rights march, in the day that will be forever known as Bloody Sunday.

Massachusetts Travel Journal—Day Three (Cambridge)

Maybe if you live in an area long enough you get used to such matters as a crazy quilt of roads and parking garages of endless levels. But I was a tourist, so getting around Cambridge posed something of a problem for me today.

When I finally found a space in the Aylwife parking garage, I went down to the T station and took the Red Line to Harvard Square. The day was as raw as yesterday, so I clutched my scarf even harder than before.

Next to the information booth kiosk at Harvard Square, I took a Cambridge Advantage Tour offered by Vince Dixon. Dressed in a green shirt and black tricorn hat, Vince offered a fact-filled two-hour walk through the Co-Op, Harvard Yard, Radcliffe Yard, and Cambridge Commons.

On Cambridge Commons, I was surprised—and glad to see—a statue commemorating Ireland’s Great Hunger of the 1840s—the first statue of its kind in New England. (Former Irish President Mary Robinson came to its dedication in 1997.) My photo accompanies this post.

At the conclusion of that tour, I walked down Brattle Street until I came to the Longfellow House. How could a mere poet afford such a magnificent structure? On the National Park Service tour, I found out: he’d married the daughter of a textile manufacturer, whose daughter prevailed upon him not merely to buy this house, but all the land stretching in a line from here to the Charles River!

Nearly 60 years before the happy couple moved in, the house had been abandoned by a notorious Loyalist and taken over by George Washington as his headquarters during the siege of Boston. Longfellow’s study had been the room where Washington conferred with Henry Knox about hauling the cannon from Fort Ticonderoga that were used to force the British out of Boston, and the rooms Longfellow had rented briefly as a young Harvard professor where the same ones where Washington had slept during his months here.