A SLIGHTLY LATE HAPPY ST. PATRICK’S DAY: Today, to be Irish American is to be a typical member of the “white majority.” They’re told they’ve been living a life of “white privilege.” But, if so, it was not always thus. Maybe it’s a good time to remember the tough times …

By all accounts, nineteenth-century Ireland—from which Irish immigrants to this country fled by the boatloads—was a remarkably dismal place even before the Great Potato Famine. As Gustave de Beaumont, traveling companion to Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote in the 1830s: “I have seen the Indian in his forests and the Negro in his chains, and thought, as I contemplated their pitiable condition, that I saw the very extreme of human wretchedness; but I did not know then the condition of unfortunate Ireland.”

With the famine, things took an almost unimaginable turn for the worse. In a short period of time, the potato, Ireland’s staple crop, essentially disappeared. One and a half million, half-starved souls were cast upon American shores in the years between 1845 and 1855. And these were the lucky ones. Out of Ireland’s population of eight million, around one million died.

When these rural immigrants got off the boat, many were illiterate, unskilled and ill-equipped for urban life. Not everyone sympathized with them. Friedrich Engels, who regarded himself a champion of the workingman, viewed the Irish immigrant to Great Britain as having a “crudity” that “places him little above the savage.” For work requiring skill or patience, Engels complained, “the dissolute, unsteady, drunken Irishman is on too low a plane.” Here in America, many agreed with Engels’ assessment. “No Irish” signs went up. And for decades, Irish neighborhoods had more than their share of crime, prostitution, and other urban pathologies.

Yet despite all these difficulties, things eventually worked out. It’s the kind of story that makes me optimistic about America and quite willing to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day as a day of revelry.