AND ANOTHER THING
How New York's Governor, Pataki, compels teachers to lie to kids
PAUL JOHNSON
Who now merits the title of the Greatest Liar in America, left vacant by the late and unlamented Lillian Hellman, of whom Mary McCarthy said, 'Every word she writes is a lie, including "and" and "the" '? I have been inclined to award it to the character assassin Christopher Hitchens, who recently poured his menda- cious filth over Mother Teresa. But a new challenger has arisen. Step forward, Gover- nor George E. Pataki of New York! On 9 October, this Ananias of Albany, this Miin- chausen of the Hudson, signed a law which not only suggests or advises but actually compels New York state schools to teach their pupils that the Irish potato famine of 1845-49 was deliberately caused by the British. 'History teaches us', said this per- jured prestidigitator, 'that the Great Irish Hunger was not the result of a massive fail- ure of the Irish potato crop but rather was the result of a deliberate campaign by the British to deny the Irish people the food they needed to survive'.
I am not sure that even Stalin, when rewriting the Soviet Encyclopaedia to suit his changing policies, or Joseph Goebbels, when canying out his strategy of the Big Lie, went as far as Pataki. For what in fact he is doing is forcing New York state teach- ers, on pain of dismissal, to tell innocent children something which they know to be a complete fabrication. For anyone who has so much as glanced at the contempo- rary documents about the famine, which exist in staggering abundance and have been worked over in scores of monographs, is aware that Pataki is lying. I trust that one or more of these teachers will flatly refuse to lie on Pataki's political behalf and take the issue to the courts. And I have no doubt at all that the New York State Court of Appeal or, if necessary, the Supreme Court in Washington will rule this statute unconstitutional. In the meantime, it is of interest to look once more at the facts of the potato famine, because in this instance they have an ironic twist.
The best essay on the Irish potato was written by Henry Hobhouse in 1985 in a fascinating book, Seeds of Change: Five Plants that Transformed Mankind, published by HarperCollins. There are three pota- toes: the yam, the sweet potato or Ipomoea batatas, and the true white or Irish potato, Solanum tuberosum, which was originally grown in the High Andes. It reached Europe from America in the 16th century — possibly got to Ireland via the wrecked ships of the Armada — and became a sta- ple in Ireland about 1625. The potato was produced by what was known as the lazybed system, which was extraordinarily economic of labour and enabled a narrow strip of indifferent land 500 yards long to feed an entire family throughout the year. The Irish made lazybed farming of potatoes universal in the south and west and it was for them both a blessing and a curse. With death rates, especially of infants, falling fast as they did in the 18th and 19th centuries, Ireland underwent a population explosion such as the world has seldom seen. Between 1760 and 1840 the Irish people increased from 1.5 million to 9 million, a rise of 600 per cent in 80 years. This was particularly marked in southern Catholic Ireland, where in the 40 years, 1801 to 1841, the population multiplied five times over. The potato fed them all; or rather, it did when things went well.
Apart from the earliest years of the set- tlement of America in the 17th century, Americans have never been in danger of starvation and famines are unknown to them. They were a common occurrence in Europe, however. Britain was the first European country to become famine-free, thanks to the agricultural revolution of the 18th century. But Ireland was another mat- ter. The Irish census of 1851 lists all the periods of food shortage in Ireland from 1724 to 1849, and I commend it to the attention of anyone in America who is actually interested in truth. Between 1724 and 1749 there were five failures of the potato crop, one of them severe. Between 1750 and 1774 there were five years of 'dis- tress', two of them bad enough to be classi- fied as 'famine'. Between 1775 and 1799 there were another five years of distress, one of them famine (though it was confined to Ulster). Between 1800 and 1824, there were nine distressed years, five at the famine level, and in 1821-22, the worst famine: probably 250,000 people died of hunger and related diseases. Between 1825 'Like the ones we got on fish.' and 1849 no fewer than 14 out of 25 years were classified as 'distress', of which eight were famine (sometimes local), including the Great Famine. In other words, the problem was endemic, and it tended to worsen as the population increased, depen- dency on the potato grew and disease made the crop more precarious.
These diseases — Governor Pataki, please note — nearly all came from Ameri- ca, as did the original article. In the 1750s, a fungus disease, Fusarium caendeum, which rotted potatoes in store, appeared. Next was leaf-curl, transmitted by aphids (this came from Europe). Then, in 1795, Botrytis cinerea, which attacks a variety of plants, crossed into Ireland. And in 1833 (appeared a new horror, blackleg. Finally came the most devastating crop-killer of all, blight, still a scourge of healthy pota- toes. This fungus, Phytophthora infestans, came, as Hobhouse puts it, 'from some dark reservoir of American genetic mis- chief', and only appeared on the European side of the Atlantic in June 1845, in the Isle of Wight. It then spread rapidly and by 1 August had been reported in every country in mainland Europe. It first hit Ireland later that month. It was calamitous in its consequences and reappeared periodically until the experts found a remedy for it in the 1920s.
Now here we come to the ironic bit. The disease had been reported and recognised two years before, in 1843, in the United States. A detailed study by E.C. Large, The Advance of the Fungi, published in 1940, shows that blight came to the Isle of Wight from the United States, very likely from a potato peeling thrown overboard from an American ship in the Solent. Why did not the authorities in New York State, the Port of New York in particular, take steps to prevent the export of this deadly killer, which starved so many Irish people to death? Because New York was a very cor- rupt place. Only a few years before, Samuel Swartwout, Collector of New York Cus- toms, had fled to Europe, taking with him $1,222,705.09, the biggest official theft in American history. In 1843 New York State had an incompetent governor, as it has a lying one now. But no purpose is served by apportioning blame for this ancient catas- trophe. And it is an insult to the memory of the dead Irish to invent fantasies about them in the hope of getting a few dirty votes from living ones.
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