As a boy, down south, there were two songs that stirred me as no other songs could—one was a song that I loved and one a song that I hated, and one of these songs was the battle hymn of the south, “Dixieland,” and the other was “Marching Through Georgia.” But once upon a time when I was half-grown, a wandering piper came to the town where I lived, a man who spoke with a brogue and played with one. And he carried under his arm a weird contraption which to me seemed to be a compound of two fishing poles stuck in a hot-water bottle, and he snuggled it to his breast and it squawked out its ecstasy, and then he played on it a tune called “Garryowen.” And as he played it, I found that my toes tingled inside my shoes, and my heart throbbed as I thought it could only throb to the air of “Dixie.” And I took counsel with myself and I said, “Why is it that I who call myself a pure Anglo-Saxon should be thrilled by an Irish air?” So I set out to determine the reason for it. And this is the kind of Anglo-Saxon I found out I was:
My mother was of the strain, the breed of Black Douglas of Scotland, as Scotch as haggis, and rebels, all of them, descendants of men who followed the fortunes of Bonnie Prince Charles, and her mother lived in a county in North Carolina, one of five counties where up to 1820, Gaelic was not only the language of the people in the street, but was the official language of the courts. It was in that selfsame part of North Carolina that there lived some of the men who, nearly a year before our Declaration of Independence was drawn up, wrote and signed the Mecklenburg Declaration, which was the first battle-cry raised for American independence. On the other side, I found, by investigation, that my father’s line ran back straight and unbroken to a thatched cottage on the green side of a hill in the Wicklow Mountains, and his people likewise had some kinsmen in Galway, and some in Dublin with whom, following the quaint custom of their land, they were accustomed to take tea and fight afterwards. (Applause and laughter.) I found I had a collateral ancestor who was out with the pikes in the ’98 and he was taken prisoner and tried for high crimes and misdemeanors against the British Government, and was sentenced to be hanged by the neck until he was dead and might God have mercy on his soul! And he was hanged by the neck until he was dead, and I am sure God did have mercy on his soul, for that soul of his went marching on, transmitting to his people, of whom I am proud to be one, the desire to rebel against oppression and tyranny. (Applause.) 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. But I like to think of another Irishman, Matthew Lyon by name, the son of an humble Wicklow peasant, who was sold as a slave to the New England plantations because he, an Episcopalian, dared to raise his voice and his arm in defense of the rights of his Catholic neighbors and kinsmen in the County of Wicklow; and he bought his freedom with a black bull, which, according to family tradition, he first stole, and he became a United States Senator from Vermont, and cast the vote, against the wishes of his constituents, which made Thomas Jefferson President of this country over Aaron Burr and by so doing altered the entire course of our country’s history; and while he was in jail in a town in Vermont for his attacks on the odious alien and sedition laws, he issued a challenge for a duel to the President of the United States, and being released, he moved down to Kentucky and became a Congressman; and later, having quarreled with all his neighbors there, he moved on to Arkansas and was named as Arkansas’ first territorial delegate to Washington, and he might have moved still further west and might have filled still more offices had he not in the fullness of his maturity, when he was seventy years young, been thrown from a mule and had his neck broken. I like to think of Matthew Lyon and his career because he, also, was an ancestor of mine. (Applause and laughter.)
Well, as I said a bit ago, I set out to trace my Irish ancestry. In that undertaking I found a ready helper in a distant kinsman who was not carried away by the fetish that the south was all Anglo-Saxon, whatever that is; and he worked me early and late on family records. Indeed, he worked me so hard that sometimes I think I might have likened my position to that of a colored brother in a little town in my state who was the only member of his race at the local election who voted the Democratic ticket. 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. Now, he held to the theory, common even among those of the more enlightened races, that a political office meant much honor and much pay but mighty little work. Nevertheless, as a matter of form he carried a shovel with him on the morning when he reported for service. But the white man who was to serve over him had very different ideas regarding the obligation owing to the municipality. No sooner had the darkey cleaned up one pile of debris than the foreman would find another and yet another for him to wrestle with. It was four o’clock in the afternoon before the darkey so much as straightened his back or wiped the sweat off his brow or blew on the new-formed blisters in the palms of his hands. Finally he said: “Boss, ain’t you got nuthin’ to do but jes’ to think up things fur me to do?”
“Yes,” the white man said; “that’s all my job—just to keep you busy.”
The darky said: “Well, suh, in that case you will be pleased to know you ain’t goin’ to be workin’ to-morrow.” (Laughter.)
But I kept on working and I discovered a lot of things about the lost tribes of the Irish in the south. The State of Kentucky from which I hail has been called the cradle of the Anglo-Saxon race in America, and it has been said that the mountaineers of that state, with their feuds and their Elizabethan, Chaucerian methods of speech represent the purest strains of English blood to be found to-day on this continent. Now, then, let us see if that is true. I have looked into that matter and I tell you that fifty per cent, at least, of the dwellers of the mountains of the South and notably of Kentucky and Virginia are the lineal descendants of runaway indenture men, Irish rebels mainly, from the Virginia plantations. I know a mountain county in Kentucky of which half of the population bear one of three names. They are either Mayos, or Patricks, or Powers. And I once heard an orator stand up before an audience of those Mayos and Powers and Patricks and congratulate them on their pure English descent, and they believed it! (Laughter.)
I wish you would pardon me once more for referring to my line of ancestry, for it is testimony to prove my claim. On my father’s side I am descended from a group of men who went from New England to Kentucky and the names of these men were Lyon and Cobb, which is a Danish corruption of O’Connor, and Machen, and Clendenin, and O’Hara, and Glenn, which is a corruption of Glynn. What a hot bunch of Anglo-Saxons! (Laughter.)
The Congressional District in which I was born and where I used to live has thirteen counties in it. Listen to the names of these thirteen counties: Marshall, Calloway, Graves, McCracken, Lyon, Livingston, Caldwell, Trigg, Crittenden, Ballard, Hickman, Fulton, Carlise—thirteen counties and all but two of them have Irish names.
What is true of my own section of Kentucky is true of the rest of the States. Daniel Boone has been called the first explorer of Kentucky and it has been said he was of English descent. Both of those statements are wrong. Daniel Boone was not the first explorer of Kentucky. The first man to explore Kentucky was an Irishman by the name of John Finley. But before him was still another Irishman by the name of McBride—James McBride. He lingers in state history as a shadowy figure, but I like to think of him as a red-haired chap with a rifle in one hand and possibly a demijohn in the other, coming out through the trackless wilderness alone and landing from his canoe on what was afterwards to be known as the Dark and Bloody ground. Aside from his name, it is proven that he was an Irishman by the legendary circumstances that immediately after coming ashore he carved his name in deep and enduring letters in the bark of the largest beech tree of the forest, and claimed all of the land that lay within his vision as his own, and shot an Indian or two and went on his way rejoicing. As for Daniel Boone, the great pathfinder, he really was descended from the line of Buhun, which is Norman-Irish, and his mother was a Morgan, and his wife was a Bryan, and his father was an Irish Catholic.