American holidays are in many respects reflections of American values and culture, reminding us of who we are and what's most important to us. And America is such a melting pot of diverse values and cultures that even holidays designed to honor one are eventually adopted and beloved by all.
This is the Forgotten History of the American Holiday.
St. Patrick wasn't Irish. That's what makes his story so special. He was born Maewyn Succat in a town in Roman-occupied Britain in the late 300s AD but later adopted the Roman name Patricius. As a teenager, he was captured by pirates and enslaved for six years. He had never been much of a religious child even though his father was a deacon in the Christian Church, but as a slave, he found God and converted.
After he escaped and made his way home to Britain, his faith kept him from being bitter at the Irish pagans who had enslaved him and he decided to return to the country in order to convert it. Using the three-leafed shamrock to teach the Irish natives about the Holy Trinity, he succeeded, and within a century or so Ireland became a bastion of Christianity.
For more than a thousand years, Ireland marked his birthday--March 17th--with mass and feasts in celebration of a foreigner who changed their nation forever.
Yet no nation was as changed by St. Patrick's Day as the United States, who turned it into a uniquely American celebration of the foreigners who helped build it. Amid the Irish potato blight of the 1840s, poor Catholic immigrants flooded into America by the tens of thousands, largely settling in New York City and Boston. They were despised, just as Irish immigrants had largely been despised throughout the nation's history.
In 1772, homesick British soldiers patrolling colonial New York marched through the city to a breakfast feast in what is considered the first St. Patrick's Day parade in the country's history. But as the few Irish immigrants in the new nation celebrated their traditional feast, Americans resented them for it because it was seen as a vestige of the hated British colonial rule.
American nativists began "paddy making"--burning effigies of Irishmen with potatoes and bottles of whiskey in their hands until the practice was banned in the early 1800s. Still, the resentment of the Irish in America grew with each wave of immigration until it reached a boiling point midway through the century.
But then, the Civil War broke out. Hundreds of thousands of those Irish immigrants enlisted and served the Union with distinction. At long last, they started to gain acceptance.
And St. Patrick's Day became the perfect way to honor their contributions to American society, especially in New York and Boston, where politicians began to curry their favor to win their votes and attended their parades and celebrations en masse.
St. Patrick's Day became the vehicle by which Irish immigrants became Americans, as the broader culture celebrated their traditions with them but they assimilated into that broader culture to create a celebration that serves as the perfect metaphor the cultural melting pot that America had become.
The traditional Irish meal of ham and cabbage became corned beef and cabbage when Irish immigrants purchased cheap salted beef from Chinese merchant sailors in New York's harbor. The Industrial Revolution allowed for the mass production of green clothes and hats and eventually green beer that became staples of American St. Patrick's Day parties, where people of all races, religions and creeds were on one day a year at least a little bit Irish