John P. Irish
John Powell Irish (1843–1923) was a leader of the Democratic Party in the U.S. state of Iowa, a landowner in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta region of California, a fiery and influential public speaker, and an opponent of prejudice against Japanese, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, women's suffrage and labor unions.
"[8] Irish died at the age of eighty on October 6, 1923, from a fall while attempting to board a moving streetcar in Oakland, California.
[4] About Irish's time in Iowa, ex-journalist H.C. Parkhurst, who had known Irish since boyhood, recalled in an essay titled "Western Newspaper Men," written for the Nebraska State Historical Society: As a newspaper publisher, fine public speaker, politician and leading citizen of unblemished name, he won attention and respect.
In the chapter about the Sacramento Valley, for which he was responsible, "John P. Irish implicitly chides those who might denigrate the West by pointing out a wheat field in the irrigated Sacramento Valley nearly twice the size of Rhode Island and worth more than sixteen million dollars, the same amount the federal government paid Mexico in 1848 for California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and parts of Colorado and New Mexico.
[18] Irish helped found the State Home for the Adult Blind,[19] where he was president of the governing board and for twenty-five years was a director.
"Mr. Irish said the home stood as a model for such institutions, not only in the United States, but in European countries" the Associated Press reported.
[20] Irish was one of the Democratic leaders who broke away from William Jennings Bryan over the latter's stand on a monetary system based on silver, and instead lobbied for a gold standard for U.S.
[4] He was a member of the executive committee of the Monetary Congress organized in 1897 in Indianapolis, Indiana, to promote the gold standard.
[22] In September and October 1895 Irish and Thomas V. Cator, who argued in favor of free silver, toured California with a series of debates on the question.
[23] The next year Irish attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago but repudiated the national ticket headed by Bryan, whom he called a "raw man, who has achieved nothing in public or private life to fit him for the Presidency—a man who has won his reputation delivering orations at county fairs and Populist picnics."
"[24] In October 1882, Irish, by then the "principal owner" of the Oakland Times, was attacked by a union printer who attempted to stab him while he was addressing a meeting.
"[14] In a 1906 address to the Starr King Fraternity of the First Unitarian Church of Oakland, Irish assailed "arrogant labor unions" for a rise in juvenile crime because they were "opposed to the apprenticeship of the American boy."
"I now take the opportunity to say publicly that I never employ any one but a "scab," he added, "and in that way enter my protest against a system that is driving our young men into lives of idleness.
[26]In 1913 Irish publicly protested a proposal to exempt unions from the Clayton Antitrust Act then being debated in the Senate.
Typical was this 1911 speech reported in the San Francisco Chronicle: The burden of the argument of Irish was that there could not be power without responsibility.
Colorado had more juvenile delinquents in proportion to population than any other state because the women neglected their home duties to do politics, he said.
[13] In December 1907, Irish opened a campaign for repeal of the Exclusion Act with a speech at a gathering of California fruit growers in Marysville.
"[30] In 1919 Irish published a pamphlet, Japanese Farmers in California, in which he repeated the remarks he had made to the 52nd convention of the California Fruit Growers and Farmers that year, saying that When we treated our treaty with China as a scrap of paper and by the Geary Act excluded thirty thousand Chinese who were legally domiciled here, and by murdering and destroying the property of other Chinese, drove them out, there was created a shortage in farm labor, and this economic vacuum drew in the Japanese, who came protected by a solemn treaty between their government and ours.
In a column in the Los Angeles Times, Irish wrote that the present anti-Japanese agitation, like the anti-Chinese movement of years ago, has the same psychology as the Russian anti-Jewish pogrom, which always starts with the lie that Jews have murdered Christian children to use their blood in the rites of the synagogue.
