Uncle Sam's Lodging House

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Uncle Sam's Lodging House

This cartoon, published in Puck in the 1880s, reinforces the stereotype of the Irishman as an essentially combative troublemaker. Uncle Sam reprimands him, "Look here, you, everybody else is quiet and peaceable, and you're all the time a-kicking up a row!"  The editorial that accompanied the cartoon asserted: "the raw Irishman in America is a nuisance, his son a curse. They never assimilate; the second generation simply shows an intensification of all the bad qualities of the first. . . .They are a burden and a misery to this country."  From the Balch Institues Broadside collection.