It was a demented comment. Like the parent commenter, I'm living in a city built in large part by Irish and Italian immigrants (as well as members of a couple of other ethnic groups which people are happy to mock, if they're the kind of people who mock ethnic groups) well before FDR was elected (WTF?) and... I just don't know where to begin...

What’s the relevance of their service in WWII? I’m not questioning their character, I’m pointing out their immigration fundamentally changed the country, which is undeniably true. In the aggregate, Irish American culture was (and maybe still is) different from the founding cultures of the US. The Irish immigrants did not have an established tradition of small-scale self governance the way the founding Americans did. So when they were given the vote, they voted to change the country.[1]

As I said above, we can argue about whether those changes were good or bad. My point is that the changes were fundamental. The country was supposed to look more like New Hampshire than New York.

[1] I go to a church that happens to have a high representation of northeastern Congregationalists. We had an ice breaker activity where we went around and talked about what we liked to cook. They were almost apologetic about it. They started their stories with “well I grew up being taught cooking was just for sustenance, …” They cut donuts in half at events so nobody feels tempted to take more than they should eat. It is incomprehensible to me as someone from South Asia. But it’s the basis for a worldview that does affect how those people would run the country: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/opinion/george-bush-wasps...

I'm loath to engage more with this weird anti-Irish prejudice, but I should point out that your blaming the Irish (and Italians apparently?) for FDR is ahistorical. FDR won 42 of 48 states and won the popular vote against Hoover by 17%, about 7 million votes. The total number of Irish immigrants who arrived in the US during that time was like 350k [1]. Needless to say, FDR was also not Catholic.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Americans#Mid-19th_centu...

In 1930, the foreign born population was 15% of the population, and Catholics were an (overlapping) 16%. Both groups voted overwhelmingly for FDR (80-90%).

How is it “prejudiced” against Irish or Italians to point out that their voting as a bloc fundamentally changed the country during the 20th century?

I had something here to refute your point, but I realized that there's nothing to be gained in trying to combat some bizarre attempt to resurrect the Know-Nothing Party as a shambling zombie on a thread nobody is reading, so I'm done.

> The country was supposed to look more like New Hampshire than New York.

Really? Where is that written, and by whom?

New Hampshire as of 1491?

The Federalist Papers.