History’s Erratics Irish Catholic Dissidents and the Transformation of American Capitalism, 1870–1930 reviewed by James P. Breen
Published in American Catholic Studies, 2026.
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Abstract

, By his own account, David Emmons has been “studying the history of Irish Catholics in America for more than thirty years” (10). History’s Erratics is the culmination of his wide-ranging and careful study, and it is immediately evident that Emmons believes American labor historians have taken neither the Irishness nor the Catholicism of Irish Catholics seriously enough. These distinct but overlapping identities, Emmons argues, “profoundly affected the response of IrishCatholic [sic] workers to modern American capitalism, and to the ways they would contest capitalism’s principles and power” (255)., Emmons writes that Irish Catholics never fully assimilated to American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They could not help but retain their Irish and Catholic values and, thus, were alienated from mainstream American Protestant culture. Emmons borrows the petrological term “erratic” to describe this [End Page 67] cultural difference. Glacial erratics are rocks carried by a glacier and deposited in a new, unfamiliar place. These erratics stand out because they do not belong. They are “rocks of a different order and unlike the rocks all around them” (2). Thus, erratics can only be understood within the context of this glacial journey; they require a deep understanding of their origins. Emmons believes the same is true of Irish Catholics in America. They were “a people out of time and out of place” (3) in the United States, and it is worth understanding why., Emmons describes how the Great Famine and the Irish’s colonial subjugation to England combined to create “ancestral sorrows” (21), borrowing William Butler Yeats’s words, which shaped Irish history and Irish culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, Irish suffering did not cease once crossing the Atlantic. Once arriving in the United States, the Irish “did brutally hard labor for inadequate pay that America might prosper” (22). For Irish radicals, this exploitation at the hands of English masters and American capitalists became inextricably linked. Freedom from one necessarily required the freedom from the other., Emmons also emphasizes the importance of Catholicism to the Irish. To be Irish was to be Catholic, while to be Anglo-American was to be Protestant. This mattered to the development of Irish radicalism because Catholicism was communal and traditional. It was not acquisitive and looked backward. Protestantism, on the other hand, was individualistic and modern. It demanded social mobility and material progress. Thus, for Emmons, Irishness and Catholicism stood starkly opposed to—indeed, occasionally hostile to—the Englishness, Protestantism, and laissez-faire capitalism of the United States., History’s Erratics spends the first three chapters constructing this Irish Catholic working-class culture and explaining how it differed from mainstream American culture. The final four chapters demonstrate how this culture operated in practice. In Chapter 4, Emmons returns to Butte, Montana—the site of his excellent The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925—to show how a seven-month strike of copper miners in 1917 was tied to Ireland’s Easter Rising of 1916. Chapter 5 examines the phenomenon of Irish communists in America, including William Francis Dunne, who effortlessly weaved together stories about American laborers, the Bolshevik Revolution, and Irish nationalism in his newspaper. Chapter 6 analyzes the robust economic critiques that Irish Catholics like Father John Ryan and Francis Patrick Walsh, who Emmons called “the model Catholic Irish contrarian” (210), levied against American capitalism. Chapter 7 focuses on the anti-Irish attitudes of President Woodrow [End Page 68] Wilson, Irish self-determination, and the “semicold war . . . between Ireland and Great Britain and Ireland and the United States” (242). Finally, for those readers who still may be skeptical as to whether these Irish Catholic radicals truly mattered to American history, Emmons uses his lengthy Epilogue to suggest that “literally everything the New Deal tried to do can be found in the political playbook of IrishCatholic [sic] erratics” (268)., In History’s Erratics, Emmons makes several significant contributions to American labor history. Most importantly, he challenges American labor historians to take religion, especially Catholicism, more seriously in their analysis. Irish Catholic ideas and rituals “were not just folksy superstitions of interest only to ethnologists” (113). When it came to...