In this provocative and engaging book, David Emmons argues that cultural divergence between American Protestants and Irish Catholic immigrants played a more important role in shaping class conflict and US capitalism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than scholars have assumed. By the time Irish Catholics arrived on American shores in large numbers after the Great Famine of the 1840s, Anglo Protestants had already imprinted their culture on the fledgling nation and become a dominant force in both politics and economics. They viewed Irish Catholic immigrants with disdain, perceiving them as a “flawed people of a false faith” (p. 1). Irish Catholic immigrants brought with them an intense Anglophobia, viewing themselves as exploited victims of British colonial rule. Emmons uses a geological metaphor to explain the role he believes that Irish Catholics played in the United States. He suggests that they were like glacial “erratics” – alien pieces of rock and soil picked up from one geographical area and deposited on another, quite different from whence they came (p. 2).

Irish Catholics, Emmons argues, were cultural erratics in America because they “were out of time and out of place” (p. 3). They found it difficult to assimilate, partly because they came from a premodern society and exhibited premodern attitudes toward industrial work and time discipline. Although many émigrés from other countries experienced a similar time warp upon moving to America, the evolving Protestant work ethic in the United States particularly chafed at Irish Americans because their long history of exploitation by the British and their devotional Catholicism made them question Protestant values linking industriousness and the acquisition of material wealth with godliness. In contrast to American Anglo Protestants, Irish Catholics tended to value the well-being of the community over individual success.

Further fueling animosities between the two groups were the continued assaults on Irish immigrants by American Protestant political and intellectual elites, who viewed them as slaves to popery and a danger to democracy. American Protestant businessmen derided the Irish for their allegedly lax work efforts and as unfit for any but the most menial and low paying jobs. Although many scholars have documented the anti-Irish sentiments of American Protestant elites, Emmons breaks new ground in demonstrating the extent to which American Protestant reformers shared these sentiments, including abolitionists, Social Gospel activists, and leading socialists. This hostility led Irish Catholic working-class activists to carve out independent spheres for themselves. Some worked within the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to develop trade unions that became safe havens for Irish Catholics. Others built on Irish traditions of communalism and on Catholic doctrine to promote radical visions of industrial democracy. As an example of the latter, Emmons uses Irish American labor lawyer Frank Walsh, who President Wilson appointed to the Commission on Industrial Relations in 1913. Walsh and his allies on the committee conducted investigations of work conditions around the country and wrote a final majority report that outlined a comprehensive program to democratize industrial relations and to allow workers to participate in managerial decisions in industry. Emmons suggests that their report circulated widely and may have influenced the Irish nationalists who rebelled against Britain in 1916.

The 1916 Irish Easter Rising, in turn, influenced Irish American trade unionists, who were particularly inspired when Irish Socialist James Connolly proclaimed the birth of an independent Irish Worker’s Republic shortly after Irish forces occupied government buildings in Dublin. The British execution of rebel leaders following their surrender outraged Irish Americans and provoked strong resistance to the United States entering World War I on the British side. Emmons demonstrates this point with a case study of Butte, Montana, home to a large community of Irish American miners. Many of these workers belonged to a local conservative trade union that had historically pursued amicable relations with the mine owners. During World War I, however, Irish syndicalist leader James Larkin visited Butte regularly to propagate antiwar and anti-conscription sentiment. Pearse-Connolly Irish Independence Clubs appeared in the city and worked in alliance with local Finnish and Industrial Workers of the World activists to further fuel antiwar sentiment. When a fire erupted at one of the copper mines and killed hundreds of workers in 1917, a strike ensued. Emmons suggests that a volatile mix of work-place issues, antiwar sentiments, and Irish nationalism were all likely important in encouraging the normally conservative Irish American miners to persist in their strike activities for over seven months.

Butte was but one example, among many, of increased Irish American labor militancy during the war. Many elites responded by equating support for the Irish Sinn Féin movement with the new threat of Bolshevism. Yet, although a few Irish activists, including James Larkin, became “Celtic Communists”, a more unique and enduring brand of Irish American radicalism rooted in communal Irish traditions persisted among those promoting democratic control of industry and a greater US commitment to anti-colonialism around the globe (p. 147). This distinctly Irish American strain of labor reform lay dormant during the 1920s but re-emerged in the 1930s with the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the reforms of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Emmons makes a persuasive case for the importance of cultural divergence between American Protestants and Irish American Catholics in shaping the class struggle and US capitalism during the period from 1870–1930. Inevitably in such a tour de force, there are omissions that raise questions about some of his analysis. In his discussions of nineteenth-century Protestant reformers, Emmons neglects American Protestant reformer Henry George, who many supporters of the Irish Land League in Ireland and the United States idolized. Both George and Land League activists might object to Emmons characterization of Irish immigrants as premodern, as they believed the struggle over land ownership, and the rights of agricultural workers and tenant farmers, were a critical component of the ongoing international class struggle.Footnote ¹

Emmons also avoids consideration of the US labor party movement of the post-World War I era led by Irish American and Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL) President John Fitzpatrick. Like Frank Walsh, Fitzpatrick and other party leaders operated on the “seam” of labor and Irish nationalist activism and produced a party platform that supported very direct forms of industrial democracy as well as a strongly anti-imperialist foreign policy (p. 5). In contrast to Walsh, Fitzpatrick remained deeply embedded in a working-class world and struggled with how to win support for the labor party movement and a drive for industrial unions in the city’s stockyards and steel mills among a multiethnic and multiracial work force. Minutes of CFL meetings illuminate the Labor Party’s syncretic roots; German and Polish Socialists, Mexican anarchists, Irish syndicalists, and Irish Sinn Féiners all contributed ideas for the Chicago Labor Party’s platform. For a few years, the labor party movement spread like “a prairie fire” across the American heartland until AFL opposition, ethnic and racial divisiveness, and a communist insurgency in the ranks forced the CFL to end its experiment in labor politics. To use a famous phrase by British historian E.P. Thompson, whose work Emmons discusses at length, the Chicago example suggests that the process by which “class happens” proved more complex in the United States than in Britain or Ireland during this era. It required that local Irish American labor leaders evolve to become more multicultural and pluralistic. The experiences of local labor activists, such as those in Chicago and Butte, likely proved more important in shaping the attitudes and strategies of grassroots CIO activists in the 1930s than Walsh’s work in Washington, D.C.Footnote ²

One other issue deserves comment. To his credit, Emmons addresses an exhaustive range of secondary sources related to his major themes. The one curious shortcoming here is his neglect of literature by historians such as David Roediger and Noel Ignatiev on how some Irish Americans “became white”.Footnote ³ This is not to say Emmons ignores race entirely. He uses Bruce Nelson’s scholarship to demonstrate how Irish patriots believed the Irish bid for independence was exceptional because it sought to end white colonialism. He also suggests that some Irish American radicals nonetheless emphasized the need for the Irish to embrace ongoing struggles for non-white nations. But the racist attitudes of other Irish Americans sometimes undercut their commitment to the communal ideals Emmons discusses so well. Literature on whiteness could help to explain how Irish erraticism spawned conflicting tendencies.

These omissions aside, Emmons makes a significant contribution by redeeming a neglected but influential strain of Irish American labor radicalism rooted in Irish communal traditions emphasizing the need for a moral economy that cultivated “good heartedness” (p. 255).