{"id":47167,"date":"2025-01-25T20:00:59","date_gmt":"2025-01-25T20:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/american-history\/david-emmons-on-his-new-book-historys-erratics\/"},"modified":"2025-01-25T20:00:59","modified_gmt":"2025-01-25T20:00:59","slug":"david-emmons-on-his-new-book-historys-erratics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=47167","title":{"rendered":"David Emmons on his New Book, History\u2019s Erratics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<style><![CDATA[<![CDATA[\/*! elementor - v3.19.0 - 28-02-2024 *\/\n.elementor-widget-text-editor.elementor-drop-cap-view-stacked .elementor-drop-cap{background-color:#69727d;color:#fff}.elementor-widget-text-editor.elementor-drop-cap-view-framed .elementor-drop-cap{color:#69727d;border:3px solid;background-color:transparent}.elementor-widget-text-editor:not(.elementor-drop-cap-view-default) .elementor-drop-cap{margin-top:8px}.elementor-widget-text-editor:not(.elementor-drop-cap-view-default) .elementor-drop-cap-letter{width:1em;height:1em}.elementor-widget-text-editor .elementor-drop-cap{float:left;text-align:center;line-height:1;font-size:50px}.elementor-widget-text-editor .elementor-drop-cap-letter{display:inline-block}]]]]><![CDATA[>]]><\/style>\n<p>David M. Emmons\u2019 provocative new book <a href=\"https:\/\/www.press.uillinois.edu\/books\/?id=p088193\"><em>History\u2019s Erratics: Irish Catholic Dissidents and the Transformation of American Capitalism, 1870-1930<\/em> <\/a>deploys a wealth of theory and decades of research to reframe our understanding of the Irish Catholic working class. The term erratics, as he explains in his book, is a metaphor derived from glacial erratics, to convey the dissidence that arose among Catholic Irish workers who rejected American capitalism.\u00a0 J. Hollis Harris interviewed him about some of the book\u2019s themes and arguments.<\/p>\n<p><strong>You use the term \u201cIrishCatholic\u201d as an important analytical device throughout <em>History\u2019s Erratics<\/em>. Can you elaborate on the process by which you arrived at the term? Why do you as a labor historian insist on this rather than Irish Catholics, Irish Americans, or Irish immigrants?<\/strong><\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_15212\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-15212\" style=\"width: 289px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-15212 \" src=\"https:\/\/www.lawcha.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/p088193_lg.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"289\" height=\"436\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.lawcha.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/p088193_lg.jpg 500w, https:\/\/www.lawcha.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/p088193_lg-199x300.jpg 199w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 289px) 100vw, 289px\"\/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-15212\" class=\"wp-caption-text\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.press.uillinois.edu\/books\/?id=p088193\">History\u2019s Erratics: Irish Catholic Dissidents and the Transformation of American Capitalism, 1870-1930 (2024)<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>I use the neologism \u201cIrishCatholic\u201d as a shorthand way of saying that many in Protestant America made no distinction between Irishness and the religion of most of the Irish immigration.\u00a0 I should add that Irish Catholics frequently made no distinction either.\u00a0 For them, being Catholic meant being not British and not Anglo-American.\u00a0 What for Protestants was the Irish curse was for my erratic Irish the ultimate Irish blessing.\u00a0 One Irish writer, Luke Gibbons, said that Catholicism was the Irish\u2019s \u201cineradicable ethnic component.\u201d\u00a0 Another one, Fintan O\u2019Toole, wrote that \u201cIrish Catholic had come to stand for some third thing born out of the fusion of the other two.\u201d\u00a0 I decided to make the fusion literal by minting a new word.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I acknowledge that not all of those who came to America from Ireland were Catholics.\u00a0 But I also note, with emphasis, that the Protestant Irish immigrants called themselves what they were, \u201cScotch-Irish,\u201d that is dissenting Protestants from Scotland removed to an Ireland they did not like and to which few pledged any allegiance. They were not erratics, out of time and out of place in America. I\u2019ll never forget the young Protestant woman visiting Montana from Belfast who when introduced by her American hosts as \u201cour Irish visitor,\u201d politely but as firmly as the situation demanded, corrected her hosts: \u201cBut I\u2019m not Irish, you know.\u00a0 I\u2019m British.\u201d She was not just professing her citizenship; she was claiming her shared culture.\u00a0 For purposes of convenience though not of total accuracy, I\u2019ll let her speak for the whole of the Protestants of Ireland. Or, if that won\u2019t do, let the host of scholars I assembled and cited in the book who said essentially the same thing, speak for the whole of them.\u00a0 Included prominently among those scholars is E.P. Thompson.<\/p>\n<p><strong> Throughout the book, cultural persistence between Ireland and Irish America seems to be a central, if not recurring feature of your analysis. The importance of political and cultural holdovers from Irish society like shoneenism, Catholicism, communalism, and others comes to mind. To your point, however, Protestant-made America was in the process of becoming both modern and industrial in the postbellum era. If immigration history and labor history are one and the same, as many historians contend, then how does your interpretation of cultural persistence help readers better understand the formation of working-class identities?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I never made an exact\u2013or even inexact\u2013reckoning of what percentage of the book was about Ireland and what percentage about America.\u00a0 I am, however, fairly certain that, with the obvious and important exception of Kerby Miller\u2019s <em>Emigrants and Exiles<\/em>, I give the \u201chome county\u201d more attention than most historians of American immigration.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>To the specific points of your questions: I picked the year 1870 to begin because I wanted to push my story deeper into the industrializing era of modern America.\u00a0 I also wanted to dodge some of the issues posed by the existence of American slavery as it influenced and confounded American labor history.\u00a0 The Irish Catholics in the work force of this modern and industrializing\/industrial America were \u201cpre-modern\u201d and \u201cpre-industrial.\u201d That was true of a great percentage of all the immigrant\/ethnic components of the American working class.\u00a0 This much is known and frequently commented upon.\u00a0 Herbert Gutman and many after him have made certain of that.\u00a0 Many in the American industrial working class did in fact come from \u201cbackward,\u201d that is, pre-modern societies; meaning that many of the men and women in it were out of time and out of place and had to be \u201csocialized.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_15213\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-15213\" style=\"width: 422px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-15213\" src=\"https:\/\/www.lawcha.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/PhotoScan2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"422\" height=\"501\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.lawcha.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/PhotoScan2.jpg 1428w, https:\/\/www.lawcha.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/PhotoScan2-253x300.jpg 253w, https:\/\/www.lawcha.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/PhotoScan2-862x1024.jpg 862w, https:\/\/www.lawcha.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/PhotoScan2-768x912.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.lawcha.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/PhotoScan2-1293x1536.jpg 1293w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 422px) 100vw, 422px\"\/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-15213\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Courtesy: History\u2019s Erratics<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>The \u201cbackwardness\u201d of the Irish Catholics among America\u2019s \u201cpre-modern\u201d labor force, however, is almost always attributed by historians to co-incidents, simple chronology, historical sequence, or a stunted historical evolution.\u00a0 For various reasons, usually left unexplored, they hadn\u2019t \u201ccaught up\u201d with modernity yet, but the unstated assumption was always that\u2013kicking and screaming, to be sure\u2013they would. That\u2019s an advance over the days when modern Protestant America said that IrishCatholic backwardness was owing to racial defects\u2013including the ones that made and kept them Catholics\u2013and hence irremediable,<\/p>\n<p>Both explanations, the \u201ccoincidental\/chronological\u201d and the racial, leave the story incomplete.\u00a0 Being pre-modern and\/or pre-industrial are <em>social<\/em> conditions.\u00a0 They imply that Irish Catholics were backward because they came from a backward place\u2013whatever the reason for that backwardness\u2013and professed a backward religion. I don\u2019t deny the superficial truth of that; I deny only that it explains much if anything of importance.\u00a0 The laggard habits of Irish Catholics <em>were<\/em> historically derived, but calling them only \u201cpre-modern\u201d or, as E.P. Thompson did, \u201csemi-feudal,\u201d implies that they were transient.\u00a0 Irish Catholic workers would not be forever out of time and out of place in industrial and capitalist America.\u00a0\u00a0 Sooner or later, they\u2019d catch up and get used to the place.\u00a0 I would add here that, sooner or later, they did.\u00a0 But not by 1930 when I close my account of their erratic years. \u00a0I left what happened after 1930 to other historians.<\/p>\n<p>My emphasis is on cultural values that go much further back in time than the pre-modern Irish Catholic immigration and direct involvement in working for wages in a modern American capitalist economy.\u00a0 Premodern was not just descriptive; it was evaluative.\u00a0 It meant \u201ccivilized.\u201d\u00a0 Premodern was a term of reproach.\u00a0 That\u2019s a conceit\u2013with or without any racist origins; I substituted \u201ctraditional\u201d for premodern.\u00a0 Traditional is morally neutral.\u00a0 It defines what a people are, not what they are not.\u00a0 Traditionalism is a cultural trait; it defines an active state of being.\u00a0 It is not about people in the process of becoming; it is about people as they were and preferred to remain.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>This is an important point in my answer to the next part of your question.\u00a0 Irish Catholic involvement in the American labor movement is also frequently commented upon.\u00a0 Here also, however, the reason is almost always because so many of them were in the American industrial working-class\u2013and spoke a kind of English.\u00a0 Circumstance, what I earlier called co-incidence, explains it.\u00a0 I\u2019m of a different mind.\u00a0 I think they were \u201claborites;\u201d more specifically, that they were industrial unionists and social democrats not from historical circumstance, but for reasons that antedate their knowing what \u201cindustry\u201d and \u201cworking class\u201d even meant, reasons that go back much further in their history than their entry through American factory gates.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The cultural values they brought from Ireland to America and passed down generation to generation were communal; I call them ecclesial; clannish will work, too.\u00a0 By whatever name, the <em>idea <\/em>of industrial unionism was a \u201cbirthright;\u201d they were born to it. So was the <em>idea<\/em> that democracy had to be more than political.\u00a0 It had to have a social as well as a political component. In 1913, the top one-half of one percent of the American people held 40 percent of the nation\u2019s wealth.\u00a0 Many Irish Catholic workers held the erratic notion that that was not a democracy.\u00a0 That did not make them radicals.\u00a0 It does, however, make than subtle, if unconscious, subverters of Protestant America\u2019s regnant values.\u00a0 That\u2019s not the standard interpretation which holds that the unlovely features of America\u2019s mines, factories, and foundries radicalized\u2013or, at least, politicized\u2013the American working class.\u00a0 America didn\u2019t make them dissident.\u00a0 Neither did Marx.\u00a0 Ireland and their historically derived culture did it.\u00a0 Which makes Irish history an important part not just of American \u201cworking-class identities\u201d but of everything in American history where an Irish Catholic influence was felt and can be shown.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 That is a major part of what I call my reinterpretation by accretion.<\/p>\n<p><strong> In <em>History\u2019s Erratics<\/em>, IrishCatholic dissidence and thus cultural divergence seems to make them exceptions to the typical U.S. working-class history. While other groups might have aligned with dominant Protestant social norms or joined broader industrial labor movements to become more \u201cAmerican,\u201d your erratics seemingly resisted this path. As you demonstrate, they subverted American capitalism, but also helped transform it in spite of their continued Irishness. From this perspective, how might <em>History\u2019s Erratics<\/em> inform a broader understanding of American social history, particularly with respect to the influence of ethnicity, religion, and class in the development of American capitalism?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m not sure they were an \u201cexception to the typical U.S. working-class history,\u201d or that there is a \u201ctypical American working-class history,\u201d or even that there was a \u201ctypical American working class.\u201d\u00a0 Those hypotheses would have to be tested by other deep dives into the culture of the other major ethnic components of American labor to see if those others did, in fact, \u201calign with dominant Protestant social norms . . . and become \u201cmore American.\u201d\u00a0 To a certain extent, all of this country\u2019s immigrant and ethnic workers \u201caligned\u201d with American <em>society<\/em>; they lived in it.\u00a0 They had no choice.\u00a0 Similarly, all \u201cbecame more American\u201d or, at least, less of what they were.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 My analytical framework, however, is Irish Catholic worker culture that arose before they entered the American working class.\u00a0 That culture arose from Irish history and was passed down through the generations.\u00a0 Parts of it, in the words of Robert Orsi, were \u201calmost inherently subversive\u201d of the values of modern capitalist America. \u201cSubversive\u201d did not always mean ideologically radical, but clearly being subversive is an advance on being merely \u201cerratic\u201d or \u201cdissident.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Mention should also be made of the aggressive rhetoric and actions of Irish nationalists and the pugnacious language of Irish nationalists in America.\u00a0 Anger was part of the stock in trade of both.\u00a0 So was organizing for angry purposes.\u00a0 Add now the language of James Connolly, also central to my main point: \u201cThe cause of Ireland,\u201d he said, \u201cis the cause of labour; the cause of labour is the cause of Ireland.\u00a0 They cannot be dissevered.\u201d\u00a0 Marx, Engels, and Lenin, among others, had good reason to try to recruit Irish republican nationalists into the advance guard of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism.\u00a0 It was not the Irish\u2019s advanced theoretical understanding that commended them; it was their bandit tendencies.\u00a0 E.P. Thompson, joined by Eric Hobsbawm, agreed.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_15214\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-15214\" style=\"width: 427px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-15214\" src=\"https:\/\/www.lawcha.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/PhotoScan-7.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"427\" height=\"365\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.lawcha.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/PhotoScan-7.jpg 1497w, https:\/\/www.lawcha.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/PhotoScan-7-300x256.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.lawcha.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/PhotoScan-7-1024x875.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.lawcha.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/PhotoScan-7-768x656.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 427px) 100vw, 427px\"\/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-15214\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Courtesy: History\u2019s Erratics<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>A word about why I chose \u201ctransformation\u201d for my subtitle.\u00a0 One reason was because of Jackson Lears\u2019s use of the word in the context of culture in his <em>No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture<\/em>.\u00a0 Another was the title of Karl Polanyi\u2019s book <em>The Great Transformation.<\/em>\u00a0 Together, Lears and the \u201cteam\u201d of Polanyi and Conrad Arensberg provided me with points of entry, Lears into American culture, Polanyi and Arensberg into Irish Catholic culture and the challenge to American capitalist values that it posed.<\/p>\n<p>Put as briefly as I can, Irish Catholic dissidents in America, both immigrants and their near descendants, came from societies in which the economy was \u201cembedded in\u201d (Polanyi\u2019s words) and subordinate to society.\u00a0 Irish townland economies were based on reciprocity; they were ones where those with bread shared it with those without on the safe assumption that the favor would be returned.\u00a0 The society of modern capitalist America, on the other hand, was \u201cembedded in\u201d and subordinate to a markets-driven economy; bread went to those who could pay the asking price.\u00a0 That depended on wages which depended on labor markets, and the price of bread, which depended on commodity and transportation markets.\u00a0 Laissez-faire\u2013leave the markets alone; let them work their magic unhindered.\u00a0\u00a0 In such an economy, hunger could easily be made a weapon of class war.\u00a0 Or, as the Irish knew well, a weapon in colonization policy.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong> The topic and timeframe of <em>History\u2019s Erratics <\/em>brings another important labor history to mind \u2013 David Roediger\u2019s <em>Wages of Whiteness. <\/em>In some ways your work picks up where Roediger left off by covering the period from the Civil War to the New Deal and arguing that working-class IrishCatholic dissidence helped drive the transformation of American capitalism through the Great Depression. Can you explain how <em>History\u2019s Erratics <\/em>may or may not link up with Roediger\u2019s conclusions about working-class whiteness in the antebellum period? Moreover, what are some of the key differences between IrishCatholic working-class experiences and those of other immigrant groups in America between 1870 and 1930?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I dealt with Roediger\u2019s excellent book in some detail in my earlier <em>Beyond the American Pale<\/em>.\u00a0 I\u2019ll summarize here: There were also \u201cwages of Protestantism.\u201d\u00a0 (In Butte, I found something that looked suspiciously like the \u201cwages of Irishness\u201d).\u00a0 All of those \u201cNo Irish Need Apply\u201d notices contained an unstated sectarian adjective: No Irish <em>Catholics<\/em> need apply.\u00a0 The applications of the self-identified \u201cScotch-Irish\u201d were welcome.\u00a0 It was papists who needed not apply.\u00a0 That American nativism and the IrishCatholic response to it were among the sources of an evolving\u2013and dissident\u2013IrishCatholic culture is one section of my \u201ccultural turn.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That, however, is as far as the \u201clinkage\u201d between the wages of Protestantism and Roediger\u2019s book can be taken.\u00a0 I am not making an argument that American anti-Catholicism was even remotely as fierce, as constant, as cruel, as violent, as destructive, or as omnipresent as American racism.\u00a0 Mine is not an argument for a \u201ccritical [ethnic] theory.\u201d\u00a0 Critical race theory, as I think Roediger employs it, is an indispensable analytical tool in American labor history.\u00a0 So is an understanding of the specific cultures of America\u2019s immigrant\/ethnic labor force.<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u00a0<\/strong><strong>Your epilogue ends the book on a fascinating discussion of Irish American responses to the Irish War of Independence, the emergence of the <em>Saor St\u00e1t, <\/em>and the Irish Civil War. One cannot help but notice the sharp contrast between the outcomes they observed in Ireland and faced America. On the one hand, many felt the Irish bourgeoise-led \u201cFreak State\u201d was a product of shoneenism, one totally devoid of the aspirations revivalists, republicans, and the laborite left held for an independent Ireland. On the other, America responded to IrishCatholic opposition and the Great Depression with the New Deal, thus creating the possibility of a more humane existence for many working-class people. Given these very different outcomes, would you say that IrishCatholic cultural divergence and working-class opposition actually pushed Gilded Age America away from developing into a \u201cFreak State\u201d of its own? Taking the point further, how might this history help us understand the current state of the labor movement, American capitalism, and U.S. politics? <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I love those very leading questions!\u00a0 But let me first challenge a couple of their assertions.\u00a0 The Free State was not \u201c<em>totally<\/em> devoid\u201d of the hopes of the cultural revivalists and republicans on your list of \u201cIrish dreamers.\u201d The economy of the Saor St\u00e1t was never quite American capitalism writ small.\u00a0 Ireland after 1923 was never quite a cultural wasteland.\u00a0 Your question also gives too much credit to \u201cIrishCatholic opposition\u201d for the development of ideas of \u201cmoral capitalism.\u201d\u00a0 (And that from someone who read and approved of \u201chow the Irish saved civilization\u201d!)\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Polanyi in his <em>The Great Transformation<\/em> writes that the decades-long transformation from traditional, non-market economies to modern and capitalist ones was never unchallenged. \u00a0There were always, and contemporaneously, countervailing forces.\u00a0 Polanyi called them the \u201cdouble movement.\u201d\u00a0 He doesn\u2019t list Irish Catholics among them, though he comes close and I don\u2019t think he would have objected to my inclusion of them.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>They were among the many movements\u2013and IrishCatholic dissidence had many of the features of a \u201cmovement culture\u201d\u2013that \u201cpushed Gilded Age America\u201d away from the bourgeoise \u201cshoneen\u201d state it had become.\u00a0\u00a0 I would even point to the New Deal\u2019s Federal Art Project.\u00a0 FDR didn\u2019t just take lessons from Pope Pius\u2019 1931 labor encyclical \u201cQuadragesimo Anno;\u201d he admired the labor-themed murals that Diego Rivera had done for the \u201cDetroit Industry\u201d project.\u00a0 The Works Project Administration had a \u201cpoetic\u201d as well as a relief function.\u00a0 It fused art and politics.\u00a0 The Irish Revivalists would have loved the WPA and its agencies; they kept artists, poets\u2013and historians\u2013fed.<\/p>\n<p>Two of the things I most wanted <em>History\u2019s Erratics <\/em>to do was change minds and the historical narrative on the idea that Irish nationalists in America wanted a free Ireland to look like America.\u00a0 Some may have\u2013or may have said they did\u2013but those on whom I focus both my attention and my affection most assuredly did not.\u00a0 I also wanted my book to correct the record: Irish Catholic workers in the U.S. were not hopeless reactionaries; they were not responsible for why \u201cit,\u201d as in communism, syndicalism, socialism, or a labor party, \u201cdidn\u2019t happen here.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Indeed, they came closer than most (any?) to seeing that \u201cit\u201d would, or that \u201cit\u201d could have.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>David M. Emmons\u2019 provocative new book History\u2019s Erratics: Irish Catholic Dissidents and the Transformation of American Capitalism, 1870-1930 deploys a wealth of theory and decades of research to reframe our understanding of the Irish Catholic working class. The term erratics, as he explains in his book, is a metaphor derived from glacial erratics, to convey [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47168,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12032],"tags":[2268,3701,28416,28418,28417],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-47167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-history","tag-book","tag-david","tag-emmons","tag-erratics","tag-historys"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>David Emmons on his New Book, History\u2019s Erratics - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=47167\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"David Emmons on his New Book, History\u2019s Erratics - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"David M. Emmons\u2019 provocative new book History\u2019s Erratics: Irish Catholic Dissidents and the Transformation of American Capitalism, 1870-1930 deploys a wealth of theory and decades of research to reframe our understanding of the Irish Catholic working class. 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