David Emmons’s History’s Erratics is simultaneously personal, funny, and enlightening. Throughout the book, Emmons’s command of Irish and Irish-American history is on full display. Laden with metaphor and compelling characters, History’s Erratics places Catholicism and Irish culture at the center of a reinterpretation of the experience of Irish immigrants to the United States and their encounters with capitalism.
In the first chapter, Emmons uses a petrological metaphor to frame his account. Emmons borrows the idea of a glacial erratic: a rock or group of rocks moved by a glacier and deposited in a new place. These idiosyncratic rocks are out of place in their new surroundings and can only be understood within the context of their glacial migration. Emmons applies this framework to Irish Catholics who emigrated from their homeland to the United States. Throughout the book, Emmons uses this metaphor to reframe Irish immigrants during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Irish workers, rather than being precapitalists, had developed a healthy skepticism of Protestant capitalism through the tensions that arose between the Protestant, extractive United Kingdom, and its Catholic, colonial subjects. The logic of capital often affronted Irish cultural sensibilities and helped to “premake” what Emmons calls an “oppositional Irish American Working Class” (85). As Emmons poetically explains, the experience of watching as ships “laden with food left the ports of a starving Ireland” engendered a certain kind of Irish radicalism (114).
This radicalism, and its various avatars, are the focus of History’s Erratics. From a struggle over mining in Butte, Montana, to the beginnings of the New Deal, Emmons traces how Irish radicals encountered and made sense of capitalism in America. The strongest chapter of this book is the fourth, which analyzes the “Butte Rising” of 1917. Emmons writes with familiarity and clarity as he returns to the topic of his 1989 book, The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925. In the microcosm of Butte, Emmons illustrates for readers the intersection of Irish nationalism and working-class radicalism. In 1917, Butte’s mining industry, which had been dominated by an Irish-run company and an almost exclusively Irish union, became the site of a struggle at the intersection of class, religion, and nationalism. Since the 1880s, the Irish-led Anaconda Copper Mining Company (ACM) and the Butte Miners’ Union (BMU) had collaborated in the name of advancing Irish nationalism. In this configuration, nationalist and religious interests superseded class interest. In 1897, Irish radical Ed Boyce became the president of the Western Federation of Miners and began a campaign against ACM. Boyce, an avowed socialist and proud Irish nationalist, saw a clear connection between capitalism and the colonialism that oppressed his homeland. Ultimately, Boyce understood the Irish bourgeoisie not as an ally in the nationalist struggle but as an enemy to be overcome in class struggle. For Boyce, the struggle of the Irish people and the struggle of the Irish working class could not be separated. His two-pronged radicalism led Boyce to upset a decades-old nationalist balance in Butte’s mining industry.
Furthermore, Emmons connects Boyce’s crusade in Montana to the radical Easter Rising in Ireland, led by James Connolly. Connolly and Boyce agitated not to suspend the class struggle in favor of Irish nationalism but rather to intertwine the liberation of the working class with the liberation of the Irish people. The agitation against ACM, begun by Boyce, combined with the Easter Rising and World War I, culminated in a strike by Irish miners that lasted seven months. In his account, Emmons artfully explains how Irish mineworkers made sense of their situation. In short, their loyalty to Ireland persisted but became intertwined with a militant class consciousness and a deep feeling of exploitation by both the United Kingdom and the United States. The violent deprivation that Ireland suffered at the hands of English colonialism instilled a deep awareness of oppression and an abiding hatred for all things English. Even where this understanding wrongly blamed England, Emmons argues, it led Irish radicals to make connections between the oppression they suffered as colonial subjects, Catholics, and workers. Emerging from this context, Irish immigrants found themselves deeply out of place in a world run by Protestant capitalists.
Emmons’s metaphor of the glacial erratic is well chosen to make sense of this historical predicament. Caught between the United Kingdom and the United States, the Irish who remained home suffered greatly under colonial rule, while those who emigrated found themselves in a country often wholly at odds with their religious and societal values. Emmons’s choice to highlight the erraticism of the Irish during this time deserves recognition. Accepting that Irish immigrants were out of place in the Protestant capitalism of the United States helps account for the particular radicalism of Irish dissidents. In the epilogue, Emmons locates the importance of Irish Catholics in union leadership as well as the rank and file. Irish radicals’ commitment to “subordinating the economic to the social,” Emmons argues, shaped American labor unions and positioned the American working class to respond to the Great Depression (266).
Emmons’s work makes several important contributions. Chief among them is his framework of the erratic, which serves well in its role as a guiding metaphor. It is also worth scholars’ time to carefully consider Emmons’s treatment of religion. Emmons places Catholicism at the center of his study and treats it as a foundational part of the intellectual and cultural context within which Irish dissidents operated. This book demonstrates that to do successful labor history, scholars must be willing to take seriously the religion of their subjects and differentiate between official doctrine and local, even personal, religious practices and beliefs.
History’s Erratics is a strong contribution to the field of labor history. Emmons’s work will be of interest to scholars interested in Irish history, immigration, capitalism, and labor, and those concerned with how religion and nationalism can intervene in these fields. Emmons’s voice as a writer is on full display as he allows himself to be present in the material. While this style may sacrifice some clarity of argument, it permits Emmons to ruminate on the history as well as the evolution and state of the field. The product is a book that is informative and compelling.
