Q&A with the author of HISTORY’S ERRATICS

David M. Emmons, author of History’s Erratics: Irish Catholic Dissidents and the Transformation of American Capitalism, 1870-1930, answers questions on his new book.

Q: Why did you decide to write this book? 

I had multiple goals, all arising from issues left over from my two previous books, The Butte Irish and Beyond the American Pale. The first of those books was about the Irish miners of Butte, Montana, the second about Irish in America’s real and constructed Wests. I needed to extend my range, beyond Butte, beyond western America, and beyond 1910 where I’d concluded American Pale. I also felt compelled to answer—to my own satisfaction, at least—questions raised by both books: Was class or ethnicity the principal and governing allegiance of Irish Catholic workers in America? Were they contradictory allegiances?  Could the two be fused into parts of a single cultural whole, kindred causes, to be pursued simultaneously and under the same flag? If that were the case, did this not create a cultural rift between Irish Catholic workers and native-born Americans and other immigrants?  In sum, did it not make them cultural misfits in America? This was my “cultural turn.” 

Petrologists describe rocks moved by glaciation from their place of origin to other and unlike places “glacial erratics.”  The glaciers retreated, but the erratics were left where they’d been tumbled, out of time and out of place. Irish Catholics were that in the U.S. Cultures derive from experience, from history—real and imagined. History first made the Irish non-conforming; it then put them on the road to a place with a strikingly different historically derived culture.  It then put them to work. 

Q: What is the most interesting discovery you made while researching and writing your book? 

As I continued to read and think about Irish Catholic working people in America, particularly those of strong Irish nationalist and/or republican instincts, it became obvious that being an Irish Catholic working in a market capitalist and self-consciously Protestant America was a single and distinct cultural category, one set apart from the regnant social and cultural values of the U.S. That distinct culture, however, was in place long before they entered the American working class. Historians speak often of alien peoples as Others. Irish Catholics were among America’s. They were communal rather than individualistic; their “economies” were based on reciprocity not markets. Democracy to be real had to have a social and economic component.   

Historians know what native-Americans thought of the Irish and other immigrants. I wanted to see what this one group of immigrants and ethnics thought of Americans. That perspective has been too seldom employed. Filtering lenses could be sighted both ways: As the Irish were among America’s Others, so Americans were among the Irish’s. 

Q: What myths do you hope your book will dispel or what do you hope your books will help readers unlearn?  

History’s Erratics is a major reinterpretation of the Irish Catholic immigrant and ethnic experience in America. The fact that the Irish were white, spoke English (of a sort), and were (at least to the more tolerant of their American host society) marginally Christian did not make them assimilable. Assimilation is a form of domestic imperialism; the Irish were as resistant to it as they were to it in its colonial form. They were among America’s most conspicuous non-conformists. Irish “dissidence” arose from incomprehension—most didn’t understand America; defiance and quiet hostility—some didn’t like or were quietly indifferent to America; or—and in far more instances than historians have previously acknowledged—a genuinely radical and never quiet rejection of modern industrial capitalism as a violation of sacred Irish Catholic social and cultural truths. In sum, many didn’t understand America; some didn’t like it; more than a few wanted to change it. On a related point, it is past time to retire the notion that Irish republicanism was modeled on the American version; America in 1776 was one thing. It was quite a different and less praiseworthy thing in 1876 and 1926. 

I also hope that my reinterpretation will dispel the idea that Irish Catholics were a conservative, even reactionary, element in the American working class and in the American labor movement. Their role in transforming and softening the hard edges of American capitalism must be acknowledged.   

Q: Which part of the publishing process did you find the most interesting? 

The part I best understood! The new technology still bedevils me, but I have a renewed appreciation for the great gifts that can come only from reviewers and other outside readers who read manuscripts and guide the process. It is in this spirit that I thank David Brundage, who turns out to have been the anonymous R1 of my acknowledgments section.   He told me my cultural turn had worked, then added immeasurable to it with his suggestions. I’m in his debt.   

Q: What is your advice to scholars/authors who want take on a similar project? 

Do it!  Some of the research for History’s Erratics and almost all of the writing was done against a backdrop of the anti-immigrant xenophobia and racism of contemporary right-wing representatives of the Republican Party. Add to that their purposeful ignorance of and manipulation of American history and the historians’ environment becomes even less relaxed. There is a new urgency to writing about American immigration and labor. Finally, I offer to those who would take up the cause the same advice that Jackson Lears offered me—and everyone else who read his splendid No Place of Grace: “history without a moral dimension is pedantry.” That is particularly true of American labor history with a moral dimension built in.   

Q: What do you like to read/watch, or listen to for fun? 

I’ve gone back to rereading America’s “classics” from Melville to Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. In other words, I’m reading what few others are!  I also like to read in my field, though I know (and am frustrated by the fact) that I will find something that should be in my books but that I overlooked or that hadn’t appeared in time for inclusion. I have also forgiven the lords of Major League Baseball for most of the awful changes they made to the game.  I’m a fan again—in large part because of all of those “erratic Others” who play it so well. Finally, let me thank SeriusXM for channel 78 (Symphony Hall), Channel 67 (American Jazz), and Channel 20 (Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band). I listen to one of those almost every night.


David M. Emmons is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Montana. His books include The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925 andBeyond the American Pale: The Irish in the West, 1845–1910.


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