As Ice Age glaciers left behind erratics, so the external forces of history tumbled the Irish into America. Existing both out of time and out of space, a diverse range of these Roman-Catholic immigrants saw their new country in a much different way than did the Protestants who settled and claimed it. These erratics chose backward looking tradition and independence over assimilation and embraced a quintessentially Irish form of subversiveness that arose from their culture, faith, and working-class outlook. David M. Emmons draws on decades of research and thought to plumb the mismatch of values between Protestant Americans hostile to Roman Catholicism and the Catholic Irish strangers among them. Joining ethnicity and faith to social class, Emmons explores the unique form of dissidence that arose when Catholic Irish workers and their sympathizers rejected the beliefs and symbols of American capitalism.

A vibrant and original tour de force, History’s Erratics explores the ancestral roots of Irish nonconformity and defiance in America.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Characteristics of an Erratic Culture

1. “Ancestral Sorrows”: The Making of an Irish Catholic Culture
2. “And a Fourth There Is Who Wants Me to Dig”: Patsy Caliban and the Limits of American Liberalism
3. A Transnational “Freemasonry of the Disinherited”: The Premaking of an Oppositional Irish American Working Class
4. An Irish Catholic Working Class: The Butte “Rising” of 1917
5. Celtic Communists: “The Irish Contingent” among America’s Radicals
6. A “People Very unlike Any Other People”: The Irish Catholic Challenge to American Capitalism
7. “The Irish Movement Has Forgotten to Be American”: Woodrow Wilson and the Transatlantic Great Red Green Scare

Epilogue. The Durability of Culture: The Erratic ’20s

Notes

Bibliography

Index