History's Erratics

Abstract

This book is a major reinterpretation of the role of Irish Catholic workers in the challenges to and eventual transformation of American capitalism during the middle and late industrial period. The dissent from the regnant values of free-market capitalism by many of the post-Famine immigrants and their descendants was an important, and too often overlooked, aspect of the efforts to restore a measure of moral conscience to the conduct of the American economy. That these dissident Irish fought against the exploitation of Ireland by British imperialism as well as the exploitation of workers by capitalism is an accompanying theme. Some of those dissidents, both labor and Irish nationalist, were radicals; far more were simply uncomprehending. The gross inequalities of wealth in America mocked Americans’ claims that they had created a democratic society. As did Britain’s insistence that Ireland remain a subordinate part of the Empire. Democracy, to be genuine, had to be social and economic as well as political, and capitalism and imperialism were neither. The word that best expresses Irish Catholic outsideness is erratic, taken from geology and used as petrologists use it when describing rocks brought by glaciers from their native ground to places previously “claimed” by rocks of a different and incompatible order.