Beyond the American Pale

The noted historian of the Irish of Butte, Montana, David M. Emmons has provided an interpretive history of the Irish in the American West. He believes that Irish Catholics were beyond the American pale, both in a metaphorical sense, as people who did not fit into the dominant Protestant vision of America's West, and in an actual sense, that real barriers kept the Irish separate from the American mainstream. Thus, the Irish had to create an “alternate Frontier” (p. 173). Emmons begins by setting the cultural, social, and political premises of what the Irish brought with them and what they faced when they landed in America. He makes a case for the continued significance of anti-Catholicism among American reformers, highlighting the connections abolitionists saw between ending the physical slavery of Africans Americans in the South and the “mental slavery” of the Roman Catholic Church. Thus Irish Catholics, like southern slaveholders, had to be excluded from the American West. Emmons believes that the Irish were “most unlikely Westerners” (p. 107). Ultimately, they belonged more with the Indians, their “savage twins” (p. 346), than with the dominant Americans. They survived and thrived only by reestablishing their communities, “transplanting the townlands to America” (pp. 250–86) and by preserving their pre-modern “clannish[ness]” (p. 258). Emmons illustrates astutely how this strong ethnic sensibility could help them, for example, dominate Butte and be leaders of the anti-Chinese movement

Archaeology · Butte · Culture of the United States · Ethnology · Frontier · Genealogy · Immigration · Irish · Mainstream · Political science · Politics · Protestantism · Sensibility · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies

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