Ireland and Irish America: Culture, Class, and Transatlantic Migration (review)

Field Day has given Kerby Miller the opportunity to compile his most important articles and essays in one volume, with which he says he hopes to pay tribute "to the Whiteboys, the Steelboys, and others," who "strove with gods against their world's destruction." Established scholars and students alike will be glad that Miller's work has been gathered in such a way. No longer will they have to search out the scattered and diverse sources, although reading his seminal Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (1985), remains compulsory for anyone interested in Irish emigration. Miller introduces the book by stating that he hopes it not only outlines the story but also provides an "understanding" of Ireland and Irish America. Miller divides his fifteen chapters into three sections, and he adds a substantial epilogue, the latter being the most original element of the book.

Section one is titled "Culture, Class, and Emigration in Irish Society."Here, he reiterates the thesis outlined so forcefully in Emigrants and Exiles, that the Irish migration experience was in general a very harsh one. The poorer Catholic Irish retained communal premodern values, which emigration destroyed. In Ireland and America these Irish were uncomfortable with the individualism of modern capitalism, and expressed their unease in everything from their correspondence to their language. Miller continues to emphasize that "passivity and fate" dominated migrant lives. Where some sections of the Irish in America displayed cohesion and accommodation with bustling America, such as in their organized supports of Irish nationalism, these merely reflected the hegemonic efforts of the prefamine Irish-American bourgeoisie to establish and "maintain their authority over the Catholic masses." Miller regrets that these poorer and, according to him, often radical masses consented to being co-opted into America and American values in order to achieve the struggle to end British rule in Ireland. These opening chapters are a strong restatement of what Donald Akenson has archly described as the "Celtic-Catholic Handicap thesis." Miller still believes that Irish Catholics justifiably—if not for their stated reasons—felt like exiles in the United States. In his revising for this section, Miller does not address Akenson specifically (indeed, he is never cited), but it is undoubtedly a counter blast to those, like the Canada-based scholar, who criticize his view of prefamine and famine Ireland as well as his description of Irish life in America. Unfortunately, Miller does not answer the charges directly.

Section two, "Irish Protestants in Ireland and America," reflects Miller's later career and ongoing research into the story of Irish Protestants and emigration. Influenced by his work with Bruce Boling, Arthur Schrier, and David Doyle for the collection of letters, Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan (2003), Miller came to revise some of his earlier views on Irish Protestants. Originally, Miller saw Protestants as "more energetic, industrious, innovative, thrifty, and individualistic—more capitalist-minded, in other words—than their Catholic countrymen." The five chapters included in this section indicate that the Protestant experience was more complicated than originally thought. His 1993 essay "'Scotch-Irish,' 'Black Irish,' and 'Real Irish': Emigrants and Identities in the Old South," while somewhat overstated, remains thought-provoking. The other chapters are stronger and innovative. He provides a provocative account of the development of an Irish identity among Ulster Presbyterian immigrants in America in "'Scotch-Irish' Ethnicity in Early America: Its Regional and Political Origins," which appeared in Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan. His chapters on "Class Conflict and the Origins of Unionist Hegemony in Early Nineteenth-Century Ulster" and "The Famine's Scars" explore the growing sense of alienation among Ulster Protestants—particularly Presbyterian—from the British political system in Ireland. He correctly highlights how the recent sectarian divisions in Northern Ireland have not been immutable since the Plantation of Ulster, but have ebbed and flowed through the varying political atmospheres. Here, Miller indicates clearly how the experience of Irish emigrants...