The Orange Riots: Irish Political Violence in New York City, 1870 and 1871 by Michael A. Gordon (review)

BOOK REVIEWS109 were soon disappointed. Transplantation did not occur easily. Second, many of the most cherished values of antebellum Protestant America were called into question by the new realities presented by the mining regions. Transiency, "extreme ethnic and racial diversity" (p. 1 13), a paucity ofwomen, and other novelties, undermined eastern evangelicalism, which was now merely one choice among "a dizzying array of alternative religious conceptions," that competed in "this marketplace of morals" (p. 5). The evangelical world view often conflicted with life in the mines. Particularly troublesome was the evangelical correlation of success with hard work. In the mines, luck was often a greater determinant of success than hard work. In this and other instances, Protestant evangelicalism as brought from the east seemed incapable of explaining the world the miners encountered. Third, there is the story "of the creation of a new type of society . . . that exhibited new patterns of religious adherence" (p. 5), a "California piety," that presaged a more "modern" religious sensibility than that expressed by antebellum eastern evangelicalism. This story is ably demonstrated in her chapter, "The Moral World of the California Miner." Ms. Maffly-Kipp has written a challenging and important study of religion in Gold Rush California, and of religion in antebellum America. My biggest complaint with this study is its almost complete neglect of Catholicism; after all, the study is entitled "Religion and Society in Frontier California," and to neglect the significant presence of the Catholic Church is to miss a major part of the story of "religion and society." Maffly-Kipp too easily dismisses the Catholic Church by claiming "the rapid influx of settlers to the north quickly overwhelmed an already weakened Catholic structure producing a free market of religious beliefs" (p. 117). Even so, the Catholic Church was a major player in that free market, and its efforts as well as its relation to competing Protestant groups needed to be considered. MafflyKipp 's study would have been better named "Protestant Religion and Society . . ." Jeffrey M. Burns Chancery Archives, Archdiocese ofSan Francisco The Orange Riots: Irish Political Violence in New York City, 1870 and 1871. By Michael A. Gordon, (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. 1993· Pp. xxii, 263- «35.00.) On July 12, 1870, a provocative Orange parade through Irish Catholic neighborhoods triggered retaliation in Elm Park on New York's upper West Side. When the incident ended, eight were dead, and many were injured. Because of Fenian and Ancient Order of Hibernian threats, Mayor A. Oakley Hall banned the 1871 parade, but Governor John T. Hoffman, another Tarn- 110BOOK REVIEWS many hack, appealing to Protestant opinion, canceled Hall's directive. Responding to stone throwers and snipers, soldiers protecting the parade route fired indiscriminately into a mostly hostile sidewalk crowd, killing sixty, wounding at least a hundred. Michael Gordon offers a detailed history of the riots, but the most important sections of his book are the discussions of the reasons for and the consequences of Irish Catholic violence. Contradicting the interpretation of other historians, Gordon insists that the Orange riots were more than an Old Country religious feud transported to the New. Following and expanding on Iver Bernstein 's analysis of the 1863 draft riots, he argues that Irish Catholic anger had cultural, social, and political as well as religious sources. Borrowing from Kerby Miller's Emigrants and Exiles thesis, Gordon interprets Irish Catholic immigrants as pre-modern, pre-industrial people confused and overwhelmed in urban industrial America. They viewed American republicanism from collectivist and egalitarian perspectives. Anglo and other Protestant Americans saw it in individualistic, competitive terms. Orange parades not only reminded New York Irish Catholics of Anglo-Irish Protestant and Ulster Presbyterian oppression in Ireland; they also interpreted them as visible signs of the American Protestant elite's intention to deprive them of a cultural and political place in the city. In defending the Orange right to celebrate Boyne Day, Anglo-Americans expressed contempt for Irish Catholics as an inferior species and their religion as alien and subversive. And they associated Irish "barbarism" with Tammany corruption. According to Gordon, the Orange riots had a profound effect on late nineteenth-century New York history, encouraging reform movements that destroyed Boss...