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Reviews
| The Paddy Camps: The Irish of Lowell, 1821–61. By Brian C. Mitchell. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006 (1988). xvii + 247 pp. Maps, illustrations, graphs, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $25.00 (paper).
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This is a very welcome new edition of Brian Mitchell's 1988 study of the Irish in antebellum Lowell, Massachusetts. As best I can tell, it is unrevised except for a brief paragraph in the introduction, where Mitchell lists some of the more recent studies of the Irish in America. A case could be made that Mitchell should have incorporated some of that new scholarship into a revised edition of his book, but as president of Bucknell University, he probably had a couple of other things to do. It was a pioneering study but—almost twenty years after its first appearance—it has become almost an exercise in historiography. Despite this, the book has stood up extremely well and still has some important historical lessons to teach. |
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Mitchell's was—and remains—a "soft" social history of an important immigrant and ethnic group. Here is where I wish he could have found time to revise some of his earlier conclusions with the addition of material from newer studies. He pays very little attention to labor issues, even though his "paddies" were seemingly permanently fixed in the lower levels of the working class. The "exile motif" receives even less attention, although this sense of themselves as exiles produced intense Anglophobia. Mitchell includes an extended discussion of nativism in the 1850s but even this is without a sharp edge as he attributes it to "impatience" rather than to endemic anti-Catholicism. Even more surprising, Mitchell does not deal with the important difference between Irish immigrants and Irish ethnics—the first and second generations. Neither does he address the related issues of "whiteness" or abolitionism's close association with nativism. |
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What he does superbly, however, is deal with the tensions within the Irish community. Some had to do with "countyism" (although he never uses the term) and with the faction fights between Corkonians and Connachtmen. Some were linked to the timing of immigration: those who came to Lowell before the Great Hunger became more attached to the place and had more resources than the desperately poor who arrived after 1845. Indeed, that second, famine wave of immigrants was a source of some considerable embarrassment to the "better class" of Irish who had preceded them. |
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Mitchell is equally adept in his discussion of the changing response of Lowell's Irish to the Yankees who ran the town and the textile mills that sustained it. In the 1820s and 1830s, the Irish accommodated themselves to their "host society." They would probably have acknowledged that the Yankees were, in truth, their hosts and they the "guests." There were times when this relationship looked like obsequious foot shuffling and other, more frequent times when it arose from a hardheaded and pragmatic evaluation of what was needed to survive—and even a few times when the Irish acted like Yankees because they thought like Yankees. But this accommodation gave way when the Fathers O'Brien arrived to take over Lowell's Irish Catholic church and when the Yankees turned from "hosting" the Irish to reviling them. Here is where Mitchell is at his best—and where his book retains its force and relevance. |
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In sum, I wish Mitchell had had time to revise and update what is, frankly, a dated book. But it is also a very good dated book, and all students of Irish America owe the University of Illinois Press thanks for reissuing it.
David Emmons
University of Montana
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