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Montana
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The Butte Irish : Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875-1925
David M. Emmons, in The Butte Irish, examines the development of
Butte, Montana, as an Irish town, tracing the story from the Potato
Famine to about 1925. He focuses on two major questions: (a) What made
Butte such a popular destination for Irish immigrants, both directly
from Ireland and from other Irish areas of the US? and, (b) How did
the development of an Irish enclave in Butte affect the development of
the city? He goes on to examine the evolution of class relations
within the Irish in Butte. Emmons describes Butte as a unique location
in America for the study of an ethnic community. He argues that the
town developed in such a way and at such a time that it was one of the
only towns in the country to have a strong working-class, immigrant
community in a position of major influence and power. There were
several keys that made this path of city evolution possible. The first
was the switch from silver and gold mining to copper production in the
1870's. This is key for Butte's "Irishness" on several
levels. First, because of the large capital investment required for
copper mining, Butte was forced to industrialize to a much greater
extent than other major gold and silver mining camps of the West.
Thus, Butte was the only one of these mining camps to become a major
city. Immigrants from many of these camps came to Butte in large
numbers. The timing of the beginning of Butte's copper era is a second
major factor. The Irish Potato Famine of the 1840's caused huge
numbers of Irish to immigrate to America. In the years immediately
following the famine, the Irish were nearly forty percent of those
immigrating to the United States. Large numbers of Irish continued
to immigrate in the next thirty years, supplying the US with many
unskilled workers. Many of these Irish went to the mining camps of
the west, the coal mines of Pennsylvania, or the copper mines of
Michigan, because mining was one of the only industries they were
familiar with. As many of the western mining camps became
"played out," or ran out of viable ore, in the late
nineteenth century, the Irish looked to the developing Butte. Because
Butte was becoming an established city only when the Irish started
going there, it did not have a previously existing community of
entrenched middle class Americans, nor did it have a prior political
structure. This is another key difference between Butte and other
towns with sizable Irish populations such as Boston or San Francisco.
In pre-existing towns and cities, the middle class often looked down
on those of the working class, or at least had control of the
political and social structure of the area. It is a well-known fact
that Marcus Daly was one of the main reasons so many Irish came to
Butte. Daly was the owner of the Anaconda Mining Company, and a strong
Irish nationalist. His hiring policies were famous throughout the
West, and even in Ireland, as being very generous to the Irish. Emmons
lays out these reasons, detailing them extensively. His research was
thorough, utilizing "two full carloads" of primary materials
including records of Butte churches and Irish social organizations,
letters, newspapers. Also cited in Emmons' bibliography are extensive
interviews and secondary sources. Emmons is just as thorough in his
treatment of the second question. He considers the miners of Butte on
many levels. One of the more interesting themes of the book is the
discussion of conflicting loyalties within the Irish enclave of the
Mining City. The author frames this as the question of whether the
people considered themselves "working Irish-Americans" or
"Irish-American workers." He examines the politics of the
struggling Ireland and its relationship with England, the structure of
the Butte social organizations and the way their roles and importance,
both absolute and relative to one another, changed and grew during
this period, and changing demographics within the Irish and the rest
of Butte-Silver Bow. The Butte Irish is a well-written and
well-executed account of the development of a town and community,
offering many insights into working class ethnography, labor
relations, Montana history, and Irish history, among others. Emmons
has managed to cover aspects of all these areas, even while
maintaining a strong focus and cohesiveness throughout the book.
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