In Catholics across Borders, Mark Paul Richard challenges the paradigm of ethnic and religious conflict in US immigration history. Through his “community study” of French Canadian immigrants and their descendants in Plattsburgh, New York, from the 1850s to the 1950s, he argues that “interethnic cooperation rather than conflict served as the prevalent pattern” of social life in the city and its surroundings (p. 4). In nine chapters, Richard recovers the story of a northeastern borderlands community and its exceptionally expansive practices of ethnic identity and “Americanness.”The first three chapters describe the French Canadian immigrants who settled in Plattsburgh during the first half the nineteenth century. While the city drew fewer immigrants than industrial centers like Fall River and Lowell, Massachusetts, the new arrivals joined a Catholic majority composed primarily of Irish Americans. These immigrants gained a foothold in the region through their interethnic celebration of holidays like St. Patrick's Day, the Feast of John the Baptist, and the Fourth of July, while the Grey Nuns of the Cross and Oblate priests—both based in Canada—gained certification and public funding for parish schools beginning in the 1860s. Ethnic institutions like the lay Saint John the Baptist Association and the French-language newspaper Le National displayed a keen political consciousness on issues like Métis rights in Canada and French Canadian access to the spoils system in the US federal government; despite this, sources are silent on the 1889 murder of a Protestant, native-born Plattsburgh resident by a Catholic Canadian American immigrant, a silence Richard interprets as evidence of local interethnic harmony (pp. 82–83). During a period often characterized by nativism, he argues that the last decades of the nineteenth century in Plattsburgh established patterns of pluralistic cooperation that lasted well into the twentieth.Chapters 4 through 6 document the first decades of the twentieth century. Plattsburgh residents from across religious divides participated in the search for Catholic “Founding Fathers,” uniting around the figure of the French explorer Samuel de Champlain and erecting a monument in his honor in 1912. French Canadian immigrants continued to expand their institutional footprint in the city, when competing factions—the Grey Nuns and the Local Physicians, led in part by the prominent Dr. J. H. LaRocque—founded the nonsectarian Champlain Valley and Physician's hospitals, respectively. This period was also the end of an era of relatively easy movement across the international border. Following a dispute over teaching obligations between the Diocese of Ogdensburg and the Grey Nuns, in 1921 the sisters were separated into distinct Canadian and US communities (p. 165). Richard demonstrates that, in the early 1920s, administrative conflicts over labor in religious organizations as well as legal immigration restriction reified national boundaries.The final three chapters trace Plattsburgh's Franco-American population into the mid-twentieth century. While much of the country was roiled by the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan, both the Champlain Valley and Physician's hospitals opened nursing schools offering opportunities to both Catholic and Protestant women. Yet there were limits to the community's pluralism. While Richard suggests in his conclusion that Catholic institutions in Plattsburgh often “promoted similar themes” to contemporary diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, he concedes that a shared whiteness bridged the ethnic and sectarian divisions between French Canadians and their Irish Catholic and Anglo Protestant neighbors—exemplified by the minstrel shows they used to raise funds for schools throughout the Great Depression (pp. 257, 211). Even their nonsectarian commitments were loosened during the early Cold War, when the hospitals, nursing programs, and schools highlighted their Catholic foundations to contrast themselves against atheistic communism (p. 248). Despite a century of growth, Richard writes in his Afterword, declines in religious vocations and school enrollments caused many of the Catholic institutions founded by French Canadian immigrants to shrink, consolidate, and, often, disappear by the twenty-first century.Catholics across Borders provides a straightforward account of Plattsburgh's French Canadian immigrant community and its descendants, even while it grapples with the complexities of gender in US Catholic history. Indeed, Richard shows that even in ideal circumstances of interreligious cooperation, Catholics were often their own most formidable antagonists, as the Grey Nuns could attest through their struggles with the Oblate priests and the Diocese of Ogdensburg over wages and teaching assignments. His book is also a timely reminder that tensions at the US–Canadian border are contingent and serve political purposes. Future work on the history of the northern border, French Canadian immigrants, and US Catholicism ought to account for the exceptions and continuities Richard offers in this book.
Colin Crawford (Thu,) studied this question.