| In 1884, over 90 percent of the one thousand or so inhabitants of Beaver Island, Michigan were either first or second generation Irish-Americans. The preponderance of these Islanders had historical links to Arranmore Island, located in northwest Donegal, Ireland. The colonization of this northern Lake Michigan island corresponded with the growth of the Great Lakes commercial fishing industry. Near the end of the nineteenth century, Beaver Island had become the largest fresh water fishery in the United States.; The Islanders' immigrant experience was unique in that it diverged from that of the urban American Irish. Whereas Irish city dwellers, primarily residing along he Atlantic Seaboard, transplanted a traditional worldview characterized by passivity, fatalism, and alienation, the Beaver Irish worldview was one of action, independence, and optimism. Moreover, while the former were affected by the assimilative forces of Irish nationalism, American Catholicism, and machine politics, the Islanders' physical and cultural isolation from Anglo-Protestant America, for the most part, impeded assimilation.; In order to survive the difficult transition to their new island home, the Islanders "invented" new social and institutional forms, or what may be called the cultural construction of "Islandness." An important component of this Islandness was its religious personality, which consisted of a blend of transplanted peasant religious patterns and American republican ideology. Later, island Catholicism was reinvented and closely resembled American devotional Catholicism. Politically, the Islanders invented a political paradigm that was predicated on the transplanted hierarchical social system of Arranmore, but was relatively open to liberal democracy. Resembling the internal workings of the American urban political machine, only writ small, the Islanders' political practices reflected a "tax and spend" fiscal ideology, which led to the rise of a reformed pro-statism government and contributed to the abolition of their county government. The fundamental aspect of Islandness was its reliance on commercial fishing. The ability to control, at least in part, their economic destiny was the impetus for the Islanders transition from an Old World subsistence-orientated moral economy to a modern market-driven one. Commercial fishing provided the Islanders a springboard, which vaulted them out of privation and into the petty-proprietor-class. |
