MARK PAUL RICHARD, Catholics Across Borders: Canadian Immigrants in the North Country, Plattsburgh, New York, 1850-1950. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2024. ISBN: 9781438496214

 reviewed by David Vermette

Mark Paul Richard’s previous work on Lewiston, Maine (Loyal But French) and his definitive book on the Ku Klux Klan in New England (Not a Catholic Nation) are landmark contributions to the study of that region’s Franco-Americans. Spurred by New Yorkers who decried the relative neglect by historians of that state’s French-Canadian immigrants, Richard has now turned his attention to the Franco-Americans of Plattsburgh and the North Country region of the Empire State.

In Catholics Across Borders, Richard discusses the growth, development, and decline of the institutions French-Canadian immigrants formed in Plattsburgh between 1850 and 1950. He shows that the French-Canadian presence in Plattsburgh dates to the refugees from the Rebellions of 1837-38. Not long after, attracted by jobs in timber and mining, as well as available farmland, French Canadians began making their homes in Plattsburgh in increasing numbers. Thus, Plattsburgh had a French-Canadian presence before the Civil War. New England French Canadians were also present in that region prior to the war. However, in general, it was only after 1865 that a dearth of labor in the textile industry drew them to these states in numbers sufficient to form permanent communities. But Plattsburgh’s French Canadians already had their own “National” (ethnic) Catholic parish, Saint-Pierre (aka St. Peter’s) and their own school by 1860. 

Plattsburgh would later spawn a second French-Canadian parish, Notre Dame des Victoires. (The city also had an Irish Catholic church named, ironically, for French Canada’s patron saint John the Baptist.) In addition to their churches and schools, Plattsburgh’s Franco-Americans founded a long-lasting local mutual aid society and a hospital that served the region’s patients regardless of ethnicity or religion. The immigrant population grew in size and importance such that between 1902 and 1931 the city had elected no less than three Franco-American mayors.

Richard goes into great detail—it is tempting to call it minutia—about the funding and activities of Franco-American churches and schools, and the religious orders that staffed and served them. These orders of priests, nuns, and brothers included the Oblates, the Grey Nuns, the Brothers of Christian Instruction, and, later, Dominican nuns. The ranks of at least some of these orders swelled following the anti-clerical movement in France in the late 19th and early 20thcenturies that brought numerous francophone religious to North America. 

As in New England, francophone institutions in Plattsburgh were anglicized, slowly and unevenly, in the first half of the 20th century. Although consciousness of the French-Canadian past and sporadic nods to the language and traditions continued into the mid-20th century, use of the French language slowly diminished. Speaking in 1940, one of the Brothers of Christian Instruction said of the local Catholic school at which he taught, “[it] enabled the people to pass from a French-speaking to an English-speaking community without the faith suffering in any way.” Thus, by that date, anglicization was at least widespread if not complete. 

If this book were a film, movie critics might well have demanded more tension in the plot. Generally, Richard found very little conflict between Plattsburgh’s ethnic groups or religions. Even the intra-Catholic conflicts between the Grey Nuns who taught in local schools and the Oblates who oversaw St. Peter’s were resolved reasonably amicably. There is an apparent rivalry between two competing hospitals in town, but this comes to very little. 

Historians are constrained to report what they find, and a lack of conflict may be worth noting. As Richard mentions several times, Plattsburgh contrasted with New England in that, overall, there was cooperation between Franco-American and Irish-American Catholics in the northern New York city. Unlike Plattsburgh, New England communities from Danielson, Connecticut, to Fall River, Massachusetts, to Manchester, New Hampshire, to Lewiston, Maine, among others, experienced vituperative struggles between these two ethnic groups, in the churches or on the streets. The relative harmony Richard found in Plattsburgh is potentially an important difference between New England and New York that bears further research.   

One conflict that Richard does report is reminiscent of recent debates over the principle of laïcité in Québec. In 1906, a lawyer from New York City complained that nuns who taught in a Plattsburgh school, financed and administered by the local public school board for decades, conducted classes while wearing their religious garb. This was in violation of state law. The Grey Nuns relinquished the support and oversight of the local school board rather than don secular dress. Nuns teaching in public schools was not unknown in predominantly Catholic districts, such as parts of Northern Maine, during this period.

While Richard’s subtitle promises a book about Canadian immigrants, his work is almost exclusively a history of Franco-American institutions and their leaders. There is almost nothing in his book about the working people, be they farmers or laborers, who, little doubt, constituted  the vast majority of the Franco-American population here as elsewhere. Readers learn from Richard about Plattsburgh’s Franco-American parishes but little about their parishioners beyond the fact that they were poor. 

Richard states that industries such as timber and mining attracted French Canadians to this region of New York, but we hear nothing about the conduct of these industries, not even what type of ore they mined. Richard does not tell us about the places of origin in Québec of these French-Canadian immigrants, nor about their living and working conditions, and only a small amount about their rise in socioeconomic status as the community grew. We do not learn whether or not they had, as in many New England industrial towns, a dedicated neighborhood where they congregated. While North Country New York Franco-Americans were more agricultural than their more urban New England compatriots, we learn nothing about the balance between farmers/farm laborers and industrial workers.

Thus, like many other studies of Franco-Americans, this book is a history of elites. I include the clergy and other religious among elites since, unlike much of the Franco-American population, many were formally educated, if not wealthy. They had leadership roles that held prestige among their flock during the period in question. Richard’s research makes clear, however, that a not insignificant minority of the religious orders whose activities he painstakingly follows were not of French-Canadian origin, and the numbers of the Québec-born among them decreased over time. 

In contrast to his prior study of Lewiston, Richard’s focus on elites and their institutions mirrors many other studies of Franco-Americans such as Armand Chartier’s The Franco-Americans of New England: A History. For his part, Chartier justifies his emphasis on elites where he writes,

The sources of nineteenth-century Franco-American history reveal much more about the educated class of Franco-Americans than about the people. This is why historians, in any synthesis of the current state of the knowledge of this period, must of necessity focus on the attitudes and accomplishments of the militant élite and attempt to trace the evolution of the institutions they founded between 1880 and 1900.1 

I disagree. We may not have many first-hand accounts of “the people'' of that period (although we have a few, such as the reminiscences of French-Canadian workers collected by the WPA Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s). But there are many written sources that allow us, through extrapolation, to learn about the lives of Franco-American workers in the 19th century and beyond. From the U.S. Census we can learn about the average size of their households, and about the population density and configuration of their neighborhoods. Vital records, often kept by the local authorities prior to the 20th century, can inform researchers about inter-ethnic or inter-religious marriages among the working class; death records reveal data about infant mortality and causes of death which gives us clues about the living and working conditions among Franco-Americans.  From board of health reports kept by local or state authorities we may glean important indications about public health in Franco-American communities. Corporation reports and other company papers, such as payroll records, allow researchers to estimate the ethnic composition of the workforce of the industries that employed Franco-Americans. And beginning after the Civil War, several states began convening bureaus of labor statistics whose annual reports are rich sources of information about working class lives for much of the period Richard studied.

Richard makes good use of the U.S. and state censuses in this book, and he is well aware of the types of sources mentioned above. In his work on Lewiston he makes use of some of these very sources. His change of focus here is puzzling. Were such sources unavailable for Plattsburgh? Why did Richard choose to focus so heavily on a handful of institutions that served the French-Canadian immigrants to the neglect of the immigrants themselves? 

One positive outcome of this choice is the focus it brings to the history of Franco-American women. Both nuns and laywomen loom large in his account of Franco-American institutions. Richard’s research shows how nuns were leaders and how they exhibited agency in the face of clergymen who sought to limit or direct their activities. Laywomen were instrumental in financing Franco-American institutions in a time when pecuniary resources in this community were limited. Richard’s community study, among the work of some others, is thus a corrective to the relative neglect of Franco-American women, as a separate category, in many of the more widely-read histories, written by men for the most part. Richard’s main contribution in this book, therefore, is to women’s history, and to the history of the Catholic Church in the U.S., as well as adding to the ranks of works that discuss institutions that served a Franco-American population. 

An exception to Richard’s focus on elites and their institutions is his account of the Chapleau murder case. In 1889, a Franco-American farmer named Joseph Chapleau murdered his non-Franco-American neighbor. The fatal assault was witnessed by the sons of another neighboring, Franco-American family. One of the sons, age 16, spoke little English and appears to have been baffled by the U.S. courts, in which he was expected to testify. A local doctor and leader in the Plattsburgh Franco-American community apparently explained to the teenager the latter’s duty under the law. But the young man was so overwhelmed by these events that he took his own life. This case gives the reader a peek into the lives of two working, agricultural Franco-American families of the region. Richard’s account suggests that Chapleau, who had married a non-Franco-American and was comfortable with English, had assimilated somewhat to the host society. The neighboring Franco-American family had only rudimentary English-language skills, limited education, and seems quite unassimilated.

In the same chapter, Richard provides a riveting account of Franco-American reactions to the 1885 trial and execution of Métis leader Louis Riel. He shows that Franco-Americans, as a diasporic Francophone community, were more disposed to defend Riel than their cousins north of the border. Riel traveled extensively in New York and the New England states. Franco-Americans also knew that Riel was a naturalized U.S. citizen. They petitioned the Secretary of State in Washington to intervene in the case, but in vain. New York Franco-American Edmond Mallet was an advocate for Riel. Not long after Riel’s unjust execution, Mallet delivered a thunderous speech excoriating the Canadian government for its conduct in this case at a convention of Franco-Americans. This chapter in Richard’s book is fascinating and functions like a stand-alone essay. In subject matter and pacing, it is unlike any of the other material in the book.

Richard also has some interesting comments on the tendency of Franco-Americans to use minstrel shows, popular entertainments in this period, to finance their activities. Minstrelsy is widely viewed today as having depicted African-Americans in a demeaning and stereotyped manner. Richard quotes one scholar’s view that minstrelsy was a tactic used to move “white ethnics from a racially liminal to a white identity.” Thus the conditionally white, the not-quite-white-enough, attempted to graft themselves into a fully white identity by adopting the characteristic prejudices of the dominant culture. 

These efforts at assimilation into mainstream whiteness were only partially successful in the Plattsburgh region, as elsewhere, as late as 1950. This is evident in a collection of poems published that year by a local “farmer, salesman, and country shopkeeper” named Herbert Dewey. Dewey’s doggerel verse written in “North Country (i.e. French-Canadian) dialect” was replete with stereotypes depicting the Francophones as ridiculous, unintelligent illiterates who spoke a comical brand of English. Writes Richard, “in much the same way that minstrel shows demeaned people of color, poems like…Dewey’s made French-Canadian descendants appear inferior to their anglophone counterparts.” 

Dewey’s works were not the only examples of the use of dialect literature to depict French Canadians and Franco-Americans as unserious dullards who were unintentionally hilarious to their allegedly superior, anglophone neighbors. Richard quotes historian Jay Gitlin who claims that such portrayals of French Canadians, that Gitlin also discovered in 19th century Michigan, were comparable to “a French habitant minstrel show.”

Most likely, both Franco-Americans who staged minstrel shows and the authors of the French-Canadian dialect literature would have deemed their works harmless entertainment. They may have pleaded that they did not intend to demean the racial/ethnic groups in question. But both genres show how popular art and entertainment can influence the views of a dominant culture insidiously by portraying out-groups as jovial buffoons while claiming to celebrate their charms. 

Those interested in Franco-American history await a more general synthesis of the French-Canadian presence in the state of New York. However, Richard’s study of Plattsburgh has increased our knowledge of this presence and will provide a useful, professionally researched resource for the author of that future, more general tome. Readers interested in the history of women in the U.S. Catholic Church will also find in Richard’s latest book a thorough case study of this topic. As in his other books, Richard’s attention to detail and fact-first, theory-later approach has moved the ball forward. In addition to his studies of Lewiston and of the Ku Klux Klan, he has made yet another significant contribution to our knowledge of the French-Canadian heritage in the United States.

Notes:

(1) Armand Chartier, The French-Canadians of New England: A History (Worcester: Institut Français, Assumption University), 2000,  p. 42.