Abstract
Labor history has many controversies but none more persistent than the history—or myth—of a group of Irish miners in central Pennsylvania known as the Molly Maguires. As Mark Bulik describes them, “the only consensus is that there is no consensus . . . even on the very existence of a society called the Mollie Maguires” (p. 7).
Provoked by family history, with his mother born on the banks of the West-West, a river that ran through the anthracite region of central Pennsylvania, Bulik offers a unique, and sometimes conflicted, vision, combining labor history with an enormous range of social and ethnic history.
Most histories of the Mollies focus on the period after the Civil War, when they were infiltrated by the Pinkerton agent James McParlan and prosecuted by Frederick Gowen, the railroad and coal capitalist of the area. Bulik, however, expands this history, providing several long chapters about the organization of resistance in Ireland by the whiteboys in the 1760s to the British landlords, describing their association with “the cycle of peasant calendar and festive groups such as mummers, strawboys and wren boys” (p. 47). The mummers were a tradition that “promoted community cohesion by visiting homes during the Christmas season, dressed as women, or in straw, with painted faces,” and were given drinks and money but “the Mollies worked so hard to expropriate the legitimacy of the mummers,” and “both before and after the Mollies, there is evidence of connections between violent secret societies and festive groups” (p. 29).
The revival of the mummers tradition by Irish immigrants in Pennsylvania developed in the year of the anti-Catholic crusade of Benjamin Bannan, owner and editor of The Miner’s Journal, but also “the year in which the militia of Schuylkill County had broken nine strikes and humiliated Irish Catholics by playing an Orange anthem” (p. 153).
Bulik follows the development of an organization through the Civil War to the better-known period of the Mollies, which ended with the public hangings of twenty men in the late 1870s. He shows the resistance to the Civil War draft by the miners, the anti-Catholic and antiunion movements, and the rise and decline of the anthracite region as the background to the movement. He is also skillful about describing the monopolization of the coal fields, as small operators were bought out, and the impact on the miners and their organizations.
On the large scene of labor history, Bulik presents the Mollies as “not so much a dead end in the labor movement as a vital part of the complicated process by which the transplanted Irish peasants of the anthracite region were over time transformed into American industrial workers” (p. 298). This history is illustrated by the rise of the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association (WBA), led by John Siney, which wanted to “lend the union a degree of respectability.” The WBA won “limited” gains in several strikes in 1868—higher wages but not a shorter workday—but when the Pennsylvania state legislature legalized unions in 1869, “the new approach that the union represented brought miners to its banner in droves” (p. 257)
While looking at the earliest origins of the Mollies, Bulik also extends their history into the twentieth century, what he calls “the shadows of the gunmen”—from the 1882 murders of two British officials in Dublin’s Prospect Park (expanded in the novel Valley of Fear by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) to two union officers in Philadelphia—“rough-and-tumble Irishmen from Schuylkill County” (p. 288)—John McCullough of the Roofers Union, who may have been “a gunrunner for the IRA” and who was shot to death in the kitchen of his home, allegedly by the Mafia in 1980 (p. 290), and Johnny Morris of the Teamsters, whose union hall had “enough guns and ammunition to equip a small army,” supposedly “to disrupt the 2000 Republican National Convention.”
For all of his careful research into the Mollies, however, Bulik repeatedly refers to them as “a society of assassins” (p. 5), “a small band of Irish gunmen” (p. 259), “a violent secret society” (p. 296), and “a band of assassins” (p. 297) because “for the Mollies, murder was politics by other means” (p. 297). The mummers in Ireland “were Molly Maguires, members of the last of Ireland’s peasant conspiracies, and when they did not get what they wanted, the killing became very real” (p. 20). “Molly Maguire leaders all countenanced violence or the threat of it” (p. 298) when “the season for vengeance was nigh” (p. 44). This whole debate about unionism and “violence” is a constant one, and while Bulik can recognize “violence” when the militia attacked the miners, the very conditions that the coal owners forced the miners to endure are not included in the “violence” category. It is also misleading to claim that “the Mollies fired the first shots in Americas labor wars” (p. 5) and that—quoting other historians—“it was the Molly Maguires who gave the United States its first glimpse of class warfare” (p. 5)