2025/03/01 by David Brundage · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Irish and British Studies
paper · doi:10.1215/15476715-11521318
openalex publication_date 2025/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
Do we really need another history of the events that took place in Pennsylvania’s anthracite district in the 1860s and 1870s, events that Mark Bulik characterizes as “one of the longest and most murderous industrial conflicts the nation has ever seen” (9)? After all, the Molly Maguires, the secretive grouping of Irish American miners that stood at the center of these events, have been the subject of several scholarly books, as well as an Arthur Conan Doyle novel, a shelf of polemics arguing for the guilt or innocence of the twenty men who were eventually hanged, and even a Hollywood movie starring Sean Connery as Pinkerton detective James McParland, who infiltrated the Mollies and provided evidence for their prosecution. With the publication of Kevin Kenny’s Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (1998), which persuasively analyzed the Mollies as both a “shadowy pattern of actual violence” and an “ambiguous concept in a system of ideological representation” (73), one could be forgiven for assuming that we had learned just about all that we could regarding this dramatic moment in US working-class history.The Sons of Molly Maguire, however, demonstrates that even the most familiar of such moments can be profitably reexamined in the light of previously unexplored sources and new conceptual framings. Bulik, a senior editor at the New York Times, proves adept at the historian’s craft, conducting substantial research in both Pennsylvania and Irish primary sources and uncovering a great deal that is new. He has also elaborated the transnational approach to the Mollies that Kenny had initiated, while developing a generally persuasive new interpretation of his own. Finally, he has fashioned a vivid and memorable narrative that should engage any reader interested in the subject.The first part of the study makes good on its subtitle by analyzing the Irish roots of the Mollies, drawing not only on work by some of the most important Irish rural historians and folklorists but also, helpfully, on work by notable scholars of preindustrial protest in England, Wales, and France, such as E. P. Thompson and George Rudé. In four substantial chapters, Bulik traces popular festive traditions that cemented the bonds of rural society; the rise of secret societies like the Defenders and Ribbonmen (who mixed communal defense against the anti-Catholic Orange Order with mutual aid and even a sort of informal trade unionism); and the increasing salience of the land question over the course of the early nineteenth century. These ideas and organizations culminated with the emergence of an Irish underground movement calling itself the Molly Maguires on the eve of the Great Famine in the mid-1840s. Kenny covered some of this ground in his earlier study, but Bulik adds much more detail and goes beyond County Donegal, Kenny’s primary focus, to include the Ulster borderland counties of Cavan, Leitrim, and Monaghan. Especially impressive is his careful analysis of the overlap between the festive culture of mummers (young, single men who dressed in women’s clothing or straw costumes and traveled door to door near the Christmas, New Year’s, and midsummer holidays, performing plays and demanding food or drink) with the more political traditions of Ribbon and Molly Maguire protest. Kenny had mentioned a possible mummery connection, but only briefly—and, in fact, he had cited Bulik’s then-unpublished research as the basis of his discussion.Having established the Mollies’ roots, Bulik then explores their branches in Pennsylvania anthracite. At the center of his analysis is the Ancient Order of Hibernians (a neo-Ribbon body, in his telling), which established itself in the United States with an organization in Schuylkill County that by 1845 was deeply involved in trade union activity, Democratic politics, and opposition to emancipation—this last reflecting a deep-seated racism that Bulik attributes somewhat superficially to Irish American fears of Black economic competition.These threads came to the surface during the Civil War, when, in the first wave of Molly Maguire violence in Pennsylvania, opposition to emancipation and resistance to unequal and punitively enforced conscription laws (along with growing labor conflict) led to several assassinations in 1863. Here Bulik builds on Grace Palladino’s important study, Another Civil War (1990), while again adding a great deal of new evidence of his own. A second wave of violence came in the wake of the defeat of the miners’ new union, the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association (WBA), in the Long Strike of 1875. By this time, however, McParland had infiltrated the clandestine movement, and the arrests and trials began the following year. In his discussion of these later events, Bulik does not add much to earlier accounts, but his focus, after all, is on the roots of the phenomenon, not its flowering.Beyond the transnational reconstruction of Irish roots is a partially new interpretation of the Pennsylvania Mollies that harks back to classic work by Herbert Gutman and Eric Hobsbawm. In different ways, both historians had posited a transition from preindustrial collective behavior to modern labor activity (what Hobsbawm called “learning the rules of the game”: Labouring Men [1964], 345). Bulik builds on this framework in conceptualizing a dialectic between the retributive violence practiced by the Mollies and the more “forward-looking” WBA: “Just as coal is created from peat pushed underground and subjected to tremendous pressure so were American workers made of Irish peasants and industrial union members of Mollies. The peasant solidarity that served as the bedrock of the Molly Maguires became the industrial solidarity that served as the foundation of the WBA, and, later, the United Mine Workers” (301).Bulik’s final chapter moves in several different directions, with a discussion of a mummery / Molly Maguire motif in James Joyce’s Ulysses and an interesting hypothesis regarding a Molly Maguire legacy that might explain the persistence of labor violence and Irish American support for the IRA in Pennsylvania as late as the 1970s; however, the evidence for this hypothesis is much less substantial than in the rest of the book. Nonetheless, this is a stimulating coda to an important work that does indeed contribute something new to our understanding of the topic.