Efflorescing in the 1840s in Donegal, Leitrim, and other northern and western counties, the Molly Maguires, ‘Mollies’ or ‘Mollys’ became a common epithet for clandestine, violent, and coercive association. What makes the Mollies important is not their range or reach, nor even their physical longevity in those places where they first emerged; it is more the fact that they endured in the collective memory long after their reality had faded. This memory was helped by migration. The transfer of secret society traditions from Ireland (sometimes via Britain) to the United States is commonly asserted, though little concrete evidence exists of this carriage from one setting to another. Instead, we rely on assumptions derived from the durability of organisations’ names and on the presence of Irish communities within which such outfits could grow again. Quite clearly, though, as this book shows, the Mollies were one outfit that was packed in the cultural baggage of Irish emigrants.
In this highly-readable new account, Mark Bulik attempts to set straight some records. He is inspired by the fact that, for scholars today, ‘the only consensus is that there is no consensus’ about the nature and meaning of Molly Maguire activities in the U.S. He ascribes the lack of firm conclusions to the concentration of American scholars on U.S. labour conditions. Instead he points to roots in Ireland, which is where the story must begin. That said, the need for Bulik’s book is in some ways curious, for this is by no means a new area. In fact, it is a well-tilled field. Apart from nineteenth-century accounts and histories, there was J. Walter Coleman, The Molly Maguire riots: industrial conflict in the Pennsylvania coal region (1936), Wayne J. Broehl, The Molly Maguires (1964) and, most recently, the best study of all: Kevin Kenny’s detailed labour history, Making sense of the Molly Maguires (1998), which also examines the Irish roots in the early chapters. Bulik, however, more than anyone previously, makes the connection between clandestine folk rituals in Ireland and protean, modern labour protests in the coalfields of Pennsylvania.
Bulik strongly assert the continuities between these old and new world forms of popular, labour organizations, linking them to wider streams of popular and clandestine protest where men dressed as women in an inversion of gender roles that sought to mask identity, reduce risk, shock and scare victims and observers. These were not behaviours that were unique to Ireland. Indeed, British traditions of feast day mummery and holiday ritual influenced some Irish, with the plantation of Ulster clearly causing such activities to be incorporated into Ulster culture. In terms of our understanding of these traditions, the work of the British Marxists on popular movements is instructive, for it has amply demonstrated that there was an element of politics (short of revolutionary intent) in many social actions from food riots and strikes to banditti marauding and harming livestock and damaging crops.
In Ireland, such cultural traits spread beyond Molly Maguires. The Lady Clares, Lady Rocks, the followers of Queen Sadbdh, the Wren-boys, and the Protestant Peep o’ Day Boys, all at times dressed as women. These were then cultural expressions linked to wider European modes of frivolous feast-day indulgence or socio-economic protest, some of which was conducted in the guise of women. Northern England’s machine-wreckers – the followers of Ned Ludd – did the same thing. There is no denying that this combination of gender inversion and disguise was important, though I have found no evidence that the modern urban or small-town Ribbonman (the most common and perhaps most sharply-defined type) ever adopted the sartorial aspects of the Wren-boys or Molly Maguires.
Self-evidently, all labour movements gain inspiration to some extent or other from class hierarchies and inequalities. It is no surprise, therefore, that Molly Maguireism was fired by the same sparks of conflict that later lit up more conventional labour activity. Indeed, such class tensions were very acutely present in the 1860s and 1870s, in the anthracite regions of Pennsylvania, when a movement of violent, proto-trade unionists, mostly Irishmen, imported some of the techniques and tactics of north and west Ireland to industrial and communal relations in the new country. These were the Molly Maguires. As with the strategies adopted by later Fenians, the Molly Maguires used legitimate fronts (in their case the Ancient Order of Hibernians) to hide their activities. The core of activists dedicated to vigorous, sometimes violent collectivism in which the mystique of the oath- and ritual-bound secret society was blurred with primitive trade unionism. In Pennsylvania specifically the Mollies were an Irish element of the miners’ trade union, the Workers’ Benevolent Association. Later, their members morphed into Knights of Labor, an overwhelmingly Catholic trade union run by Terence V. Powderly, a second-generation Irishman and one-time mayor of Pennsylvania’s mining capital, Scranton.
Although, as Bulik points out, their first victim was an Irish worker, the Molly Maguires primarily sought reprisals for disadvantage against Welsh and English foremen, workers, and biased non-Irish town officials and policemen, whom they held responsible for their grievances. While these labour wars looked like so many in the Atlantic world, with their emphasis of protean organisations struggling for leverage by cajoling workers to show solidarity and employers to offer recompense, they also entailed vital ethnic aspects that reflected their origins in the tight kin and communal networks back home in Ireland.
The strength of Bulik’s work is in his fascinating exploration of traditions of folk ritual and performance in the mists of time, and his implication of forward continuities into militant Irish-led union violence in Pennsylvania in the 1950s through to the 1970s. The passages on mummers and Wren-boys (the latter taking on a tyrannical form as late as the 1920s in Cork as an I.R.A. front) are fascinating. Connecting seemingly ancient ritual form to the clandestine, dead-of-night activities of the Molly Maguires in 1860s America requires something of a leap of faith. Yet in many respects there are plausible anthropological connections through codes, conventions and memories, if not in personnel. Bulik is writing about a ‘mind-set’. However, he does not impose what was (as he acknowledges) only a sub-set of labour protest onto all of Irish, let alone American, labour. He argues that the mind-set was hardy and lived long, and he is right.
