Book Review: The Sons of Molly Maguire: The Irish Roots of America’s First Labor War by Mark Bulik

Abstract

Mark Bulik The Sons of Molly Maguire: The Irish Roots of America's First Labor War, New York: Fordham University Press, 2015; 384 pp.: ISBN 97808232O2236, $39.95 On 2 January 1863, five assassins killed James Bergen, a disabled Union Army veteran. A week later, two of his friends were shot and wounded. These events, iMark Bulik writes, marked the start of the first labour war in the United States. The assassins were Molly Maguires, members of a secret society noted for resorting to violence. From 1877 to 1878, 20 Mollies were tried and executed. Plenty of ink has been spilled about the Molly Maguires. Some contemporaries derided them as primitive terrorists. Marxists and Socialists considered the executed Mollies martyrs. Much of what we know about the Mollies, the author argues, is either problematic or badly interpreted. Therefore, this book strips away some of the gray mist of myth, misinformation, and propaganda that has long shrouded the origins of the Molly Maguires' (p. 9). One of Bulik's principal objectives is to contextualize the Mollies by placing them in a transatlantic context. He contends that the lack of consensus about the Molly Maguires is partly because many writers tended to view the violence in a primarily American context, rather than an Irish one' (p. 7). To counter this trend, he spends nearly a third of the book hunting for the Irish roots of the Mollies. To his credit, he unearths fascinating information. For instance, he highlights the relationship between the Mollies and mummery, or, an ancient play performed by amateur troopers who visited nearby homes during the Christmas season' (p. 28). Mummers and the Mollies were different sides of the same coin. The mummers were the 'benevolent face of an alternative social order' (p. 43). The Mollies, the darker side, utilized violence to terrorize landlords in Ireland and mine owners in the United States. Thus, in addition to finding that the Molly Maguires and the mummers were of a piece, Bulik offers a social history of Ireland. He focusses on the fierce conflicts between tenants and landlords. In his analysis of organized agrarian violence, he discusses two broad groups. The Whiteboys were a loose-knit, largely apolitical southern Ireland organization concerned with 'issues related to the land and rural life' (p. 46). The Defenders and the Ribbonmen, on the other hand, concentrated in Ulster and 'busied themselves in sectarian battles, labor activity, nationalist politics, and tenant rights' (p. 46). The Defenders, the earlier organization, were suppressed and reborn as the Ribbonmen. The Molly Maguires debuted on 10 December 1844 and were quickly revealed to be Ribbonmen 'who had adopted a new name, a new agenda, and a new set of symbols, whole keeping their old organizational structure' (p. 87). The Mollies maintained a militant focus on access to land and food and 'showed a remarkable willingness to move beyond mere threats by taking on the authorities with aggressive shows of force' (p. 93). Throughout the rest of the book, Bulik discusses the consequences of transplanting this alternative social order to the United States. Irish immigrants carried their own legacy from the deadly competition for land in the north of Ireland--a tradition of collective action that soon became evident, in two related forms. …