Kevin Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. xi + 336 pp. $18.95 paper.

Abstract

Few episodes in North American working-class history have attracted as much attention as the rise and fall of the Molly Maguires. The term refers to a secret movement of Irish miners who employed threats and violence in confronting their adversaries in the anthracite coal fields in the decade after the US Civil War. Most interpretations have been ideologically charged and focused mainly on the violence itself, beginning with sensational newspaper accounts and Alan Pinkerton's own book based on information from his operative James McParland who infiltrated the movement. At least one study, J. Walter Coleman's The Molly Maguire Riots (Richmond, 1936), showed a healthy skepticism for McParland's biased sources—Pinkerton and others who were more interested in hanging the Molly Maguires than in understanding them. In The Molly Maguires (New York, 1983 [1964]), however, Wayne Broehl, Jr., developed the more typical view that the Mollies were terrorists and the Pinkertons heroes. Though he handled the evidence less critically than Coleman, it is Broehl's account that has been viewed as the standard, perhaps the definitive account for more than a generation. With all this work and much more, why do we need another study of the Molly Maguires and what is it that makes Kevin Kenny's by far the most valuable treatment of them?