‘The mendacious Irish character:’ Molly Maguire, anti-Irish sentiment, and anti-labor propaganda in the American press, 1880–1920

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper evaluates the prevalence and impact of nativist and anti-labor narratives built on the claim that the ‘Molly Maguires’, a vague 1860s and 70s militant Irish labor phenomenon of the Pennsylvania anthracite region, was still active between the 1880s and the 1910s. It finds that such narratives were widespread until the late 1890s, and still regionally significant until the late 1900s, finally fading into obscurity in the 1910s. ‘Molly Maguirism’ as a media narrative was primarily directed at organized labor and the (Irish) working class; it is best understood as a form of ethnicized proto-Red Scare tactic, but could incorporate other elements, such as broader nativist ideology and sectarianism. Based on these findings, prevailing models of Irish acculturation, such as Painter’s ‘second enlargement of whiteness’, are obsolete; the paper recommends a thorough revision of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Irish American working-class history, accounting for the continued and hitherto massively underestimated presence of anti-Irish sentiment.