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sherlock60This week, the canon story we’re looking at is The Valley of Fear (Pt. 2, Chaps. 1-4) and the chosen topic is The Molly Maguires.
Oh, crikey, this is a difficult one…
To quote part of a review of Making Sense of the Molly Maguires by Kevin Kenny on Google Books:
Twenty Irish immigrants, suspected of belonging to a secret terrorist organization called the Molly Maguires, were executed in Pennsylvania in the 1870s for the murder of sixteen men. Ever since, there has been enormous disagreement over who the Molly Maguires were, what they did, and why they did it, as virtually everything we now know about the Molly Maguires is based on hostile descriptions of their contemporaries.
Let’s have a go:
◘ The Mollies were a secret society based among the Irish coal miners in the anthracite fields of northern Pennsylvania in the 1860s and 1870s. [The Irish Story]
◘ The Molly Maguires took their name from a rural secret society in Ireland. The Irish Mollys were so-named because their members disguised themselves in women’s clothing, used powder or burnt cork on their faces, and pledged their allegiance to a mythical woman — Mistress Molly Maguire — who symbolized their struggle against injustice.The American Molly Maguires… did not disguise themselves in women’s clothing, though some of them “blacked up” for disguise. [Kevin Kenny, 2013]
◘ The [Pennsylvania] Molly Maguires was neither an ordered secret society nor a vast conspiracy. Rather, the [mine] workers engaged in sporadic collective violent protest characteristic of particular rural areas of Ireland from 1760 to 1850. [Dictionary of American History, 2003 on Encyclopedia.com]
◘ Conditions for the workers in this period were dreadful and coal mining was a dangerous and poorly paid profession. [The Irish Story]
◘ Despite the ethnic rivalries among the miners (particularly between Irish and Welsh) they managed to organise themselves into a union, the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association. The Great Panic of 1873 (one of the worst depressions in American history) gave mine bosses the opportunity to attack the wages and conditions of the miners… This led to the Long Strike of 1875 which lasted seven months and saw the governor order in troops to the region. The strike ultimately failed.The miners were forced to return to work under the new rates of pay and the union was badly damaged. [The Irish Story]
◘ The Molly Maguires society emerged from this background. Their targets became mine owners, company policemen and strike breakers. Intimidation, assaults and sometimes murder were employed by the Molly Maguires to rectify the grievances they felt would not be dealt with by a legal and political system that was hostile to immigrants and the working class. [The Irish Story]
◘ Molly Maguire history is sometimes presented as the prosecution of an underground movement that was motivated by personal vendettas, and sometimes as a struggle between organized labor and powerful industrial forces. Whether membership in the Mollies' society overlapped union membership to any appreciable extent remains open to conjecture. Kevin Kenny, 1998 via Wikipedia]
◘ The violence, however, was not all one-sided. The most noteworthy case of the tables being turned took place in Wiggans Patch, near Mahanoy City. Early in the morning of December 10, 1875, a group of armed and masked men burst into the home of the three men believed to be involved in the deaths of [Thomas] Sanger [a colliery foreman killed allegedly over a workplace grievance] and [William] Uren [a miner--killed because he was a witness to the murder]. The vigilantes killed… Charles O’Donnell and also the pregnant wife of Charles McAllister. (McAllister was wounded but survived.) [Joseph Bloom, 2000]
◘ Franklin Gowen was president of both the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company. ...his response to the Mollies was to hire the Pinkerton Detective Agency… Armagh native, James McParland [he also spelt his name McParlan, and used the alias “McKenna” while undercover] was selected to infiltrate the Mollies and report back to the Pinkerton agency on their actions. [The Irish Story]
◘ Arrested by private policeman and prosecuted by mining and railroad company attorneys, the trials, in the words of historian Harold Aurand, "marked one of the most astounding surrenders of sovereignty in American history." Aurand notes that the state's role in the proceeding was limited to providing "the courtroom and hangman." [Douglas O. Linder (2010)]
◘ In the entire series of Molly trials, not a single Irish American was empaneled on a jury. Instead, the fate of the Mollys was decided largely by German immigrants, many of whom admitted to understanding English only poorly. [Douglas O. Linder (2010)]
◘ The Ancient Order of Hibernians was a nationwide fraternal organization whose membership was limited to those of Irish-Catholic descent. In the coal region, however, the A.O.H. served as the cover organization for the Molly Maguires. Although not all members of the local A.O.H. lodges were Mollies, all of the Molly Maguires eventually tried and convicted of crimes were members of the A.O.H [Joseph Bloom, 2000]
◘ The leader of the local AOH was John Kehoe. [Kevin Kenny, 2013]
◘ ...authorities launched in late 1876 a prosecution of Kehoe for a murder committed in 1862… No witness placed Kehoe at the scene of the attack--and one witness specifically testified that he was not among the gang of men who beat [mine foreman Frank ] Langdon [the murder victim]. Historian Kevin Kenny… called Kehoe's first-degree murder conviction fifteen years later "unquestionably the most dubious of all the verdicts handed down to the Molly Maguires." Douglas O. Linder (2010)
◘ Kehoe was granted a posthumous pardon in 1979. [Wikipedia]
Some useful resources:
Ten things to understand about the Molly Maguires by Kevin Kenny on the OUPblog (2013)
Making Sense of the Molly Maguires by Kevin Kenny Review by Cory Johnson and James Dennis on World Socialist Web Site (1999).
Molly Macguires in Pennsylvania Coal Regions by Joseph Bloom on HistoryNet (2000)
Molly Maguires On Wikipedia.
The Molly Maguires Trials: An Account by Douglas O. Linder (2010).
The Molly Maguires On The Irish Story. An article, and a radio episode of the Irish History Show on Near FM: interview with Irish-American historian, author and poet John Kearns, discussing the Molly Maguires. 48 mins, 30 secs.
The Molly Maguires and the Detectives by Allan Pinkerton (1880). The whole book in a scanned form online. Part of the University of Connecticut Libraries collection. Various download options available.
Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.
Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.
Oh, crikey, this is a difficult one…
To quote part of a review of Making Sense of the Molly Maguires by Kevin Kenny on Google Books:
Twenty Irish immigrants, suspected of belonging to a secret terrorist organization called the Molly Maguires, were executed in Pennsylvania in the 1870s for the murder of sixteen men. Ever since, there has been enormous disagreement over who the Molly Maguires were, what they did, and why they did it, as virtually everything we now know about the Molly Maguires is based on hostile descriptions of their contemporaries.
Let’s have a go:
◘ The Mollies were a secret society based among the Irish coal miners in the anthracite fields of northern Pennsylvania in the 1860s and 1870s. [The Irish Story]
◘ The Molly Maguires took their name from a rural secret society in Ireland. The Irish Mollys were so-named because their members disguised themselves in women’s clothing, used powder or burnt cork on their faces, and pledged their allegiance to a mythical woman — Mistress Molly Maguire — who symbolized their struggle against injustice.The American Molly Maguires… did not disguise themselves in women’s clothing, though some of them “blacked up” for disguise. [Kevin Kenny, 2013]
◘ The [Pennsylvania] Molly Maguires was neither an ordered secret society nor a vast conspiracy. Rather, the [mine] workers engaged in sporadic collective violent protest characteristic of particular rural areas of Ireland from 1760 to 1850. [Dictionary of American History, 2003 on Encyclopedia.com]
◘ Conditions for the workers in this period were dreadful and coal mining was a dangerous and poorly paid profession. [The Irish Story]
◘ Despite the ethnic rivalries among the miners (particularly between Irish and Welsh) they managed to organise themselves into a union, the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association. The Great Panic of 1873 (one of the worst depressions in American history) gave mine bosses the opportunity to attack the wages and conditions of the miners… This led to the Long Strike of 1875 which lasted seven months and saw the governor order in troops to the region. The strike ultimately failed.The miners were forced to return to work under the new rates of pay and the union was badly damaged. [The Irish Story]
◘ The Molly Maguires society emerged from this background. Their targets became mine owners, company policemen and strike breakers. Intimidation, assaults and sometimes murder were employed by the Molly Maguires to rectify the grievances they felt would not be dealt with by a legal and political system that was hostile to immigrants and the working class. [The Irish Story]
◘ Molly Maguire history is sometimes presented as the prosecution of an underground movement that was motivated by personal vendettas, and sometimes as a struggle between organized labor and powerful industrial forces. Whether membership in the Mollies' society overlapped union membership to any appreciable extent remains open to conjecture. Kevin Kenny, 1998 via Wikipedia]
◘ The violence, however, was not all one-sided. The most noteworthy case of the tables being turned took place in Wiggans Patch, near Mahanoy City. Early in the morning of December 10, 1875, a group of armed and masked men burst into the home of the three men believed to be involved in the deaths of [Thomas] Sanger [a colliery foreman killed allegedly over a workplace grievance] and [William] Uren [a miner--killed because he was a witness to the murder]. The vigilantes killed… Charles O’Donnell and also the pregnant wife of Charles McAllister. (McAllister was wounded but survived.) [Joseph Bloom, 2000]
◘ Franklin Gowen was president of both the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company. ...his response to the Mollies was to hire the Pinkerton Detective Agency… Armagh native, James McParland [he also spelt his name McParlan, and used the alias “McKenna” while undercover] was selected to infiltrate the Mollies and report back to the Pinkerton agency on their actions. [The Irish Story]
◘ Arrested by private policeman and prosecuted by mining and railroad company attorneys, the trials, in the words of historian Harold Aurand, "marked one of the most astounding surrenders of sovereignty in American history." Aurand notes that the state's role in the proceeding was limited to providing "the courtroom and hangman." [Douglas O. Linder (2010)]
◘ In the entire series of Molly trials, not a single Irish American was empaneled on a jury. Instead, the fate of the Mollys was decided largely by German immigrants, many of whom admitted to understanding English only poorly. [Douglas O. Linder (2010)]
◘ The Ancient Order of Hibernians was a nationwide fraternal organization whose membership was limited to those of Irish-Catholic descent. In the coal region, however, the A.O.H. served as the cover organization for the Molly Maguires. Although not all members of the local A.O.H. lodges were Mollies, all of the Molly Maguires eventually tried and convicted of crimes were members of the A.O.H [Joseph Bloom, 2000]
◘ The leader of the local AOH was John Kehoe. [Kevin Kenny, 2013]
◘ ...authorities launched in late 1876 a prosecution of Kehoe for a murder committed in 1862… No witness placed Kehoe at the scene of the attack--and one witness specifically testified that he was not among the gang of men who beat [mine foreman Frank ] Langdon [the murder victim]. Historian Kevin Kenny… called Kehoe's first-degree murder conviction fifteen years later "unquestionably the most dubious of all the verdicts handed down to the Molly Maguires." Douglas O. Linder (2010)
◘ Kehoe was granted a posthumous pardon in 1979. [Wikipedia]
Some useful resources:
Ten things to understand about the Molly Maguires by Kevin Kenny on the OUPblog (2013)
Making Sense of the Molly Maguires by Kevin Kenny Review by Cory Johnson and James Dennis on World Socialist Web Site (1999).
Molly Macguires in Pennsylvania Coal Regions by Joseph Bloom on HistoryNet (2000)
Molly Maguires On Wikipedia.
The Molly Maguires Trials: An Account by Douglas O. Linder (2010).
The Molly Maguires On The Irish Story. An article, and a radio episode of the Irish History Show on Near FM: interview with Irish-American historian, author and poet John Kearns, discussing the Molly Maguires. 48 mins, 30 secs.
The Molly Maguires and the Detectives by Allan Pinkerton (1880). The whole book in a scanned form online. Part of the University of Connecticut Libraries collection. Various download options available.
Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.
Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.
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no subject
Date: 2016-06-26 11:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-06-26 12:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-06-26 08:50 pm (UTC)However, I laid hands on Pinkerton's account of his clash with the Molly Maguires -- which I understand is the account Doyle was working from -- and I was hoping to read it this week. This is timely and necessary context for that endeavor, thank you! :-D
no subject
Date: 2016-06-26 11:02 pm (UTC)And Pinkerton's agency will be the focus of next week's discussion. As usual I will be having a rummage around the internet and seeing what I can find ^^"
no subject
Date: 2016-06-26 11:07 pm (UTC)And yay, maybe I'll have something to contribute by then. :-)
(eta: scanned format online, yes, but there are also downloads in various formats in the lower sidebar. The epub is OCR, which means it's typo-laden but readable-enough, especially once you learn to look at the shape of the word instead of listening to the sound of it.)
no subject
Date: 2016-06-27 09:41 pm (UTC)