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Making Sense of the Molly Maguires KEVIN KENNY, 1998
New York: Oxford University Press pp. xii + 336, $45.00
Many key moments in U.S. labor history revolve around violence, and the classic tale of the Molly Maguires, the 19th-century equivalent of today's "going postal," provides a good example. In the anthracite coalfields of northeastern Pennsylvania during the 1860s and 1870s, the Molly Maguires took action on their workplace-based grievances, committing intimidation, physical assaults, arson, industrial sabotage, and murder. The Irishmen who participated in these actions felt squeezed by unrelenting employers, hostile police and politicians, and ethnic-based discrimination. Finally in the 1870s Pinkerton James McParlan infiltrated the Maguires. His testimony convicted and led to the execution of 20 Irish miners and the destruction of their secret society. The Maguires have always been shrouded in mystique, because precious little evidence exists about them. Now Kevin Kenny's book, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, presents a well-researched and subtle interpretation of the Maguires and their times.
Kenny argues that "The Molly Maguires always existed on two related levels: as a sporadic pattern of violence engaged in by a specific type of Irishman, and as a ubiquitous concept in a system of ideological representation ..." (6). His book begins by exploring the world which produced the Maguires, first in Ireland and then in Pennsylvania. Kenny links the Maguires to traditions in the Irish countryside, where the disruption of traditional landholding practices generated a pattern of violence. Those Irish miners...