The Sons of Molly Maguire - by Mark Bulik (Paperback)

About the Book

Traces the rise of the Molly Maguires from Ireland's devastating potato famine to the turbulent dawn of the American labor movement. With a heavy emphasis on the folk culture that underpinned the Mollies, the book documents the group's Civil War rebirth in Pennsylvania, and its lasting influence.

Book Synopsis

Sensational tales of true-life crime, the devastation of the Irish potato famine, the upheaval of the Civil War, and the turbulent emergence of the American labor movement are connected in a captivating exploration of the roots of the Molly Maguires. A secret society of peasant assassins in Ireland that re-emerged in Pennsylvania's hard-coal region, the Mollies organized strikes, murdered mine bosses, and fought the Civil War draft. Their shadowy twelve-year duel with all powerful coal companies marked the beginning of class warfare in America. But little has been written about the origins of this struggle and the folk culture that informed everything about the Mollies.

A rare book about the birth of the secret society, The Sons of Molly Maguire delves into the lost world of peasant Ireland to uncover the astonishing links between the folk justice of the Mollies and the folk drama of the Mummers, who performed a holiday play that always ended in a mock killing. The link not only explains much about Ireland's Molly Maguires--where the name came from, why the killers wore women's clothing, why they struck around holidays--but also sheds new light on the Mollies' re-emergence in Pennsylvania.

The book follows the Irish to the anthracite region, which was transformed into another Ulster by ethnic, religious, political, and economic conflicts. It charts the rise there of an Irish secret society and a particularly political form of Mummery just before the Civil War, shows why Molly violence was resurrected amid wartime strikes and conscription, and explores how the cradle of the American Mollies became a bastion of later labor activism. Combining sweeping history with an intensely local focus, The Sons of Molly Maguire is the captivating story of when, where, how, and why the first of America's labor wars began.

Review Quotes

Mark Bulik's The Sons of Molly Maguire is a superb work of scholarship. Focused on origins, this work situates the Irish emergence and American persistence of the Molly Maguires in all of their considerable complexity, while likewise ably revealing not only the crucial developments of the 1870s that have embedded the Mollies in American memory but also the factors contributing to the Mollies' continuing legacy extending into the present.---James P. Leary, University of Wisconsin

Mark Bulik's The Sons of Molly Maguire: The Irish Roots of America's First Labor War is a work of considerable scholarship, which carefully unpicks the tightly braided strands of ethnic, labor and party politics in the mid-nineteenth-century coal fields, especially the west branch of Schuylkill County. Drawing on the extensive research, he illuminates the competition between the Irish and other immigrant groups, and, most interestingly, the regional, class and generation tensions within the Irish community itself.---Breandan Mac Suibhne, Dublin Review of Books

Mark Bulik's The Sons of Molly Maguire is an engaging and enlightening work of historical research and scholarship. As well as bring into focus the Mollies' role in giving America its first taste of class warfare, Bulik's incisive and original explorations sweep aside myths, legends, half-truths, and untruths. He significantly deepens our understanding of these flesh-and blood laborers, who they were, where they came from, and how their struggle resonated through the labor movement in the United States. Thoughtful, insightful and unfailing fair, The Sons of the Molly Maguire is history at its best.---Peter Quinn, author of Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America

With deft writing and impressive research, Mark Bulik offers a new explanation for a conflict that shook the very foundations of post-Civil War America. The Molly Maguires were at the center of America's first great labor war, but as Bulik shows, the first shots of that war were fired not in northeastern Pennsylvania, but in the fields and villages of Ireland.---Terry Golway, author of Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics

About the Author

Mark Bulik is a senior editor at The New York Times. His most recent book is Ambush at Central Park: When the Irish Revolution Came to New York (Fordham University Press.)