Introduction

Abstract n the r86os and r87os, the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania drew national attention for their violence. After a series of assaults and killings, deeprooted fears of a secret Irish terrorist organization hardened into certainty. Sixteen men were assassinated, most of them mine officials, and there were numerous beatings and acts of industrial sabotage. The culprits, it was believed, were members of the Molly Maguires, an oath-bound secret society imported from Ireland. Pinkerton detectives were sent into the anthracite district under cover and the hunt for the Molly Maguires culminated in a series of showcase trials. Twenty Irishmen were convicted of a range of heinous crimes and sentenced to be hanged. Their trials and executions were the spectacular climax to a singular episode in American history, one that remains shrouded in ambiguity. Because of the uncertainties built into the subject, the Molly Maguires have been depicted in every imaginable way, from sociopaths and terrorists at one end of the spectrum to innocent victims and proletarian revolutionaries at the other. But ever since the r87os one specific narrative has been dominant: the Molly Maguires as inherently evil Irishmen who terrorized the anthracite region for two decades before being brought to justice by the heroic exploits of James McFarlan, a Pinkerton detective. This interpretation dominated the newspapers, pamphlets, and local histories of the time, as well as the first full-length books devoted to the subject, Allan Pinkerton’s semifictional work, The Molly Maguires and the Detectives, and Francis P Dewees’s ostensibly factual 4 Making Sense of the Molly Maguires history, The Molly Maguires, both of which were based on McParlan’s testimony and published in 1877. The same viewpoint was repeated, in its essentials, by the journalist Cleveland Moffett in 1894; by the historian James Ford Rhodes in 1909; and as literary fiction, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1915.