Rough Justice

Abstract By the mid-187os, the violence in the lower anthracite region was once again drawing national attention, just as it had a decade earlier. The single year from October 1874 to September 1875 was the most concentrated period of Molly Maguire activity. In this period, eight more assassinations were attributed to the organization-the same number as in the previous twelve years. Two of the assassinations took place late in 1874; the other six were committed in the four months immediately following the Long Strike.Although it was castigated as mindless barbarity by contemporaries, much of the Molly Maguire violence of the 1870s involved the enforcement of a specific type of retributive justice. The victims varied from Welsh gang members to miners, mine superintendents, and public officials. But the strategy of revenge employed in each case was much the same: direct, violent, and lethal. Elements of greed, dishonesty, and brutality entered into the picture, as they often do in human affairs; some of the participants in the Molly Maguire violence were not fighting for social justice in any meaningful sense, being animated instead by strictly individual grievances. But most of the violence bore either a primary or a secondary connection to labor relations, the assassination of mine officials in the most direct sense, and the assassination of public officials and Welsh miners and gang members because it was part of a general interethnic conflict that had its material basis in patterns of discrimination in the workplace.