Since its inception in June 2011, this blog has received
more than 14,000 hits worldwide. Interest has come from the United States and Europe ,
and from countries throughout the world struggling with religious and ethnic
conflict.
Irish Catholics in the United
States during Pennsylvania ’s
“Molly Maguire” conflict navigated a river of ethnic hatred. In 1871, a bemused
correspondent for the Irish Times noted
that “native” Americans, those born on U.S. soil, wanted Irish immigrants
only as “hewers of wood and drawers of water.”
In 1871 the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), an Irish
Catholic benevolent society working under newly revised charters in New
York and Pennsylvania , sought to enhance the standing of Irish
Catholic men. In the words of John Kehoe, AOH delegate for Pennsylvania ’s
Schuylkill County
Exhaustive research shows that AOH officers charged with
“Molly Maguire” crimes in the Pennsylvania
coalfields embraced an agenda of wide-ranging reform that included political,
labor, social, and even financial initiatives. The combined efforts of these
AOH men generated a powerful hybrid—one that combined American individualism
with the AOH creed of friendship, unity, and support to those less fortunate.
In Pennsylvania ’s
coal region, a region gripped by cruel Gilded Age practices, AOH advocacy
included labor reform to benefit mineworkers of all ethnicities.
This extraordinary movement, born of American political
optimism and colored with Irish Catholic principles of equity and compassion,
never came to flower. Twenty-one AOH men charged as “Molly Maguire” terrorists
died on gallows in five counties. At least sixteen of them left behind
statements of innocence.
I have spent more than a decade researching and documenting
this conflict. In October 2013, I formed the Kehoe Foundation to help support this
work. The foundation’s website is currently under construction. I’ll post its
web address here as soon as it becomes available.
In a world torn with ethnic strife, the nonviolent advocacy
embraced by many of Pennsylvania ’s
nineteenth-century Irishmen condemned as “Molly Maguires” deserves a fair
hearing.
