Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.1 | The History Cooperative

Making Sense of the Molly Maguires. By Kevin Kenny. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. xii, 336 pp. Cloth, $39.95, isbn 0-19-510664-4. Paper, $18.95, isbn 0-19-511631-3.)

Historians, folklorists, novelists, and filmmakers have lavished attention upon the Molly Maguires. Most of them have accepted the myth of marauding Irish killers terrorizing the anthracite regions, which was propagated initially by the local journalists, Pinkerton detectives, and a railway executive turned prosecuting attorney. Kevin Kenny has written what is easily the best book in this large library. He repudiates that myth and situates the killings for which twenty Irish Americans were hanged between 1877 and 1879 persuasively in the context of a profound cultural transformation undergone by both Ireland and its diaspora in the aftermath of the potato famine and the industrialization of the anthracite country. 1

Kenny scrutinizes critically the sources on which historians of the eastern Pennsylvania coalfields have had to rely. The early representations of the Molly Maguires were not simply distorted by prejudice against the Irish; they were essential ideological ingredients in the triumph of a new social order. His critique is informed by recent explorations of the history of Ireland, which have replaced the familiar English versus Irish dichotomy with a panorama of regional and class diversity and a postfamine "devotional revolution." . . .

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