Unveiling the Molly Maguires: Crime, Corruption, and Conflict

Title: Unveiling the Molly Maguires: Crime, Corruption, and Conflict
Original Publication Date:
Transcript URL: share.descript.com/view/IP42hKmRmn0
Description: Dive into the gritty history of organized crime, the tumultuous era of the Molly Maguires, and the repercussions of corruption during civil unrest. Tune in to our latest episode feature Friend of Ours, Joe Pascone of the Turning Tides History Podcast. theturningtidespodcast.weebly.com
#OrganizedCrime #MollyMaguires #CivilWarHistory #CorruptionExposed"
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Begin Transcript:
[00:00:00] Welcome to Organized Crime and Punishment, the best spot in town to hang out and talk about history and crime. With your hosts, Steve and Mustache Chris.
Welcome back everybody. Today, I am joined as usual by Mustache Chris. We're blessed to have our, another member of our crew, Joe Pascone. You'll recognize his voice from other episodes, but you'll also recognize his voice as he is the voice of the. Organized crime and punishment commercial. So thank you so much for joining us today, Joe.
[00:01:00] Uh, I guess to come up with a term, forget about it. No problem. Forget about it. Hey. Joe is going to join us today to talk about a really interesting aspect that brings together different shades of law enforcement, different shades of crime and organized crime, and all of this kind of blurs the line between organized crime and crime.
Crime and the legal system, everything sort of gets blurred together. And that is in the story of the Molly Maguires. It might be a topic that people have heard of or heard a little bit of, but maybe don't know a lot about it, but it's a really critical aspect, but it's kind of nestled inside of many aspects of American history.
And let's, I think the best way to get into this is, let's just get right into it. Uh, Joe, what got you interested in thinking about these Molly Maguires? So the Molly Maguires [00:02:00] first came to my attention. I'm doing a massive series currently on the American labor movement, rise of trade unions, labor unions, and they were sort of the first, they're considered the first labor martyrs in American history.
Um, whether they deserve that distinction, we can get into it for sure. They were, their trial, they were railroaded, it was railroaded through, at the end of it, 20 people hung, uh, in, in, in America. Simply because they were a part of this thing called the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Uh, but, so how do you get into this?
How do you talk about something so complicated with so many levels? Uh, especially about an Irish American secret society with labor union and political organizations a part of it and all the rest. The best way to do that, I think, is with a Hindu proverb from, from India, uh, obviously. So, of course, so I got this proverb from the Mark Bullock book, The Sons of [00:03:00] Molly Maguire, The Irish Roots of America's First Labor War.
In it, the Indian king is Faced with calamity, the prime minister comes to him, says, we need to make a decision on, you know, disease, ravaging the land, catastrophe, whatever war doesn't matter. Uh, he says, okay, sure. Fine. But first I need three blind men and an elephant. Uh, so the prime minister is like, okay, I don't really see the point of this, but let's go through with this.
The three blind men and the elephant are brought before the King and the King asked the three blind men. To describe the elephant for him. So one is trying to put one of the blind men is trying to put his arms around the waist of the elephant. And he says, the, the, the elephant's like a barrel. Another one is trying to measure how high, how tall the elephant is.
He says, no, the elephant's like a tree. The last one is feeling the elephant's tusks. And he says, no, you're both wrong. The elephant is like a spear. So just like the Molly Maguire's and the elephant. [00:04:00] They are all of these things and none of them at the same time, uh, bear with me, . So they were in a sense, a barrel because they insulated and protected the Irish community that they were a part of.
They were a tree because they had branches that extended to neighboring communities and, and neighboring Irish, uh, Irish people around them in coal country and in Ireland originally. Uh, and they were like a spear, because they acted, at least in their eyes, on the community's behest. They committed crimes, they robbed people, they murdered, with the quote unquote blessing of the community.
So that's where we should start here. We could start with the Irish roots, and this is one of the main of three characters I like to describe in this story. The first character is Ireland. The next is America, specifically Schuylkill County and the anthracite region. Uh, and the final character is coal itself and the coal [00:05:00] mining trade practice.
Yeah, so it's really interesting when you dig into each of those, it really is the three characters, and it's kind of hard to believe that Cole is a character, but it really is. Cole is such a huge, huge part of the founding of American industry, and the founding of the America as we know it today, the industrial giant that the North became during the Civil War.
is directly related to coal. Uh, in my previous episode, I cover the coal wars in Colorado, which led to the Ludlow massacre, the battle of Ludlow, however you want to look at it. Uh, but in there, uh, Thomas G. Andrews, I believe is the writer's name. He makes a, uh, incredible point. The cowboy might've quote unquote, tamed the West, but the coal miner won the West more than any other profession.
They provided the cowboy with the gun, the bullets, the The knife, the hammer, uh, you know, the tools of his trade without that, uh, America would still be pretty much a desolate place [00:06:00] where a few thousand people are able to survive. But thanks to coal and the advent of steam and things like this, America exploded, not only in population and in migrant labor, but also in, um, you know, power.
But, yeah, to start this story, first place you have to start, I think, is Ireland, because this is where the the Mollie Maguires first pop their head up. And they don't do it in the traditional coal regions. They do it in the borderlands of Ulster. Uh, those who don't know, Ulster is today, or at least most of Ulster is today, Northern Ireland.
Huge tension, division still between, uh, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Uh, one of the main defining features of Ulster is a thing called the Black Pig's Dyke. This is in myth mythology, or in local legend, the Irish believe that a massive black pig created the dyke with its tusks, ramming it through the the earth.
Uh, scientists now think that these, that this dyke is actually a [00:07:00] long gone series of fortifications. It belonged to the Red Branch Warrior Brotherhood, which is a super cool name. Uh, at a, yeah, at a place called the Balinamuk, or it's, it's spelled Ball in a Muk, but I believe it's pronounced Ball in a Muk.
Local legend says that this same pig, he was stopped as he was doing his thing. By, uh, a man, who I guess was angry that he was tearing up his field, threw a rock at him, and it stopped the pig in its tracks. And that's why there's this big defile at around this same area. Ulster was …