Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to cool people. Did cool stuff. You're
Speaker 1: weekly reminder of what happens when bosses drag out a
Speaker 1: strike so long that it drives people out of their homes.
Speaker 1: That's what we're gonna talk about today.
Speaker 2: Not for nothing.
Speaker 3: I learned this morning that it was Bob Iger's fault
Speaker 3: that they revealed the murderer of Laura Palmer too soon
Speaker 3: on Twin Peaks. So if anyone was looking for an
Speaker 3: additional reason, if you really want to get granular and petty,
Speaker 3: that was a fun one.
Speaker 1: That is reason enough.
Speaker 3: Yes, I'm willing to I'm willing to take it. To
Speaker 3: perceive slights, I don't care whatever turns people against this man.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's Jamie Loftus over there, rabble rousing. Jamie Office
Speaker 1: is my guest this week. Hy, Jamie. How you doing.
Speaker 2: I'm I'm great.
Speaker 3: I've been thinking about the Molly McGuire is quite a
Speaker 3: bit this weekend.
Speaker 2: Over the weekend because.
Speaker 3: I saw my irishest family last night, including my cousin
Speaker 3: who's Molly McGuire. Molly McGuire, and I mentioned this and
Speaker 3: she responded with huh, So I think that the whole
Speaker 3: family is going to learn a lot from my family.
Speaker 1: She's going to think about her name after that.
Speaker 4: I know.
Speaker 3: It is canonically a coincidence because my grandma's maiden name,
Speaker 3: but I think she'll think it's cool that well, actually
Speaker 3: I don't know how the story ends, so maybe not it.
Speaker 1: We'll get there.
Speaker 3: I'll do like a Titanic situation and be like just
Speaker 3: listen to just watch VHS one, no need to watch
Speaker 3: VHS two.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a little bit of the whole thing where
Speaker 1: sometimes I've fish people in Ireland are more radical than
Speaker 1: Irish people in the US, But I still think that
Speaker 1: they're They're real interesting and cool. There's just there's more
Speaker 1: asterisks in this in this episode than the previous episode.
Speaker 1: I'm prepared, but also with us is Sophie Lichterman, our
Speaker 1: producer sub so Pi so Phi.
Speaker 4: I've agreed to record this podcast at nine am on
Speaker 4: a Monday.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Usually we make this like cole elaborate joke where
Speaker 1: there's like only fifteen minute break between the two episodes
Speaker 1: when we record, but this time there was actually a
Speaker 1: longer break between the episodes for us than for you.
Speaker 1: Isn't that wild?
Speaker 2: That's true.
Speaker 1: Our audio engineers Ian Hi Ian Hi Ian Hien and
Speaker 1: our music was written for us by un woman. This
Speaker 1: is part two of a two parter. You probably figured
Speaker 1: that out. It's about the Molly Maguires. You also probably
Speaker 1: figured that out either by looking at the title or
Speaker 1: by listening to us talk. But in part one we
Speaker 1: learned about how when you try to enclose the commons
Speaker 1: in Ireland, a bunch of people put on dresses, questionable
Speaker 1: makeup and murder you. And so now we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about what happens when some of those people moved
Speaker 1: to the United States, where spoiler alert, the working conditions
Speaker 1: are not good for people who have no money.
Speaker 2: Hold on run that back.
Speaker 1: The land of opportunity was the land of an opportunity
Speaker 1: to be exploited.
Speaker 3: Right, I mean, some of these people, if that was
Speaker 3: that was that was the dream all along?
Speaker 1: Was that probably was the dream alone to be wildly exploited. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a kink, I guess that. I mean, almost starving
Speaker 1: in Appalachia is better than litter released starving in Ireland.
Speaker 1: So we're going to talk about Appalachia. We're going to
Speaker 1: talk about Pennsylvania in particular, and we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about a Pennsylvania primarily in the eighteen sixties. But you know,
Speaker 1: being US will jump around a bunch. The US it
Speaker 1: liked coal in the eighteen sixties. It still does. See
Speaker 1: the aforementioned We're all going to drown as the water's rise,
Speaker 1: and the US needed lots of coal. Fortunately it had
Speaker 1: lots of it, fortunately for the industrialization of the US
Speaker 1: of the nineteenth century. Not fortunately for US one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty years later. Yeah, they'd never found this stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm sure we would have found some other way to
Speaker 1: fuck everything up. So the best quality coal is called
Speaker 1: anthracite coal. Northeastern Pennsylvania has a ton of anthracite coal,
Speaker 1: is the world's biggest deposit of anthracite coal. Okay, so
Speaker 1: a lot of Irish people fleeing starvation and colonization, they
Speaker 1: show up to be settlers in a different colonized country,
Speaker 1: the United States. They show up in Pennsylvania, which I
Speaker 1: hate typing, as I'm mentioned last time, because it's annoying
Speaker 1: to spell. Specifically, they showed up in Schoukol County, which
Speaker 1: is not an indigenous name. It's Dutch for hidden stream.
Speaker 1: This had been Lenape Land until they were forced off
Speaker 1: in seventeen seventy eight. By the eighteen forties, the area
Speaker 1: was still very very rural and or wild. This is
Speaker 1: like one of the kind of Appalachia being like still
Speaker 1: one of the least populated parts of the United States,
Speaker 1: even though it's like right in the middle of where
Speaker 1: colin you know where the United States part is. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's just like all around Appalachia, right, there's like
Speaker 1: a ton of people. Right the east mid Atlantic is
Speaker 1: a very densely populated area, but you go into the
Speaker 1: mountains and that stops being the case. So where this
Speaker 1: coal is is very rural. There were two coal fields
Speaker 1: in the area. There was a northern one, which was
Speaker 1: geologically blessed with being near surface coal that was easier
Speaker 1: to mine. This was mined by large corporations. Then there's
Speaker 1: the southern field where our Irish wound up. And this
Speaker 1: is smaller scale operations, like more like mom and pop
Speaker 1: exploiter shops with only a couple hundred employees instead of
Speaker 1: like these, you know, thousands of employees.
Speaker 3: A small I mean, I love a small scale exploitation, yeah,
Speaker 3: Because then there's always the American dream.
Speaker 2: You can always dream of exploiting at a higher level.
Speaker 1: What if one day you get to put the boot
Speaker 1: on someone's neck.
Speaker 2: We're gonna need a pair of bigger boots.
Speaker 1: I know, on those boots m m our bootstraps, like
Speaker 1: the like the little loop on the back of the boot.
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: I honestly think of those hideous flat Greek sandals like
Speaker 3: the cool girls wore in the early two thousands.
Speaker 2: When I think, if I think.
Speaker 3: There's sandal straps, I don't even think of boots.
Speaker 1: Those shoes were evil.
Speaker 2: That was that was out of my pay grade. Socially.
Speaker 4: I tryed literally, I'm trying to look up what a
Speaker 4: bootstrap is. But there's like some company called Bootstrap and
Speaker 4: their horrible logo, which is just a giant purple bee
Speaker 4: is the only.
Speaker 2: Which boots have Which boots have strapped? I associate boots with,
Speaker 2: you know, laces.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean it's like my boots have a
Speaker 1: little loop on the back that you can use to
Speaker 1: pull the boot on. That's the best I can think.
Speaker 3: Okay, that's I've interacted with that kind of bootstrap.
Speaker 4: I mean, I guess it's just I don't want to
Speaker 4: see the giant purple bee.
Speaker 1: Tell me what it is.
Speaker 3: It's yet another way that the American dream. It's it's
Speaker 3: fake down to the language.
Speaker 4: They're like, the answer on here is not what we
Speaker 4: want because you can't actually pull you.
Speaker 1: I heard somewhere, and this is not in my script,
Speaker 1: so I can't like a test to this. I heard
Speaker 1: somewhere that bootstrap the whole, like pick yourself up by
Speaker 1: the bootstraps was actually like a leftist prays making fun
Speaker 1: of the American dream. It was like, oh, yeah, just
Speaker 1: pick yourself up by the bootstraps, that's possible. And then
Speaker 1: everyone's like, okay.
Speaker 3: It almost sounds it almost sounds like how much could
Speaker 3: a banana cost ten dollars?
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: They're like, well, yeah, because rich people aren't wearing wearing
Speaker 3: them boots.
Speaker 4: The parts of the I have the definition, nfo, oh
Speaker 4: it is it is the loop. It is the loop.
Speaker 4: Like for example, look at this boot. They got two
Speaker 4: of them on the side.
Speaker 2: What a useful chart? Yeah, two different arrows pointing at
Speaker 2: the loop.
Speaker 4: But if Yeah, the first like seven things on Google
Speaker 4: were telling me something about a popular CSS framework, and
Speaker 4: then the next one was telling me that it means
Speaker 4: advancing oneself or accomplishing something without aid.
Speaker 1: So I interpretation, Yeah, there should be an instead of Kickstarter,
Speaker 1: there should be a site called bootstrapper, and it's a
Speaker 1: site where you sign up and you just don't get
Speaker 1: any money. Yeah, and you just can't. You actually just
Speaker 1: can't accomplish anything sport. Okay, So the southern coal fields
Speaker 1: where you have lots of bootstrappers, they dug deeper with
Speaker 1: worse equipment and worse pay. People were getting the equivalent
Speaker 1: in like twenty twenty three money of fifty dollars a
Speaker 1: day for work that will one hundred percent murder you.
Speaker 1: Like pretty much everyone who doesn't die in the course
Speaker 1: of the violence that will be in this episode dies
Speaker 1: from black lung. The Irish who showed up there. They
Speaker 1: are some of the roughest and poorest of the Irish immigrants,
Speaker 1: which is fucking saying something. And unlike most of the
Speaker 1: rest of the eighteen forties Irish immigrants into the United States,
Speaker 1: a lot of them don't speak English. You have a
Speaker 1: larger wave of Irish speaking immigrants in the eighteen eighties
Speaker 1: or so, But in the eighteen forties, as we talked
Speaker 1: about last time, a lot of folks who are coming
Speaker 1: from places where people still spoke Irish were able to
Speaker 1: hold on in Ireland a little bit more so, it's
Speaker 1: very unlikely that these people were like card carrying Molly
Speaker 1: McGuire's when they show up. It's like they weren't like,
Speaker 1: let's go to America and start a chapter of Molly McGuire's.
Speaker 1: Probably they weren't even like, oh god, we have to leave,
Speaker 1: we're starving and were Molly McGuire's, so let's go do
Speaker 1: that instead. Molly McGuire Ism was as much a sort
Speaker 1: of spirit of resistance and a tactic as much as
Speaker 1: it was an actual secret society. It was also what
Speaker 1: you called every Irish person you don't like.
Speaker 3: So is that another I mean, I know we were
Speaker 3: talking about that in the last episode as well. Where
Speaker 3: because the history like that, Because Molly McGuire could be
Speaker 3: used as a pejorative, it could be used to reference
Speaker 3: an organized group, or it could be used just to
Speaker 3: like explain it kind of just a shorthand for a
Speaker 3: resistance mentality. Does that kind of muddle up the history
Speaker 3: of like who is actually associated with what.
Speaker 2: And how things sort of shake out?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, there's hundreds of there's like one hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty years of historians arguing about whether the Molly Maguires
Speaker 1: are real. Oh great, Like, it is possible that is
Speaker 1: entirely just what they were called by their enemies. It
Speaker 1: is far more likely that they existed, and a lot
Speaker 1: of the they're not real like people compare it to
Speaker 1: being like when people are like the mafia isn't real, Like, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they don't admit that they exist, but they exist, you know, okay,
Speaker 1: but it's hard to peace out what is? What there was, however,
Speaker 1: a public society, It was semi secret society, a fraternal organization.
Speaker 1: The first organization that the Irish form in the New
Speaker 1: World is called the Ancient Order of the Hiberians. This
Speaker 1: is not actually an ancient Order, but the cool thing
Speaker 1: to call your group, Like, yeah, how.
Speaker 2: A should we talk it? A couple couple of years
Speaker 2: ago it was.
Speaker 1: Let's see, I want to say, eighteen thirty six. Nice,
Speaker 1: but they formed as the Ancient Order. They've been called
Speaker 1: this since. Actually, no, you're exactly right. They took the
Speaker 1: name Ancient Order in eighteen thirty eight, when they've been
Speaker 1: around for two years.
Speaker 2: That rocks.
Speaker 3: I think that fans of like K pop groups should
Speaker 3: start doing that. Yeah, yeah, just start calling themselves an
Speaker 3: Ancient Order. At random. Where's the harm? It sounds fucking cool.
Speaker 1: If your group isn't a league, a lodge or an
Speaker 1: ancient order, what are you doing? That's why we're pleased
Speaker 1: to announce Cool Zone, the ancient Order of.
Speaker 3: Pool Zone, the ancient Order of Cloth on media cool down.
Speaker 2: Yeah cool, we should just have a place called cool Lodge.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm verge.
Speaker 2: Yeah all right, Sophi's approved it.
Speaker 4: It's all great ideas. And as the head of the
Speaker 4: Ancient Order of the Cool Zone, let me just grabbed my.
Speaker 1: Giant staff that I loot. Yeah, yet you got a sword,
Speaker 1: I think definitely.
Speaker 4: Like one of those like Gandalf sword slash staff situations.
Speaker 1: Yeah, with your sword in one hand, staff and the other.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're wearing a very complicated hat right now is
Speaker 3: how I would describe it.
Speaker 4: Yes, thank you.
Speaker 1: With the complicated hat has studio headphones built into it, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because it's a podcasting order, Yeah obviously.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's there's a mic at the top of the
Speaker 3: staff too. It's actually a very functional unlike a lot
Speaker 3: of yeah functional, it's very women's fashion is historically not functional,
Speaker 3: and I think that you're really you're really changing the
Speaker 3: narrat thank you yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: So this particular fraternal organization they're still around and they suck.
Speaker 1: Now sick. They they tried to ban gay Irish American
Speaker 1: groups from the Saint Patrick's today, Saint Patrick's Day Parade
Speaker 1: and York City. They've probably sucked for a really long time.
Speaker 1: I don't know if they sucked back in the eighteen
Speaker 1: thirties when we first started talking about them, but going
Speaker 1: back to nineteen hundred, they were the right wing side
Speaker 1: of Irish Republicanism. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, which is the
Speaker 1: precursor to the IRA, actually always hated them for being
Speaker 1: right wing nationalists. And the Ancient Order showed their true
Speaker 1: colors in the Irish Civil War when they backed the
Speaker 1: Treaty with England and the division of Ireland, and then
Speaker 1: in the Spanish Civil War where they went and fought
Speaker 1: for Franco the fascist. Ooh, I think that the Ancient
Speaker 1: Order of Iberians is honestly like what annoying right Wingish Americans,
Speaker 1: you know, like right wing Irish Americans think that the
Speaker 1: IRA is like right wing because as a rored Republican
Speaker 1: in it.
Speaker 3: Oh right, yeah, this Americans are not Americans also not
Speaker 3: immune to.
Speaker 1: This yeah, if you want. If if you're listening to
Speaker 1: this and you're a right wing Irish person, don't are
Speaker 1: Irish American. The ira is not your, guys, but the
Speaker 1: ancient order of the Hiberians is. So they might have
Speaker 1: been a right for the first few decades. I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: They formed in eighteen thirty six in New York City
Speaker 1: and Schoogle County, and they took the name in eighteen
Speaker 1: thirty eight. And they basically existed at first to protect
Speaker 1: Catholic churches, and Catholic folks were facing a lot of
Speaker 1: like anti papist, anti Catholic sentiment, right, and so they
Speaker 1: formed to protect those institutions. In most places, it was
Speaker 1: a very peaceful, sort of boring place. In the coal fields,
Speaker 1: they had really significant overlap with the molly maguires, okay.
Speaker 1: And and the miners, especially the Irish miners, who actually
Speaker 1: will get into this. They weren't miners, they were mine laborers, okay.
Speaker 2: And then what was the distinction there?
Speaker 1: Oh, I love that you actually have a functional memory.
Speaker 5: This.
Speaker 1: That is why it's better if I record the two
Speaker 1: things in a row. We did talk about this last time.
Speaker 1: I think it had.
Speaker 3: To do with being outside of the mines, but still
Speaker 3: working for the mines.
Speaker 2: Is that correct?
Speaker 1: No? That no, that's what kids had to do.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, sorry, I'm thinking of the miners again. Okay, yeah, really.
Speaker 1: Yes, you have three groups. You have the miners with
Speaker 1: an E, the mine laborers, and then the miners with
Speaker 1: an o oh my god. The miners with an E.
Speaker 1: They go in and they're the skilled labor and they
Speaker 1: go in and like pick where to mine, right, and
Speaker 1: then they like sometimes do the actual sort of mining.
Speaker 1: But then they just like leave the coal on the ground.
Speaker 1: As best as I can tell, it'll be like a
Speaker 1: little different in different minds because there's a lot of
Speaker 1: different physical methods of mining, and the mine laborers are
Speaker 1: also hanging out down there, and then they have to
Speaker 1: gather the coal and put it in the carts and
Speaker 1: carry it out and all this shit, okay, and they
Speaker 1: have the most dangerous jobs in the mine, okay. So
Speaker 1: they live off of like fifty dollars a day and
Speaker 1: modern money. Extended households lived under one roof, usually a
Speaker 1: married couple. There are kids, some relatives, and some borders right,
Speaker 1: if not an entire second family. Many households were run
Speaker 1: by widows because a lot of men kept dying in
Speaker 1: industrial accidents. Kids, of course, worked, both boys and girls.
Speaker 1: Girls didn't work in the minds, but as domestics and
Speaker 1: doing sewing or whatever, basically anything to bring in money
Speaker 1: because you all are fucking starving.
Speaker 3: So I'm I feel like, I'm this is I know
Speaker 3: the answer to this question already, But how do you
Speaker 3: know how young they were starting?
Speaker 2: And I'm assuming there's like.
Speaker 3: No form of like any organized education happening at this time,
Speaker 3: or was there.
Speaker 1: I'm under the impression that there's not a formalized education
Speaker 1: at this time, Okay, But I actually don't know the
Speaker 1: answer to that. I know a lot of the kids
Speaker 1: were starting at like seven, but overall it was more
Speaker 1: like preteens, gotcha, okay. And so at first, the mining
Speaker 1: in the area was like surface shafts and you would
Speaker 1: just go down to hit the water level and then
Speaker 1: you stop right because it's the fucking middle of the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century. You don't got a way to get water
Speaker 1: out of a hole. By the eighteen seventies, they moved
Speaker 1: more to tunnel mining, and they also started working below
Speaker 1: the water level by pumping water out. They also use
Speaker 1: something called room and pillar mining, which is where you
Speaker 1: mine a bunch of coal but leave some pillars made
Speaker 1: out of coal in the room of coal. Right, you
Speaker 1: can hold up the hold up the roof, but then
Speaker 1: someone has to go in and remove the pillars because
Speaker 1: that's coal too. You can't just leave that in the
Speaker 1: ground and then the room collapses. This is dangerous. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and there are all kinds of other dangers. They had
Speaker 1: funny names for all the different smells of gases that
Speaker 1: would kill them.
Speaker 2: Ooh, hit me.
Speaker 1: The stink damp, the fire damp, the black damp, and
Speaker 1: the white damp.
Speaker 3: They should be poopery variantow and so you have ahead
Speaker 3: and those are all different like shorthands for a distinct Yeah.
Speaker 1: I forgot to write though, like it's like not carbon
Speaker 1: monoxidecause that doesn't smell, but it's like carbon dioxide or yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't write them down. There's a lot of different
Speaker 1: things that will kill you. But you know what true
Speaker 1: isn't trying to kill you until it gets all of
Speaker 1: your money.
Speaker 3: Could it, by any chance be the amazing products and
Speaker 3: services that are sponsoring this fine program.
Speaker 1: That's right, and we recommend almost all of your money
Speaker 1: on these products. And services, but holding onto a little bit.
Speaker 1: So there's still a reason that capitalism wants you alive.
Speaker 1: Here's some ads. Okay, we're back. And so I was saying,
Speaker 1: there's the difference between the miners the skilled work. The
Speaker 1: skilled miners they had apprenticeships. They actually had some independence
Speaker 1: in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. By the
Speaker 1: end of the nineteenth century they don't once the big
Speaker 1: companies come in, and then you have mine laborers who
Speaker 1: are usually paid by the miners, and they get paid
Speaker 1: about a third of what a miner did.
Speaker 2: Wow, the Welshian needs it's been much as it is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And the Welsh and the English got
Speaker 1: to be miners and the Irish got to be laborers.
Speaker 1: To an overwhelming degree. There was very consistent discrimination against
Speaker 1: the Irish in terms of employment opportunities and housing opportunities
Speaker 1: and all kinds of things. There was, specifically in this
Speaker 1: time and place, an ethnic hierarchy that went American, British, Welsh, German,
Speaker 1: Irish Jesus. Okay, yeah, people get really wanting to before
Speaker 1: they figured out, like I mean, okay, they already had racism, right,
Speaker 1: but you know, before they Yeah, people really want to
Speaker 1: find reasons to hate other people over weird ethnic bullshit.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, it's like and the fact that Irish, I mean,
Speaker 3: the Irish are at the bottom of that totem pole
Speaker 3: and just leaving other people out entirely don't even make
Speaker 3: the totem pole right.
Speaker 1: Well, and it's like, and actually that's going to come up.
Speaker 1: This particular area didn't have any the other way lower
Speaker 1: than any white worker. And people always say that Irish weren' white,
Speaker 1: and I don't remember I talked with this last time,
Speaker 1: but it's like they were white, they were just ethnically
Speaker 1: they faced ethnic oppression, but they were far above Chinese
Speaker 1: and black workers, which there largely weren't any in this
Speaker 1: time and place. At least according to everything I read,
Speaker 1: they would have been higher than certainly black workers and
Speaker 1: Chinese workers. Yeah, okay, only about eleven percent of Schoogle
Speaker 1: County was Irish. They were slightly less than half the
Speaker 1: foreign born population there, but in the mining towns they
Speaker 1: had a clear majority. The other big group was the Welsh,
Speaker 1: and the two groups fought a lot. They had kind
Speaker 1: of a gang warfare going on that was ethnic because
Speaker 1: the Welsh, who were seen basically as British were given
Speaker 1: the choice jobs and so facing all this different oppression
Speaker 1: being mistreated, they formed themselves some Molly McGuire's once again,
Speaker 1: they left basically no evidence of their own and for
Speaker 1: decades in the area. There's two competing ideas about how
Speaker 1: to handle exploitation. Right, there's the British way, which is
Speaker 1: trade unionism. This was developed during the Industrial Revolution in Britain.
Speaker 1: I think it comes from Chartism, but I didn't like
Speaker 1: fall far enough down that rabbit hole to like speak
Speaker 1: more about chartism.
Speaker 3: Ok.
Speaker 1: And this is using strikes and overall it is an
Speaker 1: attempt at a non violent approach. Obviously strikes, particularly in
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century, did end up very violent, but the
Speaker 1: like the larger picture strategy of trade unionism was about
Speaker 1: strikes and non violence. Okay, then there's go ahead.
Speaker 4: Oh.
Speaker 3: I just was curious of how much Molly mcguiresm in
Speaker 3: Irish people who immigrated to the US, how much it
Speaker 3: resembled what we were seeing or what we were talking
Speaker 3: about of what was happening in Ireland. Is it more
Speaker 3: of a continuity of thought and resistance or are there
Speaker 3: like visual or like organizing hallmarks to to the Molly mcguires.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about it a bit more, but overall, in
Speaker 1: the US, the Molly McGuire's kept well they kept the
Speaker 1: bad makeup, and they didn't.
Speaker 2: I was like, did they did they keep?
Speaker 3: So they kept the makeup, they did dropped the dress
Speaker 3: the cross. Well, that's honestly disappointing. I would prefer exactly
Speaker 3: the reverse.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what are you gonna do? All right?
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you've got this English method of dealing with
Speaker 1: exploitation that is like polite. Then there's the Irish way,
Speaker 1: which is direct and violent action against the people who
Speaker 1: exploit you.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to make an argument about which one
Speaker 1: worked better, because neither one worked in this story. Frankly,
Speaker 1: this is not a story with a happy ending, Okay,
Speaker 1: but I will say how much I love the industrial
Speaker 1: workers of the world.
Speaker 4: A story with a happy ending.
Speaker 1: No, See, that's the thing about cool people, the cool stuff.
Speaker 1: It's a happy middle.
Speaker 4: Thanks.
Speaker 1: The real treasure was the violence we enacted all along.
Speaker 3: Wow, it really was about the violent and exploitation chated.
Speaker 1: But okay, much like the Irish were being cheated in
Speaker 1: so eventually unionism and direct action of other sorts actually
Speaker 1: start kind of becoming a little bit better friends at
Speaker 1: different points. Eighteen forty two, the US is five years
Speaker 1: into a depression. Miners start getting paid in goods instead
Speaker 1: of money. This wasn't company store times because it's the
Speaker 1: small operators. This is like before mining gets really bad, right,
Speaker 1: but it's still really bad. It's amazing that it could
Speaker 1: get worse from where it was so July seventh, eighteen
Speaker 1: forty two, some workers protested and they marched from a
Speaker 1: small town to the county seat of Pottsville. And they're
Speaker 1: armed with clubs. They're shutting down the mines as they pass.
Speaker 1: This is not this is all ethnicities. Soon fifteen hundred
Speaker 1: folks are marching and they try to form a union,
Speaker 1: and the operators refuse to accept it, and the strike fails.
Speaker 1: In eighteen forty nine, they successfully form a union. It's
Speaker 1: called the Bates Union. It's run by a guy named
Speaker 1: Bait Baits. The main argument that they have is that
Speaker 1: they want to get paid in cash for the work
Speaker 1: they do instead of like promises of goods, right m hm.
Speaker 1: This union tried hard to push the idea that workers
Speaker 1: and bosses had the same interests, such as keeping the
Speaker 1: cost of coal high. And this was like a thing
Speaker 1: during a lot of this trade unionism is basically trade
Speaker 1: unionism didn't start off trying to be like we hate you, bosses.
Speaker 1: It tried to be like, hey, what if we work together?
Speaker 1: You know. Unfortunately the guy Bates it was named after,
Speaker 1: probably he took all the union money and ran off.
Speaker 3: No, well see that's it's a red flag to name
Speaker 3: the union after yourself.
Speaker 2: It almost is like he unionized with himself.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. He's like, everyone giving me money, I'll put
Speaker 1: it where it needs to go.
Speaker 2: That's a good Yeah.
Speaker 3: No one should be naming a union after themselves and
Speaker 3: not the collective that is it.
Speaker 2: That's a major red flag, all right.
Speaker 3: Well, not not to victim blame, but yeah, you know,
Speaker 3: maybe maybe there was chad of yeah, why did we
Speaker 3: name it after a guy?
Speaker 1: Yeah, they don't do that again, at least in eighteen
Speaker 1: fifty eight. They do the union thing again. In eighteen
Speaker 1: fifty eight, the miners went on strike for higher wages,
Speaker 1: and during this time you get some coffin notices posted around,
Speaker 1: basically with drawings of pistols and coffins that are like, hey,
Speaker 1: you'd better not scab. Only you ever heard the word
Speaker 1: black leg for a scab. No, I hadn't either. Black
Speaker 1: leg is an old timey word for it's distinct from
Speaker 1: a scab. A scab, at least in nineteenth century, is
Speaker 1: a hired worker from somewhere else who breaks a strike.
Speaker 1: A black leg is someone who works there already who
Speaker 1: doesn't join the strike. Okay, And so most of their
Speaker 1: stuff they're using the terminology black leg, not scab.
Speaker 3: Okay, And interesting, Okay, I've been hearing I mean, just
Speaker 3: for no reason, all that I've been looking into, you know,
Speaker 3: like granular terms, because it's I think that there's maybe
Speaker 3: people that are getting extremely confused by how many different
Speaker 3: terms there are for uh, for I think what is
Speaker 3: now colloquially just but imagine I said it, right, yeah,
Speaker 3: just called scabbing. But now you're like, oh no, there's
Speaker 3: this there's this whole fun vernacular that we get to use.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally, yeah, Okay. So they set up, they start
Speaker 1: go on strike. They're spreading out the coffin notices, which
Speaker 1: is clearly there's some like Molly mcguiresm within the union. Right.
Speaker 1: So the sheriff shows up with two companies of infantry,
Speaker 1: one company of cavalry and one company of artillery to
Speaker 1: put down the strike. Okay, it works. The US sure
Speaker 1: hates organized labor. No one was killed, but three men
Speaker 1: were sentenced to sixty days in prison for organizing the strike,
Speaker 1: and the coffin notices were signed the children of Molly McGuire.
Speaker 1: And so for the first time in the US, is
Speaker 1: that so lit? I just love how dramatic that is.
Speaker 1: It is.
Speaker 2: I just like, bless, bless, bless.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Irish for just being just being extreme drama queens.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 3: The ancient order, the children of Molly McGuire, It's just
Speaker 3: all so damn good.
Speaker 2: I love our people. They're great, you know.
Speaker 1: And so the the first probable this is the first
Speaker 1: time that mcguiresm shows up in the US is eighteen
Speaker 1: fifty eight. The first probable killing by the mcguires was
Speaker 1: probably retributive. It's a Welshman shot and killed an Irishman
Speaker 1: and then was found not guilty. So then that Welshman
Speaker 1: was killed by a pit with a pickaxe by a
Speaker 1: man who had quote blackened his face with powder.
Speaker 2: Okay, kind of sounds like an open shutcase.
Speaker 1: But yeah, an irishman probably the guilty party was hanged
Speaker 1: for this, okay, and most of McGuire. McGuire is was
Speaker 1: not personal vendettas. It was class and labor focused, and
Speaker 1: the rest of their killings were class and labor focused.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't their main method. Mcguireism wasn't even the
Speaker 1: main method of these Irish immigrants. Strikes and militant labor
Speaker 1: unionism was the start until that became impossible because because
Speaker 1: of the Civil War.
Speaker 2: Ah that.
Speaker 3: I was like, okay, okay, tell me about this Civil war.
Speaker 3: I was taught about it all wrong at school.
Speaker 1: Yeah. God, today's heroes are not Civil war heroes. Uh,
Speaker 1: really kind of sketchy on race overall, with their choice
Speaker 1: and their makeup?
Speaker 4: Am I on today?
Speaker 1: I know? I know?
Speaker 2: Is it just nine am on a Monday?
Speaker 1: Or are you fucking with me? Macbat It's not both.
Speaker 1: It's not as bad. I'll leave it to you all that. Okay.
Speaker 2: So I don't know.
Speaker 4: You wrote a sentence that says really kind of sketchy
Speaker 4: on race overall, what with.
Speaker 1: Their choice and makeup and their militant anti draft protests.
Speaker 2: The sentence after the Civil War?
Speaker 3: Okay, wait, yeah, tell me more expand on that, please?
Speaker 1: So when the Irish in the US overall, especially here
Speaker 1: in Scuogle County, when they would vote, they would vote Democrat.
Speaker 1: Nineteenth Century politics in the US are a fucking mess.
Speaker 1: The Democrats are less anti immigrant and less anti Catholic
Speaker 1: than the Republicans. They're also the pro slavery Party and
Speaker 1: the anti war party right anti the Union War effort
Speaker 1: against the Confederacy. But until the Republican Party came around
Speaker 1: eighteen fifty four, all parties were the pro Slavery Party,
Speaker 1: and the main opponent to the Democrats before them was
Speaker 1: the Whigs, who briefly spun out into the No Nothing Party,
Speaker 1: who are Protestant Zealots who hated Catholics and drinking and immigrants.
Speaker 1: We talk about some of their like militant anti German
Speaker 1: immigrant actions that they took in Chicago on I think
Speaker 1: the very first episode of Cool People, Cool Stuff. The
Speaker 1: No Nothings. They're not great. So the Irish have been Democrats, right,
Speaker 1: that is their tradition because the other side fucking hates them.
Speaker 1: But they are also Democrats because Democrats are kind of
Speaker 1: the working class party, because the working class are sometimes
Speaker 1: real fucking dense, and they bought into the line if
Speaker 1: you free the slaves, they'll take your jobs. I have
Speaker 1: no quotes from many Molly Maguire's one way or the
Speaker 1: other about any of this, but they did vote Democrat,
Speaker 1: and that is the overall picture of immigrant labor being
Speaker 1: racist in the US. Okay, so the war starts and
Speaker 1: two big things come as a real of this. First,
Speaker 1: all labor actions are basically accused of being pro Confederate.
Speaker 1: It is now treason to interrupt the flow of coal
Speaker 1: to the federal government. Second, there's a draft. I would
Speaker 1: argue that drafting people is immoral, but in this case,
Speaker 1: the draft was specifically targeting to crush both the labor
Speaker 1: movement and Maguireism in Schouogle County.
Speaker 3: Oh so it's like turbo moral. Yeah, they're like, yeah.
Speaker 1: Wait a second, Why is everyone who's being drafted an
Speaker 1: Irish immigrant who specifically was fighting for the union?
Speaker 2: Wow?
Speaker 3: Yeah, wait, you're going to want to draft everyone who's
Speaker 3: ever advocated for themselves in their entire life. That's putting
Speaker 3: immorality on a skateboard and giving it a hat, and
Speaker 3: yeah all this other shit. Okay, Okay, so the labor
Speaker 3: movement is okay, this is so I'm thinking meatpacking again
Speaker 3: of just like being impacted by you know, I guess
Speaker 3: function executive orders that it's like, we will, underno circumstances
Speaker 3: shut down this industry where you are constantly put in
Speaker 3: peril and are just trying to unionize, and we will,
Speaker 3: you know. And it's unpatriotic of you too to not
Speaker 3: want to play ball exactly as mandated.
Speaker 1: Yeah, awesome, So people start resisting the draft. In eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty two, a mine foreman docks the Irish workers pay
Speaker 1: and then yelled at some Irish workers for spitting on
Speaker 1: the American flag, which they probably weren't doing for a
Speaker 1: cool reason. The so the Irish workers killed the guy
Speaker 1: the gou just docked their pay and yelled at them. Also,
Speaker 1: in eighteen sixty two, miners go on strike, so the
Speaker 1: sheriff brings the militia in a battalion of two hundred
Speaker 1: men to keep order and keep people working. When the
Speaker 1: draft comes, censuses go around to determine who to draft,
Speaker 1: and these were met with resistance from women and kids.
Speaker 1: The grown men had to hide, right, and so a
Speaker 1: bunch of women went out and threw hot water sticks
Speaker 1: and stones and hee haw, okay cool, yeah back yeah.
Speaker 1: The person who oversaw the draft was this guy named Bannon,
Speaker 1: who specifically hated the Irish Catholics and the Molly mcguires.
Speaker 2: Something very name one good Bannon.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: When the list of conscripts gets announced anyway, on October sixteenth,
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty two, it included a greatly disproportioned number of
Speaker 1: Irish workers, especially those suspected of Anyone suspected of being
Speaker 1: a Molly McGuire was drafted. So a thousand armed people blockade.
Speaker 3: Go ahead, Sorry, I get, but it's because the definition
Speaker 3: of like, quote unquote being a Molly McGuire is so
Speaker 3: viscous and vague it almost Yeah, it's like almost like
Speaker 3: a McCarthyism kind of thing where they're like, we don't
Speaker 3: like you.
Speaker 1: Okay, No, it's absolutely a McCarthyism thing. And it's kind
Speaker 1: of like with McCarthyism, everyone started being like, I'm not
Speaker 1: a communist, what the fuck you're talking about? But some
Speaker 1: people were like, I am a communist, fuck you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And that's kind of how Mally maguiresm is is. It's like,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not a Mally McGuire, and some people
Speaker 1: are like, well I am, fuck you yeah, and you're.
Speaker 3: Like, well, no matter what, everyone's getting mistreated, and like yeah.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah.
Speaker 1: So when these people are drafted, a thousand armed people
Speaker 1: blockaded the train that was leading away the draftees. I
Speaker 1: believe this led to them getting the draftees out of
Speaker 1: the train. More troops came in and put that down,
Speaker 1: But in the end, the miners actually this first draft
Speaker 1: the miners win. Lincoln himself was like, oh shit, if
Speaker 1: we stationed more troops in Schoogle County and draft more
Speaker 1: people there, we're gonna have a full on insurrection. So
Speaker 1: they forged aff A David's saying that the volunteers had
Speaker 1: filled the necessary spots. So they still got to be like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, no, we got everyone we need from Schoogle County.
Speaker 1: It's cool, and so they drove off the draft. Okay,
Speaker 1: most of the Molly McGuire attention during this wasn't about
Speaker 1: the draft. It was about it stayed class focused, and
Speaker 1: they had no other tool left besides direct action because labor.
Speaker 1: You can't do a labor union during this, right, right,
Speaker 1: So a couple months later, two hundred armed mcguires raided
Speaker 1: a mine and beat their bosses and then the guys
Speaker 1: who'd been mistreating them at the mine, then they took
Speaker 1: over the mine and shut it down. Crowds attacked and
Speaker 1: beat several other mine operators in the coming months, basically
Speaker 1: anyone who was like mistreating them. In eighteen sixty three,
Speaker 1: the draft expanse and it becomes federally controlled. This time,
Speaker 1: they suspend habeas corpus due process of law for anyone
Speaker 1: suspected of draft resistance. And now even the Republicans in
Speaker 1: the Union are mad about the draft, right, okay, because
Speaker 1: it's clearly immoral. Yeah, which is so hard in this
Speaker 1: like larger context. Is like overall, I'm like very fucking
Speaker 1: happy that the Union beat the Confederacy, right, like, of course,
Speaker 1: but this new draft law, it lets rich people off
Speaker 1: the hook very even more directly. You could pay three
Speaker 1: hundred dollars, which is more than a year's worth of
Speaker 1: work for a minor, right, or you can go ahead.
Speaker 3: So it's just so it's it's shifting to just I mean,
Speaker 3: it was directly targeting the poor anyways, but this just seals.
Speaker 1: It, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's formalized now. Yeah, and so
Speaker 1: for the North as well as the South. Like in
Speaker 1: one of the first episodes we did on the show,
Speaker 1: the Civil Civil War, war the Civil War within the
Speaker 1: Civil War and the Confederacy, we talk about how Confederates
Speaker 1: nose plead for listening to you see. We talked about
Speaker 1: how the Confederates were drafting everyone and how this led
Speaker 1: to a civil war within the Confederacy, and how Confederate
Speaker 1: soldiers viewed it as a rich man's fight and a
Speaker 1: poor man's sorry, a rich man's war and a poor
Speaker 1: man's fight. And this is true for the Union too,
Speaker 1: And this doesn't surprise me, but this is the first
Speaker 1: time I've read about it personally, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Also, during this whole thing, you're not supposed to draft
Speaker 1: anyone who's not American, right, because that's the whole thing,
Speaker 1: And so you're only supposed to draft American citizens or
Speaker 1: people who have stated their intention to become American citizens,
Speaker 1: like foreigners who are working on becoming American citizens. This
Speaker 1: was completely ignored, and you know, poor migrants were drafted
Speaker 1: left and right.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, it's you can be an American when it's
Speaker 3: convenient to be an American, and when it's not, then
Speaker 3: fuck you you're not.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, which has no comparison to anything that happens now.
Speaker 2: No, everything's fixed.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Some people try to like read this kind of
Speaker 1: story to be like, oh, the spirit of the Irish
Speaker 1: or something, right, and I'm like, this is a story.
Speaker 1: I mean, yes, it's about some Irish people, but it's
Speaker 1: a story about immigration into the US, right, And so
Speaker 1: like the modern version of this, if you're looking for
Speaker 1: modern people who are fighting in similar ways, it's not
Speaker 1: the fucking Irish anymore, right, it's the people who buy
Speaker 1: stuff from our sponsors. Eho eh No, on that one
Speaker 1: actually felt immral uh so im.
Speaker 2: Moral that it that it went back to being kind
Speaker 2: of funny.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and once again wondering what podcast I'm on.
Speaker 1: I have. I had a stress dream last night about
Speaker 1: starting researching someone who someone told me was cool, and
Speaker 1: I committed to doing an episode about it, and then
Speaker 1: about halfway through I found out how incredibly uncool the
Speaker 1: man was, and then I was like, I'm stuck doing
Speaker 1: the episode.
Speaker 2: What did we say?
Speaker 4: Did we say the magpie after we found out about
Speaker 4: that guy that was a bad husband? We read the
Speaker 4: end first when it comes to.
Speaker 1: This, So don't worry. You're safe, just like you're safe
Speaker 1: from missing out on the ease deal deals deals deals, Wow, wowow,
Speaker 1: and we're back. So in Scuocle County someone stole all
Speaker 1: the draft records, which is cool. An officer leading search
Speaker 1: for draft dodgers found himself murdered. A lot of this
Speaker 1: was probably German immigrants, not Maguire's, because the German immigrants
Speaker 1: were just as mad about it because they had all
Speaker 1: the same reasons to be mad about it. Census takers
Speaker 1: were driven off by gunfire, and this started becoming like
Speaker 1: really organized resistance. There were meetings held twice a week
Speaker 1: in all the townships about how all the immigrants could
Speaker 1: resist the draft. Any mind owner who turned over their
Speaker 1: list of employees would have their equipment trashed by their workers.
Speaker 1: And three thousand resistors started drilling militarily, and they're led
Speaker 1: by returning soldiers. So this rocks.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So like people who've either been in for nine months
Speaker 1: or three years at this point, they show back up
Speaker 1: and they're like, all right, we're going to train you
Speaker 1: all to fight so they can fight against the people
Speaker 1: trying to draft you. They managed to get light artillery.
Speaker 1: This was probably smuggled down from Canada and they were
Speaker 1: called Maguire's and they were called buckshots. That was just
Speaker 1: the other word for them at this point.
Speaker 3: So sorry, is this still kind of exclusively Irish organizing
Speaker 3: or is it becoming more of like a multicultural group.
Speaker 1: I am not entirely certain. I believe that the three
Speaker 1: thousand people drilling were Irish, okay, But I know that
Speaker 1: a lot of the other direct action was happening more broadly,
Speaker 1: and so I actually don't have any particular reason to
Speaker 1: believe one way or the other about there's a lot
Speaker 1: of multi ethnic organizing and there's a lot of intra
Speaker 1: ethnic fighting happening during all of this time, and it's
Speaker 1: kind of hard to piece some of it out. But
Speaker 1: Federal troops show up and enlist them at gunpoint. It
Speaker 1: never comes to a large battle, And the whole time,
Speaker 1: the Federal troops are being like, oh, it's a Confederate
Speaker 1: conspiracy to invade the North, but it absolutely was no
Speaker 1: such thing. They were not loyal to Confederacy. No evidence
Speaker 1: of them ever having anything to do with the Confederacy
Speaker 1: ever came out, No actions were ever taken against the
Speaker 1: Union by the mcguires. It was all resistance to being
Speaker 1: drafted troops stayed in the area for the rest of
Speaker 1: the war. A bunch of mine operators became officers in
Speaker 1: the military. The officer in the area was given permission
Speaker 1: to draft anyone he wanted and arrest anyone who resisted
Speaker 1: the draft. So this means that he can just throw
Speaker 1: anyone he wants in jail with no habeas corpus, and
Speaker 1: he uses it immediately to fight the union movement. Anyone
Speaker 1: he wants arrested is arrested. This doesn't make people like
Speaker 1: the war effort anymore. It's also probably why I know,
Speaker 1: I know. It's also probably why the union movement tends
Speaker 1: towards mcguiresm instead of labor organizing at this point, because
Speaker 1: open actions will get you drafted or arrested. One mine
Speaker 1: owner was mistreating everyone, so workers sat down and considered
Speaker 1: considered a strike. He told them that it was during war.
Speaker 1: A strike was treason and they would be treated as treasonous.
Speaker 1: So a bunch of people showed up on Guy Faux
Speaker 1: Night November fifth, nine, eighteen sixty three, which is generally
Speaker 1: an anti Catholic celebration, so it was probably intentional that
Speaker 1: these Catholics show up on that day. They break into
Speaker 1: his house, they kill him and they leave his body
Speaker 1: in the crossroads. One of the mcguires was killed during
Speaker 1: this action in crossfire. Okay, two generals wound up stationed
Speaker 1: in the area, and even more troops come in. The
Speaker 1: Catholic Church threatens to excommunicate anyone belonging to a secret society.
Speaker 1: The Catholic Church is like, fuck the McGuire's right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, sure, but it's also I mean whatever, yeah, one
Speaker 3: of the Catholic Church is one to talk, I know,
Speaker 3: I know.
Speaker 1: Well, that's the thing is, they're like, be in our
Speaker 1: secret society's yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we've got more infrastructure we could do, and we're
Speaker 3: doing some bad shit.
Speaker 1: Get out of here, yeah exactly. And so the Catholic
Speaker 1: Church threatens to excommunicate anyone belonging to a secret society. Okay,
Speaker 1: But and then the anti McGuire newspapers they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: most people don't support it. It's just a few bad agitators.
Speaker 1: There's just a few evil mcguires in there making all
Speaker 1: the good Irish people act bad. This is not true.
Speaker 1: It is a broad movement made from general discontentment, right,
Speaker 1: and and in the end, like to take a larger
Speaker 1: picture of the Irish in the Union during the war,
Speaker 1: three times as many Irish fought for the Union as
Speaker 1: for the Confederacy, and this did include a ton of volunteers.
Speaker 1: There was the sixty ninth Irish Brigade, whose green flag
Speaker 1: had the slogan in Irish we will never run from
Speaker 1: the clashing of the blades. And those who volunteered in
Speaker 1: the Union, they also a lot of them had I mean,
Speaker 1: some of it was probably like we like our new country,
Speaker 1: but like overall, I think it was well, they wanted
Speaker 1: to learn how to fight and shoot guns so they
Speaker 1: could go back to Ireland and kick the English out
Speaker 1: of their country.
Speaker 2: It seems reasonable.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I might as well do a like perfectly ethical
Speaker 1: war over here so that you can go back and
Speaker 1: to another perfectly ethical war.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just kind of like a warm up situation.
Speaker 2: I get it. You don't want to go.
Speaker 3: It's it's Mario rules. You don't just go for the
Speaker 3: big boss, you know. Yeah, Yeah, it's incremental.
Speaker 1: Yeah. After the war, things cooled off in Schougle sort of.
Speaker 1: The mcguires killed several more mine superintendents, they settled some
Speaker 1: old scores, and the railroad formed a private police force
Speaker 1: basically the railroad at this point starts buying up all
Speaker 1: the mine operators in the southern coalfield. So Reading Railroad
Speaker 1: is now the big new bad, big new bad in
Speaker 1: the area.
Speaker 2: Reading Railroad. Wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so so close to LeVar burton territory.
Speaker 1: And yet so far because that man will never do
Speaker 1: anything wrong.
Speaker 3: Nope, he directed Smart House? What did he possibly do?
Speaker 3: That's famous? Credit smart House?
Speaker 1: Wait, I've never heard of smart House.
Speaker 2: Magfie. I feel like you'd enjoy a smart House.
Speaker 3: It's a classic Disney Channel original movie that predicts a
Speaker 3: lot top.
Speaker 4: Three Disney Channel original movie.
Speaker 2: And I think it ages pretty well.
Speaker 3: It's about the kid that wins a like robot house
Speaker 3: that's controlled by this AI mom uh, and it's about
Speaker 3: it's an AI cautionary tale before Blacknology existed.
Speaker 2: It's It's Black Mirror Junior.
Speaker 3: It's so good and they play a smash Mouth song
Speaker 3: say it's a class Oh yeah, okay. LeVar Burton has
Speaker 3: never missed his entire life.
Speaker 4: So anyways, Reading Railroad, I was saying it and it
Speaker 4: starts Katie siicall, so it does I totally know who
Speaker 4: is I know?
Speaker 1: I knew LeVar Burton is. He was very important in
Speaker 1: my childhood as I grew up watching Reading Rainbow and
Speaker 1: Star Trek as like the two things.
Speaker 2: Oh he's the best.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel like both of those things prepared him
Speaker 3: for his greatest work, Disney Channel's Smart House.
Speaker 1: Obviously. So the Railroad shows up Reading Railroad, Uh, not
Speaker 1: run by LeVar Burton, and they deputize a bunch of
Speaker 1: paid mercenaries, And so you now have private police instead
Speaker 1: of public police, which which is like even worse than
Speaker 1: public police, which is impressive because public police are clearly
Speaker 1: not doing a very good I have negative opinions about
Speaker 1: the establishment. Soon Reading Railroad becomes everyone's landlord and boss
Speaker 1: workers no longer own their own homes, and the Railroad
Speaker 1: brings on Pinkertons as detectives to be part of this
Speaker 1: classic villain of the pod, the Pinkertons.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like there's certain I feel like across podcasting
Speaker 3: in general, you're like, the Pinkertons are gonna come up.
Speaker 3: JEdgar Hoover's gonna come out. One of these motherfuckers like
Speaker 3: just worms their way into every damn story of Yeah.
Speaker 1: Actually, most of what we know about the maguire's is
Speaker 1: a Pinkerton detective.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, so useful primary resource.
Speaker 1: I mean, but it's also part of why, like a
Speaker 1: lot of the things that make them look bad. I'm like,
Speaker 1: I don't know how true it is.
Speaker 2: It could be true, but never trust a Pinkerton.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So there's no longer a draft in occupying soldiers,
Speaker 1: and so workers are less mad overall, and with the
Speaker 1: occupation of their area gone, an actual labor movement is
Speaker 1: able to start up. And so this what stopped the
Speaker 1: kind of agrarian violence mode of class struggle. The mcguireism
Speaker 1: was the labor union, the fact that there were methods
Speaker 1: by which to seek address for your grievances or whatever.
Speaker 1: And because mcguiresm is a backs against the wall clause
Speaker 1: out approach, which is only necessary when your backs against
Speaker 1: the wall, they form the working Men's Benevolent Association, which
Speaker 1: is good because it doesn't have a man's name in
Speaker 1: the title.
Speaker 3: That's yeah, it means that it at least stands a
Speaker 3: stronger chance of being equitable.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it has some problems, but it forms an eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight United Minor and Laborer English and Irish, Welsh
Speaker 1: and German. It favored strikes and negotiation rather than midnight murder.
Speaker 1: The leaders mostly British or opposed to the McGuire's, or
Speaker 1: rather McGuire Ism. The rank and file had a ton
Speaker 1: of McGuire's. The main founder was actually was actually Irish
Speaker 1: born himself, but he was a He was Anglo English,
Speaker 1: not in that his parents were from England, but he
Speaker 1: was a guy named John Signey and he had worked
Speaker 1: most of his life in England and spoke English as
Speaker 1: his first or maybe only language. And there's this enormous
Speaker 1: cultural gap between the Irish speaking Irish and the more
Speaker 1: Anglo Irish types. This guy goes on to die on
Speaker 1: from old miner's friend Black Lung, but before he does that,
Speaker 1: they fight for the eight hour workday. They're able to
Speaker 1: unite thirty to sorry thirty thousand of the thirty five
Speaker 1: thousand workers in the region.
Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah, that's incredible.
Speaker 1: And it's particularly noteworthy because the skilled miners were paid
Speaker 1: for what they produced, not by the hour, so for
Speaker 1: them it was throwing in their lot with the unskilled
Speaker 1: laborers kind of like how actually the ups strike that
Speaker 1: like the ups drivers who are full time get paid
Speaker 1: all right, but their part time employees get paid like shit,
Speaker 1: and so the full time employees are willing to go
Speaker 1: on strike for their part time employees.
Speaker 2: You know, I see, Okay, I do love.
Speaker 3: I'd say, I know it's a very tired meme, but
Speaker 3: I just love when leftists get pissed off and invent
Speaker 3: the weekend.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's total ailling. Yeah. And they also supported what
Speaker 1: I think is the best thing that labor unions can do,
Speaker 1: which is they supported the idea of forming worker cooperatives.
Speaker 1: And they go around, they start setting up cooperative stores,
Speaker 1: and they start trying to cooperativize different minds. The railroad
Speaker 1: won't let them, but they start doing a lot. So
Speaker 1: they're cool in a lot of ways. They have two
Speaker 1: major problems. One, they try hard to cozy up to
Speaker 1: the owners. They're like, we abhor all violence and believe
Speaker 1: that the owners and the workers have mutually aligned interests.
Speaker 1: And the owners are like, yeah, I mean, we'll fuck
Speaker 1: you up, and they use violence all the time and
Speaker 1: do not you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, nice. Try.
Speaker 1: Then the other big problem, and you guess what the
Speaker 1: big problem is of a labor organization in nineteenth century America.
Speaker 2: Mm Oh, there's so many no, okay. Yeah. I was like,
Speaker 2: is it racism or is it in fighting or is
Speaker 2: it both?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, I guess you know. Okay, So this labor
Speaker 1: union brings together men and only men of different white ethnicities.
Speaker 1: There weren't any Chinese families for them to be directly
Speaker 1: racist against. But like all the reformist non revolutionary unions
Speaker 1: in the US at the time, they were explicitly racist
Speaker 1: against Chinese and black workers. It is likely that the
Speaker 1: mcguires weren't any better. But I don't know. I don't
Speaker 1: have any like statements from the mcguires one way or
Speaker 1: the other.
Speaker 3: But I'm and so. So they're unionizing in areas where
Speaker 3: there are few, to know, non white families, essentially. But
Speaker 3: is it just because this is happening during the Civil
Speaker 3: War era that we have insight into what their racial
Speaker 3: views are. I mean, it's like, I'm definitely safe to infer,
Speaker 3: but I didn't know where that comes in.
Speaker 1: So a lot of labor unions in the late nineteenth
Speaker 1: century in the US specifically complained about Chinese people taking
Speaker 1: the jobs they would go out of their way to do,
Speaker 1: all the exact same thing that was happening to white
Speaker 1: immigrants as soon as they could, they turned around into
Speaker 1: the non white immigrants.
Speaker 2: Those fucking girl bosses.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, and this is like again part of why.
Speaker 1: And there's some other unions that explicitly did work. Also
Speaker 1: there's black unions, but there's also some unions that were
Speaker 1: explicitly multiracial. But it's why, once again, I keep pointing
Speaker 1: to the industrial workers the world is the people who
Speaker 1: came on the scene, and one of their founders was
Speaker 1: a black anarchist woman named Lucy Parsons. And they just
Speaker 1: like came on the scene and immediately like they were
Speaker 1: mostly out wet, well actually they were all over the place,
Speaker 1: but out west they like specifically worked with like like
Speaker 1: worked with Japanese folks who were also being by that period,
Speaker 1: Japanese folks were the the immigrant people who are being mistreated, right, Okay,
Speaker 1: So but that's not that's nice. This is this is
Speaker 1: five years earlier. Yeah, okay, So this is a.
Speaker 3: Majority, if not I guess all men like white men
Speaker 3: who are poor and from a number of Okay, yep,
Speaker 3: well not surprising, I yeah, but it sucks, it certainly does. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And yeah, so the union fights for the workers in
Speaker 1: September eighteen sixty nine, a fire burn down the timbers
Speaker 1: that hold open a mine and one hundred and ten
Speaker 1: Menners asphyxiated, and so the union throws a rally to
Speaker 1: try and be like, hey, we need some fucking safety here.
Speaker 1: Some people in the crowd claim that the Irish started
Speaker 1: the fire as like revenge against the Welsh for wanting
Speaker 1: to have ended an earlier strike or whatever the fuck right,
Speaker 1: and this is nonsense. It helped the bosses by getting
Speaker 1: the workers to blame each other. But even the fucking
Speaker 1: governor of Pennsylvania was like, this wasn't caused by bad
Speaker 1: luck or the Irish. This was caused by the fucking
Speaker 1: operators and a lack of safety, okay, And so the
Speaker 1: workers fight. They get the Safety Act passed in eighteen seventy.
Speaker 1: But this has actually some positive effects. Still, American minds
Speaker 1: are three times more deadly than British mines at the
Speaker 1: same time. In just this coal field, between eighteen seventy
Speaker 1: and eighteen seventy five, five hundred and fifty six workers died.
Speaker 1: This is after the Mine Safety Act passes. And the
Speaker 1: other thing that sucks about the Mind Safety Act it's
Speaker 1: always the double edged sword of trying to seek anything
Speaker 1: with reform is it. It created more discipline in the mines,
Speaker 1: and it actually centralized authority more into reading railroads hands
Speaker 1: I see.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: But the WBA, the worker in Men's Benevolent Association, they
Speaker 1: get pay raises, they get a minimum wage plus sliding
Speaker 1: scale based on the level of production and the value
Speaker 1: of coal. But all of their nonviolence and ass kissing
Speaker 1: the bosses didn't save them. They were painted as violent
Speaker 1: terrorists every time they did anything, and the government and
Speaker 1: owners started chipping away surely but steadily, against all their gains.
Speaker 1: By eighteen seventy three, conditions for miners worsen, so some
Speaker 1: of them wires get up to their old tricks because
Speaker 1: the union isn't working and they're literally again starving, so
Speaker 1: they start setting fire at mines. They're overturning coal cars,
Speaker 1: they're beating up mines supervisors. So the owners turn to
Speaker 1: the detectives they have on higher the Pinkertons. The Pinkertons
Speaker 1: refer to the McGuire's as a quote noxious weed of
Speaker 1: foreign birth. And check out this quote from them. Wherever
Speaker 1: in the United States iron is wrought from Maine to
Speaker 1: Georgia ocean to ocean wherever coal is used for fuel. There,
Speaker 1: the molly McGuire leaves his slimy trail and wields with
Speaker 1: deadly force his two powerful levers secrecy combination. I have
Speaker 1: no idea what combination means in this sense.
Speaker 3: This is this is the and these are the drama
Speaker 3: queens we can't stand. Yeah, this is this is drama
Speaker 3: queen tendencies being weaponized for evil. Yeah, exactly, God losers.
Speaker 3: All right, well, I guess that is very Pinkerton behavior.
Speaker 1: Sure, yeah, So they send an undercover, an Irish Catholic
Speaker 1: immigrant named James mcparlan. He joins the Ancient Order of Hiberians,
Speaker 1: and since he's literate, he finds his way into becoming
Speaker 1: their secretary. And basically all of the molly McGuire's were
Speaker 1: in the Ancient Order of Hiberians. Later, there's this whole
Speaker 1: conspiracy case that trying to claim the Ancient Order of
Speaker 1: Iberians is the molly McGuire's, but it's almost certain that
Speaker 1: it's just that all the molly mcguires are in the
Speaker 1: Ancient Order of Tiberians because elsewhere around the country ancient
Speaker 1: Order of Iberian people ain't doing any of this shit, okay,
Speaker 1: and so he becomes their secretary, which, by the way,
Speaker 1: is how Karl Marx took control the First International. While
Speaker 1: I'm talking shit, he became their secretary and then started
Speaker 1: writing everything. Okay. So mcparlin he stayed undercover for two years,
Speaker 1: then he disappeared, only to reappear later at trial. The
Speaker 1: other infiltrator from the Pnkersons infiltrated the union, but his
Speaker 1: reports were like, oh, actually this isn't Molly mcguiresh at all.
Speaker 1: They're all really tame. The union's actually just doing what
Speaker 1: it says it is, okay, but that wouldn't work for
Speaker 1: the union. For the railroad, Sorry, it wouldn't work for
Speaker 1: the railroad. They wanted to destroy the union, so they
Speaker 1: just lied, even though they had an infiltrator saying hey,
Speaker 1: it's actually all peaceful here, and they were like, they're
Speaker 1: all terrorists and Irish bastards, ye, So they destroyed the union.
Speaker 1: The long strike lasted from January to June nineteenth, eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy five. This was during a really nasty recession. The
Speaker 1: bosses got ready for this. They formed a union of
Speaker 1: their own, which happens all the fucking time. All the
Speaker 1: minor operators get together to figure out how to fuck
Speaker 1: over their workers collectively. And before they told everyone about
Speaker 1: some wage cuts, they stockpiled enough coal for the long strike.
Speaker 1: So during the strike, the boss is stoked anti Irish
Speaker 1: sentiment and got the Welsh to attack the Irish. This
Speaker 1: had been going on for decades, right, the gang warfare eventually? Okay,
Speaker 1: so you ever seen like one of the I don't
Speaker 1: know if gangs in New York has this or not.
Speaker 1: There's this whole thing in nineteenth century New York City
Speaker 1: where you have like firefighter gangs who get into fist
Speaker 1: fights over who puts out a fire.
Speaker 2: No, that sounds like a sexy dream, my mom would have.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well that sexy dream is alive in Scugle County.
Speaker 2: Nice, that's all let her know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's my pitch for a Netflix show. And there's
Speaker 1: firefighter warfare happening. The Brits have a fire company, I
Speaker 1: think the Brits and Welsh, they like, live on one
Speaker 1: side of town and the Irish have a fire company
Speaker 1: on their own side of town. But when fires in
Speaker 1: the middle breakout, there's fierce fighting. Often this turns into
Speaker 1: gun battles and people are probably I don't know from
Speaker 1: which side, probably both people are setting fires in the middle,
Speaker 1: just so that they have an excuse to fight.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, that's crazy.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: So during the strike, the industry kept saying that union
Speaker 1: was all Molly McGuire's. The Molly mcguires are a tiny
Speaker 1: percentage of the union. Irish people are a reasonably high percentage.
Speaker 1: But again, I mean overall the union is the like
Speaker 1: not McGuire method. But by the end of the strike,
Speaker 1: as the strike is clearly not working, various folks start
Speaker 1: dropping out and starting to work right, starting to blackleg
Speaker 1: and more and more union workers of every ethnicity gave
Speaker 1: up on strict nonviolence and non sabotage. So loaded coal
Speaker 1: cars were getting dumped. Mindes started getting burned, gangs beat
Speaker 1: up black legs. Coffin notices popped up with phrases like quote,
Speaker 1: notice is here given to you men, the first and
Speaker 1: last notice that you will get for no man will
Speaker 1: go down this slope, like go into the mine after tonight.
Speaker 1: If you do, you can bring your coffin along with you.
Speaker 1: By the internal christ internal not they mean eternal whatever,
Speaker 1: but they wrote internal bring your coffin along with you
Speaker 1: by the internal christ mean what this notice says?
Speaker 2: I believe them?
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, they meant I believe that. Yeah. In the end,
Speaker 1: the railroad company won, the union was destroyed. The last
Speaker 1: holdouts were mostly the Irish speaking Irish from the strongholds
Speaker 1: of the Molly mcguires, but hundreds of British miners were
Speaker 1: still with them too, and a thousand workers marched from
Speaker 1: mind to mind trying to shut down work, but heavily
Speaker 1: armed police stopped them, at one point firing into the crowd.
Speaker 1: The workers went back to work. Some were so weak
Speaker 1: from starvation that emergency rations had to be provided by
Speaker 1: bosses to get them back on their feet, which is
Speaker 1: just an example of how capitalism wants to feed you.
Speaker 1: It literally just wants to feed you enough so that
Speaker 1: you can go work in the mines.
Speaker 3: Yeah, enough so that you won't I mean yeah, like
Speaker 3: you're saying before, hawking feels too harsh because you were
Speaker 3: effectively selling, yeah, all those amazing products and services.
Speaker 2: Just enough so that you won't die, so you retain
Speaker 2: labor value.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Within two years, wages dropped less than fifty percent.
Speaker 1: Before eighteen sixty nine, levels okay, workers had strict discipline
Speaker 1: now like they're treated how factory workers were being treated
Speaker 1: in the city, which is also not how people should
Speaker 1: be treated. Private police broke up all public demonstrations with violence,
Speaker 1: so the Maguires were like, all right, fuck it. We
Speaker 1: tried doing it the nice way. If you want violence,
Speaker 1: we were born into violence by hundreds of years of
Speaker 1: resisting colonization. Over the course of three months, they killed
Speaker 1: six people. One Molly wrote a letter to the paper
Speaker 1: and said, quote, I am against shooting as much as
Speaker 1: you are, but the union has broke up and we
Speaker 1: have got nothing to defend ourselves with but our revolvers.
Speaker 1: If we don't use them, then we shall have to
Speaker 1: work for fifty cents a day, and went on to
Speaker 1: say that the other nationalities would do so but for
Speaker 1: cowardice and quote I have told you the mind of
Speaker 1: the children of miss us Molly Maguire. All we want
Speaker 1: is a fair day's wages for a fair day's work,
Speaker 1: and that's what we can't get now by a long shot.
Speaker 1: He closed by saying they would make it quote hot
Speaker 1: as hell for the employers that they needed to. This
Speaker 1: is the only statement we have from the McGuire's.
Speaker 3: Wow, okay, it's I mean, it's I don't know, I
Speaker 3: know everyone's mileage varies, but six casualties as opposed to
Speaker 3: the number of casualties that you know you stand to
Speaker 3: lose by not advocating for yourself, Like, yeah, I feel
Speaker 3: like those stories are not by you, mac Bibe. But
Speaker 3: it's just like you hear those stories so often, even
Speaker 3: on like podcasts I listened to. Sometimes they're like, well,
Speaker 3: obviously killing.
Speaker 5: Is wrong, yeah, yeah, yeah, but but even then your
Speaker 5: your mileage may very yeah, but yeah, like bring, well
Speaker 5: they killed six people.
Speaker 2: It's like, but what did they stand to lose? Yeah, sure,
Speaker 2: like yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no totally. And so that's one hundred and fifteen
Speaker 1: people just or whatever, or one hundred and ten people
Speaker 1: just aphixiated in a mine, you know.
Speaker 2: And that's nothing to say of, you know, the losses
Speaker 2: they suffered from the draft being stacked against them intentionally
Speaker 2: and just all this other stuff like, yeah, six people,
Speaker 2: all right, Sorry.
Speaker 1: So Pinkerton's fed information to vigilante gangs. That's the other thing, right,
Speaker 1: It's like we always talk about the violence that happens
Speaker 1: in like one side of this, you know. So Pinkertons
Speaker 1: fed information to vigilante gangs who went off on a
Speaker 1: moral crusade to stop the mcguires. The private police turned
Speaker 1: the other way or joined as they showed up and
Speaker 1: anyone like at these houses of people who suspected being
Speaker 1: Molly McGuire's and killed their families and grabbed a bunch
Speaker 1: of irishmen. And in the end fifty people were indicted
Speaker 1: for the murder of sixteen people over thirteen years. So
Speaker 1: there are sixteen deaths being blamed on the Maguires. Their
Speaker 1: mind superintendents and foremen, public officials who are all various
Speaker 1: types of cops and marshals. They didn't just face the
Speaker 1: structural violence of poverty and discrimination. They faced private police,
Speaker 1: Welsh gangs, and federal troops. Right, all of the suspected
Speaker 1: ring leaders were tavern keepers. And this may or may
Speaker 1: not have been real. We have no idea, and it
Speaker 1: might have been part of the Protestant anti drinking crusade
Speaker 1: because that was this whole thing going on at the
Speaker 1: time and the trials of farce. They were arrested by
Speaker 1: private cops. The only evidence was a Pinkerton infiltrator who
Speaker 1: had probably been working as an agent Provoctur. Later that
Speaker 1: guy went on explicitly to be an agent Provoctur and
Speaker 1: other labor struggles. No Irish Catholics are allowed to sit
Speaker 1: on the jury. The prosecutor was a fucking railroad employee.
Speaker 1: For fuck's sake, it was. It gets called even by
Speaker 1: the history books that hate the mcguires, like most history
Speaker 1: books are not on the McGuire's side. Sure, even by them,
Speaker 1: it's called trial by corporation. Yeah, and some of them
Speaker 1: were probably guilty, some of them were probably innocent. Several
Speaker 1: turned snitch and became star witnesses. But one of them,
Speaker 1: this one guy, he turned snitch. He was like, I
Speaker 1: didn't kill a guy. It was it was these other guys.
Speaker 1: They totally killed that guy. So his wife disavows him.
Speaker 1: Ooh she hell yeah. She testifies in court that he
Speaker 1: is the murderer and that he is turning on innocent men,
Speaker 1: and she refuses to support him in prison. This is
Speaker 1: the most real maguire in the whole fucking story, as
Speaker 1: far as.
Speaker 2: Sir, where's her fucking bio kick that rocks?
Speaker 3: Yeah, he snitched and he got double stitch. Yeah no, yeah,
Speaker 3: no job in jail, No, wife.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, sad for him.
Speaker 1: He does, he gets set free. The five many testifies
Speaker 1: against We're not at least one of the snitches gets
Speaker 1: a thousand bucks from the prosecution to help them leave
Speaker 1: the country. So they're literally just being paid by the company.
Speaker 2: And these sound I mean, they sound like show trials,
Speaker 2: Like were they like heavily covered and all that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the mcguires, I didn't talk about it enough. The
Speaker 1: mcguires are like big news everywhere about this haven of
Speaker 1: terrorists in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 2: Basically okay, okay.
Speaker 1: And and it's basically like all labor organizing is given
Speaker 1: a bad name by being compared to mcguires, which is
Speaker 1: very frustrating because I'm just like, well, I don't know whatever,
Speaker 1: Like I'm sure some of what they did was like
Speaker 1: not the best, but overall, I'm like, Molly McGuire's did
Speaker 1: nothing wrong.
Speaker 2: But like you're like, but consider the context. Yeah, like
Speaker 2: drop in the bucket.
Speaker 1: We should aspire to be the kind of people who
Speaker 1: go claws out when people try to destroy us, Like right,
Speaker 1: I just genuinely believe that.
Speaker 2: Well, it's it's like with I mean, within this story,
Speaker 2: there's you know, examples of how the how the opposite
Speaker 2: approach was was tried.
Speaker 3: And was not. I mean, I guess that in this
Speaker 3: case both were not extremely effective.
Speaker 1: But it's you and I keep thinking about it because
Speaker 1: I've been thinking about this the story really even more
Speaker 1: than often. It impacted me and let me thinking about
Speaker 1: a lot of things because you have these two approaches
Speaker 1: and neither one is working, and it really depends on
Speaker 1: what we call working, because like, ooh, okay, I think
Speaker 1: that there is something to be said about just living
Speaker 1: your life in a way where you don't roll over
Speaker 1: and die. And sometimes like that's all we can ask
Speaker 1: for is to be part of communities who support us
Speaker 1: as we choose to not roll over and die. And
Speaker 1: like again and again, they would try to not go
Speaker 1: claws out, they would try to join unions, they would
Speaker 1: try to do things the other way. I believe that
Speaker 1: man when he said that we don't like killing any
Speaker 1: more than anyone else, but all we have now is
Speaker 1: our revolvers.
Speaker 3: You know, well, it's it's and it's like if they
Speaker 3: enjoyed killing, they probably would have killed more than six people.
Speaker 1: Sixteen but yeah, yeah, sixteen, I mean but over the
Speaker 1: course of eleven years, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Exactly, exactly like these.
Speaker 3: It's not the behavior of a movement that relish isn't killing. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so I mean I completely believe that. And wow, Yeah,
Speaker 3: the molly mcguars did nothing wrong. They were doing except
Speaker 3: their their fucking best except, oh, I mean, except their
Speaker 3: opinions on race, which seemed to be almost universally.
Speaker 1: Rot from what we do, which we don't know much of,
Speaker 1: but we can infer twenty men were hanged, at least
Speaker 1: one of whom has been proven posthumously humor whatever after
Speaker 1: his death was proven innocent.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: And this was meant to be this like glorious of
Speaker 1: restoration of law against mob rule, but it wasn't. One
Speaker 1: judge later said of it, quote, the Molly maguire trials
Speaker 1: were a surrender of state sovereignty. A private corporation initiated
Speaker 1: the investigation through a private detective agency. A private police
Speaker 1: force arrested the alleged defenders defendants, and private attorneys for
Speaker 1: the coal companies prosecuted them. The state provided only the
Speaker 1: courtroom and the gallows, and so they go down in
Speaker 1: history as evil terrorists of violent ethnic mafia. It wasn't
Speaker 1: until about fifty years ago that historians started really looking
Speaker 1: into their history as part of labor history. I wouldn't
Speaker 1: say they're perfect. I wouldn't say midnight retribution is how
Speaker 1: to get things done. But yeah, better to go down
Speaker 1: with your call.
Speaker 2: So I mean.
Speaker 3: Agree, heard, agree, And it's so interesting, Like I mean,
Speaker 3: you referenced this earlier in the episode of how this
Speaker 3: see this history, and this like labor history still seems
Speaker 3: inherently tied into stereotypes around Irish Americans.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally, Yeah, I feel like that's where so much
Speaker 1: of that comes from, like the but I mean some
Speaker 1: of those stereotypes that come back even to like the
Speaker 1: way that I've read a lot of history in the
Speaker 1: past year and a half working on this show, probably
Speaker 1: more than I had and the rest of my life
Speaker 1: put together right again, And I think a lot about
Speaker 1: how like the Irish like myth of like oh, like
Speaker 1: there's this sort of English myth of like the Irish
Speaker 1: as like crazy backwards people or whatever, and then there's
Speaker 1: the sort of inversion of that myth, the like how
Speaker 1: the Irish safe civilization? You know, all of these sorts
Speaker 1: of things, And the thing that I keep running across
Speaker 1: is that it's like, well, actually, in a lot of
Speaker 1: ways the Irish culture was more interesting and chaotic and
Speaker 1: pagan and all of these things. And that's part of
Speaker 1: why it's cool. And I think that's part of why
Speaker 1: people get really excited about it. I think the other
Speaker 1: reason people get excited about it is like white people
Speaker 1: really want to cling to some level of oppression so
Speaker 1: that they can feel like.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's the other thing.
Speaker 3: It's like that the resistance to because I know, I
Speaker 3: mean there's like people my own family that are, you know,
Speaker 3: like definitely guilty of this of like they're there's such
Speaker 3: a there's such a tendency to cling to like no,
Speaker 3: this it was this group of people, this specific group
Speaker 3: of people, and not just like a wider claiming of
Speaker 3: like no.
Speaker 2: It's it's labor.
Speaker 3: It's people that have a vested interest in labor movements
Speaker 3: and who are being actively oppressed. But no, one not
Speaker 3: not not spicy enough branding for for some Yeah, and
Speaker 3: and and thus evil persists.
Speaker 2: And that's the only reason I think, so I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but if people don't want evil to persist, this
Speaker 1: isn't an ad transition.
Speaker 3: This is I was like, Magfie, you're already flying pretty
Speaker 3: close to the senter.
Speaker 1: Let's get more ads in here now, now this is
Speaker 1: a this is a move to plugs.
Speaker 3: Okay, wow, okay, well actually again this this I mean,
Speaker 3: obviously you know better than anyone that so much of
Speaker 3: this hasn't changed, but so many of so much of
Speaker 3: this reminds me of the of meatpacking plants that I
Speaker 3: researched in the history of unionizing and how in similar ways,
Speaker 3: like we were talking about earlier today, how some meat
Speaker 3: packing unions were interracial and they were very inclusive and
Speaker 3: very effective, and then there were others.
Speaker 2: That weren't that way.
Speaker 3: And also in not quite this I mean about thirty
Speaker 3: years after the McGuire's, I guess we're active. But yeah,
Speaker 3: there's just like so many parallels and what we were
Speaker 3: talking about today in like current meatpacking unions. If you
Speaker 3: want to learn more about that, you should read my.
Speaker 2: Book Raw Dog, A Naked History of Hot Dogs. And
Speaker 2: you can get it wherever you get books, which.
Speaker 3: Is hopefully an independent bookstore or you know whatever not
Speaker 3: fucked up way you acquire books. You could steal it,
Speaker 3: whatever you want to do. I just if you want
Speaker 3: to read it, I would love that, and you can,
Speaker 3: you know, bug me online.
Speaker 2: I'm around except for TikTok too Loud.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I can't wait to leave all of those things,
Speaker 1: but I haven't yet what I want to plug. I
Speaker 1: work with a publisher called Strangers in the Tangled Wilderness,
Speaker 1: and we're an anarchist collective publisher, and we're putting out
Speaker 1: an book that's available for pre order right now. It's
Speaker 1: called to the Ghosts Who Are Still Living. It's by
Speaker 1: Ami Winetrub, and it's it's not actually entirely dissimilar to
Speaker 1: what we're talking about. Well, it's completely disimilar in a
Speaker 1: lot of other ways. It's about learning about ones like
Speaker 1: Jewish ancestry in Eastern Europe and kind of as an
Speaker 1: anti Zionist trans anarchist talking about what it means to
Speaker 1: be dispossessed from family history and what it means to
Speaker 1: reconnect to it. And it's a really good book. We
Speaker 1: only put out books that we're really excited about, and
Speaker 1: this is our third book that we're putting out. It's
Speaker 1: called to the Ghosts We're Still Living by Ami Winetrub,
Speaker 1: and it's available at Tangled Olderness Dot. A work eventually
Speaker 1: be available at any more books are for sale, but
Speaker 1: right now it's pre order and if you pre order it,
Speaker 1: you get an eleven by seventeen colored poster that's silk screened.
Speaker 1: That's super cool. That's what I got.
Speaker 3: That.
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