Behold, The Molly Maguires Mystified :: Movie Movies Film Essays

Behold, The Molly Maguires Mystified Based on the testimony of James McParlan, he was convicted along with quatern others of the shooting death of Thomas Sanger and William Uren. Hung on June 21, 1877 in Pottsville. Buried in Pottsville, PA.1 Since the dawning of the industrial revolution, producing the stratification of socioeconomic status into a competitive course hierarchy never before seen, conflict theorists have appeared to define the unjust. From William Blakes poetry to Karl Marx manifestos, from Bethlehem steel strikes to the current Labor Party, from Fidel Castro to the Mexican Zapatista movement, from Lenin to Mao Tse Tung, from the Molly Maguires to lever Hoffa, the desire to upgrade the conditions of the working class have had a continual role in justifying violence, providing an equilibrium to keep capital interests in check, motivated intact countries to gain newly instituted political leaders and formats of rule, even in offering some form of purpose for, i dentity with, and release of violent rage within the tribal nature of humans in a world of disintegrating, or disintegrated, tribes. The question of the new millennium might very well be whether or not humans can live without enemies. In a country, if not a world, with creature comforts easily secured, labor issues becoming obsolete, where will youthful man direct his barbaric energy? Neither law, nor philosophy, nor reason, nor spiritual counsel has prevailed against this primitive element in mans nature revenge. The upward raceway of civilization, and it has been upward, is twisted by it, leaving grim milestones in appalling quantity. (Lewis viii)2 The Molly Maguires were one such labor voice, if perceived this way, one such tribe (both causally and ethnically), and one such milestone, active from the 1860s to the 1870s. It is this period in the Pennsylvania anthracite coal neighborhoods which the 1970 movie is based. Long before child labor laws, a minimum wage, suit able standards on working conditions, or any form of labor union (the first geographically encompassing the Pennsylvania coal region was the shabbily organized, often squabbling, General Council of the Workingmens Associations of the Anthracite Coal Fields founded on March 17, 1869 Aurand 69), the Molly Maguires were an active labor force, if one views them as such, or a marauding group of renegades, thugs, and Godless anarchists, if one is persuaded to perceive them in that light.