by Vincent Traina

Created on: October 06, 2008   Last Updated: March 15, 2009

The industrialization of America came with an assault on the dignity of the family by indiscriminately cramming men, women, and children of all ages into factories like sardines in a can. It was among this intense social change that the Philadelphia Trade Union, in the 1830s, prophesied, "That cormorant capital will have every man, woman, and child to toil; but let us exert our families to oppose its designs." 1848, the year of revolutions' across Europe and the same year that Herschel Mordechai's son (Karl Marx) published his manifesto, a labor publication called Ten Hour Advocate expressed, "We hope the day is not distant when the husband will be able to provide for his wife and family, without sending [the wife] to endure the drudgery of a cotton mill."

It was on this ongoing scene that the Molly Maguires entered in during the turbulent years around the time of the American Civil War. Composed of a secret brotherhood of Irish-Catholic coal miners seeking the dignity of a living wage, safer conditions, and protection from the abuses of their employers, this group of Pennsylvanian laborers began the very first labor union movement at a time when unions were still illegal in America.

Reputed to commit acts of sabotage inside of the coal mines, the Mollies rebelled against their coal companies' inhumane treatment of their predominantly Irish emigrant workers. To combat what was viewed as a subversive organization by Pennsylvania's industrialists, the latter hired private detectives called "Pinkertons" to spy on the Mollies. As a result of this infiltration, the two years that followed America's one hundredth birthday witnessed a series of show trials and executions that culminated in the hanging of twenty Irish Catholic Pennsylvanian coal miners; half of whom were put to death on June 21, 1877, dubbed Black Thursday. Four years later, in 1882, the United States Government officially dubbed "Labor Day" a new federal holiday.

In 1891, Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum ("Of New Things"), a letter about the plight of the working classes. One of its famous declarations is, "Let the working man and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely as to the wages; nevertheless, there underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accepts harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice."

Indeed, our value system has been turned upside down and people like the Molly Maguires might just be ready to turn over in their graves. America's Weimar-like debt is getting worse. More American jobs, both skilled and unskilled, are continuing to be shipped overseas. The gang of thieves in Wall Street is continuing to suck the blood of the American people. The middle class is continuing to work harder and harder for less and less. Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.

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