Margaret talks with Jamie Loftus about the wild history of Irish secret societies, the fight against the enclosure of the commons, and class war in the coal fields of the US.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. It's
a podcast about people who did stuff. I'm your host,
Margaret Kildren, and with me today as my guest is
the only person who has written a book about hot dogs.
That is currently on my bedside table because I haven't
(00:22):
started it yet.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I loved this. I was wondering how that sentence was
going to end, and I'm very satisfied with where it landed.
What a treat.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Yeah, No, I'm excited to read it. It was waiting
for me when I came back from the trip. Although
now I was ended up like kind of sad because
I saw you on this trip and I didn't get
it signed. Which is the lesson that you should never
pre order books. That is the lesson that I.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Think that that's true. I will be carrying that lesson
into to sabotage everyone I know.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Really, Yeah, because if you pre order books, it helps
people's careers amazing, like the fact that Jamie Loftus is
now a New York Times bestselling author.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
It's the perfect crime. Magpie is complicit in this crime.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Yeah, I don't know. I just think it's cool and
you can put that on books from now on. And
people will be like hell yeah, and people can't give
you shit anymore, because if people give you shit, you
can be like, yeah, they.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Don't know it was only one week because of pre orders.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Yeah, exactly. It really is, like, Actually, why I push
preorders so hard with everything that I publish is that
totally it matters a lot. It's disproportionate. But the rest
of the credits. The other voice that you're hearing is
the one and only Sophie Lichtermann. Hi, Sophie, how are
you doing.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Hey, I'm good.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
My friends are here. Yeah, it's a good day. It's
a good day. Yeah, friends are here. Dogs here.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
I can see your dog, Magpie.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Good dog is sleeping on the floor behind my chair.
At some point he'll get up and run around and
have too much energy because it's too hot out, so
he doesn't like spending all this time outside, so he's
too much energy.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
I am sad to not be able to see flee
Jamie's cat.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Me too. Boy, he's a good boy. He'll be he'll
be with me soon enough. But yeah, he's just been
really hating. He's he's a real hater of global warming,
more so than most people, because only only in selfish ways.
But he's just been sort of like climbing around my
dad's house, hissing at the general vibe.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Fair. You don't know what he gets up to at night.
He could be off trying to confront global warming in
a more direct way.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
It's true he's doing direct action, but only at night. Yeah, yeah, exactly,
That's when the best direct action is done.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
That's often true, depending on the type of direct action
you want to do. Which are we talking about some today?
But okay, wait, first, our audio editor is Ian. Everyone
say hi to Ian, including Ian Ian. Our theme music
was written for us by unwoman Jamie. You've ever heard
of Molly mcguires?
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Ooh no, it just sounds like someone who's probably related
to me.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Maybe we'll find out my grandma.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
My grandma's maiden name was McGuire, and she has so
many siblings that died, probably one was named Molly.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
So Molly maguire herself was potentially fictitious and we'll talk
about that.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Oh exciting, Okay.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Yeah, okay, So this week we're going to talk about
what happens when owners drag strikes out indefinitely in order
to break a union.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Why we'd be talking about that. Okay, you know, seems random.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
But I know, just completely random thing that's happening this week.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
We're going to start by going back to the eighteenth
and nineteenth century to talk about the long history of
collective retributive agrarian violence and secret societies in Ireland.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Ooh okay, I'm so excited for this. This is like
an algorithm chose for me. This is great.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Yeah, no, I really lost myself in researching this one.
A lot of rabbit holes. This is great, And we'll
talk about how that came to a head and lives
in the American imagination in the coal fields of northeastern Pennsylvania,
where some Irish miners took it upon themselves to defend
their community and their way of life against their bosses
(04:47):
or depending on how you want to look at it,
they became just another shitty gang. But sixteen mine bosses
and cops and shit got murdered. Twenty irishmen ended up hanged,
all because they weren't allowed to union nies anymore.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Oh, for folk's sake, Okay, I did have to do
the standard brain check of uh not children, minors.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Yes, yes, okay, people who go into the minds actually
make it even more complicated. They're actually mostly mine laborers
and not minors, because minor was the specialized job and
mine laborers got paid a third as much money.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
And oh, it's like animation writers and TV and live
action writers.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Interesting, there's no and with what's happening now, I don't
know what you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Sorry, I'm just I'm I'm projecting everything is about me.
I thought you were I thought that sentence was going.
It's difficult to talk about because most of them are
minor minors, which would be kind of I mean minor semantically,
but also you know, realistically, I'm glad it was it
is glad it didn't go that way.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
I mean, I mean a lot of them are about
a third of them are children, some of the miners times.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Although actually ironically, early on in the coal fields and
we'll talk more about this in a little bit, early
on in the coal fields, there's actually better labor conditions
than later once it became more monopolized, and this group
is going to kind of span that difference. And for
a while children were actually not allowed to go into
the mines, but instead were shale breakers who hung out
on the surface and broke rocks all day. It's not great,
(06:25):
but it doesn't give you black. You got to wait
till you're like maybe sixteen before you can get cirketting
black lung, which maybe today's characters die of.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Oh wow, okay, wow, this is so fast. I can't
even conceive of what story happening right now that this
could be a reflection of. But I'm also thinking about
because I just can't not think about hot dogs until
I die. Now about meatpacking too. I feel like I'm
(06:53):
going to have some meat packing symmetry here. I'm so
excited to hear about.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
This because I will happen.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Also, it just it feels like an industry that has
gotten progressively worse as time goes on.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Yeah, I learned that. Actually I learned that from you
reading an excerpt of your book. And if people like
history about this kind of thing, I recommend Raw Dog
by Jamie Waltas. So this week we're going to talk
about the Molly Maguire's, which was a semi real secret
society of poor irishmen who declared their Lloyd loyalty to
a mythological woman. Broke out and broke out weapons, and
(07:30):
they did this in two countries, and to tell the
story that came to head in eighteen seventy seven. We
are of course going to go back across the ocean
to one hundred years earlier, to the mythical emerald land
of leprechauns and fairies called Ireland. There's this country, or
Ireland or whatever it's called Ireland. We've covered Irish stuff
a bunch of times on the show already. People should
(07:50):
check out when we talked about Roger Casement, the gay
Irish knight who brought down King Leopold and was killed
for trying to end English rule in Ireland, or Grace O'Malley,
the pirate Queen of the West Coast of Ireland, and
I talk more about the greater breadth of Irish history,
and I think those episodes and those actually weirdly bookend
what we're talking about. Grace O'Malley was before Roger Caseman's
after we're going to start in the eighteenth century. Ireland
(08:13):
was really fucking poor in the eighteenth century. It had
plenty of resources, but it was a colony, and colonies
are set up so that the Brits can extract your value.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
Don't seem to really benefit from their many resources. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
No, Yeah, it was Britain's first colony. They famously went
on to have a few more.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
You never forgot your first time, I know, I know.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
That's the one that caught away. Fortunately most most of
them have gotten away at this point.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Wow. Really really horrific metaphor we're crafting here.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Yeah, in sixteen ninety five you get the Irish penal codes.
The Popoury Law of seventeen oh four basically said that
if you are Catholic. I know, if you're Catholic, you
can't have any land. You can't own any land on
your own island if you're Catholic, which, for anyone keeping track,
(09:10):
most of the indigenous people of Ireland were Catholic and
most of the settlers were Protestant. This is there's blurriness here,
and I'm not trying to make like grand generalizations, but
that's a big part of all of this. I feel like, probably.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Funny if this is where you came out as extremely
pro Catholic, You're like, this is, as we all know,
a Catholic podcast, so.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Really upgrading. I mean, what's funny is that, like this
is actually an episode about exactly the part of Catholicism
I like, which is the Catholics who hate the Church.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Yes, that is a very powerful and underdiscussed area. I mean,
granted for good reason. But I don't know has anyone
else in this call been personally victimized by Catholicism.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
I got really lucky in that I was technically raised
Catholic by someone who's effectively pagan and didn't make me
go to church. So I kind of got raised by
the kind of Catholics that we're talking about today.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Oh okay, so he won the Catholic lottery. Congratulations.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Yeah, I'll take it you were not so lucky.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
No, but there's certainly people who in my own home
state that had it worse.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Yeah, fair enough. So the Catholics are suddenly dispossessed. So
the Irish are no longer allowed to own land in Ireland,
and so people had been on this land for millennia
and they suddenly found they didn't own the place anymore.
And it didn't help that traditional Brehen law, the pre
Christian law in Ireland that was still kind of going
(10:45):
a little bit at this point, didn't have the same
conceptions of absolute landownership. So It's part of how they
showed and be like, you don't even like own this,
we can just like own it. You know, Ireland was
carved up by Protestant landowners, many of whom were British,
many of whom were Irish born descendants of the British,
and it was carved up into these estates and suddenly
everyone owed rent. I don't know if you've ever been
(11:07):
personally victimized by rent, but it is another system of extraction,
much like the.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Catholic Actually not currently, Margarete, because I just got evicted,
so kind of slaying on a different.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
Level, no fault of fiction. I also just to say,
not that it matters, but.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Yes, there's plenty of eviction related slain about to happen
in this story.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
Yes, oh, I can't wait.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
So suddenly your landlord is making money off of you.
It's even more egregious because of the family. Your family
had owned the place since time immemorial. And your landlord
is some guy with a British accent, or even just
speaking English at all. Different parts of Ireland were and
weren't speaking English. And that guy, your landlord, doesn't even
(11:57):
live in the country, and he takes all of your wages,
the rent you pay, and he uses it to hire
people to kill you and beat you up in this
case called colonial troops. More commonly understood now, is police
not really big ato capitalism or imperialism. As listeners the
show might be aware.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
Okay, see that's the pro catholic thing. I just wanted
to is bad that I needed that I knew.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Yeah, So the Irish in the seventeenth century, eighteenth century,
they're they're poor as fuck overall, and despite what British
newspapers claimed, they weren't stupid. They knew what was happening,
and no one has ever successfully claimed that the Irish
are cowards. So they decided to do something about it.
There's a lot of ways that they decide to do
something about it. Many of those ways involved like organizing
(12:49):
and trying to have revolutions and shit, and those are great,
and we have talked about some of them, and we'll
talk about more of them, but today that's not what
we're talking about. Today. We're going to start with what's
called a very in violence. Good band name I know,
and a better band name than what's about to happen,
which is it started in the way that nothing else
(13:11):
good has ever started or ever will because it started
with the White Boys.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Oh horrible band name, the worst band name I can
think of.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
There's so many unfortunate things in the back of this,
in this story where I'm like, everything's really cool except
for this one part that really people should just try
and copy.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
We just need a second draft.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Yeah, yeah, that's the real revision of history is we're
literally going to just change history, not change what we
talk about, but we're going to go back in time
and be like, this isn't going to read good in
a couple hundred years.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
You won't believe. I mean, things are, we're doing great,
but yeah, we just needed a name change.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Yeah. So you have all these tenant farmers, and I'm
going to conflate a whole lot of geography and like
an entire century into one overly convenient narrative. But landlords
weren't charging as much around as they possibly could overall, sorry,
were charging much money as much money as they possibly
could overall. The Anglican Church they're in on it too.
(14:14):
They're charging tithes aka taxes on the land. So you
have to pay tithes for a church for a Ford religion,
as well as your taxes too, landlord. The landlords could
charge a ton for farming land, and they'd be like, well, look,
we're charging you all this money for the farming land,
but you have all of the access to the commons.
You have all of this access to grazing land, and
(14:36):
so it's fine, you'll be fine. It's going to be
totally fine. The commons was this age old tradition of
having a fuck ton of land that just kind of
belongs to everyone where you can like graze your animals
and harvest timber and shit. I'm going to come back
to the White Boys, but first, do you want to
hear about how Ireland lost all its trees?
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Oh? No, yeah, but yes, I do know, I.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
Know it's kind of heartbreaking.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
In the BC, this is like.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
The Irish Loraxe story. Yeah, I mean is they're Irish
law rats.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
It's like it's more like the lore Ax's children have
come back for vengeance.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Ooh okay, I would watch this a twenty four movie
that rocks.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
Yeah. So Ireland used to be about eighty percent forested
in the sort of BC times, and pre Christian Island
you had not pre Christian Ireland, you had Bretan law,
which included cool shit like women can initiate divorce, which actually,
like when I talk about the like weird Catholic folk
Catholicism of Ireland, like I did an episode where it
talks about how like women in the sixteenth century who
(15:41):
were ostensibly Catholic were divorcing their husbands because wild, because
that was part of Irish Catholicism. Because Irish Catholic anyway,
it wasn't Roman Catholicism. It's distinct.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Don't tell current Irish Catholics. They will not take well
to this.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
No, we'll even talk about how that happened in the
mid nineteenth century.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Yay.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
So because Breton law survived. The Christianization of Ireland started
in the fourth century, and it didn't really start going
away until the English, or rather the Normans first in
the twelfth century. Brend Law survived longer in some places,
which is how you have these Catholics getting divorced. Then
Henry the Eighth and Queen Elizabeth in the whatever century,
(16:24):
early modern, late Renaissance, whatever the fuck. I didn't write
down the years, and I don't remember off the top
of my head because I read too many books. Henry
the eighth and Queen Elizabeth were like, man, you know what,
we hate the forest. We hate that the Irish have forests.
They specifically hated the forests because the Irish kept hiding
(16:45):
in the forest to kill all the British people.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
Oh okay, So it was not I mean, not that
this makes it better, but I was like, is it
just a random like I woke up today and decided
that I because it seems like imperial types do that
as well, where they're like, you know what, I'd like
to destroy forever today?
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Yeah, I mean that's like kind of a colonization itself,
is like, yeah, what if I just go over there
and just destroy everything.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
I'm cranky today? What if I ruined thousands of people's
lives generationally forever?
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Yeah. They cut down all the forests and they turned
it into boats, so they had like build an armada
against Spain or whatever. By sixteen hundred Irish force, forests
are down to twelve percent of the island and the
sixteen hundred is The English also started killing all the wolves,
bastard alumni of the pod Oliver Cromwell paying a bounty
to kill wolves. Historically, the Irish were like, really, into
(17:40):
wolves and their enemies called them wolves a lot, and
so it was also there's like symbolism in killing all
the wolves. By sixteen fifty six, there's only two percent
of the forest left, which is how it is now
three hundred and fifty years later, there's still only two
percent of the forest left in Ireland.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Wow, there's been have there? Well, I mean this is
out of the scope, but I'm curious if there's been
reforestation efforts. I'm imagining there has been.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
Bit.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
I mean there are and actually a lot of this,
this little chunk comes from I forgot to write down
the name of a group, a group that is working
to reforest Ireland.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Oh that's amazing, Okay, yeah, No.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
It's interesting because there is this whole movement to reclaim
a lot of traditional Irish values and culture and language,
and some of that includes reforesting and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
As the proud owner of a hat that says sci
Fi sluts for reforestation, I'm very in favor of this.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
By seventeen eighty six, the last wolf in Ireland was killed.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
When I was sixteen, I visited my family in Ireland
and I saw that they're like wornheady trees little and
I like just cried and wrote a bunch of shitty
poetry about it.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
Anyway, I wish i've it is my one of my
great wishes. Well, my dad is still young enough to
sort of make the trip with me to go back
to his because his memories of Ireland they're very funny
because it's like we're I think I'm third generation American
and my dad used to have to go back to
(19:12):
the farm that his family is from in like the
depths of Galway and work for the summer. And so
every time I'm like, let's go to Galway together, and
he's like boom no. But I was like, they they
can't make you work anymore. You're old.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Come on, I'm also third generation from Galway, so no way.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Wow, which is cosmically connected. Maybe some of our ancestors
suffered on the same farmland.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Yeah flat. At the same time, so Ireland has these
tenant farmers. They're told they can't access the commons, which
was the justification for the high rents, and so the
enclosure movement happens, which is basically one of the worst
things that's ever happened in all history, and actually pretty
(20:04):
much capitalism comes out of it. And probably the reason
that we're all going to drown and die of global
warming is because of this thing that happened in England
around this time and that they brought over to Ireland,
which is they went around and they stole all the
communal land and created a new economic system based on that.
The landlords, they are like, what if instead of letting
peasants grace their livestock and grow food on all this
common lands, what if we just throw fences around it,
(20:25):
arrest everyone who trespasses and steal their livestock and hold
it for ransom and call it impoundment. So they do that,
and this dispossesses not just the Catholics, but Catholics and Protestants.
This is a class thing and not a religious thing,
a sectarian thing, I see. And in the eighteenth century
(20:46):
there actually wasn't as much sectarian conflict along class line
within class lines in Ireland. It was fairly united in
the like fuck this attitude, and so you get what's
called agrarian violence, the Irish reputation for being fighty. But
it's usually perceived as like drunken angry men hitting each other,
as Chile's But a grarian violence is not that it
(21:07):
is class warfare against the rich, or rather self collective
self defense. Not all of it was good. Some of
it was very good, and it started with the White boys.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Oh God, Magpie, you know the sentence that just came
out of your mind. I know, I know, all right,
but I'm I'm I'm listening. Nonetheless, Yeah, there's so many
complicated things. But before I tell you about the white.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
Boys, why don't I tell you about It'd be really
awkward if potatoes was the sponsor today.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Well, I mean, before before you talk about the white boys,
let's toss the white boys a couple of bucks because
they make most products and services. Right, Yeah, that's a
really at least benefit from them. Woo, and we're back.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
So the white Boys in this context is somewhere between
an organization, a secret society, and a tactic. Some groups
formed and officially called themselves the White Boys. Others just
used the tact tactic and it was basically all all
anti landlord violence that happened around this time was called
white boyism, again, a label we will not be bringing back.
This was not about they wore white clothes when they
(22:27):
did this stuff. They often wore white dresses. This was
often men dressing as women, so irishmen would dress up
in white clothes, often dresses, pledge their allegiance to a
mythical woman or goddess named siv All Talk or Ghostly
Sally in English, or to other mythical women named Johanna
Meskill or Sheila Meskill. And then they would go out
(22:49):
in the middle of the night and threaten, beat, and
assassinate landlords, bailiffs, land agents, tenants who moved into people's
homes they had just been evicted from, and basically anyone
who went against I guess you could call it the
people's law, and you got a lot of things. You've
got community self defense. You could call it terrorism. There
(23:09):
are a lot of words for what they did. Most extensively,
this happened in the northern, Middle and northern western parts
of the country, especially in places where Irish culture was
being impacted most directly by colonial culture at that time.
Okay and the White Boys were explicitly non sectarian, but
(23:29):
meanwhile sectarianism and nationalism and revolution are brewing. It's something
I hadn't really thought through about Irish revolutionary movements and
anti colonial movements is that, like you take countries that
are colonial forces, like the US or Rhodesia, who have
these like quote unquote revolutions where the colonists want to
(23:50):
be free from their home country, but they actually like
are still the settlers and controlling the economy and fucking
over the people who originally lived there, you know, right,
And then you have actual anti colonial movements when indigenous
people want to be free. And Ireland had both, yes,
and they often worked together. Some people were like, I
(24:14):
don't like paying taxes anymore on the money that I
steal from all these poor people and other people. The
Catholics were like, how come we're not equal? Fuck this
also fuck England. And they worked together and they wanted
a republic. Spoiler alert. They failed.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Oh well yeah that's so yeah, I need that.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
But yeah, god, the world would be different. It would
be so different, no potato famine, no mass immigration. So
they managed to take part of the island as the
Irish Republic, only a small part of it, and it
lasted about twelve days. This was not incredibly successful. This
was sixteen ninety eight, seventeen ninety eight. Oh god, you
(24:57):
think I would have written it? Down in the Script
seventeen ninety eight. But part of the way that England
won is they did some divide and conquer shit. They
told all the Protestants in the North, hey, if you
turn your back on all the Catholics that you're fighting
alongside of, well forgive you for your little rebellion. People
took them up on it, and that's where a lot
of sectarianism comes from in Ireland. That is the start
(25:19):
of sectarian gangs of Protestants and Catholics murdering each other.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
And it wasn't perfect before that, but more and more
historians are coming around to them. The most of the
early struggle was not religiously sectarian, and it was a
class and anti colonial focused.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
So the Secret Society talking about shit like that, people
hate that.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
I know know what I would I keep reading all
these historians being like. One of the problems is that
since Ireland kind of won its independence, everything got rewritten
to be about Irish nationalism, and specifically Irish Catholic nationalism,
and everything kind of got rewritten to be like the
Catholic Church is the heroes of all of this, and
(26:05):
they sort of used it to impose a theocratic state
for most of the twentieth century in the Ireland and
prevent people from controlling their bodies.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
It's always I feel like you have a unique ability
to force me to hold two realities or the duration
of enough.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
To say that the Catholics are oppressed and that the
Catholic Church was monstrous.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Yes, exactly, exactly the Catholic Church that has existed in
our lifetime and the one that you're talking about.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
Yeah, yeah, totally and okay. So the secret societies in
Ireland they split at this time too. The Protestants formed
the Orange Order, who are still around in their right
wing pro England guys. And the Catholics absolutely without the
Church's blessing and against the Church's direct order because they're
Fault Catholics, not Roman Catholics. They formed their own new
(27:00):
groups called with all kinds of names, and the ones
that I've written down or founder the Threshers, the Lady Claires,
the Terry Alts, and the Ribbon Men.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
These are roller derby teams and you know it.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Yes, and the Ribbon Men is all butch and it rules.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
And I'm rooting for them fairoughly at inch and every
match except.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
When they go against the Lady Claires who are all
trans women, and then.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
You're you're going back and forth. You're like, I can't
really lose in this scenario.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
Yeah, I know, right, whence we win? Yeah, And so
all of these groups get conflated together. The most famous
of these is the Ribbon Men, so I'm going to
follow their thread. They started as a group called the
Society of Ribbon Men, and they were an outgrowth of
the Defenders, which was a radical Republican Catholic sectarian group
who had been they were absorbed into the United Irish
(27:58):
prior to the Revolution of seventeen I So there had
been this group and then seventeen ninety eight came and failed,
and then the Society the Ribbon Men came out. But
they were radically Republican also even though they just but
they were specifically at the start anti clerical again, because
the Church was like, you can't do this, and they
were like, we're gonna anyway, right, And they got their
(28:22):
name because they wore a green ribbon in their buttonhole.
There were two main centers of the Ribbon Men between
eighteen twenty two and eighteen forty. One was in Dublin.
The other was in north central Ireland. In north central Ireland,
the Orange Order was very strong, and so there's a
lot of just like street fights. Some of the ribbon
Men's stuff was this going around at night and fucking
shit up. A lot of it was just getting into
(28:45):
street fights with the Protestant gangs.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Regardless, I think that the white boys could really take
take some hints, some tips from the ribbon men and
just you know, named themselves a little more vaguely. The
ribbon men could mean anything. I could be on their side.
I could not be on their side.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
Yeah, I know. I don't want to be on the
White boys side, just instinctively.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
I know. And then the fact that we are put
in this position, it seems very unfair.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
Oh, it's gonna get worse. The Molly mcguires do some
stuff that we'll get to it, okay. So they spread
to the to England and Scotland as the Hiberian Funeral Society,
which is probably it almost certainly means this is a
fraternal order where people come together, like before people at
health insurance and stuff. You would join a fraternal order
(29:33):
like the Masons are example of this, and you would
join a fraternal order and you pay your dues, and
then when you needed a funeral or a wedding or whatever,
it would pay for it.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
Right.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
So the Hiberian Funeral Society was almost certainly just like
the Irish people who need like work.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
When you die, and then your boys throw you a funeral.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
Yeah, exactly, so your family can afford to see you
in the ground and stuff.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Right.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
It sounds like, here's a society that's going to make
you need a funeral, and they come from a group
that absolutely made some people need funerals, so that's kind
of cool. In eighteen twenty five they had a split.
The majority formed Saint Patrick's Fraternal Society in order to
make the church happy, because the church was like, you
can't have secret societies, fuck you. But a bunch of
(30:20):
them continued under the name Ribbon Men or now you
get the Molly mcguires, and this was an agrarian urban
split in some ways. The agrarian folks were like, nah,
I just want to fuck up landlords and be wild.
The urban folks were like, you know, let's develop this
into like a more of a nationalist thing for the
freedom of Ireland.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
Whatever.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
They're both fine, but following the ribbon men through this
particular and the Molly mcguires, what would they do? Basically
their motto was if you fuck with the peasants, will
fucking kill you.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Or I mean, no arguing, no arguing so far. But yeah,
but what are their methods?
Speaker 1 (31:03):
So one of their main methods was what was called
a coffin notice, which is where you go up and
you put a threatening note on a door with a
picture of a coffin on it, and you're like, this
is you, buddy, You're going to be living in this coffin.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
So dramatic.
Speaker 4 (31:18):
I love this Jack all right, alright, Jesus, I'm going
to quote from a coffin notice that was posted on
all the Catholic churches in one region in eighteen fifty
one to landlords, agents, bailiffs, grippers.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
I have no idea what a gripper is. The Internet
won't tell me. Wait grip or ripper, gripper, Yeah, no idea.
Irish slang from eighteen fifty one is hard to fucking google,
especially when it's a word to me. I know, maybe
actually it's just a time traveling person from the current
strike and it's actually a key grip.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Oh, the best boys, the key grips. They're traveling through
time to be Molly Maguire's. Yeah, I would watch that
movie if we're allowed to make it.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
To landlords, agents, bailiff's grippers, process servers, and usurpers or
underminers who wish to step into evicted tenant's property, and
to all others concerned and tyranny and oppression of the
poor on the Bath estate, take notice. Take notices in
all caps that you are hereby under the pain of
a certain punishment which will inevitably occur. Prohibited from evicting tenants,
(32:25):
executing decrees, serving process, distraining for rent, or going into
another's land, or to assist any tyrant landlord eight or
agent in his insatiable desire for depopulation. Recollect the fact
the fate of Maleveler on this his anniversary dated May
twenty third, eighteen fifty one. Maleveler was a magistrate or
(32:47):
a land agent, guy who found himself suddenly dead.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
Okay, and not a cartoon dragon, which was my guess.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
Yeah, no, yeah, okay, okay, until we that we make it.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
Yeah, that absolute rocks. I would be a fan of
bringing back the Leveler as a cartoon dragon, and that
reminds me of like how there was this group of
middle school juggle lettes that I really wanted to be
accepted by and they would say shit that in that
kind of cadence, it's a very powerful cadence.
Speaker 3 (33:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
I actually think there's some juggle at there's some juggle
at energy going on with the Molly maguires. We're going
to talk about in terms of their fat and clothing
and questionable decisions.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
They have a little outfits.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
Oh, they have outfits, especially makeup and okay, so so
now random acts of violence and agrarian violence that are
which are collective violence. These are attributed to white boys
and ribbon men alike, but not to be outdone onto
the stage of history stuff our main heroes and kind
of anti heroes a little, the Molly fuckings. There is
(34:02):
likely continuity between the Defenders, the ribbon men, and the
Molly mcguires. Almost everything we know about any of these
groups comes from people who hate them. It is mostly
the state trying to destroy them, who writes all of
the things that we have Besides some coffin notices and
one letter from like one hundred from decades later in Pennsylvania,
(34:24):
that we'll get to the in eighteen fifties, the ribbon
Men and the mcguires are probably the same organization or
sort of non organization. It was a lot of kind
of like Antifa. It's like like sometimes there's organizations that
call themselves it, but lots of people just do it
and call themselves it and use similar tactics.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Okay, so it's historically is it hard to tease out
which is which it is?
Speaker 1 (34:52):
And partly because a lot of it revolves around conspiracy
cases where the state wants to claim that everyone is
part of a formal organization and the newspapers.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Are sound familiar.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
I know, it's very anti Factually, it's like all of
these people and in this case, all Irish people are
like drunk, evil terrorists who are lazy, and that's why
they go through incredible amounts of effort and risk their
lives to defend the land they're on. That's the symptom
of laziness. I've ever heard one.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
Yeah, extreme effort that could kill you.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Yeah. Yeah. So when the Irish were driven off of
land or enclosures were set up, the molly maguires would
storm the place, tear down fences, drive off or mutilate
and kill livestock. This is one of their not great
moments from my point of view. You know, they're not
big animal rights people. Landlord agents were threatened, beaten, and killed.
Tenants who settled on evicted eviction land were treated the
(35:45):
same way. Merchants and millers were attacked if they charged
too high of prices, and pasture land was dug up
and planted with potatoes. Even the Pinkerton, who later investigated
them and saw them hanged in the US, said that
the eye Irish Molly Maguire's goal was to quote, to
take from those who had abundance and give it to
the poor.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
He described, Pinkerton is calling you Robin Hood. I mean,
where are we at? I know?
Speaker 1 (36:13):
He described their tactics as quote. Their mode of operation
was to have their leader dressed up in a suit
of women's clothing to represent the Irish mother begging bread
for her children. Under this disguise, the leader would be
named Molly, would approach a storekeeper and quote demand the
amount levied on him in the shape of me meal,
flower and general groceries. If the storekeeper didn't give the
(36:35):
Molly what she asked for, the rest of the Mollies
would pour into the place and loot it and basically
be like and if you tell the pigs, we'll come
back and fuck you up again.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
Wait, so the sorry I just thought it. So the
act would be preceded by community theater. Yeah, yeah, that's incredible,
there's so there. They should I mean, we personally should
(37:05):
bring that back because it's really hard to get people
to engage with community theater. And that is incredible. That
fucking rocks again. Yeah, irin the Irish are such drama
queens in it unbelievable. I love it. Yeah. So is
there there's one Molly mcg like one Molly who's performing
(37:30):
and then everyone else is wearing their regular clothes or
is it or is it a sea of Molly's.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
So as far as I can tell, because actually this
tactic was across I'll talk about this a little bit
more too. The tactic kind of was across the British
isles at this point sometimes also, and and it was
a mix. It's like, not everyone dresses up as a Molly,
but a lot of people do. And so I'm guessing
the crowd that storms it is a mix and this
(37:56):
is just one of their tactics. Another tactics is they'll
do like mid justice where they all maybe all of them,
dress up as women and then go and like break
into someone's house. And we'll talk about a cross dressing
aspect in a minute. But it comes from Okay, Okay,
we'll get to it. Okay. So there's a British guy
with a surn his name Sir Thomas Larkham, who said
(38:18):
at the time quote, they're in fact two codes of
law enforcing an antagonism won the statute law enforced by
judges and jurors in which the people do not yet trust,
the other a secret law enforced by themselves. It's agents,
the ribbon men, and the bullet. One tactic they supposedly did,
and I absolutely think this is scare tactics, Like this
is like newspaper bullshit, was that the mcguires would conceal
(38:41):
needles in the grass so that the cows would eat
them and die.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
Oh my god, Okay, yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:48):
This sounds like people put HIV infected needles in the
coin returns a lot of payphones.
Speaker 2 (38:53):
You know. Oh yeah, yeah, a classic.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
Yeah. They were shitty to animals, including cattle horns and
hunting dogs owned by their enemies. They would kill and
mutilate animals as a as a vengeance. Quite often the
McGuire's had a pagan taste of their festivity. Noess, they're
they're like theatricalness. There should be to violence spiked around
the Celtic celebrations of Halloween and May Eve, possibly because
(39:19):
folks were already dressing up in wild costumes. For those
anyone who once I didn't I took this out of
the script. It's for sake of time, but I'm going
to like paraphrase it back in you should look up
the Ren Boys and the Straw Boys and the May
Boys of Ireland for like wild cool folk costume pagany
(39:39):
amazing stuff and like weird masks and stuff.
Speaker 2 (39:45):
But in so, the the your working theory, oh the
Ren Boys. Wow, Yes, I am co signed CO signed there.
So So the the working theory is Halloween is a
good time to go out because everyone's dressed up anyways.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
So I think it's like not like just that you're
more disguised when you're I think it's like more like
we're all worked up. You know, you come together for
this community celebration and then you're like, you know, what
fuck it, let's like go get some shit done. And
then it also it'll tie into like some Mummer stuff
that'll talk about in the second and so they return.
(40:25):
Also tradition in the Molly McGuire's they didn't declare their
loyalty to Sive the mythical woman that the white boys did,
but instead they called themselves the children of Molly McGuire,
who probably wasn't a real person, but that doesn't stop
there for being myths about her. One is that a
widow named Molly McGuire refused to be evicted and her
(40:48):
house was destroyed on top of her.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
And she died, though.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
Another is that she'd just been evicted and like had
been kicked out and people banded together to avenger. Other
is that Molly McGuire owned an the legal bar where
they all met to plan. The best, but probably least likely,
is that there was a specific real woman named Molly
McGuire who had pistols strapped each thigh like fucking tomb raider,
who led the man on their nocturnal raids.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
Okay, so like Irish Annie Oakley vibes, that's kind of fine. Yeah,
I just double checked because I was like am I
remembering this incorrectly? I do. You will not be able
to find her because we don't have the same last name.
My grandma's maiden name is McGuire, my cousin's name is Molly,
and her full name is Molly McGuire. Blank. I don't
(41:37):
think my family knows about the Molly mcguires. And this
is an incredible revelation. Oh my god, but I accidentally
created I bet your grandmother true mcguires. I bet my
grandmother did too, and she was probably like, yeah, let's
name he this.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
Yeah, like.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
That's cool, that's I'm kind of I'm old about it. Yeah,
because I'm I've got McGuire blood in me, so yeah,
with Molly McGuire's real and she's you know, twenty six
and lives in Massachusetts.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
Yeah. Yeah. All the women in my family are just
named Margaret. There's so many Margarets. There's like multiple times
where someone named Margaret marries a man whose sister's named
Margaret and then they have a kid named Margaret. That
that triangle of Margaret's has happened multiple times in the
Irish side in my family tree, gorgeous.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
My grandparents' names were Patrick and Patricia. Hell yeah, they
sound like cartoon twins. But yeah, they're simply married. People.
Speaker 3 (42:40):
Give me, is that is that how you picked the
name Patricia from your boss Room's girls show.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
Yeah, it's where my grandma. Oh my gosh, I was
like a stone cold bitch. I know, just like my grandma.
Speaker 3 (42:53):
Oh man, she's my heart, My heart is full.
Speaker 2 (42:58):
Did not know that pat loftis either of them big fans.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
Hell yeah, okay, so we're gonna talk about how they
cross dressed. Oh yeah, we don't really know their reasons
for this. They didn't tend to write things down. A
lot of Irish speaking parts of Ireland at this point
didn't have much of a written culture, and anthropologists will
refer to this as it's not that they were illiterate,
it's that they were part of a preliterate culture. They
(43:24):
participated in a culture that developed complex ways of passing
along information without reading and writing right, and so the
only reason that this information is lost is because that
was disrupted, partly by the colonization and heavily by the
Catholic Church in the late part of the nineteenth century
when they tried to romanize the Irish Catholics. This preliterate
(43:46):
culture goes back as lease as far as the Druids,
who passed things along through word of mouth intentionally, even
though there was writing available to them. Right, Like, there
is an Irish writing style called ogum, right, but it's
not how they chose to pass along most information. So
wearing dresses. So this is why we don't know a lot.
I just want to like when I'm like, they didn't
write things down, I'm like that because they were like
(44:07):
too stupid or something.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
We don't have the tools. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
Yeah, So wearing dresses wasn't just about disguies. It partly
was about the skies, but it was also it lented
them a certain legitimacy, like a uniform, but like a
mythical uniform, kind of a full costume you're putting on
to become a character, so you're capable of doing more. Right,
and it became the sons and daughters of Molly Maguire.
(44:31):
They are also here's one of the messiest parts of
this whole story. They're remembered for blackening their faces.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
Oh, for fuck's sake.
Speaker 1 (44:42):
Yeah, I spent way too long this week trying to
sort out medieval and early modern early modern face blackening
to understand how it relates to blackface and it relates
to character caricaturizing other races and stuff. I still don't
entirely know where I land whether or not this was
(45:03):
like a form of black face, because there's a lot
of different descriptions of it and wactually there's not a lot. Okay,
most descriptions are just like they darken their faces and
don't say more than that whether or not. I haven't
found a source that says they painted their entire faces black,
only a source that describes them as painting their faces
(45:24):
with burned cork and then smearing it over their eyes, mouths,
and cheek, which is as corpse paint. That is this
particular time that is being described, right, is like what
you imagine somebod who's into black metal wearing. But also
many of them painted their faces white, and so it
(45:44):
was costuming. But it probably also, I'm not trying to
like entirely get them off the hook about this, it
probably included costuming to represent oneself as having black skin,
because this was a common mod medieval theatrical thing that
people would paint their skin black, either if you're like
doing Shakespeare or like representing a fellow you do it,
and it's a white actor who paints their skin black, right,
(46:05):
who does blackface? I don't want to like mince words
about that. But also still racistly, a lot of medieval
theater used painting your skin black to represent evil and
being the devil, because in this particular theatrical tradition, the
devil had his skin turned black by God for rebelling,
(46:26):
which is racism. It's just a different form of it's direct.
Speaker 2 (46:30):
And that feels more like I don't I mean, we
are still dealing with people doing black face today, but
the but what you're talking about blackening your face and
referring to badness like that is I think something that
we have not culturally even started to discuss yet, because
(46:51):
it's like then we're getting into juggalo territory like you
were talking about.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
Ye I see, I see.
Speaker 2 (46:59):
Where you were going there. That's okay, that's well, that's ugly. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
I suspect that Molly mcguires are doing this. Their whole
vibe seemed to be put on, like put on your
war paint before you got and kill the people need killing, right, Sure.
Speaker 2 (47:16):
But I also don't think that you know, historically, I
don't know. But also I wouldn't put it past predominantly
you know, white country to be very very racist.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
Yep, even if the way they do that might be today,
I'm the devil because I'm the same as a black person,
entirely fucking possible. Yeah, or they were just fucking painting
their eyes and lips, you know.
Speaker 2 (47:40):
And we don't know that's really because that's yeah, that's
that's a meyer wow.
Speaker 1 (47:46):
And it also might originate from mummery, which was imported
to Ireland by English and Scottish settlers in the seventeenth century,
and mummers. It's this theatrical tradition where mummers would travel
around on Midsummer in New Year's door to door and
costume demanding food, money, and drink. We talk about some
of this stuff in the Christmas episode, actually that we did,
(48:10):
and they would wear outlandish costumes, bright clothes, and strange makeup,
including blackface. This blackface was almost certainly blackface in a
traditional sense in the bad way. You know. Well, I see, okay,
even whatever, but you know what isn't problematic.
Speaker 2 (48:29):
Where I have a.
Speaker 3 (48:30):
Guess you can get you cannot safely say that, say
that you couldnot safely say, right, we do not pick
our ads.
Speaker 1 (48:38):
Yeah. If this, if the ads that follow are problematic,
you can direct all complaints to our complaint department on
Twitter at I write okay, and he will get back to.
Speaker 2 (48:52):
You in a timely fashion and politely and discreetly.
Speaker 1 (48:56):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (48:56):
Yes, here's some ads.
Speaker 1 (49:03):
And we're back. So Ireland leads Europe in early modern
history of men causing disturbances dressed up as women. The
threshers we taught. We mentioned them briefly as like they
went around enforcing Captain Thresher's laws. The peep o' day boys,
the Lady Claire's, the Lady Rocks. These are all cross
(49:24):
dressers too, okay, And allegiance to mythical women was like
common in Irish culture as a sort of like source
of power parishes and villages. A lot of residents would
be like children of one mother within your community. And
it wasn't just violence that called for wild costuming and
cross dressing. It was part of a lot of medieval
(49:46):
and pre medieval rituals. All over Europe, men were dressing
women's clothes for ritual and festival, but in Ireland in
particular is also associated with anti capitalist violence, and it
lasted longer and more remote less quote civilized places like
the Gale Tech the part of Ireland where Irish language
and traditional culture lasted longer through colonization. One other kind
(50:13):
of cool, weird, kind of sexist, kind of not side
of why they would cross dress apparently, or like why
what the symbolism of womanhood meant? Medieval society conflated womanhood
with chaos and wildness and irrationality. Yeah, which is like
not fair, but also like kind of cool.
Speaker 2 (50:36):
It's it's a fun language choice.
Speaker 3 (50:39):
I like.
Speaker 1 (50:39):
Yeah, over in England you have a similar thing going on.
Future friends of the Pod the Luddites who were at war.
People are like, oh, the Luddites, they were at war
against technology. They like weren't They were against their way
of life being destroyed by the early vestiges of capitalism,
which included the mechanization.
Speaker 2 (50:55):
Didn't know the origin of that.
Speaker 1 (50:57):
Yeah, we're gonna do a whole episode about it. At
some point they were like they were all losing their
jobs to the automation of textile work.
Speaker 2 (51:06):
Yeah, but we should just say that when Grandpa can't
use computer.
Speaker 1 (51:11):
Yeah, exactly. As compared to like Grandpa's way of life
was destroyed by capitalism.
Speaker 2 (51:16):
Which I mean, can't two things be true at once true?
Speaker 1 (51:22):
And so the Bloodlights would also declare loyalty to a
fictional person, in this case King Blood and cross Dress
and go function up and in Wales. In the same
time period as the Molly mcguires eighteen thirty nine eighteen
forty three, you've got the Rebecca Riots, which were farmers
protesting exploitive taxes, in particular tollgates. Apparently a lot of
(51:44):
toll roads in fucking nineteenth century Whales.
Speaker 3 (51:48):
Okay, I fucking hate toll roads. I hate toll roads.
Speaker 1 (51:53):
I set mine to no tolls and then I drive
so far out of my way to avoid.
Speaker 3 (51:57):
To make me forty five, make me irrationally angry. Yeah,
like the first like we don't really have Like I
grew up in Los Angeles and we don't really we
don't have them. And then I remember there was like
a family trip we went on where I went somewhere
and they were so and it just like as a child,
I aggressively it was like this is wrong.
Speaker 2 (52:19):
So I stand by childhood me fucked.
Speaker 1 (52:24):
Hell yeah, we're going to change your name to Rebecca Riot.
Speaker 2 (52:28):
Oh cool.
Speaker 1 (52:30):
I mean that's a way cooler name.
Speaker 2 (52:31):
Let's be honest, I'm into it. Kind of print it.
We're done. I feel like the best thing that ever
happened for Toll Roads is when John Goodman played a
toll worker in Coyote Ugly. That was I've never seen
it my that was my pro toll moment.
Speaker 3 (52:50):
That's a movie that I was like, Margaret does not
know what that is, but I do.
Speaker 1 (52:54):
Know what it is. Oh okay, I don't think you
would hate it.
Speaker 2 (52:56):
No, I don't think you would hate it. No, it's fun.
It's a good summer movie. And John Goodman he's wrapping
the tolls and he's not anti the tolls. He's kind
of ambivalent about the tolls.
Speaker 1 (53:10):
Okay, Well, but you know.
Speaker 3 (53:13):
I'm not I hate them.
Speaker 2 (53:15):
Yeah, my whole heart.
Speaker 1 (53:18):
Well, they did this street theater, literally on the street
right where they would walk up in a large gang,
about half of them dressed as women. I also like
some you know, I don't know if you knew this.
Women are often written out of history. Huh. I'm willing
(53:39):
to bet if there is a large violent group of
men or a group of people all dressed up as
women off to go fuck something up.
Speaker 2 (53:46):
I bet some of them are women.
Speaker 1 (53:51):
You don't even have to cross dressed to go to
your violence if you're a woman.
Speaker 2 (53:56):
No, no, no, MagPi, you're talking fairy tales. Yes. It's
like when I learned I recently learned we just did
an episode on Newsies at the on the Bechdel Cast,
and I love Newsies. I think it's the best. And
I was like, were there really no women news there?
(54:17):
Of course, there were so many.
Speaker 1 (54:20):
We just did an episodes too. That's cool.
Speaker 2 (54:22):
Really, Oh my god, synergy.
Speaker 1 (54:24):
I know, yeah, no, there was so many. Yeah. And
did you run across that same thing where there was
a person who put on a a version of the
play Newsies and like everyone was like, why did you
put women in this? Yes, and he was like, I
did research.
Speaker 3 (54:40):
I know.
Speaker 2 (54:41):
Yeah. Literally, it's such an easy and I love I
just love like when I was doing that research, so
many places that directed me to primary sources were uh,
Tumblr accounts that were horny for cast members of I'm
just like, we've really underestimate it. Did the intellectual potency
(55:02):
of the fangirl Yeah, totally. They've done so much for me.
Speaker 1 (55:06):
They're all librarians, and it's amazing.
Speaker 2 (55:08):
They really are.
Speaker 1 (55:09):
Yeah, okay, well, if you like the street theater element,
the Rebecca riots, they would go up to the toll gates.
I actually should have I thought this through. I would
have put in the script. You can find the script
that they read in one of the books that I read.
I don't remember which one on the top of my head.
It's probably in the fucking or whatever. It's googleble Okay.
So they would go up and they would do a
(55:30):
call of call and response. Someone was dressed up as
Rebecca or would take the role of Rebecca. And in
this case it's a biblical reference that I don't I
don't really get, but I know more about the fairies
and guardian spirits. She's married Rebecca.
Speaker 2 (55:51):
Rebecca was married to who we oh God to embarrass myself,
I know. But she had she had a baby, and
she was theoretically, they're like, you're too old to have
a baby, and then but then she had one.
Speaker 1 (56:07):
She put her career first, you know, exactly moderate pre
modern Kathy. She was a girl boss. Yeah, and so
the girl boss would do it would lead a call
in response that was like and everyone's like the gate
is keeping you Biblical Rebecca from crossing, then we must
(56:27):
destroy it. And so street theater is best when it
is also paired with direct action, and direct action is
best when it's paired with theatrical elements. And while they
did this, they all wore masks, and some of them
blackened their faces. And I don't I don't know. I
(56:47):
don't know what that means. And I'm not trying to
get them off the hook by saying that. I spend
a lot of time trying to figure out what it means.
The oldest instance of I can find of this general
collection of islands painting your face in a way that
doesn't read well and then putting on a dress and
fighting against commons enclosure was the Western Rising in England
of sixteen twenty six to sixteen thirty two. Okay, so
(57:11):
this goes back people like I don't know, there's some
shit going on. I am convinced that's go ahead.
Speaker 2 (57:19):
Oh no, good, no, go ahead.
Speaker 1 (57:21):
I'm increasingly convinced that where the Left has gone wrong
is that we stopped declaring loyalty to a mythical person
and then wearing elaborate costumes and then going off to
commit direct action at a scale that feels like war.
But we should leave black face the fuck out of it.
Speaker 2 (57:36):
Yes, yes, I mean, that's the one thing I feel
sure of. I'm like, has the Left not found a
mythical person to latch onto yet?
Speaker 1 (57:43):
But they don't know it's mythic?
Speaker 2 (57:45):
We not that's true. I guess, yeah, I guess that's
that's the complicated part. I really do. I love to
think any time I see I mean, because unfortunately, and
not to give anyone, you know, like early twenty tens PTSD,
this does evoke a flash mob.
Speaker 1 (58:02):
Yeah, totally it does.
Speaker 2 (58:05):
And we were there and you didn't have to like it,
but I do as someone who has been encouraged to
join a flash mob and ultimately didn't. I like to
think in each and everyone of these stagings, there was
absolutely one person there who was giving it, who was
not giving it one hundred percent even close was thirty
(58:27):
percent of it was secretly like I cannot fucking believe
there is not another way to accomplish.
Speaker 1 (58:34):
They're like, couldn't we loot the store without dressing up
like this?
Speaker 2 (58:38):
It just rich wulmnty like it's They're like, no fucking
way surely there's another way.
Speaker 1 (58:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (58:47):
And I just like to think of a grouchy Irish
person being like, I have to learn to dance, yeah,
to fight for my rights, And the answer is yes,
you do. But I like to think of the few,
the proud, the grouchy people who did not want to
be in the righteous flash mob.
Speaker 1 (59:07):
Yeah, there's the one person just shows up and surly
in the back. It's just like, exact, when is it
time to loot? So the molly maguires, who are ostensibly Catholics,
not to just beat this. This is just going to
come up a lot the conflict between them and the church.
They had a tenuous relationship with the church. Some local
(59:28):
clergy was on their side. In eighteen forty seven, Father
Michael McDermott was accused of encouraging his followers to kill
their landlord. He was accused of this because he did it.
Uh huh, So based Father Michael McDermott. More often, they'd
attack the church as well, because the church was overall
just another economic exploiter of the poor, and because the
(59:49):
church was trying to criminalize their behavior. Right in eighteen
forty six, they trashed the pews of a church in
County Rosscommon as one example that I found. And then
in the mid nineteenth century, the Irish Catholic Church waged
a devotional revolution trying to bring This is when they
(01:00:11):
like romanized the Irish Church. They tried to bring the pagany,
wild Irish into the proper flock. In the north and
west of Ireland, only about twenty percent of the nominally
Catholic folks actually went to Mass on any given Sunday
before the famine. And so during this devotional revolution they
(01:00:32):
went around and they fucked up all the traditional cultural stuff,
including the Holy Wells, including like attacking like belief in
fairies and curses and all that shit. And they really
really hated the traditional Irish wake, which was a very
raucous thing. And this is probably around the same time
that the Catholic Church started fucking with keening, which is
(01:00:53):
the traditional whaling of Irish women over the dead, which
was almost completely wiped out by the time that audio
technology became available. So we have like almost no actual
knowledge of what fucking keening sounded like, this thing that
survived fifteen hundred years of Christianity as like a traditional
(01:01:14):
and whatever. I'm very mad at the church for.
Speaker 2 (01:01:16):
But it did. But are there we are you implying
there are some that exist, like early recordings.
Speaker 1 (01:01:23):
There are some early recordings of people who had been
taught keenan who were like not necessarily like the specific
traditional keeners.
Speaker 2 (01:01:31):
This.
Speaker 1 (01:01:32):
I didn't research this for this episode. I researched this
for about a song that my metal band put out
a year ago that we hired a woman who studies
traditional keening as best is able to record keening into
it and it's called a malocked, which is a curse.
There's a whole other thing that I got. There's a
(01:01:52):
traditional Irish curse culture that a lot of it was
ways to curse your landlord, and they are fucking intense,
and it was like a lot of the ways actually
that women were involved in class struggle was this like
like you know that thing that in Ukraine early on
in the invasion where like a woman walks up to
a Russian soldier and says, here, put these seeds in
(01:02:13):
your pocket so that something beautiful grows when you die
and rot here.
Speaker 2 (01:02:17):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (01:02:18):
That's the kind of energy that like Irish women were
bringing to class struggle.
Speaker 2 (01:02:23):
Oh beautiful, yeah, beautiful stuff. It's just it is a
game of four DJs ya that they're playing at all times. Yeah, wonderful.
Speaker 1 (01:02:34):
And so these folk Catholics weren't necessarily actually Pagans. I'm
calling them pagany in the sense, but they would have
considered themselves devoutly Catholic. They just meant something very very
different by it, so that the devotional the devotional revolution
is something I'm very frustrated with and it impacts a
lot of this. The molly Maguires who later went to
the US, a lot of them came from the west
(01:02:55):
coast of County Donegal, which is now the bit of
the North of Ireland that isn't north in Ireland. It's
the part that's still part of Ireland, right the northwest
corner at this point. It's a real backwater, which meant
that the traditional ways of life in the Irish language
survived better there. The Irish speaking part of Ireland gets
called the Geltech and it was sort of the arc
(01:03:16):
that Irish culture was able to return from. And Donegal
was a place that was majority Catholic, but not so
overwhelmingly so is the South of Ireland. Instead, it was
a place where an Irish speaking impoverished majority worked for
an English speaking Protestant minority. And so the molly McGuire's, yeah,
(01:03:36):
so there's more tension in a lot of this place,
you know, right, And so the molly mcguires came to
the US. Came from the western part of Donegal, which
is a land of waste and bog and it is
one of the poorest and most isolated parts of Ireland.
In the eighteen hundreds, people in Donegal, a lot of
them were like literally dirt poor. It was very common
you'd have a cottage for a family, right, the animals
(01:03:59):
would sleep in side on one half of the cottage
and the entire family would sleep on loose hay on
the other half. And this isn't because they are backwards.
This is because they have been robbed over the course
of the centuries.
Speaker 3 (01:04:12):
Right.
Speaker 1 (01:04:13):
People had such rudimentary clothing that visitors were scandalized by
the scantily clad women. This is another sign of their
like wild pagan ways, which is like partly that they
didn't have the same like cultural conventions around modesty, but
partly is that they didn't have any fucking money, right.
Speaker 2 (01:04:29):
Right, which is like never included in the demonization of like, Yeah,
first of all, who fucking cares? And second of all,
there's no yeah, no context for why that's happening in
the first place.
Speaker 1 (01:04:40):
Yeah. And so they would grow food all year and
then have to sell all of their food that wasn't potatoes.
They would they would buy a calf on really really
bad credit terms and then sell it when it was
fully grown, barely able to cover the cost of buying
the calf. But in some parts of the Northwest you
(01:05:01):
had this medieval form of communal land holding called rundale,
which had died out everywhere else or most everywhere else.
And what it was is that the tenants, so they
would collectively rent a fuck tone of land, right, a
whole village would rent the village, and they would parcel
it out amongst themselves fairly, not so that everyone ends
(01:05:22):
up with the same It's not like they would like
pool all their money, but instead they would pool all
their wealth producing resources, so that everyone had an equal
chance to produce wealth. So everyone had a bit of
good land and a bit of shitty land. Everyone had
a bit of pasture land, and everyone had a bit
of like some rocks down by the ocean where you
could get some seaweed and it was non contiguous, right,
(01:05:45):
so you and folks work together to make sure that
it was alloted fairly.
Speaker 2 (01:05:50):
Go ahead. Oh so, because you're given equitable chunks of
land in terms of land quality as it were, that
means that you have your bad chunk could be far
away from your good chunk kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (01:06:06):
Yep, I see, Okay, it sounds kind of like a
pain in the ass, but it it's.
Speaker 2 (01:06:11):
Like, yeah, but you probably have right and also like
you would have to sort of I mean, yeah, ultimately
a pain in the ass, but you would have to
get to know more people and an ally with more
people in that chunk of land between your your good
bit and your bad bit.
Speaker 1 (01:06:27):
Yeah. And they would do the same with animals. They
would like collectively own the animals and then care like
sort of parcel them out so that everyone had like
a shitty cow and a good cow or whatever. I
don't think people and more than one cow, but like.
Speaker 2 (01:06:40):
Oh not their shitty cow. Wow. There's a Pixar movie, yeah,
the picture cow. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:06:49):
And so this system is part of is included in
what Marx calls primitive communism, which is actually just communism
without the extra steps, like specifically, Marx believe that you
had to be industrialized before you could become communism as
a primitive communism, which clearly existed, like kind of fucked
with his theory, so he denigrated it to Yeah, I
(01:07:12):
deleted this whole rant about why angles was anti Irish
out of the script and everyone can thank me. And
and also animals were usually moved on May first and
November first from different pieces of the land, right, which
not coincidentally lines up with the Celtic holidays May Day
and Halloween and the attendant to gray and violence against
(01:07:35):
the landlords, which would peak on those nights spicy days. Yeah,
Eventually owners break the run Dale system. They force everyone
to be traditional tenants. And the way they do it,
the way that the tenant the Rundale people, the way
they fight that is they're like, all right, fine, everyone's
land has to be contiguous. It's called squaring the land.
(01:07:58):
And the way that they would do it is they're like,
we still want everyone to have good land and shitty
land because that's the traditional way we've been doing it
for thousands of years. So they would have the contiguous
land would be like three feet wide and like a
mile long, so it would go across I think good
parts and bad parts.
Speaker 2 (01:08:17):
Again just theater, yeah, great, love it.
Speaker 1 (01:08:23):
And then also during all of this, during the destruction
of this way of life in County Donegal, they broke
up the traditional Irish inheritance system, in which property was
divided equally between all of the children rather than going
to the eldest son. It's actually this change is why
my great grandparents had to emmigray from County Galway, right
because under the old system, everyone of every gender inherits equally.
(01:08:46):
Under the new system, only the oldest son inherits. So
if you are not a son, or you're not the oldest,
you're fucked and you pretty much got to go to
the US or somewhere else.
Speaker 2 (01:08:59):
And that's why we're here. What a treat.
Speaker 1 (01:09:01):
Yeah. And then so this equal inheritance system was destroyed
after the famine. Basically famine killed not just a fuck
ton of the Irish, but it also killed a fuck
ton of the Irish traditional communistic customs and religious culture.
So Donegal was enclosed mostly for sheep farming. People fought
against it. Lots of sheep went missing or found killed.
(01:09:23):
But all of this gets blamed on Molly McGuire ism,
and some of it probably was, but later people figured
out that like the Scottish farmers were just like stealing
the sheep and selling them themselves, you know, like they
were like yeah and yeah, and everything just gets blamed
on the Molly maguires. But the Molly McGuire's.
Speaker 2 (01:09:43):
Yeah, that's like so that's so I don't know, historically
frustrating that it's like we've well never know who did
what because of whenever the predominant media culture at the
time what they wanted us to think, I know.
Speaker 1 (01:09:58):
And it's like so hard to be like, damn it,
how much did the Molly McGuire like everything got blamed
on them? And it's hard because like in some ways
therefore their actions like furthered a lot of you know,
anti Irish sentiment and stuff like that, right, But also
like I'm just fucking not mad at people who robinhood
when they're starving to death, Like I'm pro it, right,
(01:10:18):
there's a reason they're on my show, you know, Like.
Speaker 2 (01:10:23):
That is the show, is it not?
Speaker 1 (01:10:25):
Yeah? Yeah, But the molly McGuire's, they're not famous in
the US for what they did in Ireland. They're famous
for what they did in Pennsylvania, which involved lots of
murder and arson and class war and weird unionism. And
we'll talk about it on Wednesday.
Speaker 2 (01:10:43):
Cliffanger. Dun dun, duh. Oh god a Pennsylvania Cliffhanger.
Speaker 3 (01:10:50):
For some reason, I've heard about Pennsylvania more than I've
heard about Pennsylvania in.
Speaker 2 (01:10:56):
Like years, just this week. Really, it's the big Pence
a new week. I don't know why I hate Pennsylvania.
That's annoying too. I love Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh's great, not just
because they have the Catchup Museum.
Speaker 3 (01:11:13):
Yeah, that's exactly why I love.
Speaker 2 (01:11:16):
That's a big read. That's a big reason. It's a
book reason I can't lie. But it's not the only reason.
Speaker 3 (01:11:21):
Fair fair Yeah, speaking of things that are loved. Jamie Loftus,
do you have anything you want to plug?
Speaker 2 (01:11:30):
Wow? Thanks? I Yes, you should buy a book about
hot dogs. It's the summer to do it. There's no
way around it. Hot Dog Day is right around the corner.
And don't think too hard about the implications of it,
or do when you read my book Raw Dog, The
Naked Truth about hot Dogs, anything you would ever want
to know about hot dogs, except more things I've learned
(01:11:51):
since and you can get that on a bookshop dot org,
which will automatically route you to buy the book from
your nearest independent bookstore. So do that and don't talk
to me in the internet. I'm tired.
Speaker 1 (01:12:12):
I started a substack and if you want a newsletter
where twice a month I send out a free thing
to everyone that's like more about preparedness and history and
all that stuff I talk about a lot. And then
the other half is subscriber only and is like more
personal and I'm writing memoir and a lot of other
(01:12:34):
stuff there, and so you can support me or just
read my stuff at just you're not going to type
in the r oh, you're just going to google it,
type in Margaret Kiljoy substack. And also I just did
oh awesome. Also there's Sophie who has things to plug.
Speaker 2 (01:12:59):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:13:02):
Listen to sad Oligork, which is a podcast on this
very network, cool Zone Media. If you can finde it
in on all the podcast apps. It's hosted by our
friend Jkandrahan, who's the best. And for anything else at
cool Zone Media. I'm still on the internet. You could
find me. I'm not telling you how well.
Speaker 2 (01:13:26):
Let's see you on Wednesday. Bye Bye Bye.
Speaker 3 (01:13:33):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website coolzonemedia dot com or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. It's
a podcast about people who did stuff. I'm your host,
Margaret Kildren, and with me today as my guest is
the only person who has written a book about hot dogs.
That is currently on my bedside table because I haven't
(00:22):
started it yet.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I loved this. I was wondering how that sentence was
going to end, and I'm very satisfied with where it landed.
What a treat.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Yeah, No, I'm excited to read it. It was waiting
for me when I came back from the trip. Although
now I was ended up like kind of sad because
I saw you on this trip and I didn't get
it signed. Which is the lesson that you should never
pre order books. That is the lesson that I.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Think that that's true. I will be carrying that lesson
into to sabotage everyone I know.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Really, Yeah, because if you pre order books, it helps
people's careers amazing, like the fact that Jamie Loftus is
now a New York Times bestselling author.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
It's the perfect crime. Magpie is complicit in this crime.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Yeah, I don't know. I just think it's cool and
you can put that on books from now on. And
people will be like hell yeah, and people can't give
you shit anymore, because if people give you shit, you
can be like, yeah, they.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Don't know it was only one week because of pre orders.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Yeah, exactly. It really is, like, Actually, why I push
preorders so hard with everything that I publish is that
totally it matters a lot. It's disproportionate. But the rest
of the credits. The other voice that you're hearing is
the one and only Sophie Lichtermann. Hi, Sophie, how are
you doing.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Hey, I'm good.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
My friends are here. Yeah, it's a good day. It's
a good day. Yeah, friends are here. Dogs here.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
I can see your dog, Magpie.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Good dog is sleeping on the floor behind my chair.
At some point he'll get up and run around and
have too much energy because it's too hot out, so
he doesn't like spending all this time outside, so he's
too much energy.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
I am sad to not be able to see flee
Jamie's cat.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Me too. Boy, he's a good boy. He'll be he'll
be with me soon enough. But yeah, he's just been
really hating. He's he's a real hater of global warming,
more so than most people, because only only in selfish ways.
But he's just been sort of like climbing around my
dad's house, hissing at the general vibe.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Fair. You don't know what he gets up to at night.
He could be off trying to confront global warming in
a more direct way.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
It's true he's doing direct action, but only at night. Yeah, yeah, exactly,
That's when the best direct action is done.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
That's often true, depending on the type of direct action
you want to do. Which are we talking about some today?
But okay, wait, first, our audio editor is Ian. Everyone
say hi to Ian, including Ian Ian. Our theme music
was written for us by unwoman Jamie. You've ever heard
of Molly mcguires?
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Ooh no, it just sounds like someone who's probably related
to me.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Maybe we'll find out my grandma.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
My grandma's maiden name was McGuire, and she has so
many siblings that died, probably one was named Molly.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
So Molly maguire herself was potentially fictitious and we'll talk
about that.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Oh exciting, Okay.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Yeah, okay, So this week we're going to talk about
what happens when owners drag strikes out indefinitely in order
to break a union.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Why we'd be talking about that. Okay, you know, seems random.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
But I know, just completely random thing that's happening this week.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
We're going to start by going back to the eighteenth
and nineteenth century to talk about the long history of
collective retributive agrarian violence and secret societies in Ireland.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Ooh okay, I'm so excited for this. This is like
an algorithm chose for me. This is great.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Yeah, no, I really lost myself in researching this one.
A lot of rabbit holes. This is great, And we'll
talk about how that came to a head and lives
in the American imagination in the coal fields of northeastern Pennsylvania,
where some Irish miners took it upon themselves to defend
their community and their way of life against their bosses
(04:47):
or depending on how you want to look at it,
they became just another shitty gang. But sixteen mine bosses
and cops and shit got murdered. Twenty irishmen ended up hanged,
all because they weren't allowed to union nies anymore.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Oh, for folk's sake, Okay, I did have to do
the standard brain check of uh not children, minors.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Yes, yes, okay, people who go into the minds actually
make it even more complicated. They're actually mostly mine laborers
and not minors, because minor was the specialized job and
mine laborers got paid a third as much money.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
And oh, it's like animation writers and TV and live
action writers.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Interesting, there's no and with what's happening now, I don't
know what you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Sorry, I'm just I'm I'm projecting everything is about me.
I thought you were I thought that sentence was going.
It's difficult to talk about because most of them are
minor minors, which would be kind of I mean minor semantically,
but also you know, realistically, I'm glad it was it
is glad it didn't go that way.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
I mean, I mean a lot of them are about
a third of them are children, some of the miners times.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Although actually ironically, early on in the coal fields and
we'll talk more about this in a little bit, early
on in the coal fields, there's actually better labor conditions
than later once it became more monopolized, and this group
is going to kind of span that difference. And for
a while children were actually not allowed to go into
the mines, but instead were shale breakers who hung out
on the surface and broke rocks all day. It's not great,
(06:25):
but it doesn't give you black. You got to wait
till you're like maybe sixteen before you can get cirketting
black lung, which maybe today's characters die of.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Oh wow, okay, wow, this is so fast. I can't
even conceive of what story happening right now that this
could be a reflection of. But I'm also thinking about
because I just can't not think about hot dogs until
I die. Now about meatpacking too. I feel like I'm
(06:53):
going to have some meat packing symmetry here. I'm so
excited to hear about.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
This because I will happen.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Also, it just it feels like an industry that has
gotten progressively worse as time goes on.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Yeah, I learned that. Actually I learned that from you
reading an excerpt of your book. And if people like
history about this kind of thing, I recommend Raw Dog
by Jamie Waltas. So this week we're going to talk
about the Molly Maguire's, which was a semi real secret
society of poor irishmen who declared their Lloyd loyalty to
a mythological woman. Broke out and broke out weapons, and
(07:30):
they did this in two countries, and to tell the
story that came to head in eighteen seventy seven. We
are of course going to go back across the ocean
to one hundred years earlier, to the mythical emerald land
of leprechauns and fairies called Ireland. There's this country, or
Ireland or whatever it's called Ireland. We've covered Irish stuff
a bunch of times on the show already. People should
(07:50):
check out when we talked about Roger Casement, the gay
Irish knight who brought down King Leopold and was killed
for trying to end English rule in Ireland, or Grace O'Malley,
the pirate Queen of the West Coast of Ireland, and
I talk more about the greater breadth of Irish history,
and I think those episodes and those actually weirdly bookend
what we're talking about. Grace O'Malley was before Roger Caseman's
after we're going to start in the eighteenth century. Ireland
(08:13):
was really fucking poor in the eighteenth century. It had
plenty of resources, but it was a colony, and colonies
are set up so that the Brits can extract your value.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
Don't seem to really benefit from their many resources. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
No, Yeah, it was Britain's first colony. They famously went
on to have a few more.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
You never forgot your first time, I know, I know.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
That's the one that caught away. Fortunately most most of
them have gotten away at this point.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Wow. Really really horrific metaphor we're crafting here.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Yeah, in sixteen ninety five you get the Irish penal codes.
The Popoury Law of seventeen oh four basically said that
if you are Catholic. I know, if you're Catholic, you
can't have any land. You can't own any land on
your own island if you're Catholic, which, for anyone keeping track,
(09:10):
most of the indigenous people of Ireland were Catholic and
most of the settlers were Protestant. This is there's blurriness here,
and I'm not trying to make like grand generalizations, but
that's a big part of all of this. I feel like, probably.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Funny if this is where you came out as extremely
pro Catholic, You're like, this is, as we all know,
a Catholic podcast, so.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Really upgrading. I mean, what's funny is that, like this
is actually an episode about exactly the part of Catholicism
I like, which is the Catholics who hate the Church.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Yes, that is a very powerful and underdiscussed area. I mean,
granted for good reason. But I don't know has anyone
else in this call been personally victimized by Catholicism.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
I got really lucky in that I was technically raised
Catholic by someone who's effectively pagan and didn't make me
go to church. So I kind of got raised by
the kind of Catholics that we're talking about today.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Oh okay, so he won the Catholic lottery. Congratulations.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Yeah, I'll take it you were not so lucky.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
No, but there's certainly people who in my own home
state that had it worse.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Yeah, fair enough. So the Catholics are suddenly dispossessed. So
the Irish are no longer allowed to own land in Ireland,
and so people had been on this land for millennia
and they suddenly found they didn't own the place anymore.
And it didn't help that traditional Brehen law, the pre
Christian law in Ireland that was still kind of going
(10:45):
a little bit at this point, didn't have the same
conceptions of absolute landownership. So It's part of how they
showed and be like, you don't even like own this,
we can just like own it. You know, Ireland was
carved up by Protestant landowners, many of whom were British,
many of whom were Irish born descendants of the British,
and it was carved up into these estates and suddenly
everyone owed rent. I don't know if you've ever been
(11:07):
personally victimized by rent, but it is another system of extraction,
much like the.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Catholic Actually not currently, Margarete, because I just got evicted,
so kind of slaying on a different.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
Level, no fault of fiction. I also just to say,
not that it matters, but.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Yes, there's plenty of eviction related slain about to happen
in this story.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
Yes, oh, I can't wait.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
So suddenly your landlord is making money off of you.
It's even more egregious because of the family. Your family
had owned the place since time immemorial. And your landlord
is some guy with a British accent, or even just
speaking English at all. Different parts of Ireland were and
weren't speaking English. And that guy, your landlord, doesn't even
(11:57):
live in the country, and he takes all of your wages,
the rent you pay, and he uses it to hire
people to kill you and beat you up in this
case called colonial troops. More commonly understood now, is police
not really big ato capitalism or imperialism. As listeners the
show might be aware.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
Okay, see that's the pro catholic thing. I just wanted
to is bad that I needed that I knew.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Yeah, So the Irish in the seventeenth century, eighteenth century,
they're they're poor as fuck overall, and despite what British
newspapers claimed, they weren't stupid. They knew what was happening,
and no one has ever successfully claimed that the Irish
are cowards. So they decided to do something about it.
There's a lot of ways that they decide to do
something about it. Many of those ways involved like organizing
(12:49):
and trying to have revolutions and shit, and those are great,
and we have talked about some of them, and we'll
talk about more of them, but today that's not what
we're talking about. Today. We're going to start with what's
called a very in violence. Good band name I know,
and a better band name than what's about to happen,
which is it started in the way that nothing else
(13:11):
good has ever started or ever will because it started
with the White Boys.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Oh horrible band name, the worst band name I can
think of.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
There's so many unfortunate things in the back of this,
in this story where I'm like, everything's really cool except
for this one part that really people should just try
and copy.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
We just need a second draft.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Yeah, yeah, that's the real revision of history is we're
literally going to just change history, not change what we
talk about, but we're going to go back in time
and be like, this isn't going to read good in
a couple hundred years.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
You won't believe. I mean, things are, we're doing great,
but yeah, we just needed a name change.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Yeah. So you have all these tenant farmers, and I'm
going to conflate a whole lot of geography and like
an entire century into one overly convenient narrative. But landlords
weren't charging as much around as they possibly could overall, sorry,
were charging much money as much money as they possibly
could overall. The Anglican Church they're in on it too.
(14:14):
They're charging tithes aka taxes on the land. So you
have to pay tithes for a church for a Ford religion,
as well as your taxes too, landlord. The landlords could
charge a ton for farming land, and they'd be like, well, look,
we're charging you all this money for the farming land,
but you have all of the access to the commons.
You have all of this access to grazing land, and
(14:36):
so it's fine, you'll be fine. It's going to be
totally fine. The commons was this age old tradition of
having a fuck ton of land that just kind of
belongs to everyone where you can like graze your animals
and harvest timber and shit. I'm going to come back
to the White Boys, but first, do you want to
hear about how Ireland lost all its trees?
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Oh? No, yeah, but yes, I do know, I.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
Know it's kind of heartbreaking.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
In the BC, this is like.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
The Irish Loraxe story. Yeah, I mean is they're Irish
law rats.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
It's like it's more like the lore Ax's children have
come back for vengeance.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Ooh okay, I would watch this a twenty four movie
that rocks.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
Yeah. So Ireland used to be about eighty percent forested
in the sort of BC times, and pre Christian Island
you had not pre Christian Ireland, you had Bretan law,
which included cool shit like women can initiate divorce, which actually,
like when I talk about the like weird Catholic folk
Catholicism of Ireland, like I did an episode where it
talks about how like women in the sixteenth century who
(15:41):
were ostensibly Catholic were divorcing their husbands because wild, because
that was part of Irish Catholicism. Because Irish Catholic anyway,
it wasn't Roman Catholicism. It's distinct.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Don't tell current Irish Catholics. They will not take well
to this.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
No, we'll even talk about how that happened in the
mid nineteenth century.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Yay.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
So because Breton law survived. The Christianization of Ireland started
in the fourth century, and it didn't really start going
away until the English, or rather the Normans first in
the twelfth century. Brend Law survived longer in some places,
which is how you have these Catholics getting divorced. Then
Henry the Eighth and Queen Elizabeth in the whatever century,
(16:24):
early modern, late Renaissance, whatever the fuck. I didn't write
down the years, and I don't remember off the top
of my head because I read too many books. Henry
the eighth and Queen Elizabeth were like, man, you know what,
we hate the forest. We hate that the Irish have forests.
They specifically hated the forests because the Irish kept hiding
(16:45):
in the forest to kill all the British people.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
Oh okay, So it was not I mean, not that
this makes it better, but I was like, is it
just a random like I woke up today and decided
that I because it seems like imperial types do that
as well, where they're like, you know what, I'd like
to destroy forever today?
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Yeah, I mean that's like kind of a colonization itself,
is like, yeah, what if I just go over there
and just destroy everything.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
I'm cranky today? What if I ruined thousands of people's
lives generationally forever?
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Yeah. They cut down all the forests and they turned
it into boats, so they had like build an armada
against Spain or whatever. By sixteen hundred Irish force, forests
are down to twelve percent of the island and the
sixteen hundred is The English also started killing all the wolves,
bastard alumni of the pod Oliver Cromwell paying a bounty
to kill wolves. Historically, the Irish were like, really, into
(17:40):
wolves and their enemies called them wolves a lot, and
so it was also there's like symbolism in killing all
the wolves. By sixteen fifty six, there's only two percent
of the forest left, which is how it is now
three hundred and fifty years later, there's still only two
percent of the forest left in Ireland.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Wow, there's been have there? Well, I mean this is
out of the scope, but I'm curious if there's been
reforestation efforts. I'm imagining there has been.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
Bit.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
I mean there are and actually a lot of this,
this little chunk comes from I forgot to write down
the name of a group, a group that is working
to reforest Ireland.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Oh that's amazing, Okay, yeah, No.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
It's interesting because there is this whole movement to reclaim
a lot of traditional Irish values and culture and language,
and some of that includes reforesting and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
As the proud owner of a hat that says sci
Fi sluts for reforestation, I'm very in favor of this.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
By seventeen eighty six, the last wolf in Ireland was killed.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
When I was sixteen, I visited my family in Ireland
and I saw that they're like wornheady trees little and
I like just cried and wrote a bunch of shitty
poetry about it.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
Anyway, I wish i've it is my one of my
great wishes. Well, my dad is still young enough to
sort of make the trip with me to go back
to his because his memories of Ireland they're very funny
because it's like we're I think I'm third generation American
and my dad used to have to go back to
(19:12):
the farm that his family is from in like the
depths of Galway and work for the summer. And so
every time I'm like, let's go to Galway together, and
he's like boom no. But I was like, they they
can't make you work anymore. You're old.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Come on, I'm also third generation from Galway, so no way.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Wow, which is cosmically connected. Maybe some of our ancestors
suffered on the same farmland.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Yeah flat. At the same time, so Ireland has these
tenant farmers. They're told they can't access the commons, which
was the justification for the high rents, and so the
enclosure movement happens, which is basically one of the worst
things that's ever happened in all history, and actually pretty
(20:04):
much capitalism comes out of it. And probably the reason
that we're all going to drown and die of global
warming is because of this thing that happened in England
around this time and that they brought over to Ireland,
which is they went around and they stole all the
communal land and created a new economic system based on that.
The landlords, they are like, what if instead of letting
peasants grace their livestock and grow food on all this
common lands, what if we just throw fences around it,
(20:25):
arrest everyone who trespasses and steal their livestock and hold
it for ransom and call it impoundment. So they do that,
and this dispossesses not just the Catholics, but Catholics and Protestants.
This is a class thing and not a religious thing,
a sectarian thing, I see. And in the eighteenth century
(20:46):
there actually wasn't as much sectarian conflict along class line
within class lines in Ireland. It was fairly united in
the like fuck this attitude, and so you get what's
called agrarian violence, the Irish reputation for being fighty. But
it's usually perceived as like drunken angry men hitting each other,
as Chile's But a grarian violence is not that it
(21:07):
is class warfare against the rich, or rather self collective
self defense. Not all of it was good. Some of
it was very good, and it started with the White boys.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Oh God, Magpie, you know the sentence that just came
out of your mind. I know, I know, all right,
but I'm I'm I'm listening. Nonetheless, Yeah, there's so many
complicated things. But before I tell you about the white.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
Boys, why don't I tell you about It'd be really
awkward if potatoes was the sponsor today.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Well, I mean, before before you talk about the white boys,
let's toss the white boys a couple of bucks because
they make most products and services. Right, Yeah, that's a
really at least benefit from them. Woo, and we're back.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
So the white Boys in this context is somewhere between
an organization, a secret society, and a tactic. Some groups
formed and officially called themselves the White Boys. Others just
used the tact tactic and it was basically all all
anti landlord violence that happened around this time was called
white boyism, again, a label we will not be bringing back.
This was not about they wore white clothes when they
(22:27):
did this stuff. They often wore white dresses. This was
often men dressing as women, so irishmen would dress up
in white clothes, often dresses, pledge their allegiance to a
mythical woman or goddess named siv All Talk or Ghostly
Sally in English, or to other mythical women named Johanna
Meskill or Sheila Meskill. And then they would go out
(22:49):
in the middle of the night and threaten, beat, and
assassinate landlords, bailiffs, land agents, tenants who moved into people's
homes they had just been evicted from, and basically anyone
who went against I guess you could call it the
people's law, and you got a lot of things. You've
got community self defense. You could call it terrorism. There
(23:09):
are a lot of words for what they did. Most extensively,
this happened in the northern, Middle and northern western parts
of the country, especially in places where Irish culture was
being impacted most directly by colonial culture at that time.
Okay and the White Boys were explicitly non sectarian, but
(23:29):
meanwhile sectarianism and nationalism and revolution are brewing. It's something
I hadn't really thought through about Irish revolutionary movements and
anti colonial movements is that, like you take countries that
are colonial forces, like the US or Rhodesia, who have
these like quote unquote revolutions where the colonists want to
(23:50):
be free from their home country, but they actually like
are still the settlers and controlling the economy and fucking
over the people who originally lived there, you know, right,
And then you have actual anti colonial movements when indigenous
people want to be free. And Ireland had both, yes,
and they often worked together. Some people were like, I
(24:14):
don't like paying taxes anymore on the money that I
steal from all these poor people and other people. The
Catholics were like, how come we're not equal? Fuck this
also fuck England. And they worked together and they wanted
a republic. Spoiler alert. They failed.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Oh well yeah that's so yeah, I need that.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
But yeah, god, the world would be different. It would
be so different, no potato famine, no mass immigration. So
they managed to take part of the island as the
Irish Republic, only a small part of it, and it
lasted about twelve days. This was not incredibly successful. This
was sixteen ninety eight, seventeen ninety eight. Oh god, you
(24:57):
think I would have written it? Down in the Script
seventeen ninety eight. But part of the way that England
won is they did some divide and conquer shit. They
told all the Protestants in the North, hey, if you
turn your back on all the Catholics that you're fighting
alongside of, well forgive you for your little rebellion. People
took them up on it, and that's where a lot
of sectarianism comes from in Ireland. That is the start
(25:19):
of sectarian gangs of Protestants and Catholics murdering each other.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
And it wasn't perfect before that, but more and more
historians are coming around to them. The most of the
early struggle was not religiously sectarian, and it was a
class and anti colonial focused.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
So the Secret Society talking about shit like that, people
hate that.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
I know know what I would I keep reading all
these historians being like. One of the problems is that
since Ireland kind of won its independence, everything got rewritten
to be about Irish nationalism, and specifically Irish Catholic nationalism,
and everything kind of got rewritten to be like the
Catholic Church is the heroes of all of this, and
(26:05):
they sort of used it to impose a theocratic state
for most of the twentieth century in the Ireland and
prevent people from controlling their bodies.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
It's always I feel like you have a unique ability
to force me to hold two realities or the duration
of enough.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
To say that the Catholics are oppressed and that the
Catholic Church was monstrous.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Yes, exactly, exactly the Catholic Church that has existed in
our lifetime and the one that you're talking about.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
Yeah, yeah, totally and okay. So the secret societies in
Ireland they split at this time too. The Protestants formed
the Orange Order, who are still around in their right
wing pro England guys. And the Catholics absolutely without the
Church's blessing and against the Church's direct order because they're
Fault Catholics, not Roman Catholics. They formed their own new
(27:00):
groups called with all kinds of names, and the ones
that I've written down or founder the Threshers, the Lady Claires,
the Terry Alts, and the Ribbon Men.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
These are roller derby teams and you know it.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Yes, and the Ribbon Men is all butch and it rules.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
And I'm rooting for them fairoughly at inch and every
match except.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
When they go against the Lady Claires who are all
trans women, and then.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
You're you're going back and forth. You're like, I can't
really lose in this scenario.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
Yeah, I know, right, whence we win? Yeah, And so
all of these groups get conflated together. The most famous
of these is the Ribbon Men, so I'm going to
follow their thread. They started as a group called the
Society of Ribbon Men, and they were an outgrowth of
the Defenders, which was a radical Republican Catholic sectarian group
who had been they were absorbed into the United Irish
(27:58):
prior to the Revolution of seventeen I So there had
been this group and then seventeen ninety eight came and failed,
and then the Society the Ribbon Men came out. But
they were radically Republican also even though they just but
they were specifically at the start anti clerical again, because
the Church was like, you can't do this, and they
were like, we're gonna anyway, right, And they got their
(28:22):
name because they wore a green ribbon in their buttonhole.
There were two main centers of the Ribbon Men between
eighteen twenty two and eighteen forty. One was in Dublin.
The other was in north central Ireland. In north central Ireland,
the Orange Order was very strong, and so there's a
lot of just like street fights. Some of the ribbon
Men's stuff was this going around at night and fucking
shit up. A lot of it was just getting into
(28:45):
street fights with the Protestant gangs.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Regardless, I think that the white boys could really take
take some hints, some tips from the ribbon men and
just you know, named themselves a little more vaguely. The
ribbon men could mean anything. I could be on their side.
I could not be on their side.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
Yeah, I know. I don't want to be on the
White boys side, just instinctively.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
I know. And then the fact that we are put
in this position, it seems very unfair.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
Oh, it's gonna get worse. The Molly mcguires do some
stuff that we'll get to it, okay. So they spread
to the to England and Scotland as the Hiberian Funeral Society,
which is probably it almost certainly means this is a
fraternal order where people come together, like before people at
health insurance and stuff. You would join a fraternal order
(29:33):
like the Masons are example of this, and you would
join a fraternal order and you pay your dues, and
then when you needed a funeral or a wedding or whatever,
it would pay for it.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
Right.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
So the Hiberian Funeral Society was almost certainly just like
the Irish people who need like work.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
When you die, and then your boys throw you a funeral.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
Yeah, exactly, so your family can afford to see you
in the ground and stuff.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Right.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
It sounds like, here's a society that's going to make
you need a funeral, and they come from a group
that absolutely made some people need funerals, so that's kind
of cool. In eighteen twenty five they had a split.
The majority formed Saint Patrick's Fraternal Society in order to
make the church happy, because the church was like, you
can't have secret societies, fuck you. But a bunch of
(30:20):
them continued under the name Ribbon Men or now you
get the Molly mcguires, and this was an agrarian urban
split in some ways. The agrarian folks were like, nah,
I just want to fuck up landlords and be wild.
The urban folks were like, you know, let's develop this
into like a more of a nationalist thing for the
freedom of Ireland.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
Whatever.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
They're both fine, but following the ribbon men through this
particular and the Molly mcguires, what would they do? Basically
their motto was if you fuck with the peasants, will
fucking kill you.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Or I mean, no arguing, no arguing so far. But yeah,
but what are their methods?
Speaker 1 (31:03):
So one of their main methods was what was called
a coffin notice, which is where you go up and
you put a threatening note on a door with a
picture of a coffin on it, and you're like, this
is you, buddy, You're going to be living in this coffin.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
So dramatic.
Speaker 4 (31:18):
I love this Jack all right, alright, Jesus, I'm going
to quote from a coffin notice that was posted on
all the Catholic churches in one region in eighteen fifty
one to landlords, agents, bailiffs, grippers.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
I have no idea what a gripper is. The Internet
won't tell me. Wait grip or ripper, gripper, Yeah, no idea.
Irish slang from eighteen fifty one is hard to fucking google,
especially when it's a word to me. I know, maybe
actually it's just a time traveling person from the current
strike and it's actually a key grip.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Oh, the best boys, the key grips. They're traveling through
time to be Molly Maguire's. Yeah, I would watch that
movie if we're allowed to make it.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
To landlords, agents, bailiff's grippers, process servers, and usurpers or
underminers who wish to step into evicted tenant's property, and
to all others concerned and tyranny and oppression of the
poor on the Bath estate, take notice. Take notices in
all caps that you are hereby under the pain of
a certain punishment which will inevitably occur. Prohibited from evicting tenants,
(32:25):
executing decrees, serving process, distraining for rent, or going into
another's land, or to assist any tyrant landlord eight or
agent in his insatiable desire for depopulation. Recollect the fact
the fate of Maleveler on this his anniversary dated May
twenty third, eighteen fifty one. Maleveler was a magistrate or
(32:47):
a land agent, guy who found himself suddenly dead.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
Okay, and not a cartoon dragon, which was my guess.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
Yeah, no, yeah, okay, okay, until we that we make it.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
Yeah, that absolute rocks. I would be a fan of
bringing back the Leveler as a cartoon dragon, and that
reminds me of like how there was this group of
middle school juggle lettes that I really wanted to be
accepted by and they would say shit that in that
kind of cadence, it's a very powerful cadence.
Speaker 3 (33:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
I actually think there's some juggle at there's some juggle
at energy going on with the Molly maguires. We're going
to talk about in terms of their fat and clothing
and questionable decisions.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
They have a little outfits.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
Oh, they have outfits, especially makeup and okay, so so
now random acts of violence and agrarian violence that are
which are collective violence. These are attributed to white boys
and ribbon men alike, but not to be outdone onto
the stage of history stuff our main heroes and kind
of anti heroes a little, the Molly fuckings. There is
(34:02):
likely continuity between the Defenders, the ribbon men, and the
Molly mcguires. Almost everything we know about any of these
groups comes from people who hate them. It is mostly
the state trying to destroy them, who writes all of
the things that we have Besides some coffin notices and
one letter from like one hundred from decades later in Pennsylvania,
(34:24):
that we'll get to the in eighteen fifties, the ribbon
Men and the mcguires are probably the same organization or
sort of non organization. It was a lot of kind
of like Antifa. It's like like sometimes there's organizations that
call themselves it, but lots of people just do it
and call themselves it and use similar tactics.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Okay, so it's historically is it hard to tease out
which is which it is?
Speaker 1 (34:52):
And partly because a lot of it revolves around conspiracy
cases where the state wants to claim that everyone is
part of a formal organization and the newspapers.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Are sound familiar.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
I know, it's very anti Factually, it's like all of
these people and in this case, all Irish people are
like drunk, evil terrorists who are lazy, and that's why
they go through incredible amounts of effort and risk their
lives to defend the land they're on. That's the symptom
of laziness. I've ever heard one.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
Yeah, extreme effort that could kill you.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Yeah. Yeah. So when the Irish were driven off of
land or enclosures were set up, the molly maguires would
storm the place, tear down fences, drive off or mutilate
and kill livestock. This is one of their not great
moments from my point of view. You know, they're not
big animal rights people. Landlord agents were threatened, beaten, and killed.
Tenants who settled on evicted eviction land were treated the
(35:45):
same way. Merchants and millers were attacked if they charged
too high of prices, and pasture land was dug up
and planted with potatoes. Even the Pinkerton, who later investigated
them and saw them hanged in the US, said that
the eye Irish Molly Maguire's goal was to quote, to
take from those who had abundance and give it to
the poor.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
He described, Pinkerton is calling you Robin Hood. I mean,
where are we at? I know?
Speaker 1 (36:13):
He described their tactics as quote. Their mode of operation
was to have their leader dressed up in a suit
of women's clothing to represent the Irish mother begging bread
for her children. Under this disguise, the leader would be
named Molly, would approach a storekeeper and quote demand the
amount levied on him in the shape of me meal,
flower and general groceries. If the storekeeper didn't give the
(36:35):
Molly what she asked for, the rest of the Mollies
would pour into the place and loot it and basically
be like and if you tell the pigs, we'll come
back and fuck you up again.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
Wait, so the sorry I just thought it. So the
act would be preceded by community theater. Yeah, yeah, that's incredible,
there's so there. They should I mean, we personally should
(37:05):
bring that back because it's really hard to get people
to engage with community theater. And that is incredible. That
fucking rocks again. Yeah, irin the Irish are such drama
queens in it unbelievable. I love it. Yeah. So is
there there's one Molly mcg like one Molly who's performing
(37:30):
and then everyone else is wearing their regular clothes or
is it or is it a sea of Molly's.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
So as far as I can tell, because actually this
tactic was across I'll talk about this a little bit
more too. The tactic kind of was across the British
isles at this point sometimes also, and and it was
a mix. It's like, not everyone dresses up as a Molly,
but a lot of people do. And so I'm guessing
the crowd that storms it is a mix and this
(37:56):
is just one of their tactics. Another tactics is they'll
do like mid justice where they all maybe all of them,
dress up as women and then go and like break
into someone's house. And we'll talk about a cross dressing
aspect in a minute. But it comes from Okay, Okay,
we'll get to it. Okay. So there's a British guy
with a surn his name Sir Thomas Larkham, who said
(38:18):
at the time quote, they're in fact two codes of
law enforcing an antagonism won the statute law enforced by
judges and jurors in which the people do not yet trust,
the other a secret law enforced by themselves. It's agents,
the ribbon men, and the bullet. One tactic they supposedly did,
and I absolutely think this is scare tactics, Like this
is like newspaper bullshit, was that the mcguires would conceal
(38:41):
needles in the grass so that the cows would eat
them and die.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
Oh my god, Okay, yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:48):
This sounds like people put HIV infected needles in the
coin returns a lot of payphones.
Speaker 2 (38:53):
You know. Oh yeah, yeah, a classic.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
Yeah. They were shitty to animals, including cattle horns and
hunting dogs owned by their enemies. They would kill and
mutilate animals as a as a vengeance. Quite often the
McGuire's had a pagan taste of their festivity. Noess, they're
they're like theatricalness. There should be to violence spiked around
the Celtic celebrations of Halloween and May Eve, possibly because
(39:19):
folks were already dressing up in wild costumes. For those
anyone who once I didn't I took this out of
the script. It's for sake of time, but I'm going
to like paraphrase it back in you should look up
the Ren Boys and the Straw Boys and the May
Boys of Ireland for like wild cool folk costume pagany
(39:39):
amazing stuff and like weird masks and stuff.
Speaker 2 (39:45):
But in so, the the your working theory, oh the
Ren Boys. Wow, Yes, I am co signed CO signed there.
So So the the working theory is Halloween is a
good time to go out because everyone's dressed up anyways.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
So I think it's like not like just that you're
more disguised when you're I think it's like more like
we're all worked up. You know, you come together for
this community celebration and then you're like, you know, what
fuck it, let's like go get some shit done. And
then it also it'll tie into like some Mummer stuff
that'll talk about in the second and so they return.
(40:25):
Also tradition in the Molly McGuire's they didn't declare their
loyalty to Sive the mythical woman that the white boys did,
but instead they called themselves the children of Molly McGuire,
who probably wasn't a real person, but that doesn't stop
there for being myths about her. One is that a
widow named Molly McGuire refused to be evicted and her
(40:48):
house was destroyed on top of her.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
And she died, though.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
Another is that she'd just been evicted and like had
been kicked out and people banded together to avenger. Other
is that Molly McGuire owned an the legal bar where
they all met to plan. The best, but probably least likely,
is that there was a specific real woman named Molly
McGuire who had pistols strapped each thigh like fucking tomb raider,
who led the man on their nocturnal raids.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
Okay, so like Irish Annie Oakley vibes, that's kind of fine. Yeah,
I just double checked because I was like am I
remembering this incorrectly? I do. You will not be able
to find her because we don't have the same last name.
My grandma's maiden name is McGuire, my cousin's name is Molly,
and her full name is Molly McGuire. Blank. I don't
(41:37):
think my family knows about the Molly mcguires. And this
is an incredible revelation. Oh my god, but I accidentally
created I bet your grandmother true mcguires. I bet my
grandmother did too, and she was probably like, yeah, let's
name he this.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
Yeah, like.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
That's cool, that's I'm kind of I'm old about it. Yeah,
because I'm I've got McGuire blood in me, so yeah,
with Molly McGuire's real and she's you know, twenty six
and lives in Massachusetts.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
Yeah. Yeah. All the women in my family are just
named Margaret. There's so many Margarets. There's like multiple times
where someone named Margaret marries a man whose sister's named
Margaret and then they have a kid named Margaret. That
that triangle of Margaret's has happened multiple times in the
Irish side in my family tree, gorgeous.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
My grandparents' names were Patrick and Patricia. Hell yeah, they
sound like cartoon twins. But yeah, they're simply married. People.
Speaker 3 (42:40):
Give me, is that is that how you picked the
name Patricia from your boss Room's girls show.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
Yeah, it's where my grandma. Oh my gosh, I was
like a stone cold bitch. I know, just like my grandma.
Speaker 3 (42:53):
Oh man, she's my heart, My heart is full.
Speaker 2 (42:58):
Did not know that pat loftis either of them big fans.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
Hell yeah, okay, so we're gonna talk about how they
cross dressed. Oh yeah, we don't really know their reasons
for this. They didn't tend to write things down. A
lot of Irish speaking parts of Ireland at this point
didn't have much of a written culture, and anthropologists will
refer to this as it's not that they were illiterate,
it's that they were part of a preliterate culture. They
(43:24):
participated in a culture that developed complex ways of passing
along information without reading and writing right, and so the
only reason that this information is lost is because that
was disrupted, partly by the colonization and heavily by the
Catholic Church in the late part of the nineteenth century
when they tried to romanize the Irish Catholics. This preliterate
(43:46):
culture goes back as lease as far as the Druids,
who passed things along through word of mouth intentionally, even
though there was writing available to them. Right, Like, there
is an Irish writing style called ogum, right, but it's
not how they chose to pass along most information. So
wearing dresses. So this is why we don't know a lot.
I just want to like when I'm like, they didn't
write things down, I'm like that because they were like
(44:07):
too stupid or something.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
We don't have the tools. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
Yeah, So wearing dresses wasn't just about disguies. It partly
was about the skies, but it was also it lented
them a certain legitimacy, like a uniform, but like a
mythical uniform, kind of a full costume you're putting on
to become a character, so you're capable of doing more. Right,
and it became the sons and daughters of Molly Maguire.
(44:31):
They are also here's one of the messiest parts of
this whole story. They're remembered for blackening their faces.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
Oh, for fuck's sake.
Speaker 1 (44:42):
Yeah, I spent way too long this week trying to
sort out medieval and early modern early modern face blackening
to understand how it relates to blackface and it relates
to character caricaturizing other races and stuff. I still don't
entirely know where I land whether or not this was
(45:03):
like a form of black face, because there's a lot
of different descriptions of it and wactually there's not a lot. Okay,
most descriptions are just like they darken their faces and
don't say more than that whether or not. I haven't
found a source that says they painted their entire faces black,
only a source that describes them as painting their faces
(45:24):
with burned cork and then smearing it over their eyes, mouths,
and cheek, which is as corpse paint. That is this
particular time that is being described, right, is like what
you imagine somebod who's into black metal wearing. But also
many of them painted their faces white, and so it
(45:44):
was costuming. But it probably also, I'm not trying to
like entirely get them off the hook about this, it
probably included costuming to represent oneself as having black skin,
because this was a common mod medieval theatrical thing that
people would paint their skin black, either if you're like
doing Shakespeare or like representing a fellow you do it,
and it's a white actor who paints their skin black, right,
(46:05):
who does blackface? I don't want to like mince words
about that. But also still racistly, a lot of medieval
theater used painting your skin black to represent evil and
being the devil, because in this particular theatrical tradition, the
devil had his skin turned black by God for rebelling,
(46:26):
which is racism. It's just a different form of it's direct.
Speaker 2 (46:30):
And that feels more like I don't I mean, we
are still dealing with people doing black face today, but
the but what you're talking about blackening your face and
referring to badness like that is I think something that
we have not culturally even started to discuss yet, because
(46:51):
it's like then we're getting into juggalo territory like you
were talking about.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
Ye I see, I see.
Speaker 2 (46:59):
Where you were going there. That's okay, that's well, that's ugly. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
I suspect that Molly mcguires are doing this. Their whole
vibe seemed to be put on, like put on your
war paint before you got and kill the people need killing, right, Sure.
Speaker 2 (47:16):
But I also don't think that you know, historically, I
don't know. But also I wouldn't put it past predominantly
you know, white country to be very very racist.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
Yep, even if the way they do that might be today,
I'm the devil because I'm the same as a black person,
entirely fucking possible. Yeah, or they were just fucking painting
their eyes and lips, you know.
Speaker 2 (47:40):
And we don't know that's really because that's yeah, that's
that's a meyer wow.
Speaker 1 (47:46):
And it also might originate from mummery, which was imported
to Ireland by English and Scottish settlers in the seventeenth century,
and mummers. It's this theatrical tradition where mummers would travel
around on Midsummer in New Year's door to door and
costume demanding food, money, and drink. We talk about some
of this stuff in the Christmas episode, actually that we did,
(48:10):
and they would wear outlandish costumes, bright clothes, and strange makeup,
including blackface. This blackface was almost certainly blackface in a
traditional sense in the bad way. You know. Well, I see, okay,
even whatever, but you know what isn't problematic.
Speaker 2 (48:29):
Where I have a.
Speaker 3 (48:30):
Guess you can get you cannot safely say that, say
that you couldnot safely say, right, we do not pick
our ads.
Speaker 1 (48:38):
Yeah. If this, if the ads that follow are problematic,
you can direct all complaints to our complaint department on
Twitter at I write okay, and he will get back to.
Speaker 2 (48:52):
You in a timely fashion and politely and discreetly.
Speaker 1 (48:56):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (48:56):
Yes, here's some ads.
Speaker 1 (49:03):
And we're back. So Ireland leads Europe in early modern
history of men causing disturbances dressed up as women. The
threshers we taught. We mentioned them briefly as like they
went around enforcing Captain Thresher's laws. The peep o' day boys,
the Lady Claire's, the Lady Rocks. These are all cross
(49:24):
dressers too, okay, And allegiance to mythical women was like
common in Irish culture as a sort of like source
of power parishes and villages. A lot of residents would
be like children of one mother within your community. And
it wasn't just violence that called for wild costuming and
cross dressing. It was part of a lot of medieval
(49:46):
and pre medieval rituals. All over Europe, men were dressing
women's clothes for ritual and festival, but in Ireland in
particular is also associated with anti capitalist violence, and it
lasted longer and more remote less quote civilized places like
the Gale Tech the part of Ireland where Irish language
and traditional culture lasted longer through colonization. One other kind
(50:13):
of cool, weird, kind of sexist, kind of not side
of why they would cross dress apparently, or like why
what the symbolism of womanhood meant? Medieval society conflated womanhood
with chaos and wildness and irrationality. Yeah, which is like
not fair, but also like kind of cool.
Speaker 2 (50:36):
It's it's a fun language choice.
Speaker 3 (50:39):
I like.
Speaker 1 (50:39):
Yeah, over in England you have a similar thing going on.
Future friends of the Pod the Luddites who were at war.
People are like, oh, the Luddites, they were at war
against technology. They like weren't They were against their way
of life being destroyed by the early vestiges of capitalism,
which included the mechanization.
Speaker 2 (50:55):
Didn't know the origin of that.
Speaker 1 (50:57):
Yeah, we're gonna do a whole episode about it. At
some point they were like they were all losing their
jobs to the automation of textile work.
Speaker 2 (51:06):
Yeah, but we should just say that when Grandpa can't
use computer.
Speaker 1 (51:11):
Yeah, exactly. As compared to like Grandpa's way of life
was destroyed by capitalism.
Speaker 2 (51:16):
Which I mean, can't two things be true at once true?
Speaker 1 (51:22):
And so the Bloodlights would also declare loyalty to a
fictional person, in this case King Blood and cross Dress
and go function up and in Wales. In the same
time period as the Molly mcguires eighteen thirty nine eighteen
forty three, you've got the Rebecca Riots, which were farmers
protesting exploitive taxes, in particular tollgates. Apparently a lot of
(51:44):
toll roads in fucking nineteenth century Whales.
Speaker 3 (51:48):
Okay, I fucking hate toll roads. I hate toll roads.
Speaker 1 (51:53):
I set mine to no tolls and then I drive
so far out of my way to avoid.
Speaker 3 (51:57):
To make me forty five, make me irrationally angry. Yeah,
like the first like we don't really have Like I
grew up in Los Angeles and we don't really we
don't have them. And then I remember there was like
a family trip we went on where I went somewhere
and they were so and it just like as a child,
I aggressively it was like this is wrong.
Speaker 2 (52:19):
So I stand by childhood me fucked.
Speaker 1 (52:24):
Hell yeah, we're going to change your name to Rebecca Riot.
Speaker 2 (52:28):
Oh cool.
Speaker 1 (52:30):
I mean that's a way cooler name.
Speaker 2 (52:31):
Let's be honest, I'm into it. Kind of print it.
We're done. I feel like the best thing that ever
happened for Toll Roads is when John Goodman played a
toll worker in Coyote Ugly. That was I've never seen
it my that was my pro toll moment.
Speaker 3 (52:50):
That's a movie that I was like, Margaret does not
know what that is, but I do.
Speaker 1 (52:54):
Know what it is. Oh okay, I don't think you
would hate it.
Speaker 2 (52:56):
No, I don't think you would hate it. No, it's fun.
It's a good summer movie. And John Goodman he's wrapping
the tolls and he's not anti the tolls. He's kind
of ambivalent about the tolls.
Speaker 1 (53:10):
Okay, Well, but you know.
Speaker 3 (53:13):
I'm not I hate them.
Speaker 2 (53:15):
Yeah, my whole heart.
Speaker 1 (53:18):
Well, they did this street theater, literally on the street
right where they would walk up in a large gang,
about half of them dressed as women. I also like
some you know, I don't know if you knew this.
Women are often written out of history. Huh. I'm willing
(53:39):
to bet if there is a large violent group of
men or a group of people all dressed up as
women off to go fuck something up.
Speaker 2 (53:46):
I bet some of them are women.
Speaker 1 (53:51):
You don't even have to cross dressed to go to
your violence if you're a woman.
Speaker 2 (53:56):
No, no, no, MagPi, you're talking fairy tales. Yes. It's
like when I learned I recently learned we just did
an episode on Newsies at the on the Bechdel Cast,
and I love Newsies. I think it's the best. And
I was like, were there really no women news there?
(54:17):
Of course, there were so many.
Speaker 1 (54:20):
We just did an episodes too. That's cool.
Speaker 2 (54:22):
Really, Oh my god, synergy.
Speaker 1 (54:24):
I know, yeah, no, there was so many. Yeah. And
did you run across that same thing where there was
a person who put on a a version of the
play Newsies and like everyone was like, why did you
put women in this? Yes, and he was like, I
did research.
Speaker 3 (54:40):
I know.
Speaker 2 (54:41):
Yeah. Literally, it's such an easy and I love I
just love like when I was doing that research, so
many places that directed me to primary sources were uh,
Tumblr accounts that were horny for cast members of I'm
just like, we've really underestimate it. Did the intellectual potency
(55:02):
of the fangirl Yeah, totally. They've done so much for me.
Speaker 1 (55:06):
They're all librarians, and it's amazing.
Speaker 2 (55:08):
They really are.
Speaker 1 (55:09):
Yeah, okay, well, if you like the street theater element,
the Rebecca riots, they would go up to the toll gates.
I actually should have I thought this through. I would
have put in the script. You can find the script
that they read in one of the books that I read.
I don't remember which one on the top of my head.
It's probably in the fucking or whatever. It's googleble Okay.
So they would go up and they would do a
(55:30):
call of call and response. Someone was dressed up as
Rebecca or would take the role of Rebecca. And in
this case it's a biblical reference that I don't I
don't really get, but I know more about the fairies
and guardian spirits. She's married Rebecca.
Speaker 2 (55:51):
Rebecca was married to who we oh God to embarrass myself,
I know. But she had she had a baby, and
she was theoretically, they're like, you're too old to have
a baby, and then but then she had one.
Speaker 1 (56:07):
She put her career first, you know, exactly moderate pre
modern Kathy. She was a girl boss. Yeah, and so
the girl boss would do it would lead a call
in response that was like and everyone's like the gate
is keeping you Biblical Rebecca from crossing, then we must
(56:27):
destroy it. And so street theater is best when it
is also paired with direct action, and direct action is
best when it's paired with theatrical elements. And while they
did this, they all wore masks, and some of them
blackened their faces. And I don't I don't know. I
(56:47):
don't know what that means. And I'm not trying to
get them off the hook by saying that. I spend
a lot of time trying to figure out what it means.
The oldest instance of I can find of this general
collection of islands painting your face in a way that
doesn't read well and then putting on a dress and
fighting against commons enclosure was the Western Rising in England
of sixteen twenty six to sixteen thirty two. Okay, so
(57:11):
this goes back people like I don't know, there's some
shit going on. I am convinced that's go ahead.
Speaker 2 (57:19):
Oh no, good, no, go ahead.
Speaker 1 (57:21):
I'm increasingly convinced that where the Left has gone wrong
is that we stopped declaring loyalty to a mythical person
and then wearing elaborate costumes and then going off to
commit direct action at a scale that feels like war.
But we should leave black face the fuck out of it.
Speaker 2 (57:36):
Yes, yes, I mean, that's the one thing I feel
sure of. I'm like, has the Left not found a
mythical person to latch onto yet?
Speaker 1 (57:43):
But they don't know it's mythic?
Speaker 2 (57:45):
We not that's true. I guess, yeah, I guess that's
that's the complicated part. I really do. I love to
think any time I see I mean, because unfortunately, and
not to give anyone, you know, like early twenty tens PTSD,
this does evoke a flash mob.
Speaker 1 (58:02):
Yeah, totally it does.
Speaker 2 (58:05):
And we were there and you didn't have to like it,
but I do as someone who has been encouraged to
join a flash mob and ultimately didn't. I like to
think in each and everyone of these stagings, there was
absolutely one person there who was giving it, who was
not giving it one hundred percent even close was thirty
(58:27):
percent of it was secretly like I cannot fucking believe
there is not another way to accomplish.
Speaker 1 (58:34):
They're like, couldn't we loot the store without dressing up
like this?
Speaker 2 (58:38):
It just rich wulmnty like it's They're like, no fucking
way surely there's another way.
Speaker 1 (58:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (58:47):
And I just like to think of a grouchy Irish
person being like, I have to learn to dance, yeah,
to fight for my rights, And the answer is yes,
you do. But I like to think of the few,
the proud, the grouchy people who did not want to
be in the righteous flash mob.
Speaker 1 (59:07):
Yeah, there's the one person just shows up and surly
in the back. It's just like, exact, when is it
time to loot? So the molly maguires, who are ostensibly Catholics,
not to just beat this. This is just going to
come up a lot the conflict between them and the church.
They had a tenuous relationship with the church. Some local
(59:28):
clergy was on their side. In eighteen forty seven, Father
Michael McDermott was accused of encouraging his followers to kill
their landlord. He was accused of this because he did it.
Uh huh, So based Father Michael McDermott. More often, they'd
attack the church as well, because the church was overall
just another economic exploiter of the poor, and because the
(59:49):
church was trying to criminalize their behavior. Right in eighteen
forty six, they trashed the pews of a church in
County Rosscommon as one example that I found. And then
in the mid nineteenth century, the Irish Catholic Church waged
a devotional revolution trying to bring This is when they
(01:00:11):
like romanized the Irish Church. They tried to bring the pagany,
wild Irish into the proper flock. In the north and
west of Ireland, only about twenty percent of the nominally
Catholic folks actually went to Mass on any given Sunday
before the famine. And so during this devotional revolution they
(01:00:32):
went around and they fucked up all the traditional cultural stuff,
including the Holy Wells, including like attacking like belief in
fairies and curses and all that shit. And they really
really hated the traditional Irish wake, which was a very
raucous thing. And this is probably around the same time
that the Catholic Church started fucking with keening, which is
(01:00:53):
the traditional whaling of Irish women over the dead, which
was almost completely wiped out by the time that audio
technology became available. So we have like almost no actual
knowledge of what fucking keening sounded like, this thing that
survived fifteen hundred years of Christianity as like a traditional
(01:01:14):
and whatever. I'm very mad at the church for.
Speaker 2 (01:01:16):
But it did. But are there we are you implying
there are some that exist, like early recordings.
Speaker 1 (01:01:23):
There are some early recordings of people who had been
taught keenan who were like not necessarily like the specific
traditional keeners.
Speaker 2 (01:01:31):
This.
Speaker 1 (01:01:32):
I didn't research this for this episode. I researched this
for about a song that my metal band put out
a year ago that we hired a woman who studies
traditional keening as best is able to record keening into
it and it's called a malocked, which is a curse.
There's a whole other thing that I got. There's a
(01:01:52):
traditional Irish curse culture that a lot of it was
ways to curse your landlord, and they are fucking intense,
and it was like a lot of the ways actually
that women were involved in class struggle was this like
like you know that thing that in Ukraine early on
in the invasion where like a woman walks up to
a Russian soldier and says, here, put these seeds in
(01:02:13):
your pocket so that something beautiful grows when you die
and rot here.
Speaker 2 (01:02:17):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (01:02:18):
That's the kind of energy that like Irish women were
bringing to class struggle.
Speaker 2 (01:02:23):
Oh beautiful, yeah, beautiful stuff. It's just it is a
game of four DJs ya that they're playing at all times. Yeah, wonderful.
Speaker 1 (01:02:34):
And so these folk Catholics weren't necessarily actually Pagans. I'm
calling them pagany in the sense, but they would have
considered themselves devoutly Catholic. They just meant something very very
different by it, so that the devotional the devotional revolution
is something I'm very frustrated with and it impacts a
lot of this. The molly Maguires who later went to
the US, a lot of them came from the west
(01:02:55):
coast of County Donegal, which is now the bit of
the North of Ireland that isn't north in Ireland. It's
the part that's still part of Ireland, right the northwest
corner at this point. It's a real backwater, which meant
that the traditional ways of life in the Irish language
survived better there. The Irish speaking part of Ireland gets
called the Geltech and it was sort of the arc
(01:03:16):
that Irish culture was able to return from. And Donegal
was a place that was majority Catholic, but not so
overwhelmingly so is the South of Ireland. Instead, it was
a place where an Irish speaking impoverished majority worked for
an English speaking Protestant minority. And so the molly McGuire's, yeah,
(01:03:36):
so there's more tension in a lot of this place,
you know, right, And so the molly mcguires came to
the US. Came from the western part of Donegal, which
is a land of waste and bog and it is
one of the poorest and most isolated parts of Ireland.
In the eighteen hundreds, people in Donegal, a lot of
them were like literally dirt poor. It was very common
you'd have a cottage for a family, right, the animals
(01:03:59):
would sleep in side on one half of the cottage
and the entire family would sleep on loose hay on
the other half. And this isn't because they are backwards.
This is because they have been robbed over the course
of the centuries.
Speaker 3 (01:04:12):
Right.
Speaker 1 (01:04:13):
People had such rudimentary clothing that visitors were scandalized by
the scantily clad women. This is another sign of their
like wild pagan ways, which is like partly that they
didn't have the same like cultural conventions around modesty, but
partly is that they didn't have any fucking money, right.
Speaker 2 (01:04:29):
Right, which is like never included in the demonization of like, Yeah,
first of all, who fucking cares? And second of all,
there's no yeah, no context for why that's happening in
the first place.
Speaker 1 (01:04:40):
Yeah. And so they would grow food all year and
then have to sell all of their food that wasn't potatoes.
They would they would buy a calf on really really
bad credit terms and then sell it when it was
fully grown, barely able to cover the cost of buying
the calf. But in some parts of the Northwest you
(01:05:01):
had this medieval form of communal land holding called rundale,
which had died out everywhere else or most everywhere else.
And what it was is that the tenants, so they
would collectively rent a fuck tone of land, right, a
whole village would rent the village, and they would parcel
it out amongst themselves fairly, not so that everyone ends
(01:05:22):
up with the same It's not like they would like
pool all their money, but instead they would pool all
their wealth producing resources, so that everyone had an equal
chance to produce wealth. So everyone had a bit of
good land and a bit of shitty land. Everyone had
a bit of pasture land, and everyone had a bit
of like some rocks down by the ocean where you
could get some seaweed and it was non contiguous, right,
(01:05:45):
so you and folks work together to make sure that
it was alloted fairly.
Speaker 2 (01:05:50):
Go ahead. Oh so, because you're given equitable chunks of
land in terms of land quality as it were, that
means that you have your bad chunk could be far
away from your good chunk kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (01:06:06):
Yep, I see, Okay, it sounds kind of like a
pain in the ass, but it it's.
Speaker 2 (01:06:11):
Like, yeah, but you probably have right and also like
you would have to sort of I mean, yeah, ultimately
a pain in the ass, but you would have to
get to know more people and an ally with more
people in that chunk of land between your your good
bit and your bad bit.
Speaker 1 (01:06:27):
Yeah. And they would do the same with animals. They
would like collectively own the animals and then care like
sort of parcel them out so that everyone had like
a shitty cow and a good cow or whatever. I
don't think people and more than one cow, but like.
Speaker 2 (01:06:40):
Oh not their shitty cow. Wow. There's a Pixar movie, yeah,
the picture cow. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:06:49):
And so this system is part of is included in
what Marx calls primitive communism, which is actually just communism
without the extra steps, like specifically, Marx believe that you
had to be industrialized before you could become communism as
a primitive communism, which clearly existed, like kind of fucked
with his theory, so he denigrated it to Yeah, I
(01:07:12):
deleted this whole rant about why angles was anti Irish
out of the script and everyone can thank me. And
and also animals were usually moved on May first and
November first from different pieces of the land, right, which
not coincidentally lines up with the Celtic holidays May Day
and Halloween and the attendant to gray and violence against
(01:07:35):
the landlords, which would peak on those nights spicy days. Yeah,
Eventually owners break the run Dale system. They force everyone
to be traditional tenants. And the way they do it,
the way that the tenant the Rundale people, the way
they fight that is they're like, all right, fine, everyone's
land has to be contiguous. It's called squaring the land.
(01:07:58):
And the way that they would do it is they're like,
we still want everyone to have good land and shitty
land because that's the traditional way we've been doing it
for thousands of years. So they would have the contiguous
land would be like three feet wide and like a
mile long, so it would go across I think good
parts and bad parts.
Speaker 2 (01:08:17):
Again just theater, yeah, great, love it.
Speaker 1 (01:08:23):
And then also during all of this, during the destruction
of this way of life in County Donegal, they broke
up the traditional Irish inheritance system, in which property was
divided equally between all of the children rather than going
to the eldest son. It's actually this change is why
my great grandparents had to emmigray from County Galway, right
because under the old system, everyone of every gender inherits equally.
(01:08:46):
Under the new system, only the oldest son inherits. So
if you are not a son, or you're not the oldest,
you're fucked and you pretty much got to go to
the US or somewhere else.
Speaker 2 (01:08:59):
And that's why we're here. What a treat.
Speaker 1 (01:09:01):
Yeah. And then so this equal inheritance system was destroyed
after the famine. Basically famine killed not just a fuck
ton of the Irish, but it also killed a fuck
ton of the Irish traditional communistic customs and religious culture.
So Donegal was enclosed mostly for sheep farming. People fought
against it. Lots of sheep went missing or found killed.
(01:09:23):
But all of this gets blamed on Molly McGuire ism,
and some of it probably was, but later people figured
out that like the Scottish farmers were just like stealing
the sheep and selling them themselves, you know, like they
were like yeah and yeah, and everything just gets blamed
on the Molly maguires. But the Molly McGuire's.
Speaker 2 (01:09:43):
Yeah, that's like so that's so I don't know, historically
frustrating that it's like we've well never know who did
what because of whenever the predominant media culture at the
time what they wanted us to think, I know.
Speaker 1 (01:09:58):
And it's like so hard to be like, damn it,
how much did the Molly McGuire like everything got blamed
on them? And it's hard because like in some ways
therefore their actions like furthered a lot of you know,
anti Irish sentiment and stuff like that, right, But also
like I'm just fucking not mad at people who robinhood
when they're starving to death, Like I'm pro it, right,
(01:10:18):
there's a reason they're on my show, you know, Like.
Speaker 2 (01:10:23):
That is the show, is it not?
Speaker 1 (01:10:25):
Yeah? Yeah, But the molly McGuire's, they're not famous in
the US for what they did in Ireland. They're famous
for what they did in Pennsylvania, which involved lots of
murder and arson and class war and weird unionism. And
we'll talk about it on Wednesday.
Speaker 2 (01:10:43):
Cliffanger. Dun dun, duh. Oh god a Pennsylvania Cliffhanger.
Speaker 3 (01:10:50):
For some reason, I've heard about Pennsylvania more than I've
heard about Pennsylvania in.
Speaker 2 (01:10:56):
Like years, just this week. Really, it's the big Pence
a new week. I don't know why I hate Pennsylvania.
That's annoying too. I love Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh's great, not just
because they have the Catchup Museum.
Speaker 3 (01:11:13):
Yeah, that's exactly why I love.
Speaker 2 (01:11:16):
That's a big read. That's a big reason. It's a
book reason I can't lie. But it's not the only reason.
Speaker 3 (01:11:21):
Fair fair Yeah, speaking of things that are loved. Jamie Loftus,
do you have anything you want to plug?
Speaker 2 (01:11:30):
Wow? Thanks? I Yes, you should buy a book about
hot dogs. It's the summer to do it. There's no
way around it. Hot Dog Day is right around the corner.
And don't think too hard about the implications of it,
or do when you read my book Raw Dog, The
Naked Truth about hot Dogs, anything you would ever want
to know about hot dogs, except more things I've learned
(01:11:51):
since and you can get that on a bookshop dot org,
which will automatically route you to buy the book from
your nearest independent bookstore. So do that and don't talk
to me in the internet. I'm tired.
Speaker 1 (01:12:12):
I started a substack and if you want a newsletter
where twice a month I send out a free thing
to everyone that's like more about preparedness and history and
all that stuff I talk about a lot. And then
the other half is subscriber only and is like more
personal and I'm writing memoir and a lot of other
(01:12:34):
stuff there, and so you can support me or just
read my stuff at just you're not going to type
in the r oh, you're just going to google it,
type in Margaret Kiljoy substack. And also I just did
oh awesome. Also there's Sophie who has things to plug.
Speaker 2 (01:12:59):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:13:02):
Listen to sad Oligork, which is a podcast on this
very network, cool Zone Media. If you can finde it
in on all the podcast apps. It's hosted by our
friend Jkandrahan, who's the best. And for anything else at
cool Zone Media. I'm still on the internet. You could
find me. I'm not telling you how well.
Speaker 2 (01:13:26):
Let's see you on Wednesday. Bye Bye Bye.
Speaker 3 (01:13:33):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website coolzonemedia dot com or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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