Miners, Mobs, and Mollies: Picturing labor and working-class activism in the age of incorporation

Ross Barrett

The April 15, 1871, issue of Frank Leslie’s featured an article on Bowman’s Colliery in eastern Pennsylvania, which explained the coal-mining process and described the daily labor routines of the company’s employees. Praising the Bowman workers, the author noted that given a “fair remuneration for his work,” the miner “will take…much pride in picking his way to China.” A dramatic illustration accompanying the article elaborates on the themes of workman’s “pride” and intensive labor in the mines, rendering a pair of miners engaged in dangerous work as heroic and monumental types. Leslie’s account of the strike that unfolded across the coal region two weeks later, however, abandons this valorizing approach; extending a reporter’s characterization of the strikers as “disaffected” and “strongly inclined to provoke open conflict,” the attendant illustration imagines the miners’ active struggle for “fair remuneration” as a terrifying outburst of anarchic energy.

These contradictory visions of the anthracite miners of Pennsylvania anticipated the conflicting figurations of workers that would appear in Gilded-Age visual culture. Indeed, this paper studies graphic depictions of miners, mining unions, and the Molly Maguires that appeared in magazines, dime novels, and other pictorial venues of the 1870s as early attempts to craft a vision of the organizing working classes that could satisfy a wide and diverse audience alarmed, confused, and frustrated by the deepening socio-economic conflicts of the late nineteenth century. As I will show, these images performed a range of functions, soothing anxieties about the status and character of labor; illuminating the failings of corporate capital; imagining and dramatizing the structure, goals, and procedures of oppositional workers’ movements; and reframing social conflict as an entertaining fantasy suitable for domestic consumption.