President Joe Biden took a moment out of his speech in Pennsylvania on Monday to tell a macabre story about his great-grandfather being wrongly accused of murder – “not a joke,” as he put it to the Pittsburg audience.
For 90 seconds, a crowd of supporters holding signs stood quietly behind the 81-year-old president as he retold a winding election story from 1906 when his great-grandfather Edward Francis Blewitt ran for statewide office, “only the second Catholic” to be successful, he said in a clip circulating on X. At the time, political opponents accused Biden’s ancestor of being a “Molly Maguire,” a century-old term for Irishmen accused of beating up foremen in the coal mines who abused the Irish-Catholic immigrants. The president’s remarks came during a Labor Day speech meant to appeal to steelworkers voting for Kamala Harris in the battleground state.
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“A Molly Maguire back in the – in the old days, when we Irish and the Catholic and the Poles and others that were Catholic – when they came to the United States of America in the beginning of the 1840s, late 1840s, made their way down into Pennsylvania. A lot of them – and there’s, there’s a tier in the coal mines. Those guys who got there last ended up being the last people in the coal mines. But a lot of the English owned the coal mines,” Biden recalled as audience members glanced to one another, hoping for a point to the story. “And what they did was, they’d really beat the hell out of the, uh, the mostly Catholic population that was in the mines. Not a joke. Not a joke.”
According to Biden, his great-grandfather was a nonviolent politician standing up for the rights of immigrant laborers at a time of widespread abuse. That led to a smear campaign by mine owners who didn’t want to see the Irish benefit from Blewitt in the Pennsylvania State Senate. “But there was a group called the Molly Maguires, and the Molly Maguires, they’d find out the foreman who was taking advantage of an individual, and they’d literally kill him,” he went on, prompting gasps from the audience. “Not a joke,” he repeated, “and they’d bring his body up and put his body on the doorstep of his family. Kind of crude. But I’ve gotta admit: They accused my great-grandfather of being a Molly – he wasn’t.”
WATCH:
Biden just told an insanely weird story in Pittsburgh about how his grandfather was accused of being a “Molly Maguire,” Irish people who “murdered people and brought their body to the doorstep of their families.”
What in the world…pic.twitter.com/HEqMICyftc
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 2, 2024
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Blewitt ultimately won the 1906 contest and served in the Senate’s 22nd district from 1907 to 1910. Blewitt, a coal mine owner in Montana, married Mary Ellen Stanton in 1879 and fathered four sons including Patrick, the grandfather of President Biden. Monday’s story appears to be the first time that Biden has made reference to his great-grandfather’s accusations of murder.
Compared to his pre-dropout public moments, the president’s speech was relatively coherent otherwise. He has stumped for Vice President Harris in multiple swing states, leaning into his blue-collar Scranton roots as he seeks to shore up support in a state he narrowly won four years ago. In 2016, former President Donald Trump narrowly prevailed in Pennsylvania against Hillary Clinton. This time around, Democrats must contend with electric vehicle policies that have turned off large segments of the auto industry despite endorsements from its union leadership. Harris, at a joint event with Biden, announced her opposition to a planned sale of U.S. Steel to a Japanese corporation. “U.S. Steel should remain American-owned and American-operated, and I will always have the backs of America’s steelworkers,” she said, the AP reported.
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