Journal of Southern History

Larry E. Wood’s sensational title invites readers into a sordid crime story of reform, marriage, and murder. The unexpected context is Frances Willard’s temperance movement, with its motto of “Do Everything” (p. 17). Though Emma Molloy will not be familiar to most readers, she earned modest fame as a newspaper editor and temperance lecturer after the Civil War. She also appeared occasionally on woman suffrage platforms. This twice-divorced reformer hustled to support herself and her extended family, which included Cora Lee and other adopted children. As a member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union’s prison committee, Molloy befriended a lifelong young criminal named George Graham when he was in jail. As Wood observes, Molloy’s faith in Graham’s redemption was misplaced. Having written shorter pieces about the murder of Graham’s wife, Sarah Graham, Wood tells readers that “something kept drawing me back” (p. viii). In this book, Wood offers the full story as a well-paced mystery that does not fully explain his fascination. Historians will want more analysis. [End Page 134]

Wood focuses on Emma Molloy’s culpability. After George Graham’s release from prison, he and his wife and children lived with Emma Molloy. Molloy employed him as a manager and an agent. When Molloy relocated from Indiana to a farm near Springfield, Missouri, George Graham came with her. Sarah Graham, who had been married to George twice, and divorced once, stayed behind with their two sons. In Missouri, Graham married Molloy’s adopted daughter Cora Lee. When Sarah traveled to Springfield with her sons, she disappeared. Sarah’s body was later found at the bottom of a well on the Molloy farm, and the coroner concluded she had been shot. George Graham was arrested for the murder, and Emma Molloy and Cora Lee were charged as accessories. The drama did not end there, though Molloy was eventually exonerated.

Wood suggests that Molloy’s fame made her the target of an outraged public. As a speaker on controversial topics such as temperance and women’s rights, he argues, she pushed the boundaries of appropriate feminine behavior and offended many with her radical views. However, Wood overstates the uniqueness of Molloy’s public career. By the 1880s, Americans were well acquainted with women as writers and lecturers. Even so, activist women had to defend themselves against those who questioned their respectability or accused them of advocating free love. Molloy and other women’s rights activists viewed the liquor industry as their principal enemy. After her arrest, Molloy’s fellow reformers stood by her, and it would be interesting to know why, as well as how they understood Molloy’s situation. Molloy’s entanglement with George Graham was certainly unusual, and perhaps Frances Willard viewed Molloy as another victim of male power and privilege.

The scandal surrounding Sarah Graham’s murder is riveting, but that does not make it significant, except to those involved. This interesting episode raises further questions about the impact of reform on women and their families, the decentralized networks that supported social movements like temperance, and the ways nineteenth-century Americans tied their ambitions to particular causes.