The Molly Maguires and the Detectives.
An analysis of the relationship between the use of undercover policing and violent labor conflict.
Master’s program in Modern History Master’s thesis, 45 credits Author: Constantin Torve Supervisor: Helene Lööw Seminar chair: Björn Furuhagen Date of defense: June 01 2021 Semester: VT 2021
HISTORISKA INSTITUTIONEN
Abstract
This paper evaluates the role of private policing in the patterns of violence that were prevalent in the mining regions of eastern Pennsylvania during the 1860s and 1870s, and which were attributed to an Irish secret society called the “Molly Maguires”. This topic has long been subject to academic and political controversy, and the use of agent provocateur tactics by the Pinkerton agency has been strongly suggested, but never conclusively proven. Drawing on existing research on secret societies, private policing, and the role of the agent provocateur, this paper combines two strands of research that have so far largely been discussed separately. The study then attempts to close the gap on the agent provocateur question by applying methods from criminological history. Through treating different sources as conflicting testimonies, as well as using GIS to provide new insights on crime patterns in the region, it analyzes the complex relationship between undercover policing and the groups under its surveillance. The results provide decisive new evidence regarding the agent provocateur question and the role of the Pinkerton agency during the Molly Maguire trials, as well as the character of the surviving evidence.
Keywords: Molly Maguires, Pinkertons, criminological history, labor unions, policing, Irish diaspora, migration, Pennsylvania.
Acknowledgments
As Mark Bulik notes in his analysis of the cultural backgrounds of the Molly Maguires, “in south Fermanagh […] to “join” work means to begin it—the assumption being that work cannot be begun alone.”1 This thesis is an example of just how true that statement is, as I joined work with the finest, most brilliant, and most mutually supportive class any student could hope for. First of all, my deepest gratitude goes to everyone in the Uppsala University Modern History Class of 2021. Your support and encouragement kept me going in these challenging times, especially as the deadline was drawing closer. Specifically, to Martha Dunster, Erik Larsson, and my dear friend, Sam Marknäs, who embodies the best aspects of rural American culture. I am greatly in debt for the endless hours of discussion which helped shape my understanding of that odd and peculiar part of the world. I would also like to thank my supervisor, Helene Lööw, whose advice across different stages of this project was outstanding, and whose invaluable expertise in the history of policing enabled me to develop this thesis into something so much more complex and multi-faceted than I initially imagined it to be. Lars M. Andersson, Uppsala University, for the incredible dedication and support he gave to all students in this program, and his encouragement that I pursue this particular topic. Finally, Kevin Kenny, author of Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, for a very enlightening e-mail exchange. Being able to discuss my work and my initial theories with the leading expert in the field was a great honor, and I truly appreciate him taking the time to do so.
1 Bulik 2015, p. 33
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Table of contents
1. Introduction ...... 1 1.1 Black Thursday ...... 1 1.2 The eye that never sleeps ...... 2 1.3 Theory ...... 3 1.4 Previous research ...... 3 1.5 Approach, purpose, and research questions ...... 4 2. Methods ...... 6 3. Irish Ways and Irish Laws ...... 8 3.1 Steelboys, Ribbonmen and Whiteboys: social banditry and retributive justice ...... 9 3.2 Mummery and mythology ...... 14 3.3 The children of Molly Maguire ...... 15 3.4 The Ancient Order of Hibernians ...... 17 4. A surrender of sovereignty ...... 20 4.1 Private policing ...... 21 4.2 The Pinkertons ...... 24 4.3 Informants, infiltrators, and agents provocateurs ...... 28 5. The migration of a specter ...... 32 5.1 The making of a scapegoat ...... 34 5.2 The first wave...... 40 5.3 The Pinkertons become involved ...... 51 5.4 Trial by perjury ...... 60 5.5 Aftermath ...... 68 6. On the ‘agent provocateur’ theory ...... 71 6.1 Existing literature ...... 72 6.2 Assessing the evidence ...... 75 6.2.1 The case of Gomer James ...... 76 6.2.2 Other cases ...... 80 6.2.3 Changes in leadership ...... 82 6.2.4 Ethnic tensions ...... 84 6.2.5 Vigilantism ...... 86 6.3 GIS analysis ...... 87 7. Conclusion ...... 94 8. Sources and literature ...... 99 8.1 Unpublished sources ...... 99
8.2 Published sources ...... 99 8.3 Literature...... 100 9. Appendix ...... 105 Appendix A: Membership list of the AOH ...... 105 Appendix B: Letters...... 108 Appendix C: Newspaper clippings ...... 114 Appendix D: Database of incidents for chapter 6.3 ...... 117
List of figures
Figure 1: Map of Schuylkill County, 1870s, Library of Congress...... 34 Figure 2: Coffin notice published in the Miners’ Journal, March 12th, 1864 ...... 45 Figure 3: Comparison of the spatial distribution of Molly Maguire assassinations, by author ...... 88 Figure 4: Incidents from first quarter of 1873 through second quarter of 1874, by author ...... 89 Figure 5: Incidents from third quarter of 1874 through fourth quarter of 1875, by author ...... 90 Figure 6: Incidents in northern Schuylkill, October–December 1874, by author ...... 92 Figure 7: Incidents in northern Schuylkill, first half of 1875, by author ...... 93 Figure 8: Incidents in northern Schuylkill, second half of 1875, by author ...... 93
List of tables
Table 1: Incidents by period and area ...... 91
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1. Introduction
1.1 Black Thursday
On June 21st, 1877, ten men were executed by hanging in Pottsville, Pennsylvania; and in nearby Mauch Chunk. All of them were or had been coal miners, and all of them were Irish. The date of the executions would become known throughout the region as ‘Black Thursday’, and the trials in this style would continue, claiming another ten lives before finally abating in 1879. This, however, is almost the entire part of the story that is unanimously accepted as fact. Whose justice had been served here? The men on trial were said to have been part of a murderous conspiracy, the Molly Maguires, accused of a total of 16 murders in the region. For a long time, this narrative was accepted as factual, and there remains a tendency even among some historians to do so. However, others have contended that the evidence is dubious, resting mostly on the word of a private detective who had infiltrated the local mining communities, on behalf of a local mining operator. In some cases, the Molly Maguires have been reinterpreted as martyrs of the labor movement. The convictions were obtained in trials that even by the standards of the day were farcical,2 leading to an eventual posthumous pardon by the governor of Pennsylvania in 1976, and a renewed parliamentary debate in 2005.3 However, this did not provide a definite end to the scholarly discussion. Most historians today take a relatively nuanced approach to the matter, accepting the existence of the Molly Maguires as a fact while arguing that the violence was exacerbated by the conduct of local elites and private police forces. This is in large parts as convincing as it is convenient. By avoiding the risks associated with the topic, such studies may establish a minimal consensus, but they often have significant blind spots. Harold Aurand’s conclusion that the topic permits “great historical elasticity”,4 due to the vague nature of available evidence, remains valid. Kevin Kenny, one of the leading scholars on this subject, largely ignored the more controversial aspects in his 1998 monograph Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, only to claim 16 years later that the aforementioned private detective was “almost certainly” an agent provocateur.5 Kenny’s book, while still a seminal work of research, is thus in need of revision, and the author implicitly acknowledged that when making the statement just quoted.
2 Cf. Kenny 2014, p. 24 3 Cf. Pennsylvania General Assembly 2005 4 Aurand & Gudelunas 1982, p. 103 5 Kenny 2014, p. 24
1 1.2 The eye that never sleeps
If the legacy of the Molly Maguires is contested, similarly strong contradictions exist for the legacy of Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Founded by Scottish immigrant Allan Pinkerton in the 1850s, the agency became metonymic for private detectives in general throughout the late 19th and early 20th century – but also for professional strikebreakers. To this day, they are celebrated as heroes of law and order by some and reviled as the hired thugs of an anti-labor conspiracy by others. A 1996 Pinkerton biography states that “the popular image [...] is that the Pinkertons were strike-breakers when, in fact, they were acting within the law in the protection of industrial premises against a violent mob ten times their number.”6 A stark contrast exists between the self- representation of the Pinkertons as fearless protectors of the law-abiding citizenry, which found its way into some historiographical representations of the agency, and the numerous scandals regarding the use of agent provocateur tactics, involvement in lynching, and similar allegations.7 In the Molly Maguire affair, the Pinkertons played a decisive role. Having investigated the coal region through numerous undercover operatives, most prominently James McParlan, as well as being part of the uniformed private Coal and Iron Police, the eventual trials and convictions rested almost entirely on the testimony of the former and the arrests of the latter. This has long been the main subject of controversy surrounding the events. But the Pinkertons, despite their metonymic claim to fame (or infamy), were not a singular force. They have to be assessed in the broader context of private policing, which was widespread in the 19th century United States. The coevolution of public and private policing has been quite thoroughly researched, with Jonathan Obert arguing that the transformation of social bonds in the mid-19th century ultimately led to the creation of both a professionalized public police force and the emergence of private services.8 Similarly, David Churchill, Dolores Janiewski and Pieter Leloup document a broad understanding of this phenomenon in research on the history of policing, under terms such as ‘plural policing’, ‘hybridity’, ‘corporatization’, or similar.9 However, this research has, to this date, never been applied to the specific context of the Molly Maguire affair.
6 O’Hara 2008, p. 169 7 Cf. Ibid. 8 Cf. Obert 2018 9 Cf. D. Churchill et al. 2020, p. 2 2
1.3 Theory
The complexity of this topic requires a broad theoretical approach, combining theories from social history, labor history, criminology, and sociology. An introductory theory section would thus be immensely lengthy and, in absence of context, complicate rather than facilitate understanding. Each theoretical aspect will therefore be explained in the context of the respective chapter. This includes the theory of social banditry as developed by Eric Hobsbawm10 and Kevin Kenny’s definition of agrarian retributive justice11 (see chapter 3.1), the coevolution of private and public policing as established by Jonathan Obert (see chapter 4.1),12 Gary Marx’ and Robert Weiss’ theories on the role of the infiltrator in political movements and Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones’ conceptualization of the dynamics of American industrial espionage (see chapter 4.3),13 and – as the underlying foundation – an understanding of class and migration as historical factors, both in general and in the specific context of 19th century America, as established, among others, by Grace Palladino, Kevin Kenny, Mark Bulik, and Kerron Ó Luain (see chapters 3 and 5).14
1.4 Previous research
For the most part, the implications of and differences between existing works of research will also be discussed in the appropriate chapters. However, a brief overview shall be provided here. Little academic research exists on the Molly Maguires. There are six comprehensive monographs from 1930 to 2020,15 and most of the older works will only be referenced sporadically: Anthony Bimba’s 1932 The Molly Maguires is an attempt at a revision of the Pinkerton narrative, but ultimately more of a polemic and methodologically rather deficient.16 Walter Coleman’s 1936 The Molly Maguire Riots is by far the most accurate and well researched of the earlier works, and indeed has greatly informed contemporary research.17 Wayne G. Broehl’s 1964 The Molly
10 Cf. Hobsbawm 1981 11 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 9 12 Cf. Obert 2018 13 Cf. Jeffreys-Jones 1972, G. Marx 1974, Weiss 1986 14 Cf. Palladino 1990, Kenny 1998, Bulik 2015, Ó Luain 2020 15 Strictly speaking, only three of them (Coleman, Broehl, Kenny) are academic works. Bimba and Lewis were both journalists, so is Bulik, although Bimba had studied history. However, the distinction is not as relevant as it would seem; the works of Bimba and Lewis, just like Broehl’s, did not withstand the passage of time but nonetheless offer some valuable insights. Lewis’ work contains the most factual errors, including glaring internal contradictions (cf. Lewis 1964, p. 41, 119). Bulik’s work, on the other hand, lives up to academic standards, has an academic publisher, and features decisive strengths which will be detailed in chapter 6.1. 16 Cf. Bimba 1932 17 Cf. Coleman 1936, Kenny 1998, p. 4
3 Maguires has its qualities in providing a meticulous overview of the source material but is extremely uncritical towards the content of said material.18 Lewis’ Lament for the Molly Maguires provides some valuable insight on the social history of mining communities, but is even more uncritical in this regard.19 The two relatively recent works, which form the basis for discussion in chapters 3, 5, and 6, are Kevin Kenny’s 1998 Making Sense of the Molly Maguires20 and Mark Bulik’s 2015 The Sons of Molly Maguire.21 The latter two shall be discussed in detail regarding their strengths and weaknesses in chapter 6.1. Apart from monographs, very few journal articles exist, only one of which is an actual study (Kevin Kenny’s The Molly Maguires in Popular Culture, 1995)22 and two of which mostly discuss broader implications of the subject (Harold Aurand and William Gudelunas, The Mythical Qualities of Molly Maguire, 1982,23 and Kevin Kenny, The “Molly Maguires,” the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and the Bloody Summer of 1875, 2014).24
1.5 Approach, purpose, and research questions
This leaves the question of how to assess the phenomenon. There is only one fact upon which the different interpretations of the Molly Maguires can agree: The Molly Maguire affair is a criminal case. If one, fully or partly, accepts the official interpretation, the men convicted for Molly Maguirism were murderers. If one casts doubt on said narrative, that implies that James McParlan of the Pinkerton agency is to some degree guilty of said murders, and, of course, perjury. Therefore, in dealing with an unsolved historical criminal case, what could be a more appropriate method than the approach of criminological history, defined by David Churchill as “the work of history informed by criminological concepts, theories or methods”?25 This results in a complex methodological framework, which will be discussed in detail in chapter 2. The novel approach of this thesis – other than its methods – lies in the combined analysis of the two main actors in the Molly Maguire affair. Whereas previous historians have devoted themselves to either the Molly Maguires, their social and cultural background, and their activities, or the history of private policing in labor conflicts, no study so far has fully appreciated the intertwined relationship of these two actors in this specific context. Existing research rarely touches upon the motives of the agency in investigating the Molly Maguires, nor the role of private policing
18 Cf. Broehl 1964 19 Cf. Lewis 1964 20 Cf. Kenny 1998 21 Cf. Bulik 2015 22 Cf. Kenny 1995 23 Cf. Aurand & Gudelunas 1982 24 Cf. Kenny 2014 25 D. Churchill 2017, p. 380 4 in labor conflict as a whole. Drawing on Gary Marx’ seminal study on the active role of agents provocateurs in social movements, which contends that “when illegal protest actions occur there is obviously an interaction between the agent and other activists involved”26 this thesis will do just that: It will attempt to investigate how the two actors are connected, and which role private policing played in the violence of the anthracite coalfields. The focus will be on the Molly Maguires – simply because there is ample research on the Pinkertons – but the history and role of policing will always be considered. In developing a combined understanding of the Molly Maguires and the Pinkertons, this paper will attempt to demystify both. Rather than seeing the former as misunderstood labor heroes or bloodthirsty villains, or reducing the latter to the armed extension of a large-scale industrial conspiracy, it will propose an interpretation that understands them as (albeit extreme) personifications of a specific historical constellation of labor conflict and policing tactics. Instead of, in the words of Karl Marx, “mak[ing] the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them”27, even a controversial figure like McParlan will be portrayed as a mere representative of this context. After a general overview of the history of the Molly Maguires, private policing in general, and the Pinkertons in particular, two main endeavors will be pursued. First of all, McParlan’s credibility as a witness, which, after all, is the basis for the official narrative, will be assessed. Said credibility has often been called into question, but no historical research so far has undertaken the attempt of a systematic evaluation. Second, it will be discussed how plausible the “agent provocateur” theory is, and what evidence can be found to either support or refute it. Given the complexity of the subject, a variety of contexts will be taken into consideration and a set of different methods will be applied. The contexts of Irish agrarian secret societies as well as private policing will be outlined, as well as the fusion of private and public policing in the 19th century United States. This will be followed by a source- as well as literature-based approach to the events in the anthracite coalfields of Pennsylvania, upon which a revision of the literature based on the source material will be conducted. This revision will use methods of criminological history, supplemented by Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to evaluate the plausibility of the various testimonies on the events. The main research question of this paper is: how did the use of private policing impact the Molly Maguire affair? In order to answer this question, the following subquestions will be addressed:
26 G. Marx 1974, p. 439 27 K. Marx 1887, p. 7
5 1. Who were the Molly Maguires, and how did they relate to agrarian secret societies in Ireland? Why was this phenomenon transferred to an industrial context in America? 2. Did the Pinkerton Agency use agent provocateur tactics in the Molly Maguire investigation? If so, which aspects of Molly Maguirism were transformed or created by this influence? 3. How accurate are the representations of the Molly Maguires created by the Pinkertons? Is there evidence for deliberate falsification? If so, how did this affect the outcome of the affair?
2. Methods
It is not without a certain irony that this paper will use criminological methods to investigate the circumstances and consequences of what can be described as a massive overreach of policing. Yet, upon a closer look, the methodological arsenals of a detective and a historian were never too far apart. Just like the former, historians often deal with conflicting witness statements and need to make a judgment regarding which of those might be the most accurate – and which of them might have what particular incentive to lie. Not unlike the work of a detective, a historian’s work will often concern itself with the basic investigative criteria of means, motive, and opportunity. Means in a historical context translates to economic structure (as in means of production), access (or lack thereof) to institutions, education, technology, and the like. A motive could be ideological or material motivations of historical actors, and opportunity an individual’s or group’s position within a field of power or the capacity for historical action that is discussed under the term of agency. Many historians will implicitly use this exact triad, inferring (in varying order) from power relations to ideological dispositions of a group to agency of that group,28 without acknowledging – or realizing – that they are following a very similar approach to what a criminologist would use. The primary source material will be treated as potentially conflicting testimonies, the circumstances of events they establish will be reconstructed in as much detail as possible, and then searched for contradictions and inconsistencies. To facilitate this, this thesis will apply thorough source criticism which in its contemporary forms concerns itself increasingly with “the possible disjunction between available evidence on the one hand and past reality on the other”29 and which seeks to analyze sources comparatively based on spatial, temporal, subjective and formal criteria which are then applied to make a qualified judgment regarding the credibility and truthfulness of
28 Examples of this triad in historical writing include: Stoler 1992, Eads 2006, Karp 2016. Eads even explicitly references it in the title. 29 Edelberg & Simonsen 2015, p. 230 6 the sources.30 However, in this specific case, the subjective criteria of the sources are already well established – they are invariably hostile, it is impossible to compare them with neutral or opposing sources, as source criticism would tend to do, because such sources do not exist. Therefore, the source-critical method will be further complemented by an approach borrowed from postcolonial studies, which provide some useful tools for contexts in which all available source material is hostile. The approach, in these cases, is to read the available material against the grain, that is, to access the representations of a marginalized group in the text by reading it in a way it was not meant to be read, in an attempt to reconstruct a more or less reliable picture of the respective group by questioning what is said and inferring to that which is not said. A key example of this approach, which greatly informed the way this method will be used in the context of this study, is Ann Laura Stoler’s In Cold Blood, which analyzes sporadic patterns of anti-colonial violence in 19th century Sumatra. Stoler’s essay deals with a reasonably similar situation – a pattern of violence at best insufficiently explained by official narratives and a lack of primary sources that diverge from said official narratives.31 From a criminological perspective, when it stands to be determined whether the core factual elements of a case can be proven, and there is no independent evidence to do so, credibility assessment is the only way forward. Usually, four main criteria are cited as potential indicators of a lack of credibility or attempted deception: (a) inconsistency with previous statements, (b) too little confidence in the testimony, (c) testimony not in chronological order, and (d) exaggeration of circumstances. Regarding inconsistency, criminological studies in a laboratory setting32 show a significant discrepancy in the accuracy of testimonies. One such study finds an overall accuracy of 49% for statements with at least one inconsistency, as opposed to 95% for wholly consistent testimonies.33 Of course, under most circumstances historians would have to consider the dynamics of memory in this context – memory is never wholly accurate, and is subject to changes over time. This explains, for instance, shifts in the testimonies of eyewitnesses to historical events, and would have to be taken into account when comparing testimonies recorded decades after the affair to fresher ones.34 However, in this regard, we are remarkably lucky when it comes to the testimonies on the Molly Maguire affair: they all originate within an extremely narrow time frame of just three years, which limits the dynamics of memory as a factor, as considerable involuntary alterations of memory over such a short period are less likely.
30 Cf. Föhr 2018, p. 56 31 Cf. Stoler 1992, p. 151ff. 32 That is, with no incentive on behalf of the participants to deceive, which is an important caveat to the validity of these numbers. 33 Cf. Fisher, Vrij & Leins 2013, pp. 173–177 34 Cf. Vermeulen et al. 2012
7 Criterium (b) will not be applied in this analysis, as it is rather difficult to judge the confidence behind a testimony only preserved in writing. (c) will likewise be disregarded as it is to be considered the weakest indicator, and has rightfully come under scrutiny both in historical and criminological research.35 The aforementioned dynamics of memory can easily affect chronological order, and this does not indicate untruthfulness. However, criteria (a) and (d) will be applied to gauge the potential of deception in the testimonies on the case left by McParlan and Pinkerton. Moreover, this thesis will apply spatial methods to discuss and evaluate alleged patterns of Molly Maguire activity. Through the use of QGIS, a map of incidents and events will be created to discover and analyze potential differences between the two ‘waves’ of Molly Maguire activity. The use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has, in recent years, gained popularity within the field. Proponents of the method cite its capability as a research tool for historians, arguing that the format allows the researcher – as well as the reader – to interact with the material in a way that allows making patterns and relationships visible and creates, as Aaron Raymond describes it, „powerful visual statements that communicate information about the past.“36 GIS is applied as a presentational tool where other visualization methods such as graphs and tables are insufficient; moreover, it is used as an exploration tool to discover varieties and patterns that would otherwise easily be overlooked.37 This method, moreover, is closely linked to the criminological approach. GIS has long featured as a staple of forensic sciences in a variety of ways; the most interesting one for this context being known as tactical crime analysis. This approach maps crime data, usually over shorter periods (more long-term approaches would be part of strategical analysis) in order to identify hotspots of criminal activity and be able to interpret these activity clusters.38 Chapter 6.3 will do precisely that for the historical context of Schuylkill County during the years of 1873-1875.
3. Irish Ways and Irish Laws
The Molly Maguire phenomenon did not originate in the coalfields of rural Pennsylvania. Its roots, political and cultural, can be traced back to pre-famine Ireland. It is one of the many peculiarities surrounding the Molly Maguires that the origins of the phenomenon are reasonably well understood, while its more recent iterations remain a mystery. Usually, history tends to work the opposite way – once a certain group has risen to notoriety, power, and influence, or even just one
35 Historical research demonstrates that the dynamics of memory will often lead to alterations of the timeline that are neither intentional nor an indicator of untruthfulness. From the criminological perspective, the criterium of chronological order has been scrutinized particularly with regards to the influence of trauma on victim testimony, cf. Fisher, Vrij & Leins 2013, p. 177 36Raymond 2011, p. 585 37 Cf. Boonstra 2009, p. 89ff. 38 Cf. van Schaik & van der Kemp 2009, p. 224 8 of the above, it becomes increasingly well documented and understood, while its origins often remain in the dark. This is particularly the case if the more recent iterations take place in a context with a significantly higher literacy rate – yet historians have a clearer understanding of the agrarian predecessors of the Molly Maguires in Ireland during the first half of the 19th century than of the events in Pennsylvania half a century later. It is also largely unclear how the phenomenon came to be transplanted to the United States in the first place, with Kenny noting that a direct import is unlikely, as there is no evidence that any of the men implicated were involved in agrarian conflict in Ireland, and few originated from the Molly Maguire strongholds of Cavan, Monaghan and Leitrim.39 Nevertheless, the Irish origins of the Molly Maguires provide important context for the understanding of their American successors. In this chapter, the Irish roots of the phenomenon will thus be detailed, including a short overview of the various secret societies that predated the Molly Maguires, the socio-economic conditions which precipitated the rise of said societies (3.1), as well as the cultural practices and symbols that would ultimately become the foundation of Molly Maguire (3.2), before turning the focus to the actual Molly Maguires in Ireland (3.3) and discussing the roots of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (3.4).
3.1 Steelboys, Ribbonmen and Whiteboys: social banditry and retributive justice
There is little doubt regarding the fact that 18th and 19th century Ireland was indeed home to a plethora of militant secret societies, most of which, especially the earlier ones, were local and short- lived, but some of which achieved a great deal of notoriety and organizational structure that spanned across multiple counties, if not much of the island. The material conditions of rural Ireland in this period were a powder keg, with an impoverished peasantry dependent on conacry (the practice of seasonally renting small plots of land to grow potatoes) and its collectivist agrarian tradition colliding with the onset of modern capitalist economy and international trade. As cattle farming became increasingly profitable due to the possibility of selling Irish beef and butter in England, there was a strong incentive for landlords to evict conacre tenants and convert the land for pasture. The system of absentee landlords relying on a plethora of agents and bailiffs to manage their estates further impoverished the landless peasants, whose labor not only was exploited by the landlords directly but also by the countless middlemen. Agents and bailiffs, however, often provided an easy and accessible target to vent grievances.40
39 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 42 40 Cf. Bulik 2015, pp. 33–47
9 It was in these conditions that the agrarian secret societies of Ireland originated. The deficiencies of pre-famine economy, particularly in rural areas, were profound and systematic, and thus was the response.41 Driven at times by the direst economic necessity, as the loss of a conacre plot could prove fatal, and guided by a cultural understanding of community deeply rooted in a still largely intact Celtic tradition, Irish secret societies constituted a form of class struggle that was at the same time both pre-modern and modern. They were pre-modern insofar as their practices were rooted in ancient, even pagan, folk belief and tradition, and insofar as they favored and defended a mode of production that was threatened by the advent of modernity. They were modern insofar as they increasingly articulated the aforementioned claims in the language and strategy of modern nationalist thought.42 Therefore, the secret societies of rural Ireland, the Molly Maguires as well as their predecessors, are best understood as a form of agrarian retributive justice. Kenny defines this phenomenon as “a form of collective violence designed to redress violations against a particular understanding of what was socially right and wrong.”43 Contemporary or slightly later accounts, describing the secret societies as “midnight courts”, “Vehmgericht”44 or similar, illustrate that this was widely perceived to be their main purpose.45 They can thus not be understood as simple outlaws – from their perspective, as well as that of a great part of their peers, their purpose was to uphold the law, not to break it. This is an important characteristic of what Hobsbawm describes as social banditry, which concerns itself with “the defence or restoration of the traditional order of things ‘as it should be’ (which in traditional societies means as it is believed to have been in some real or mythical past).”46 Conflating this broad phenomenon of retributive justice under the umbrella of “secret societies”, as has often been done, bears the risk of mystifying them in the same vein as contemporary observers tended to do. Instead, it should be noted that these groups, while sharing similar grievances, were often vastly different from each other in base and strategic approach. Not every organization lumped together under this term was physically violent, not every one was all that secretive, and not every one was sectarian. However, Ryan identifies certain characteristics that
41 Cf. Ryan 2000, p. 120 42 Cf. Garvin 1892, p. 136 43 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 9 44 Medieval tribunals of the Holy Roman Empire, usually concerned with capital crimes. The term was later used to describe a somewhat despotic court passing swift death sentences. 45 Cf. Garvin 1982, p. 136 46 Hobsbawm 1981, p. 26. Social bandits, according to Hobsbawm, thrive in rural or mountainous areas, where law enforcement organs are stretched thinly. They begin their career not out of criminal energy, but as victims of (real or perceived) injustice, or unfounded persecution by the authorities, and they usually enjoy the support of the local populace. If they kill, they usually do so out of motives that are deemed ‘honorable’ in agrarian societies, particularly out of revenge. They are not ‘outlaws’ in any sense of the word because, as their deeds are not seen as deplorable by the community, they can rejoin it at will or may never leave it, cf. Ibid., p. 42 – 48. 10 most of them reliably shared: the use of intimidation tactics against their adversaries, often in the form of threatening notices, the acquisition of arms through burglary or similar means, and the wearing of an emblem of recognition. Through “the […] administration of illegal oaths and the use of special gestures, signs, and documents known as 'catechism’.”,47 they would create a quite ritualistic structure. Despite later efforts to portray these societies as a purely sectarian Catholic affair, the phenomenon was not at all confined to the Catholic community. Among the first recorded instances of large, cross-county organizational phenomena concerned with matters of agrarian justice are the Hearts of Oak (or Oakboys) and the Hearts of Steel (or Steelboys), two partly overlapping but distinct networks of largely Presbyterian farmers and small artisans originating in Armagh and Antrim respectively and quickly spreading throughout most of Ulster – excluding only Donegal – in the 1760s and early 1770s. The Hearts of Oak deployed a strategy of sabotage and intimidation, destroying toll gates and marching on the houses of the local gentry, but with little recorded physical violence, while the Hearts of Steel took a more immediately militant approach. In the 1772 Battle of Gilford, 2.000 armed Steelboys attacked the residence of magistrate Richard Johnston, an ardent supporter of the gentry, forcing him to flee by swimming across the River Bann.48 This early instance of militant secret societies embodies many of the complexities historical research faces in this context. Although distinct in time, place, and strategy, the Hearts of Oak and the Hearts of Steel quickly became conflated and were coupled together in historical research for a long time.49 This may be because only the latter could reasonably be classified as a “secret” society, with the former mobilizing and rallying in broad daylight, possibly leading to the belief that they were two sides of the same coin. But if this is the case, it becomes apparent why it is such a difficult task to separate fact from fiction and speculation when discussing Irish secret societies. Around the same time, secret societies became a common phenomenon among the Catholic peasantry as well. The largest, and most well-known, of these secret societies included the Defenders, the Ribbonmen, and the Whiteboys. Bulik notes that, as a general tendency, the Defenders and their successors, the Ribbonmen, were mostly based in the north and center of Ireland, tended to be involved in nationalist politics as much as in tenant and land rights, and leaned towards religious sectarianism, while the Whiteboys were active in the rural regions of the south and were often relatively apolitical on issues beyond the question of tenant rights. These
47 Cf. Ryan 2000, p. 120 48 Cf. J. Donnelly 1981, p. 8 – 42 49 Cf. Ibid., p. 7
11 characteristics could merge, however, with some Ribbon groups inheriting the Protestant leadership of 1798, and some Whiteboy groups being deeply sectarian.50 The first Whiteboy rebellions were recorded in the southern parts of Ireland, throughout Leinster and Munster, in the first half of the 1760s. Much like the Oakboys and Steelboys, the Whiteboys defined many of the themes commonly associated with Irish secret societies: quasi- military organization, uniform symbols (white bands worn around the hats and white frocks over their clothes)51, oaths of secrecy, and ritualized forms of intimidation and retribution. They first achieved notoriety by leveling ditches and fences that had been erected to enclose what had formerly been common lands.52 However, their appeal was mostly limited to the landless, and they attracted few to no supporters among artisans and wealthier peasants. This may at first have greatly limited their capacity for inter-county organization as well: during the Whiteboy unrests in Kilkenny and Tipperary in 1763, the erstwhile Whiteboy hotspots of Waterford, Cork, and Limerick made no efforts to support them, suggesting poor or nonexistent communication between them.53 Moreover, the Whiteboys went by a wide array of local names (Rockites, Blackites, or ‘the fairies’), with the label of ‘Whiteboy’ applied by outside observers, further suggesting a general lack of organizational coherence.54 Whiteboyism persisted for several decades, as a localized, sporadic pattern of violence, but would not achieve inter-county notoriety outside of a brief, but intense period of rebellion from 1769-76. Beyond overt militancy, their main activity consisted of various ways of enforcing the social contract of rural Ireland: there are records of them getting involved in affairs of arranging marriages, sometimes against the will of wealthy farmers, punishing wife-beaters, and enforcing mutual aid in times of need. In this, the Whiteboys can be placed firmly in a context of agrarian retributive justice. They could, and did, resort to large-scale violence if they saw a threat to this social contract, but there is little evidence that they concerned themselves with matters beyond it.55 As sectarian tensions increased in the 19th century, so the secret societies became increasingly sectarian and increasingly well-organized on either side of the divide. The Ribbonmen embodied this phenomenon, having originated as an offspring of the Defenders – an organization, as the name suggests, founded to defend Ulster’s Catholic community against the predecessors of the Orange Order. Just like the Defenders, Ribbonism was organized in lodges, and evidence suggests that there was some rudimentary leadership in Dublin and Belfast and some level of formal
50 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 46 51 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 22 52 Cf. Christianson 1972, p. 370 53 Cf. J. Donnelly 1983, p. 295 54 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 47 55 Cf. Ibid., p. 47f. 12 structure in terms of delegate systems and formal inter-county structures. Ribbonism inherited from its predecessors certain aspects of a modern, Republican ideology blended with Catholic imagery – but in some areas, it also retained parts of the Protestant leadership of 1798 – and became so hegemonial in some parts of Ulster that in 1813, it would be considered suspicious if a 19-year- old was not a member of the local Ribbon lodge.56 Activities of the Ribbonmen included much of the same activities ascribed to the Whiteboys: threatening letters (‘coffin notices’, warning the target to cease their activities or face the wrath of the society), acts of sabotage, and sporadic physical violence. However, a trend towards a more decidedly modern ideology, and a rising nationalist consciousness manifesting itself among the bread and butter issues of everyday life, can be inferred from a coffin notice allegedly posted by Ribbonmen in County Monaghan in 1851: “you are hereby […] prohibited from evicting tenants, executing decrees, serving process, distraining for rent […] or to assist any tyrant, Landlord, Agent in his insatiable desire for depopulation.”57 In this phrasing, desire for depopulation, it becomes apparent that the Famine was understood, at least by Ribbonmen in Monaghan, as a conscious, orchestrated act of driving the Irish off their land, which required an equally conscious, orchestrated mode of resistance. Thwarting the landlords and their agents, in this case, was no longer merely about protecting local lower-class interests, it was apparently seen as a patriotic act in defense of Ireland and the Irish in general. In the post-famine years, when Ribbonism was on the decline in most of Ireland but persisted in some of the Midland counties (Westmeath, Meath, and Offaly), there also appears to have been a tendency to move away from purely agrarian issues towards wage-labor related grievances. Whelehan argues that, in the post-famine period,
herdsmen, clerks and railway workers employed old tactics for new jobs. The familiar methods of the Ribbonmen, nocturnal intimidation by armed parties, firing at the person, destruction of property, and threatening notices and letters, were employed in attempts to control hiring and firing and regulate labour conditions.58
One example that he provides is most interesting given the context of this paper: the assassination of Thomas Anketell, railway stationmaster in Mullingar (County Westmeath), in 1858. Anketell was described as a tyrannical overseer, numerous grievances against him regarding the firing of porters and servants were well known, and he was accused of denying workers access to a garden and to the use of leftover coal. When he was killed, two laborers were arrested but released due to lack of evidence, and a potential witness was intimidated into leaving the town. This not having been the
56 Cf. Garvin 1982, pp. 140–145 57 Trench cit. Kenny 1998, p. 15 58 Whelehan 2012, pp. 7f.
13 only Ribbonite incident on the railroad, it can be assumed that this mode of agrarian retributive justice easily lent itself to being transferred into the context of industrial wage labor.59 Moreover, Kerron Ó Luain contends that Ribbonism functioned as a form of primitive trade unionism for artisanal labor in urban areas as early as 1820.60 While some doubts remain, it is reliably demonstrated that secret societies existed in some parts of Ireland (though their extent may be overstated), which goals they pursued, and which tactical and strategical means they applied to achieve said goals. However, it also becomes clear that there were various strains and traditions of secret societies, so the crucial remaining task is to identify how the Molly Maguires related to this complex pattern of distinct traditions. One aspect which may be helpful in this regard, the relationship with Celtic folk belief and traditions, will be detailed in the following subchapter.
3.2 Mummery and mythology
As briefly mentioned in the previous subchapter, an important aspect of the secrecy of these groups was their fusion with various folk beliefs and traditional holidays. Processions and ritualistic cultural practices played an important role in rural Ireland, and passing as a holiday procession would allow secret societies to conceal their presence from the authorities. Some holiday traditions, moreover, involved covering one’s faces, providing an even more ideal environment of anonymity without raising any suspicion. Agrarian secret societies from their earliest days appear to have had a certain connection to folk belief and Celtic mythology, consistent with Hobsbawm’s observations on social banditry and its invocation of a mythical past.61 The Whiteboys, for instance, pledged allegiance to a mythical female figure, Queen Sieve, from Celtic legend.62 An understanding of the cultural context and significance of this practice is thus instrumental towards understanding the phenomenon of secret societies. To this, the practice of mummery was the most instrumental. Mummery was a tradition of British origin transferred to Ulster during the Plantation, where it became infused with Celtic symbolism and folk belief. Bulik describes it as “a form of trick or treat, an ancient play performed by amateur troupes who visited nearby homes during the Christmas season.”63 A group of traveling actors in straw clothing and blackened faces would visit homes in a given area, and a largely identical
59 Cf. Whelehan 2012, p. 12 60 Cf. Ó Luain 2020, p. 56 61 Cf. Hobsbawm, p. 26 62 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 22. Alternative spellings ‘Sive’ and ‘Sahbh’ found in some contemporary sources and in research on the Whiteboys refer to the same figure, ‘Sive/Sieve’ owed to the often inconsistent Anglicization of Celtic names; and ‘Sahbh’ being the Irish spelling. 63 Bulik 2015, p. 29 14 play, with some local variations, would be shown: two champions fighting each other, one being killed, and raised from the dead with the help of a woman (a man in drag, all actors were male), who would collect payment for a ‘doctor’ from the audience. The payment would then be used by the mummery group to organize a party, inviting all the households they had visited. This practice thus had a function of reinforcing the social contract and reminding the community of the duty to participate in mutual aid – as preserved in modern-day Halloween practices, the mummers would threaten retribution if turned away, and the threat was not always empty.64 Both the motif of dead men rising to fight again as well as that of cross-dressing feature prominently in Irish mythology, particularly in Ulster. In one of the tales surrounding Cuchulainn, probably the most widely known Irish legend today, a decapitated man picks up his head and walks away, only to return to fight the next day. In the myth of Conn of a Hundred Battles, the main antagonist devises a plot to kill the hero by sending assassins disguised as women during the festival of Samhain. There is ample evidence, through folk ballads and stories of various kinds, that these legends were referenced in connection with secret society assassinations – the slain agent or landlord would rise again to fight his assassin.65 Agrarian secret societies were thus closely linked to mythology, rural popular culture, and folk belief. However, this connection is not equally pronounced in all forms of these groups. Societies of the Whiteboy variety were a lot more closely linked to these festivities and the corresponding peasant calendar than their Ribbon counterparts. There was a clear seasonal pattern to Whiteboy attacks, peaking in winter and coming to a halt over the summer, suggesting a very close connection with the peasant calendar.66
3.3 The children of Molly Maguire
During the peak of Daniel O’Connell’s parliamentary successes, between the years of 1823–1847, secret society activity saw a downturn and became overshadowed by the legal, parliamentary approach. Yet, it was never truly gone, the appeal of parliamentary efforts being “substantial rather than complete”67 and at the advent of the famine, it would once again emerge in full force. The Molly Maguires would come to be the latest iteration of this phenomenon. Their members would dress in women’s clothing, with blackened faces, and pledge their allegiance to “Molly Maguire” – a mythical figure described as “a barbaric and picturesque character [who] blackened her face and
64 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 29 65 Cf. Ibid., p. 27 66 Cf. Ibid., p. 48 67 Garvin 1982, p. 133
15 under her petticoat carried a pistol strapped to each of her stout thighs,”68 she was supposedly a widow who had been evicted from her home, and in retaliation attacked English landlords as well as their agents and bailiffs. Alternatively, she is described as the owner of an illicit tavern where her followers met and planned their attacks.69 A strong connection to mummery and folk belief is evident here, and the Molly Maguire character herself might either be a figure directly out of a mummers’ play or an evolved form of Queen Sieve of Whiteboy iconography. The Molly Maguires made their first recorded appearance in Cavan and Leitrim in 1844. The second half of 1844 would see a marked rise in agrarian disturbances – coffin notes, threats, weapon searches, and the like – followed by an abrupt, brief period of silence around the beginning of 1845, at the same time when actual mummery groups would have been active. After the festive season, violence resumed at a more intense level. The first death attributed to the Molly Maguires in Ireland was recorded at Garadice Lake, County Leitrim, on January 29th, 1845. Once again, a certain connection to folk belief is plausible, with the killing occurring two nights before the Eve of Brigid and the location being very close to the ancient human sacrifice site at Magh Slécht.70 In the following months, the Connacht-Ulster borderlands of Cavan and Leitrim would become a veritable hotbed of Molly Maguire activity. On May 14th, 1845, James Gallagher, a landlord’s agent in County Cavan, was shot at close range with a blunderbuss, and on June 22nd, George Bell Booth, a magistrate and Orange Order leader in Drumcarbin (County Cavan) was assassinated on his way home from church. In both cases, the date of the incident coincides closely with important holidays: Gallagher was killed days before Whitsun and Booth a day after Midsummer.71 During the same summer, a manifesto of some sort to the society was published in Leitrim. The document reduces the agenda of the Molly Maguires strictly to the land question, explicitly disavows both sectarianism and attacks on anyone but a landlord or agent who breaks the social contract, and strongly urges that landlords who adhere to the social contract be respected.72 The Molly Maguires went to such great lengths to copy the practice of mummery to perfection: wearing identical costumes, painting their faces black, appearing at the same time of the year, even the ‘Molly Maguire’ figure itself appears to have been borrowed from mummery, that Bulik suspects there was a certain overlap between actual mummery groups and the Molly Maguires.73 Kenny seconds this interpretation, stating that particularly the cultural motif of cross-
68 Adamic 1931, p. 12 69 Cf. Wynne 2015, p. 38 70 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 79 71 Cf. Ibid., pp. 79–82 72 Cf. Ibid., p. 85ff. 73 Cf. Ibid., p. 29 16 dressing was widespread, and “the violent societies appear to have been an outgrowth of nonviolent ones, representing the transformation of cultural play into social protest.”74 An exploration of the themes the Molly Maguires chose – the allegiance to a mythical woman, the strong connections with folk belief and mummery – suggests an origin story and a structure much closer to the Whiteboy than the Ribbon variety of agrarian unrest. The same can be said for the manifesto, which reduces the agenda of the society strictly to the land question, contains no traces of sectarian language, and is devoid of any notion of modern nationalism – which, as mentioned in chapter 3.1, featured prominently in Ribbon documents of the same period and in the same area. However, their region of origin, as well as some of the primary source material, complicates this. The Ulster-Connacht borderlands, where the Molly Maguires first appeared, were a stronghold of Defenderism and Ribbonism, but then, Ribbonism and Molly Maguirism, as Vaughan demonstrates, appear to have coincided as distinct phenomena.75 One testimony of a captured Molly Maguire in 1845, however, claims that Molly Maguirism was “the same as the Ribbon business.”76 The most reasonable explanation for this would be that the two societies coexisted and that there may have been a significant amount of overlap between them. The elusive Molly Maguires, being placed by some scholars in either tradition, may have been a synthesis of both. They displayed clear Whiteboy features, which have never been seen this consistently in any Ribbonite organization (including the post-famine ones which would come after the Molly Maguires), such as the call for non-sectarianism, the connections to mummery traditions and the peasant calendar, and the Molly Maguire character herself. At the same time, they emerged in a classical stronghold of Ribbonism and would show some Ribbonite traits which do not fit neatly into traditions of Whiteboy societies, such as their much wider social base77 and accordingly the adaptation (at least of the name) to an industrial context.
3.4 The Ancient Order of Hibernians
As stated before, it is unclear how and why exactly the figure of Molly Maguire came to be transplanted to America. It is quite apparent that there was a significant amount of organizational continuity and similarities between the Ribbonmen in Ireland and the Ancient Order of Hibernians
74 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 24 75 Cf. Vaughan 1994, p. 189f. 76 Brady cit. Bulik 2015, p. 84 77 Evident from the manifesto referenced earlier, and some coffin notices which displayed a high level of literacy. This suggests that the Molly Maguires may have had a social structure more akin to the Ribbonmen. Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 85, 93
17 (AOH). These included organizational practices, such as passwords and symbols, as well as organizational structures and a strong focus on Ulster and adjacent counties, or the diaspora from that area.78 The AOH acknowledges this in its official historical narrative, and Kenny notes that the AOH in Schuylkill County was founded by men who had been involved in Ribbonism in Ireland.79 At least for the Ribbonmen, disputing a continuity between Irish secret societies and the organizations of the diaspora would be a futile endeavor – the authority of none other than Michael Davitt, the prominent 19th century Irish republican and land rights activist, calling the AOH “the trans-Atlantic offspring of the Ribbonism of Ireland”80 is difficult to refute. The American AOH, moreover, evolved in a context that had certain similarities with the one that had sparked Defenderism and Ribbonism in Ulster. Under increasingly vitriolic (and at times physical) attacks from a hostile, Nativist establishment in the 1840s and 1850s, which will be discussed in more detail in chapter 5.1, the pressure increased to band together and speak with a unified voice. This may have spurred the coalescence of the AOH as a nationwide organization in 1853. And although the AOH seldomly echoed the militancy of its predecessors – the main focus was always mutual aid, not community defense81 – this might explain some of the Ribbonite continuities. But how exactly this continuity manifested itself is a factor that is rarely elaborated, and merits a brief discussion. Throughout much of the 19th and the early 20th century, the Ancient Order of Hibernians epitomized what Cian McMahon calls “global [Irish] nationalism”82, a vast organizational network of the Irish diaspora developing a new form of nationalist thought as a result of the community’s necessity to develop a dual identity that incorporated both Irishness and loyalty to the new home. With tens of thousands of members and branches in Ireland, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, the AOH embodied this transnational Irish identity. Few branches of the AOH, however, would ever achieve the notoriety of the one in Schuylkill County. Founded in 1833 as the Pottsville Hibernia Benevolent Association, the local chapter of the Ancient Order of Hibernians would play a decisive role in the Molly Maguire affair. Merged with a similar group based in New York in 1836, it conducted, for a while, the nationwide operations from Schuylkill County, and it had at least some links with Ribbon societies in Ireland.83 As the various local ‘benevolent societies’ merged into the nationwide structure of the AOH between the 1830s and 1850, some internal contradictions became apparent. For a long time, the
78 Cf. Garvin 1982, p. 153 79 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 17 80 Davitt cit. Ó Luain 2020, p. 55 81 Cf. Ó Luain 2020, p. 64 82 Cf. McMahon 2015, p. 2 83 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 120–126 18 understanding of the American AOH was shaped exclusively in terms of race, as part of the broader story of exclusion and inclusion of Irish Americans.84 Only recently, Kerron Ó Luain has demonstrated that the history of the AOH itself was a contested one, and there were two rival factions within the order: a middle-class segment that strived for a respectable image, often in concert with Protestant elites, and a working-class one which was at times openly militant, both in labor conflicts and in its support for physical force Irish republicanism.85 The bulk of AOH membership was thus made up of the lower classes, while its leaders came from a somewhat higher background. Some of them had lower-middle-class status even in Ireland or were American-born altogether. Open factional fights are recorded as early as 1858, with two New York sections of the order – one working-class, and allied with the powerful Tammany Hall86 network, the other more middle-class and less partisan – quarreled over parade routes. 87 Similarly, Bulik observes for Schuylkill County that a considerable personnel change occurred in the order throughout the 1850s and 1860s, which at first replaced the old guard focused on respectability with men from working-class backgrounds. This process culminated in the election of Barney Dolan, a miner, as County Delegate in 1867.88 During the 1860s, the national leadership would become essential in Irish recruitment for the Union Army,89 while many of the working class rank and file members were involved in draft resistance and militant trade unionism.90 As a response to these local patterns of Ribbonite working-class unrest, the state and federal bodies of the AOH took an opposing stance throughout the following decade, purged renegade divisions, and firmly allied with the Catholic Church in 1878.91 Nevertheless, there is some occasional evidence of the membership using Ribbon-style intimidation tactics in the workplace throughout the 1880s, and the order supported the often violent tactics of the Land League in 1879–82 through significant financial aid. The AOH would also see more faction fighting over the 1880s and 1890s, including a temporary split that was eventually reabsorbed in 1898, but the reasons behind this are hard to discern. Since the offshoot was mainly confined to the New York area, one might speculate on disputes between first-
84 The only notable exception is Bimba 1932, p. 11f., who anticipated Ó Luain’s results in stating that “the national organization [of the AOH] was controlled by the Irish bourgeoisie and the Catholic clergy and, therefore, had nothing in common with the real interests of Irish workers. […] In the anthracite regions of Pennsylvania, the situation was different. […] The branches or locals of the [AOH] were dominated by miners themselves, who transformed the […] organization into their principal organ of class struggle.” 85 Cf. Ó Luain 2020, p. 52 86 Political organization in New York City dating back to the late 18th century. It constituted a main source of power for the Democratic Party, and came to be dominated by Irish Americans from the 1850s onward. After a series of corruption scandals, it lost most of its influence during the New Deal years, and folded in the 1960s. 87 Cf. Ó Luain 2020, p. 66 88 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 159f. 89 Cf. Ó Luain 2020, p. 66f. 90 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 297 91 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 279
19 generation and second-generation Irish, monetary aspects also may have been an issue, but nothing specific is known about the reasons for the split.92 Ó Luain concludes that while the AOH did inherit and harbor some traits of Ribbonism, including a climate of conspiratorial secrecy and a certain degree of workplace militancy at the rank and file level, the order was influenced by secret societies but largely nonviolent, and its strongest traits that echoed the agrarian predecessors concerned internal affairs: “They had rejected the violent aspect of Ribbonism [but] the habit of jostling for positions – usually carried out during secretive meetings and conventions – was more difficult to cast off.”93 To give a brief overview of this internal structure, the AOH was made up of local lodges – in the context of the coal regions, it often had one even in small settlements.94 At the head of each lodge was a so-called “bodymaster”, who according to the reports on the society had a near-total internal authority over the local rank and file. The bodymasters along with other elected officials of the local division (secretaries, treasurers, and so forth) would gather on a county level to choose a county delegate to represent them at the state convention, which would in turn elect a state leadership and representatives for the national convention. A connection to a superior structure in Britain and Ireland, titled the “Board of Erin”, is often reported in 19th-century sources,95 but with regards to Ó Luain’s findings on the order spreading from America to Ireland, not vice versa,96 this is likely a fabrication. The system certainly fostered a degree of secrecy towards outsiders (and possibly towards ordinary members), but to suggest that it was a large-scale Ribbonite network is utterly unconvincing. Even Wayne G. Broehl, author of the first comprehensive scholarly work on the Molly Maguires, finds that claim to be ludicrous, despite generally being rather uncritical of the Pinkerton narrative.97
4. A surrender of sovereignty
Harold W. Aurand, in researching the history of mine workers in the anthracite coal region, concludes that “[t]he Molly Maguire investigation and trials marked one of the most astounding surrenders of sovereignty in American history. A private corporation initiated the investigation through a private detective agency, a private police force arrested the supposed offenders, and coal company attorneys prosecuted – the state provided only the courtroom and hangman.”98
92 Cf. Ó Luain 2020, p. 75f. 93 Ibid., p. 79 94 For a detailed membership list of the AOH in the Pennsylvania coal region, see Appendix A. 95 Cf. West 1876, p. 10 96 Cf. Ó Luain 2020, p. 80 97 Cf. Broehl 1964, p. 321 98 Aurand cit. Kenny 1998, p. 213 20
This ‘surrender of sovereignty’ is hardly exclusive to the Molly Maguire case, however. In this chapter, its history up to the point of the events will therefore be described, including the development of private policing in general (4.1), an account of the history and practices of the Pinkerton agency (4.2), and an analysis of agent provocateur tactics and the motives of private agencies to use them (4.3).
4.1 Private policing
The phrase of the ‘surrender of sovereignty’ may be accurate from our present perspective according to which such agendas should be an exclusively public matter, but is a misnomer insofar as it suggests enmity and controversy between the private and public law enforcement systems of the past. Rather, public and private policing coevolved. This realization has been the subject of extensive debates in recent scholarship on the history of policing, which has moved away from a monolithic conception of “the police” towards broader concepts of policing and security, sometimes framed as ‘fragmentation’, ‘plural policing’, ‘hybridity’, ‘corporatization’ or similar terms.99 In the early 19th century, little professionalization existed – sheriffs and constables were local authority figures rather than trained law enforcement professionals and depended on being able to mobilize and deputize the general public to carry out arrests. The civic Republican ideals of Jeffersonian America interpreted society as “a public community of shared interest”100 in which law enforcement was ultimately a civic duty, not necessarily a duty of the state. The underlying ideal was that owners of property, in their mutual interest, would band together to uphold the law and thus avoid the tyranny associated with state-sanctioned violence.101 Accordingly, public policing was “underdeveloped in the West, fragmented in the cities, and primarily centered on maintaining a visible patrol presence rather than crime-fighting.”102 Even large cities maintained only a small number of law enforcement officials, delegating most agendas to localized personal networks, neighborhood watches, and deputy constables. In practice, as in cities like Chicago, these systems were often heavily segmented, allowing upper-class districts to police themselves and only pay for their own infrastructure. Moreover, settlement patterns often followed ethnic lines, especially among non-English speaking immigrants, and well-connected neighborhood leaders among a given ethnicity would ensure local control.103
99 Cf. D. Churchill et al. 2020, p. 2 100 Obert 2018, p. 829 101 Cf. Ibid. 102 Ross 2020, p. 25 103 Cf. Obert 2018, p. 833ff.
21 This system worked reasonably well in a frontier setting, or even in a pre-industrialized, artisanal town with strong social bonds. However, by the early 1850s, with the rapid urbanization and the expansion of the railroad, the system of delegation faced a crisis, resulting in a perceived security threat exacerbated by sensationalist media coverage. The growth of anonymity and mobility were particularly erosive. In areas with a high level of anonymity and frequent turnover, there was either no identifiable community leadership that could be tasked with maintaining order or – if it existed – it could not be trusted to maintain control over those inhabitants with whom it shared no social bonds.104 Erosion of social bonds, however, was not the only problem. The formation of new bonds, particularly along class lines, provided another challenge. From the outset, the most striking issue that paralyzed the old system has been linked to the question of labor disturbances, as Hogg has noted as early as 1944:
What was a sheriff to do when faced not by a relatively small number of criminals whom everybody recognized for what they were but by hundreds and sometimes thousands of striking workers who were ordinarily peaceful, law-abiding citizens of a community? Could he call upon other citizens to drop their usual pursuits of life, take down their weapons, furnish their own food, and march against men who might be their own neighbors, merely to secure for some mill owner the right to operate his mill as he saw fit? […] Especially was this true when the striking employee evinced a propensity to meet force with force, gun with gun, and a cracked skull with a cracked skull. The sheriff and the country confronted a new problem. Clearly if the ordinary facilities of the law-enforcing agencies were not adequate to provide the protection which he felt necessary to the operation of his enterprise, then the employer must secure that protection for himself.105
The establishment of public police forces, moreover, was accompanied by problems and political disputes. In a period rife with Nativist agitation and marked by an increasingly contentious atmosphere over the issue of slavery, politicians of all ideological backgrounds would fight over the control of public police forces to further their agenda. This made municipal public policing highly volatile and unstable, and increased demand for private policing among those who were able to afford it.106 Jonathan Obert has argued that it was the combination of this crisis and the continued reliance of the elites on the old systems of deputization alongside the new that transformed and hybridized both public and private governance, and “created a class of specialists who […] moved easily between public and private policing roles.”107 Private policing was always a controversial issue, with the Illinois legislature considering a ban in 1857, and many were convinced that private agencies exaggerated or even deliberately
104 Cf. Obert 2018., p. 836 105 Hogg 1944, p. 171f. 106 Cf. O‘Hara 2016, p. 18 107 Obert 2018, p. 828 22 exacerbated threats to secure employment.108 By the late 1860s, however, a dual system had become the norm in the US. Private guards, such as the Reading Coal and Iron Police, and detectives from agencies like Pinkerton existed alongside, and cooperated with, an increasingly professionalized public police force.109 In fact, several studies contend that the Pinkerton system preceded and informed all federal policing systems in the United States, particularly the FBI, which has frequently been accused of entrapment and agent provocateur use.110 No other state embodied this public-private system quite like Pennsylvania, where, in the coal regions, the army and state militia were used for policing only to be replaced by private forces, as will be further detailed in chapters 5.2 and 5.3. Moreover, no private force ever achieved the notoriety or size of the state’s Coal and Iron Police forces, of which each major operator had one at their disposal. Private policing in the employment of railroads was legalized and formalized in 1865 by the Pennsylvania legislature, with the governor being able to grant police powers to any person registered by the railroad. In 1866, this system was extended to all coal and foundry businesses. No criteria for registration were set and no background checks conducted. Officially, they were supposed to only guard company property, but due to their state charter, they had just as much power in public spaces.111 While the governor theoretically had the power to revoke licenses, there is no evidence that this ever occurred in practice, giving private police forces nearly unlimited and uncontrolled agency. As for the specifics of Schuylkill County, the trend of coevolution is visible as well, with a modern public police force being first introduced in 1867, two years after the formation of the Coal and Iron Police. This system created the office of a county police marshal to be appointed by the governor and overseeing a force of up to 100 men. While the public system had some effect, companies still relied increasingly on the private system and expanded it after the public system proved to be increasingly effective.112 This tendency illustrates that, despite security concerns being the official reason for the creation of private forces, coal and iron companies in particular were likely more interested in deliberate, totalitarian abuse of police powers than in merely securing their property, which a functional public system could have achieved just as well. In the anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania, the private forces would coordinate and even merge. In the person of Robert Linden, who was both a captain of the Reading Coal and Iron Police and the head of a secret “flying squadron” comprised of an equal number of Coal and Iron
108 Cf. O’Hara 2016, p. 18 109 Cf. Obert 2018, p. 828 110 Cf. Cohen 2007, p. 33 111 Cf. Shaloo 1929, p. 58 112 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 136
23 officers and Pinkerton operatives, this coordination was embodied.113 Linden was a Pinkerton operative whose experience in the Navy during the Civil War years gave him the necessary background to run this flying squadron in a paramilitary fashion,114 which he would do to devastating effect. The system of the Coal and Iron Police would persist well into the 20th century, with a force numbering in the thousands as of 1929. Throughout their existence, they were repeatedly accused of abuse of power, gratuitous violence, and murder.115 Private policing institutions thus amounted to what Wilbur R. Miller has referred to as ‘a state within The States’ – an institution that was at times in competition with official organs, at times officially employed or deputized by them, but one that would always defy attempts at control and regulation and in turn greatly influenced public modes of policing.116 Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, one private detective company would come to embody this model more than any other: the Pinkertons. As Michael Cohen has demonstrated, they effectively functioned as a federal policing agency before the United States began developing a public counterpart.117
4.2 The Pinkertons
Founded by Scottish immigrant Allan Pinkerton, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency began as an additional security service for banks and railroads willing to go beyond what public forces had to offer. Originally involved in the Chartist labor movement, Pinkerton fled Scotland in 1843 during a crackdown against said movement and came to Illinois, where he established himself as a cooper. While scouting for suitable wood in 1847, he came upon a counterfeiting operation and returned with the sheriff to have the forgers arrested. He soon made a reputation for himself as an anti-counterfeiting investigator and was made sheriff’s deputy in 1849. A year later, he relocated to Chicago, where he became the only detective on the recently created public police force of the city.118 In 1852, he was appointed as a special agent for the US Postal Service, tasked with detecting counterfeiting and mail fraud, and founded the North West Police Agency, which would later be renamed Pinkerton National Detective Agency.119 Through this combination of public and private policing duties, his agency became the national embodiment of the trends outlined in the previous subchapter.
113 Cf. Lukas 1997, p. 183f. 114 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 281 115 Cf. Shaloo 1929, p. 59 116 Cf. Miller 2013, p. 133f. 117 Cf. Cohen 2007, p. 33 118 Cf. Hogg 1944, p. 197 119 Cf. O’Hara 2016, p. 17 24
Pinkerton quickly succeeded in creating a distinction between his agency and competitors, who operated on a reward system, by paying his detectives per diem, and established services such as anti-counterfeiting operations, investigation of fare embezzlement, and protection of company property, namely transport of valuables to and from the West Coast, for which Chicago was an important railroad hub.120 The structure of the Pinkertons was highly professionalized from the 1860s onwards, with a head office in Chicago, managed by Allan Pinkerton himself, and various regional branch offices, each with their own superintendent and local agents, as well as a centralized legal department. The Pinkertons also developed specialization training, with experienced agents leading individual departments tailored to a certain type of investigation, and passing on their skills to newer agents. The most famous example of this is probably Kate Warne, Pinkerton’s first female detective who joined the agency in 1856. By 1860, Warne was at the helm of her own women’s department in Chicago and trained female agents to conduct investigations in which their gender would provide an advantage – such as befriending the wives of suspects to gain intelligence.121 During the Civil War, the agency would become even more deeply intertwined with state power, and thus even more influential. Tasked with investigating sabotage in Baltimore, a Northern city with considerable pro-slavery elements in 1860, he claimed to have uncovered a plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln who was supposed to make a stop in Baltimore on his way to inauguration. Promptly tasked with rerouting the president-elect’s journey, he levied his newfound influence to secure employment from Union general McClellan and became heavily involved in war espionage. Although his results in this regard were mixed, Pinkerton became one of the most important independent contractors for the War Department throughout the Civil War, and was able to establish new branch offices of his agency in New York and Philadelphia.122 After the war, despite the scrutiny his work faced – several sources, including members of Lincoln’s staff, claimed that he had embellished or even entirely fabricated the assassination plot to get close to the president – Pinkerton was able to capitalize on his vast network among government and business elites that he had built throughout the war. The name ‘Pinkerton’ had, in the postwar years, become synonymous with private policing per se. The agency was able to secure further inroads into formal public policing positions, as in the case of George H. Bangs, head of the New York office, who held several positions in local police departments and federal investigative entities, and secured a major federal contract in 1871. During the postwar years, the agency also expanded its portfolio into professional strikebreaking, providing armed guards to a
120 Cf. O’Hara 2016, p. 13 121 Cf. Walton 2015, p. 49 122 Cf. O’Hara 2016, p. 19–23
25 mining operator at a miners’ strike in Braidewood, Illinois, in 1866.123 This new approach, alongside the high-profile case of the Reno gang in 1866–68, reinforced the perception among the industrial elite that the agency would “go to virtually any length in satisfying the desires of its major business clientele”124 – that is, the agency acquired a reputation to do absolutely anything to infiltrate and bring down both organized crime and organized labor, including breaking the law themselves. The Indiana-based Reno gang orchestrated the first successful train robbery in America in 1866. Perhaps due to sympathies among the local population, public law enforcement in the area proved unable or unwilling to successfully pursue the matter, and the express company whose freight had been robbed, along with the railroad company, hired the Pinkertons to investigate. The agency infiltrated the gang and was able to arrest several of its members, who were then lynched by a vigilante mob before they could be put on trial. A letter written by Allan Pinkerton in 1874 tacitly admits that the agency was involved in setting up the lynching, although its specific degree of involvement remains unclear.125 Pinkerton’s move into extralegal activities was by no means irrational or unprecedented – it was well established, as earlier private detectives had often cultivated a symbiotic relationship with smugglers and thieves, letting them walk free if they handed over a portion of the stolen goods or the revenue from selling it. The detective would then use the extorted money to reimburse his employer for a part of their losses. From their inception, the success of private detectives depended on a certain willingness to bend, if not break, the law.126 Pinkerton merely adapted this mindset into a form tailored to his elite clientele: he demonstratively did not care if his methods of bringing down thieves or strikers were illegal under any given circumstance, thereby signaling that he would fulfill his clients’ wishes no matter what. The investigation of the James-Younger gang throughout the 1870s provides a good example of that approach, as Pinkerton agents evidently committed crimes: arson and murder. After a series of failed infiltration attempts, the Pinkertons attacked the house of James’ mother in January 1875, throwing an incendiary device. The fire killed an 8-year- old boy and severely injured the mother.127 This seemingly desperate, dilettantish approach proved momentarily damaging to the reputation of the agency, but may have been motivated by a desperation to achieve quick and spectacular results. By 1872, the Pinkertons were in deep financial troubles, the extent of which is evident in letters by Allan Pinkerton himself, writing, for instance, to his Chicago superintendent Fitzpatrick in August 1872: “We are in great want of money. On every hand I am in debt, yet I
123 Cf. Hogg 1944, p. 177 124 W. Churchill 2004, p. 6 125 Cf. Ibid., p. 9 126 Cf. Miller 2013, p. 130 127 Cf. W. Churchill 2004, p. 13 26 cannot get any person to help me, but everyone whom I owe a shilling to, are calling upon me for it.”128 Internal difficulties added to the problem, with one detective embezzling several thousand dollars in funds, according to a Pinkerton letter from October 1872.129 To make matters worse, potential competitors were forming. One prominent example was the Thiel Detective Service Company, founded the same year in St. Louis, Missouri by Gus Thiel, a former Pinkerton employee. Thiel ultimately never became a serious threat to the Pinkertons, and no one would challenge the agency’s hegemony before Burns and Baldwin-Felts at the beginning of the 20th century, 130 but how this would have developed if the Pinkertons’ financial troubles had persisted even just a little longer is impossible to guess. Throughout early 1873, the agency continued to struggle. In a letter to Bangs, dating from May 18th, Pinkerton appeared hopeless and desperate. “It is the devil to pay all around. Scarcely can tell which way to go, and many times I am perfectly bewildered what to do. […] I am afraid our business will close up ere long.”131 But then, in the same letter, he suggested a last resort: “Go to Franklin Gowen […], suggest some things to Mr. Gowen about one thing or another […] and I have no doubt he will give us work.”132 Given the fact that it was Gowen who hired the Pinkertons to investigate the Molly Maguires a few months later, it is quite apparent to what this referred. The Molly Maguire investigation, along with Pinkerton’s successful incursions into the publishing world of dime novels,133 then saved the agency’s fortune and reputation. The positive press on their exploits in the anthracite coalfield soon overshadowed the arson incident, and the agency would shift its focus to professional strikebreaking. According to Weiss, “the Mollie Maguire affair bolstered the image of the Pinkertons in the eyes of corporations, and the money it received saved the Agency financially.”134 The investigation represented not only a change of fortune, but also a change of portfolio for the Pinkertons, who established a second espionage service, directed at infiltrating trade unions as well as radical groups.135 Largely unaffected by the Anti-Pinkerton Act of 1893,136 which banned Pinkerton agents from federal employment but had little impact on the private sector, its areas of activity would
128 Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency Records, Family Directors File, Letterpress Copybooks v.1, p. 26 129 Cf. Ibid., p. 194 130 Cf. Walton 2015, p. 20 131 Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency Records, Family Directors File, Letterpress Copybooks v.1, p. 350ff. 132 Ibid., p. 354 133 One example of these dime novels, which were semi-fictional, glorified accounts of real cases, will be examined closely in chapters 5 and 6, as it represents one of the most important primary sources for this thesis. 134 Weiss 1986, p. 92 135 Cf. Ibid., p. 89f. 136 As a response to the bloodshed during the Homestead strike, in which four workers and two Pinkerton guards were killed, Congress banned federal government employment of private detective agencies, and a total of twenty-six states passed similar laws, sometimes also banning private employment of armed guards. The debate was a momentary public relations disaster for the Pinkertons, but the laws proved largely toothless, and strikebreaking services by private detective agencies continued to thrive – cf. Jeffreys-Jones 1972, p. 236ff.
27 include the Haymarket affair, the Homestead strike, Ludlow, and Harlan County. Accusations of agent provocateur tactics, false flag attacks, and similar approaches were widespread throughout the agency’s history, and particularly in the 1880s and 1890s, several incidents occurred in which Pinkerton agents were caught in the act of sabotaging infrastructure or inciting riots during strikes – in a Burlington strike, 1888, one of the men arrested for wrecking a train turned out to be a Pinkerton agent, and an attempt to derail a train during the New York strike of 1890 was likewise the work of the agency.137 The career of the Pinkertons as America’s leading professional strikebreakers ended in 1937 when a series of congressional investigations, headed by Wisconsin senator Robert LaFollette Jr., exposed and condemned their unlawful activities. The agency itself survived the fallout from these investigations, but was forced to diversify into other areas. As a subsidiary of the Swedish Securitas AB, the Pinkerton Agency exists to this day, and has recently – in 2020 – been implicated in controversial, potentially illegal, acts of labor espionage in Amazon warehouses once again.138 The ample evidence for the agency employing unlawful means, up to and including murder, combined with its financial difficulties, establishes both a precedent and a strong motive for similar behavior in the Pennsylvania coalfields. The existing scholarship on the Molly Maguires, while noting the agency’s penchant for breaking the law, has generally ignored its financial troubles at the time of the affair. However, it is absolutely crucial to any evaluation of the agency’s role in the Molly Maguire case. Not only does it establish a motive to embellish or even outright fabricate spectacular findings, but Pinkerton’s effort to save his bankrupt agency is directly linked to his successful attempt to peddle his services to Franklin B. Gowen of the Reading Coal and Iron Company, and thus, the Molly Maguire investigation, as the letter from 1873, quoted earlier, makes abundantly clear.139
4.3 Informants, infiltrators, and agents provocateurs
In the previous subchapter, the use of agents provocateurs by the Pinkerton Agency has already been established. However, agent provocateur tactics have complex implications, which merit separate discussion. First of all, some clarification is in order regarding the roles of informants, infiltrators, and agents provocateurs. The use of informants has a long history in Common law-
137 Cf. Hogg 1944, p. 175f. 138 Cf. Canales 2020. This represents a clear case of path dependency: the history of the Pinkerton agency matters to a point where it actively influences the present because said history has created a dynamic within the organization in which “actors are hemmed in by existing institutions and structures that channel them along established policy paths.”, cf. Wilsford 1994, p. 251 139 Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency Records, Family Directors File, Letterpress Copybooks v.1, p. 354 28 influenced countries,140 where it can be traced back to the medieval practice of approvement. Charged with a crime, the approver confessed his guilt and implicated his accomplices in exchange for a pardon – which would only be granted if the alleged accomplices were found guilty. That this created an incentive to lie and fabricate accusations in order to save oneself was a recurring criticism, which can already be found in legal treatises of the 18th century. Nevertheless, the informant continues to play a role until the present day, and testimonies of informers were used in the Molly Maguire investigation. However, the informant is not part of law enforcement, and thus beyond the scope of this discussion. Rather, like in the medieval example, informants are suspects or defendants themselves who collaborate hoping for a pardon or a lighter sentence.141 Infiltrators and agents provocateurs, on the other hand, are part of law enforcement. While they join an organization or group under the pretense of sharing its goals, their affiliation with the police predates their membership of the former. The difference between infiltrators and agents provocateurs is gradual: Upon joining the group, a police spy or infiltrator is assigned with the task of gathering intelligence while remaining a passive observer, while the agent provocateur acts as a highly specialized instigator; his objective is to incite criminal activity among the members of the group and draw them into a trap. The use of infiltrators occurs in most branches of policing, while the use of agents provocateurs is usually confined to political policing.142 Undercover policing, too, reflects the hybridity of policing discussed in the previous chapter. According to Jacqueline Ross, it played a particularly prominent role in this hybrid system, and in the state-building process of the United States in general. While in continental Europe, techniques of undercover policing had been developed by the state in the era of Absolutism, in the US it was from its outset a private endeavor, in the employment of large corporations to suppress the labor movement and protect property both against internal theft and against outlaws in frontier areas, the ultimate goal of this strategy being “to bypass and eventually to commandeer government.”143 Therefore, while both public and private police forces used the same tactics, their motives differed. Public actors used infiltrators and agents provocateurs mainly to curtail political opposition, or gain control over segments of society that would be difficult to access by other means.144 Private
140 Other countries, of course, in many cases have their own traditions of using informants and infiltrators, e.g. rooted in the French absolutist political policing of the Haute Police, cf. Ross 2020, p. 24 141 Cf. R. Donnelly 1951, p. 1091f. Under some legal systems, this role is institutionalized as ‘state’s evidence’ or ‘crown witness’. 142 Cf. Ibid., p. 1092f. – For other types of investigation, particularly vice and organized crime, a counterpart to the agent provocateur exists, the stool pigeon. The stool pigeon has a role very similar to the agent provocateur, but his background is that of the informer: usually a gambling or drug addict, petty criminal, or similar. 143 Ross 2020, p. 24 144 Cf. R. Donnelly 1951, p. 1094
29 forces, on the other hand, may have been more inclined to use such methods because it furthered motives beyond the end goal of a particular investigation. Their objective, according to Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, was to create perpetual demand for themselves by maintaining the impression of an acute threat, and to such ends, agent provocateur tactics were of course a very practical means. Having operatives incite or commit crimes, especially in the context of labor conflict, not only ensured ongoing employment by prolonging the conflict at hand. It also created the impression of a labor movement potentially more militant and dangerous to employers than it actually was, thereby increasing demand for the services of professional strikebreakers.145 This makes it abundantly clear that private detective agencies had an interest in using agent provocateur tactics inherent in their role, which differed from both their corporate employers and state actors. Of course, state actors were at times equally willing to do corporate bidding, and used the same tactics, but not in the same perpetuity.146 This is confirmed by John Walton’s recent monograph on private detectives. Walton argues that “the frame-up was a standard tactic,”147 and illustrates that private agencies had a vested interest in fomenting violence, as it would make their service lengthier and thus more lucrative – especially since transport and accommodation of detectives were usually paid by the employing company and the agency’s overhead costs were next to zero.148 Jeffreys-Jones further illustrates this pattern with a rather telling example, which is worth quoting in full:
One day in 1914, Zumach was sitting in a New York restaurant with David Silverman, an official and executive board member of the Neck Wear Makers Union. As they were chatting, in walked Max Schlansky, of the United Secret Service Agency, 1133 Broadway. Schlansky entered into conversation with Silverman about the strike in progress against the business of Oppenheimer, Franc and Langsdorf. The guard business arising out of the dispute was being handled for the notorious Val O'Farrell Agency by its chief agent, Schultz. The engagement was yielding $300 weekly for Schultz, but was now coming to an end. Schlansky averred that Schultz did not know his business, for he had let slip many opportunities to prolong the strike. Perceiving an opportunity to extract some money out of the situation, Schlansky proposed to Silverman that the union leader hire some of his Plug Uglies to beat up Schultz's men. Schlansky pointed out that in this event, Oppenheimer and partners would probably fire Schultz, and engage Schlansky. Then, presumably for a further fee, Schlansky would ensure that the union won the strike. It is quite clear from this example that Schlansky had no desire to extirpate trade unionism. Why should he? Industrial conflict was his bread and butter.149
In 1937, the LaFollette committee, whose decisive impact on the curtailing of professional strikebreakers has been mentioned in the previous subchapter, came to a similar conclusion. One report states that
145 Cf. Jeffreys-Jones 1972, p. 245ff. 146 Cf. Ross 2020, p. 27 147 Cf. Walton 2015, p. 111 148 Cf. Ibid., p. 124 149 Jeffreys-Jones 1972, p. 246 30
employer and agency have two separate vested interests in violence. The agency's interest in violence, and by the same token that of the strikebreaker's, is that it will prolong and embitter the fight so that a stronger guard will be called out and more money expended through the agency. The employer's interest in violence is that it shall, by being attributed to the workers, bring discredit to them, thus alienating public sympathy for their cause.150
While motivation and general approach are rather easily understood, the in-depth analysis of infiltration as a tactic brings with it a very specific set of problems, regardless of whether the actors involved are public or private. Cunningham and Soto-Carrión argue that in the context of political policing, the boundaries between the infiltrator and the agent provocateur are fluid, and that all infiltrators move “between passive and active participation in social movement activity to convincingly maintain their entrée and simultaneous allegiance both to authorities and challengers. Indeed, this interstitial position – between policing and activist arenas – defines the infiltrator role.”151 Accordingly, Gary Marx, in his seminal study on the role of informants and agents provocateurs in social movements, contends that the distinction between informant and agent provocateur, while sharp in theory, is difficult to uphold empirically because even passive informants may be pushed towards a more active role in order to secure the kind of information they are looking for, or may pass on false or exaggerated information:
The nature of the role may lead the informer beyond his assigned task. "Discovering" evidence that would serve to justify his role could help to alleviate his guilt or conflict over the role. Exaggerating the importance of the group may make him feel that what he does is significant. Further, wishful thinking, limited exposure, and selective perception may lead the agent to believe a group's own exaggerated estimates of its power and appeal and to confuse vague revolutionary rhetoric with specific plans. The functions of such rhetoric and the fantasy of violence that characterize some oppressed and powerless groups may not be fully appreciated.152
When applied to the earlier discussion of the motives of private police forces in using agent provocateur tactics, it becomes apparent that this incentive to ‘discover’ evidence was even greater in the private sector, as it would stem not only from the dynamics of the role itself. Rather, private agencies would often deliberately feed false information to their employers to ensure the aforementioned perpetual demand for their services, particularly such information that exaggerated either the ideological or organizational threat level. To secure the former, an agency might turn strikers who were politically rather disinterested beyond their own bread and butter issues into hardline communists, to establish the latter, it would exaggerate numbers, possession of arms,
150 Cf. United States Congress 1937, p. 10 151 Cunningham & Soto-Carrión 2015, p. 158 152 G. Marx 1974, p. 420
31 readiness to use them, and similar.153 This does not mean, however, that an infiltrator had nigh unlimited agency to invent or fabricate evidence. Agent provocateur tactics depend on a complex relationship between political movements and policing agencies, and without the conditions for violence being met, even the most skilled provocateur would probably not be capable of inciting it, as Gary Marx emphasizes:
With the exception of outright frame-ups, when illegal protest actions occur there is obviously an interaction between the agent and other activists involved in the illegal activity. This is what makes entrapment and encouragement such interesting and illusive concepts. Unless certain political themes and tensions are present in a society and/or certain personality predispositions present on the part of potential activists, the most skilled provocateur may be unable to provoke anyone, and his efforts may merely be viewed with amusement, if not suspiciousness.154
Existing research and theories therefore demonstrate that the use of infiltrators and agents provocateurs was common, particularly in the context of labor conflict, and that dynamics inherent in the role drove them towards active participation. However, it is also established that the boundaries between passive infiltrators and active agents provocateurs are fluid and often complicated to discern in practice, and that even the most deliberately active agents provocateurs depend on circumstances and conditions that precipitate whatever action they try to provoke. That is, if the goal of an agent provocateur is to incite violence, the conditions under which an organization or group would deem the use of violence justifiable have to be met. All of this will have to be considered when assessing the potential use of agent provocateur tactics in the context of the Molly Maguires.
5. The migration of a specter
This chapter will provide some background on the regional context (5.1), and then divide the Molly Maguire phenomenon of Pennsylvania into two different segments, one from 1862–71 (5.2) and one from 1874–75 (5.3), as well as giving an account of the trials (5.4) and the aftermath of the events (5.5). Existing scholarship agrees that the two waves of Molly Maguire activity were markedly distinct not only by being several years removed from each other, but also by area of activity, targets, and overall approach. Kenny notes that immigration patterns may have played a role in this, with the second wave occurring in places that had not been settled yet during the first wave.155 While this argument certainly holds some weight, the following chapters will illustrate that
153 Cf. Walton 2015, p. 122 – Of course, public law enforcement at times had similar motives and used similar tactics, particularly in the context of the Red Scares or the Cold War, but those were contingent on specific ideological dispositions and doctrines. 154 G. Marx 1974, p. 439f. 155 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 71 32 existing research has underestimated the differences between the two waves, and that the second one was substantially transformed by the influence of private policing in the region. The source material used in this chapter includes a local newspaper (the Pottsville-based Miners’ Journal which, despite its name, was linked to the interests of local, independent operators),156 court records, the Pinkerton case files from the Library of Congress and the Hagley Museum in Wilmington, Delaware, and The Molly Maguires and the Detectives, a semi-fictional account of the affair published by Pinkerton in 1877, and was probably (at least partly) ghostwritten, although clearly based on the original reports.157 The semi-fictional texts authorized by Pinkerton have often been dismissed by researchers because (despite claiming to be), they are quite obviously not strictly factual. Rather, Pinkerton’s account of the Molly Maguires – as well as the entirety of such semi-fictional detective novels – is to be classified as “a concerted effort by private detectives to emphasize the crime-fighting uses of such tactics to counter the bad publicity from the labour infiltration that accounted for the bulk of their revenues.”158 This precisely, however, makes them incredibly valuable source material for an approach that reads them in a way they were never meant to be read. Due to its narrative character, Pinkerton’s account may contain representations of the Molly Maguires inadvertently more realistic and less invariably hostile than their representations in newspaper articles or court documents. Through a critical reading of this material, it is possible to examine how much it contrasts with other official narratives, or, in the words of Stoler, “how deeply it goes against the grain.”159 Moreover, against the assessment of previous scholars, who prioritized the reports in the Hagley collection over Pinkerton’s semi-fictional narrative,160 it is to be said that none of the reports in this collection are originals. Rather, they are summaries written by Pinkerton’s Philadelphia branch superintendent Franklin to inform Gowen of the investigation’s progress, and thus may have been substantially altered and are to be considered of equally questionable authenticity. The original reports are nowhere to be found in either the Pinkerton or the Reading archive and are to be presumed lost. From a source-critical perspective, these sources must thus be treated equally.161 Both are second-hand accounts, based on first-hand testimony but written by someone else. Both are biased against their subjects. Ascribing greater validity to the reports, as Kenny has done, is questionable under the aspect of source criticism.
156 Other newspapers, such as the Shenandoah Herald or the Mahanoy Gazette, existed in the area, but were not continuously published through the period surveyed. Since the analysis in a later chapter (6.3) requires continuous availability, the Miners’ Journal has been chosen. The Miners’ Journal also frequently reprinted news items and op-eds from other papers, which ensures a fairly good overview of the local press. 157 Cf. Walton 2015, p. 18 158 Ross 2020, p. 28 159 Cf. Stoler 1992, p. 152 160 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 154f. 161 Cf. Edelberg & Simonsen 2015, p. 219
33 For better understanding of the spatial aspects of this chapter, a contemporary map of Schuylkill County and its boroughs will be provided. Note that this map does not reflect topographical conditions; the coal regions of the county were divided into two parts by Broad Mountain, denoted on the map in New Castle Township, with the West Branch coalfield (townships Cass, Foster, Reilly, Branch, Norwegian and parts of New Castle) being the center of activity in the 1860s, and the area ‘north of the mountain’ (townships Butler, West Mahanoy, and Mahanoy), which was settled later, accounting for most incidents in the 1870s. Some incidents related to the Molly Maguires also occurred in the neighboring counties of Northumberland, Luzerne, and Carbon; unless otherwise specified, all places mentioned in this chapter are in Schuylkill County. Figure 1: Map of Schuylkill County, 1870s (Library of Congress)
5.1 The making of a scapegoat
The first verifiable mention of ‘Molly Maguire’ in the Anthracite region can be traced back to October 3rd, 1857. An article published in the Pottsville Miners’ Journal and subsequently reprinted across several other papers described a large-scale Irish conspiracy in the region. According to 34
Benjamin Bannan, editor of the paper and linked closely to the interests of independent mining operators, an organization under this name was responsible for large scale voting fraud in the state, with 55 inspectors during the 1856 presidential election, “all of them Irish”, having been indicted in Philadelphia for fraud in office. Allegedly originating in Boston, the Molly Maguires are described as a “secret Roman Catholic organization” in league with the Democratic Party, and accused of having influenced miners in the county to vote for the Democratic ticket.162 This rumor did not originate in Schuylkill County, as a similar article appeared the day prior in the Pittsburgh Gazette,163 however it could not be verified who initiated these allegations. While Schuylkill County was not the origin of the myth, it was a breeding ground for conspiracy theories regarding organized labor – and it is this history of conspiracy theories, paired with ethnoreligious scapegoating, that greatly undermines the credibility of the accounts on the Molly Maguires produced in this area. In the previous decades, coal mining had rapidly grown in the region, from 600 miners working in Schuylkill in 1830 to 3.500 in 1842 and surpassing 10.000 in the early 1850s. In the 1830s, labor relations had been relatively quiet, largely due to a scarcity of labor, correspondingly high wages, and a relatively high degree of autonomy enjoyed by the miners. The momentary peace was further sustained by the fact that coal was accessible and abundant in Schuylkill, and the horizontally constructed drift mines allowed for relatively safe, and little arduous, work practices, in which coal was picked by handheld tools without the use of explosives and in relative proximity to the surface. Mining operations were often maintained by small, independent operators, whose class distinction from the workforce would be limited; at times, the operators even worked in the mines themselves. Conversely, miners were usually skilled laborers who brought their own tools and had a relatively high degree of workplace autonomy.164 By the mid-1830s, this system began to crumble. Increasing competition between transport companies lowered coal prices and threatened the profit margins of smaller operators. Those reacted, in turn, by lowering pay and in many cases paying only in scrip, redeemable at company stores at in many cases grossly overinflated rates. The resulting confrontation pitted a Republican- voting managerial and entrepreneurial class against a staunchly Democratic working-class electorate and culminated in a strike for the first time as early as 1842 when 1.500 miners in Schuylkill County (about a third of the workforce in the region) struck. While some of the miners were armed, the strike remained peaceful, and the largely Irish miners appointed a committee of Democratic politicians to negotiate with the operators. These refused, the Miners’ Journal was livid regarding the
162 Cf. Miners’ Journal, Oct 3rd, 1857 163 Cf. Daily Pittsburgh Gazette, Oct 2nd, 1857 164 Cf. Palladino 1990, pp. 46ff.
35 supposed “effrontery and impudence”165 behind such a suggestion, and quickly began to sensationalize reports of occasional disturbances (such as the throwing of stones at the house of a strikebreaker) into attempted murder. The operators and their press outlets were keen to portray any notion of organized labor as inherently conspirative, maintaining that employees should only address grievances individually. The strike was from the beginning heavily suppressed by the militia, indicating, according to Grace Palladino, that the system of using military force in anticipation (real or proclaimed) rather than in response to violence was already taking shape in the early 1840s. So was the refusal to accept any notion of collective bargaining whatsoever, and to treat the very suggestion as an assault on free enterprise.166 Looking at the response from the Miners’ Journal, it becomes apparent that the scapegoat to be identified for labor disturbances was beginning to take shape as well. While it was not yet racialized – the corresponding editions of the paper make no mention of an Irish background – it was insinuated that despite a public and peaceful meeting preceding the sporadic scuffles, the strike was the work of unnamed demagogues with “motives of the most sinister nature”167 inciting violence and sedition among the miners.168 This was a response that was based on ‘free labor’ ideology, the belief that the drawbacks of European industrialization need not be repeated in America and that a common interest existed between labor and local capital, and therefore, that local capital had to be protected by tariffs. As the main culprit for the disturbances, the Miners’ Journal consequently identified the Democratic Party and its affiliates among the press, who were accused a week later of fabricating grievances regarding withheld payments in order to incite riots among the miners.169 Over the next years, one may observe a gradual development towards the scapegoating of the Irish in the local press. Among the early instances of racial stereotyping is an article about an Irish builder who had allegedly smashed an employer’s mirror with his hammer, believing the reflection to be another man, from 1843,170 and a description of Irish immigrants as “habituated to become the tools of artful demagogues [and] entreated by demagogues of Irish descent to join the so called ‘Democratic’ Party.”171 In the same year, the Miners’ Journal attacked Daniel O’Connell for his desire to “deluge his country with blood”172 and his “egotistical attempts to interfere with and
165 Miners’ Journal, July 16th, 1842 166 Cf. Palladino 1990, pp. 50f. 167 Miners’ Journal, July 23rd, 1842 168 Cf. Ibid. 169 Cf. Miners’ Journal, July 30th, 1842 170 Cf. Miners’ Journal, June 17th, 1843 171 Miners’ Journal, June 1st, 1844 172 Miners’ Journal, June 24th, 1843 36 promote faction against our American institutions”173 – an interesting charge, given that it was explicitly voiced in reference to O’Connell’s pronounced opposition to slavery and Bannan’s paper later opposed slavery as well, promptly attacking the Irish for lack of support for the abolitionist cause. Kenny cites Irish opposition to abolitionism as one of the main sources of Bannan’s antipathy,174 an assessment that appears a lot less convincing given the paper’s treatment of O’Connell. Instead, it seems a lot more plausible to suggest that Bannan simply harbored a general prejudice towards the Irish. While he was neutral on the issue of slavery, he attacked them for what he saw as divisive abolitionist views. Once he had embraced abolitionism, their widespread anti- abolitionist sentiment just provided him with another convenient ticket (along with their Catholicism, their affinity for collective action and organized labor, their opposition to the temperance movement, and their affiliation with the Democratic Party as a whole) to express said prejudice. Bulik notes that Bannan’s hatred of the Irish was no mere continuation of sectarianism, although Bannan’s father was an Ulster Protestant immigrant from the Belfast area. Rather, he loathed Irish Catholics because of the challenge they presented to his ideological views.175 Bannan adhered to free labor ideology and the according protestant work ethic with nearly religious devotion. Irish miners, who according to Meagher experienced net downward mobility in the period from 1840 to 1870, had little to gain from such ideological dispositions, and overwhelmingly rejected them.176 They had no chance at upward mobility, due to a lack of education and widespread workplace discrimination, and they did not aspire to live in harmony with an itself laboring, small operator class as might have been the case in the 1830s, because the mines especially in the area around Cass Township, the Irish stronghold of Schuylkill County, were controlled by a large corporation, the Forest Improvement Company. The very presence of such Irish miners, whose immigration he had furthered in the 1830s when he thought it beneficial to the independent operators, was anathema to Bannan and his worldview.177 In September 1843, one Jacob Overbeck from Pottsville used the Miners’ Journal to announce his candidacy for sheriff, declaring to run “solely and only opposed to the Irish candidate”, and accusing the latter of buying votes by bribery and distributing free liquor.178 The following year, the paper blamed the Irish themselves for the anti-Irish riots in Philadelphia.179 While it is worth noting that the paper features some sympathetic representations of the Irish as well, particularly with
173 Miners’ Journal, June 24th, 1843 174 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 77 175 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 112 176 Cf. Meagher 2005, p. 81f. 177 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 148f. 178 Cf. Miners’ Journal, Sept 23rd, 1843 179 Cf. Miners’ Journal, June 29th, 1844
37 regards to Famine refugees, the overall tendency of the 1840s links the Irish to an undue influence in American politics, alcoholism, and crime.180 The famine migration brought more Irish laborers to the mine regions, where they found conditions that were little, if at all, different from the ones they had left behind in Ireland. The scrip company store system echoed the practice of landlords in Ireland forcing tenants to grind their oats at a mill owned by the estate, at similarly inflated prices. There is evidence of operators refusing to pay wages in cash even partially, at minuscule amounts as low as twelve cents, when this was requested e.g. to buy medicine for a sick child.181 Arthur H. Lewis, in his Lament for the Molly Maguires, gives a harrowing description of the living conditions of a typical Irish family in the mining communities:
After his twelve or fourteen hour stint of dangerous, back-breaking labor, the Irishman went to what could only euphemistically be called a home. […] The frames of these two-room houses were of one-inch planks […]. Each room had one narrow window without glass. Only in summer were these slits open. Otherwise they were sealed off with cardboard in a vain effort to keep out the cold. The roof leaked and there were holes in the side walls. The floor was Mother Earth, tramped hard by generations of bare feet. […] In each of these miserable rooms lived a separate family, consisting of the man of the house, his wife, their six, eight or ten children, and even an occasional boarder. Cowsheds or chicken coops resembled human habitations more than did these shacks.182
Throughout the 1850s, the local press became ever more hostile towards the Irish. Whenever ethnic disturbances involving the Irish were reported, the Miners’ Journal portrayed the Irish as the culprits, as in the case of an altercation between Irish and Scottish immigrants in 1852 which left one Irishman dead.183 Explicit charges of the Irish influencing elections were made in 1853,184 and they were once again repeatedly linked to criminality and drunkenness.185 The pattern of blaming the Irish for any and all riot activity in which they were involved, even when only involved as victims of violence, was repeated, in greater force, in the paper’s coverage of the August 1855 race riots in Louisville, Kentucky. The non-Nativist local press maintained that it was a Nativist, Protestant mob attacking Irish and German immigrants and blamed the incident squarely and exclusively on the former.186 This is supported by the entire historical scholarship on the affair.187
180 Cf. Miners Journal, July 14th, 1849, p. 2 181 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 131 182 Lewis 1964, p. 7f. 183 Cf. Miners’ Journal, May 1st, 1852 184 Cf. Miners’ Journal, Dec 24th, 1853 185 Cf. Miners’ Journal, May 27th, 1854 186 Cf. Louisville Journal, Aug 7th, 1855 187 Cf. Congleton 1965, Hutchinson 1971, Harper 2011 38
However, the Miners’ Journal claimed that Irish and German immigrants attacked peaceful American citizens.188 In the two decades before the Civil War, one can thus observe the development of an inflammatory rhetoric that created a sectarian political climate along ethnoreligious lines – a climate that was, while to some extent manifest nationwide, far less pronounced even in other regions of Pennsylvania, where some Republican representatives would hold pro-labor views to a degree.189 Both anti-Irish and anti-labor views were thus well established in Schuylkill County long before the name ‘Molly Maguire’ would be documented in the press for the first time. Building on the established view of regarding organized labor as a conspiracy per se, as well as a similarly early established nativist, anti-immigration sentiment, the Irish in particular were increasingly singled out as culprits of political intrigue and mob tactics in a way that from the beginning and even before its clear associations with violence has the characteristics of a conspiracy theory. This has to be kept in mind when assessing any testimony on the Molly Maguires. In favor of the validity of such testimony, it is worth noting that at least one assassination of the Whiteboy flavor did occur in 1846. John Reese, a Welsh miner, killed one of his neighbors in a heavily Irish mine patch near St. Clair. He was acquitted, and upon returning to the neighborhood, he was struck down and killed with a pick. The assassin had whitened his face, a common trope in Whiteboy groups. When a local Irish miner was convicted of the murder, the influential AOH network secured his pardon. While this was never linked to any sort of organized Molly Maguire conspiracy, it at least proves that some of the mindset of agrarian retributive justice had made its way to the Pennsylvania coalfields.190 Bulik also demonstrates that the practice of mummery, so essential to Irish agrarian secret societies, had surfaced in the region during the 1850s, where it – apart from its in itself relatively apolitical, intra-community festive significance – took on a political role in the context of anti-militia protests.191 Accordingly, the existence of a group calling themselves the Molly Maguires in the antebellum years is likely not a fabrication. They feature in local Cass Township folklore, as having existed as a loosely organized group in the 1850s. Kenny suspects that around this time, they may have started to use the local lodge of the Ancient Order of Hibernians for purposes of labor activism. There is no surviving evidence documenting the existence of this group in Cass Township, and it has never been linked to any violent incident,192 but some written threats that bore a certain resemblance to coffin notes were recorded in the antebellum years already, suggesting
188 Cf. Miners’ Journal, August 11th, 1855 189 Cf. Shepard 2013, p. 38 190 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 140f. 191 Cf.Ibid., p. 155 192 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 80
39 that some Irish miners drew on forms of resistance developed in the Irish countryside.193 Whether they did so in any kind of organized secret society or just as a loosely applied tactic, however, cannot be established with certainty.
5.2 The first wave
With the outbreak of the Civil War, Pennsylvania was in a peculiar position. Bordering the slave states of Maryland and Delaware, it was a potential target for Confederate invasion and had strong tendencies of opposition to the war. Schuylkill County, with local leading Democrat Francis W. Hughes being one of the most outspoken ‘Copperhead’,194 anti-war Democrats, would soon be at the center of said opposition, which saw large-scale resistance to the draft. In what Kenny has referred to as “an amalgam of draft resistance, labor activism and direct, violent action,”195 Irish miners in the anthracite coalfield mobilized considerable resistance against the Union war effort. It was in this climate that the transformation of the nativist narratives described in the previous chapter was completed. Where a paper like the Miners’ Journal had previously been both anti-Irish and anti-labor, it would now merge these two things. Organized labor became synonymous with violence and treason, and both were heavily associated with the Irish. By the 1860s, moreover, the transition of the mining industry from pre-industrial, artisanal labor to a modern wage-labor industry was nearing completion. The autonomy of miners in the workplace decreased dramatically, and productivity demands rose.196 Cass Township, an Irish stronghold in the vicinity of Pottsville, was at the forefront of this development. Lists of rules and regulations were common already in the 1860s, the mines were bigger than in the rest of the county, and in the hands of a large corporation owned by the wealthy New York-based Heckscher family.197 For the Irish miners, this constituted, according to Bulik, “a nightmare vision of the future that looked very much like their past, with the prospect that they would be reduced to their former status as tenant farmers, subject to eviction at any time, ruled by distant powers bent on expropriating the region’s wealth.”198 Given what was said in the previous chapter regarding the living conditions of Irish miners, the hostility of the press and the local elites, combined with this onslaught of modernization, it is
193 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 135 194 The copperhead is a species of highly venomous snake widespread throughout the eastern US. During the Civil War, the term was used to describe anti-war Democratic politicians who favored an immediate peace with the Confederacy, the notion being that they were traitors, venomous snakes amidst an unsuspecting public. 195 Kenny 1998, p. 84 196 Cf. Dray 2010, p. 87 197 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 86 198 Bulik 2015, p. 119 40 entirely plausible that modes of social banditry rooted in the Irish countryside would be adapted to the American context, notwithstanding all the legitimate doubts surrounding the story of the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania. The grievances were real, and so was a good part of the violent reaction, although – without anticipating too much – it is in many cases difficult to ascertain how big exactly that part was. The labor shortage and increased demand for coal gave the miners leverage over the operators, a leverage that they would fully use. Already in 1861, written threats akin to the ones in rural Ireland started to appear in greater numbers.199 In May 1862, miners went on strike in Cass Township and disabled the pumps at the mines. When the sheriff, along with a contingent of militia, tried to reactivate them, they were repelled by the strikers. A contingent of two hundred federal troops was then deployed for assistance, but encountered no opposition. No anti-war sentiment was voiced during the strike, but in the eyes of the officials, labor resistance during the war in itself constituted treason. The Miners’ Journal, although it did characterize the involvement of the military as an overreaction at the time, would soon allege that a secret society was behind the incident.200 The first killing that would later be ascribed to the Molly Maguires occurred in Audenried, Carbon County, on June 14th, 1862. Frank W. Langdon, a mine foreman, had been involved in a confrontation during a public meeting in preparation for the Fourth of July festivities. A part of the crowd displayed notable anti-war sentiment and allegedly spit on the American flag. Langdon confronted them and was attacked after the meeting, succumbing to his injuries the day after. This incident would only retrospectively be attributed to the Molly Maguires, as the man accused of spitting on the flag was, more than a decade later, questionably identified as John Kehoe, the alleged Molly Maguire leader of the 1870s. One eyewitness reported that he told Langdon “You son of a bitch, I’ll kill you”,201 and had made similar threats before, but such allegations made over a decade later, in the heated atmosphere of a show trial, are of questionable credibility, and – even if true – do not prove Kehoe’s involvement in the actual beating. Other witnesses claimed that Kehoe had not been present at the scene. Either way, Bulik concludes that this incident represented “a drunken crime of opportunity”202 and there was no connection to any secret society activity. Soon after the passage of the Militia Act, things escalated further. Conscription was unpopular to begin with, and the fact that none other than Benjamin Bannan oversaw the draft in
199 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 167 – It is worth noting that at least one of these notes was signed “Captain Rock”, a nod to early Whiteboy activism under the label of “Rockites”, which suggests, first, a Whiteboy rather than Ribbon connection and second, a similar mode of resistance lacking central, coordinated structures. 200 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 87 201 Cf. Ibid., p. 85 202 Bulik 2015, p. 172
41 Schuylkill County probably added fuel to the fire. So did the fact that Republican officials actively used the draft to reduce the Irish electorate by imposing overinflated conscription quotas on Cass Township and similar communities. Soldiers could not vote in Pennsylvania, and recruiting an excess quota of Irishmen meant altering the political balance in the Republicans’ favor.203 The draft census in September 1862 was met with sporadic militancy, and the following month a large crowd assembled in Cass Township, bringing out the men from the collieries, and stopping a train with draftees. Troops were ordered to the county again, and confrontation seemed imminent, but, fearing that this would exacerbate rather than pacify tensions, the authorities resorted to announcing the fulfillment of the draft – releasing conscripts from their duty by claiming the quota in Cass Township had been filled by volunteers. Whether this actually was the case is debated, with Kenny claiming the result was forged,204 while Bulik maintains that the original quota – before the manipulation by the officials – had been filled by volunteers, and there never should have been a draft in Cass. Since Bulik cites an army source stating that Cass Township had an excess of 42 volunteers, his assessment appears more plausible.205 Especially with this being the case, the episode illustrates to which methods anti-Irish demagogues like Bannan would resort in order to police the community’s behavior. It is not without a certain irony that Bannan was doing exactly what he had been accusing the Irish community of doing for twenty years: manipulate the political system through a combination of schemes and violence to produce a favorable electoral outcome. The draft issue was temporarily resolved, but the peace was short-lived. In December, an armed crowd of two hundred raided the Phoenix Colliery in Forestville, Cass Township. They attacked some of the personnel, shut down the furnaces and the company store, warning that they would burn down the colliery if it, or the store, reopened. What is remarkable about this incident is that it was the first one truly reminiscent of the tactics applied in rural Ireland. Although mobilized spontaneously, the crowd enacted a coherent strategy of intimidation, much in the same way that the Hearts of Oak or the Whiteboys had done in the 18th century.206 Their target, a mine that used a scrip company store system, may have been chosen based on that fact. Incidents like this can reliably be ascribed to genuine Molly Maguire activity, while doing the same for the attack on Langdon would be highly speculative. Moreover, the incident illustrates that the source of discontent went far beyond the draft, or the war. On January 2nd, 1863, another assassination occurred which never featured in the Molly Maguire trials (and which Kenny, building his argument largely on the court records, appears to
203 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 174 204 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 88f. 205 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 180 206 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 89 42 have missed) but which clearly bears the handwriting of agrarian retributive justice and is, moreover, connected to the practice of mummery. James Bergen, a Union Army soldier and resident of Coal Castle, had apparently refused to treat a band of mummers and was shot in response. It is the only fatal incident in America that can reliably be linked to the practice of mummery, and thereby illustrates that at least some of the individuals described as Molly Maguires probably had genuine roots in Irish secret societies, rather than merely imperfectly emulating a tradition of which they had heard, but not been a part.207 Strikes continued throughout early 1863, with coffin notices signed ‘Molly Maguire’ or variations thereof becoming increasingly common in Cass Township and Audenried.208 Draft resistance, too, would resume after the passage of the Conscription Act of 1863. The provision of the act that allowed the wealthy to either recruit a substitute or pay a 300-dollar fee to avoid being drafted was sure to provoke controversy, and throughout the summer of 1863, a series of attacks on draft officials prompted Charlemagne Tower, provost marshal in Schuylkill County, to have the draft accompanied by a major show of military force.209 On November 5th, 1863, mine owner George K. Smith was shot in his home at Audenried, Carbon County. Unlike the incident of the previous year, this killing was immediately ascribed to the Molly Maguires, and once again linked to treason. Several other major disturbances and riots occurred in the area, and it was alleged that the secret society attempted to halt coal production and sabotage the war effort. Smith was indeed connected to the draft, as he had hosted some cavalrymen tasked with draft enforcement on October 20th, provided them with information on missing draftees in his employment, and received threats as a result. However, the actual motive is likely more complex, as Smith had recently fired numerous Irish mine workers. Kenny suggests that some of them may have been involved in the assassination, and that the attempted production stoppage was more likely connected to wages than to the war.210 This assassination, too, is consistent with patterns of agrarian resistance in Ireland. Smith had incurred the wrath of the community by two perceived transgressions of the social contract – in his cooperation with the draft authorities and his role as an employer. He had received warnings and threats in a fashion consistent with the modus operandi of secret societies. The group of assassins at his house was also reported to have blackened their faces.211
207 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 184 208 Cf. Ibid., p. 187 209 Cf. Palladino 1990, p. 115 – 119 210 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 97 211 Cf. Ibid., p. 98. Moreover, Bulik alleges that there had been a nocturnal gathering in preparation for this incident, where under the leadership of one James McDonnell, Smith’s fate was decided.211 Bulik takes this information from the court proceedings of a Molly Maguire trial, which – for reasons that will be detailed in chapter 5.4 – should never be taken at face value, but while doing so constitutes the major weakness of Bulik’s work on many other occasions,
43 In the aftermath of this event, several arrests were made under the military regime of Provost Marshal Charlemagne Tower. Consistent with the general theme of the previous year, Tower was a coal speculator who clearly had motives other than patriotism in enforcing a rigorous draft regime. Mine owners like him were quick to further the equation of labor grievances with draft resistance and treason.212 Another one of them, Charles Albright, who would later play a significant role in the Molly Maguire trials, wrote to Lincoln in November 1863 that a group of Irish miners, organized into a society named the Buckshots, “dictate the prices for their work [and] resist the draft.”213 This equation was more than just rhetoric. Tower, who nominally did not have the authority to carry out arrests based on offenses unrelated to the draft, abused his power to arrest miners for labor-related incidents by using the framing of such activities as treason, continuing throughout 1864 after the draft had been completed.214 In the wake of the Smith assassination alone, this approach produced at least 45 unlawful arrests in Carbon County. The detained men were held without charges for months in a prisoner of war camp near Philadelphia until they were brought before a military tribunal in Schuylkill County. Despite internal communication of the Army showing that there was absolutely no evidence against all but two of the defendants, and a majority of them being released without ever been brought to trial as the prosecution feared backlash from mass acquittals, the tribunal managed to secure thirteen convictions on mostly trumped-up charges, for up to five years of hard labor. Convictions were secured based on testimony from employers that the defendant had participated in strikes, which were explicitly equated with draft resistance.215 But the unlawful temporary pacification of Audenried only led to a renewed insurgency in neighboring Schuylkill County. In January 1864, another strike bearing the handwriting of Irish secret societies occurred in Cass Township. Under the leadership of a group of ‘committeemen’, five mines were shut down, accompanied by threats. The Miners’ Journal would publish a coffin notice in March the same year, which is exemplary for the time, and will be shown in full.
there is little reason for doubt in this instance. The facts of the case established outside of the later kangaroo court are clear enough to justify an acceptance of this account as at least largely factual, cf. Bulik 2015, p. 211. 212 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 196 213 Albright cit. Kenny 1998, p. 95 214 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 94f. 215 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 214–218 44
Figure 2: Coffin notice published in the Miners’ Journal, March 12th, 1864
Why the Molly Maguires would choose to publish their coffin notice – which targeted strikebreaking workers, not mining officials – in the paper of their sworn enemy, which did not have a significant working-class subscriber base, is unclear. Kenny claims the note was a reprint of one posted at the colliery in question,216 but the Miners’ Journal issue in question provides no such context. This suggests either a forgery or a direct choice by some ‘Molly Maguires’ to publish a threat in Bannan’s paper, as the note is to be found, without further comment, in the general announcements section. However, the note is probably authentic, as many similar ones were posted at the collieries in early 1864, and the odd phrasing ‘by the real boys’ suggests that unauthorized notes had been posted earlier.217 Throughout early 1864, Bannan and Tower, the former publicly, the latter in private letters, were advocating for a wholesale ethnic cleansing of Cass Township.218 The Miners’ Journal stated that “with the present population of Cass Township there can never be peace”219, called for “these lawless ruffians [to be] removed and their places supplied with peaceable and law-abiding citizens”,220 and for “the law to be vindicated even if Cass and parts of Riley Township should be left a howling wilderness.”221 Tower expressed in a letter that the army should remain in Cass Township “until a better population, a proper sentiment and a continuous thriving industry shall be denizens there.”222
216 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 100 217 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 188 218 Cf. Ibid., p. 229 219 Miners’ Journal, Feb 13, 1864 220 Miners’ Journal, Feb 20, 1864 221 Miners’ Journal, Jan 2, 1864 222 Tower cit. Bulik 2015, p. 224
45 The ‘committee’ was an attempt at organizing a labor union, as Grace Palladino has pointed out. The activities of the committee, about which not much is known otherwise, were aimed at bringing about higher wages, shorter working hours, or both. That this was evidently an attempt at unionizing the mines also becomes apparent in accounts of mine owners, which explicitly label the committee as a union, “render[ing] it almost impossible to conduct the operations of a large colliery with success. For instance, one rule is that no person shall be allowed to work at the collieries unless he belongs to the union and pays an initiation fee.”223 To thwart the unionization effort, coal operators once again conspired with military authorities to have the alleged ringleaders of the committee arrested under fabricated charges of treason – this time, without even pretending that the incidents had anything to do with the draft.224 The alleged Molly Maguire activities during the Civil War thus amount to a complex pattern of draft resistance, retributive justice, and labor organizing that was interpreted by the authorities and the press as “an Irish conspiracy against law, order, and property.”225 To which extent an actual secret society existed, or – if it did – for how many of the events ascribed to it it was responsible, is difficult to evaluate. There is some consistency with the modus operandi of Irish secret societies in the assassinations of Smith and Bergen as well as the reaction to the draft census in 1862, the Phoenix colliery raid, and the activities of the so-called committee. Kenny argues that there is a possibility that the Molly Maguires from the 1850s rumors in Cass Township, who had some connection with the Ancient Order of Hibernians, provided a certain degree of organizational coherence.226 Even if this was the case, however, it seems implausible to suggest that this coherence extended beyond the immediate vicinities of Cass Township and Audenried respectively. Despite Bulik suggesting so, 227 this appears implausible simply because both labor and draft resistance flared up, in alternating patterns, between Schuylkill County (around Cass Township) and Carbon County (around Audenried), in a way that more closely resembles the uncoordinated early Whiteboy uprisings than the coordinated efforts that Ribbonmen or Steelboys could muster. The suggestions by Charlemagne Tower and others of a coordinated force of resistance, several thousand strong, are nothing but absurd.228 There was probably some level of sporadic political exchange, possibly even through lodges of the AOH, but no large-scale militant secret society of Ribbonite dimensions.
223 Hewett cit. Palladino 1990, p. 154 224 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 223 225 Kenny 1998, p. 102 226 Cf. Ibid., p. 100 227 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 208 228 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 94 46
The immediate postwar years of 1865–68 were characterized by general instability. The return of discharged soldiers and a continuing influx of immigrants, along with falling coal prices and wages, added to the volatility, and some wartime grievances appear to have been carried over. The next two assassinations attributed to the Molly Maguires, that of David Muir on August 25th, 1865, and Henry H. Dunne on January 10th, 1866, both are possibly connected to draft-related conflicts. Both men had worked as superintendents in Cass Township and surroundings, and both may have been targeted due to mine superintendents’ common opposition to labor organizing and cooperation with the draft authorities.229 Muir had a well-documented history throughout the first half of 1863 in which he reopened a mine resulting in numerous confrontations with striking miners; he reported to his superiors that his home was raided in his absence.230 Likewise, Dunne had come under fire for accusing miners of loading coal cars with dirt and docking their wages, as well as being the target of the ‘committeemen’ for the dismissal of two mule drivers.231 Both Dunne and Muir, moreover, had played a role in the wave of unlawful arrests following the strike of 1864.232 It appears rather plausible that these assassinations constituted a delayed settlement of wartime grievances. Bulik records further incidents, such as the burning of a company store at a Forestville mine in late 1865, and a mine boss at the Phoenix Park colliery was shot a few weeks later. Neither of these incidents featured in the later trials, but both locations had been the sites of heavy altercations in the Civil War years.233 The events up until 1866 already show strong evidence that a significant part of the violence was the result of provocation, whether calculated or assented. The better part of the incidents of 1862 through 1866 is unimaginable without the conduct of Bannan, Albright, and Tower. In 1864, as a direct result of the actions of these three individuals, Schuylkill County resembled a warzone under foreign occupation, and tensions rose to a level that pitted those in the Irish community who had dutifully volunteered for the Union Army in the first two years of the war against those who had suffered at the hands of the marauding Army units in the two years thereafter, with often deadly effect. Bulik concludes that this type of violence was “was another clear demonstration of the precarious position in which Tower’s crackdown and Bannan’s ravings had placed those Schuylkill County Irishmen who donned the same Union blue as the men who had turned the county into an armed camp.”234 This is further illustrated by the fact that, once Tower was removed from his post, federal provisions were put in place to stop arbitrary and despotic draft regimes in
229 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 104 230 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 189f. 231 Cf. Ibid., p. 202 232 Cf. Ibid., p. 223 233 Cf. Ibid., p. 243 234 Ibid., p. 231
47 the spring of 1864, and Pennsylvania soldiers were granted the right to cast absentee ballots, the disturbances ceased immediately.235 Of course, there is no evidence that Bannan, Albright or Tower deliberately sought to provoke violence rather than bringing it about by recklessness, bigotry, and political corruption, but nonetheless it is highly unlikely that there would have been more than a fraction of the violence without it being triggered by their actions. Insofar as the allegations regarding the second wave of incidents can be trusted – and there is good reason not to trust them, as the following chapters will demonstrate – the earlier incidents of the Civil War years must have played a crucial role in the radicalization of some of the accused. Among those unlawfully imprisoned under allegations of treason was Barney Dolan, later county delegate for the AOH and predecessor to John Kehoe. The name of Michael ‘Muff’ Lawler, the bodymaster of the AOH lodge in Shenandoah which would be infiltrated by the Pinkertons, featured on a list of draft dodgers in 1865.236 But while the wartime and immediate post-war events are easily understood as the result of such provocation, the same cannot be said for the following events. In early 1867, a remarkable period of intense violence occurred. On February 11th, there was an attempted assassination on a coal operator, in which one of the assailants was killed. On 15th of March, superintendent William Littlehales was shot down on the highway from Pottsville to Cass Township, in what was probably a failed attempt at robbing the company payroll237 – although Littlehales was also a staunch supporter of wartime military intervention,238 the way the attack was carried out does not suggest the sort of premeditation consistent with an operation of retributive justice. Accompanied by several other robbery attempts, some of them successful, throughout the first three months of the year, this crime wave prompted a response from influential citizens of the region and resulted in the reorganization of local policing and courts, as mentioned in chapter 4.1. This system helped pacify the region, and with a brief interruption in the form of the death of Alexander Rea on October 17th, 1868, the rest of the 1860s was relatively quiet. Rea, another superintendent, was killed on the road from Centralia to Mount Carmel, on the border of Columbia and Northumberland County. The motive appears to have been robbery, as Rea, like Littlehales, was in charge of the company payroll.239 Another factor may have been even more decisive in the containment of violence than the policing reform, however: the rise of the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association (WBA). Led by Irish-born miner John Siney, the union managed to attract a following across ethnoreligious boundaries and combined English-, Irish-, and Welsh-born
235 Cf. Bulik 2015., p. 232 236 Cf. Ibid., p. 225, 249 237 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 106 238 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 250 239 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 109 48 miners. While many primary sources tend to equate this labor union with the Molly Maguires, or at least suggest some degree of overlap, this has been thoroughly refuted by Kenny, who demonstrates that the WBA represented a mode of labor resistance that was profoundly different from, and supplanted, the forms of agrarian retributive justice that had carried over from the Irish countryside. If there was any overlap between Molly Maguires and WBA, it never extended beyond a small fraction of the union’s rank and file membership.240 Bulik concurs with that assessment, adding that Molly Maguirism was thoroughly supplanted by industrial unionism in the West Branch region (around Cass Township) and even the combination of “a Hibernian and union man did not necessarily a Molly make.”241 Once again, it is difficult to unravel the various strains and motives of violence that occurred in the late 1860s, and how much of it may have been the actual work of the Molly Maguires. The attempted assassination of a coal operator in 1867 is very consistent with the handwriting of Irish secret societies, as are the assassinations of Muir and Dunne. The testimony of an informer, Daniel Kelly, in the Alexander Rea case also alleged that some Molly Maguires were engaged in highway robberies, but explicitly maintained that this kind of affair was never part of any official business of the order.242 To suggest that all or most spectacular cases of robbery, or even just those ascribed to Irishmen, during a period of general lawlessness were the work of the Molly Maguires would be nothing short of preposterous. Gangs of ruffians and tavern brawlers who might easily resort to more serious crime in times of economic hardship certainly existed in the frontier climate of the mining region, but did not necessarily belong to secret societies of any kind. The description of the informant reads a lot more like opportunistic, ordinary crime – a disorganized, even dilettantish robbery attempt gone wrong, committed by a group of drunk tavern roughnecks rather than the work of a secret society. According to Kelly, he and a few other Irishmen had assembled in a tavern in Ashland the night before, when amidst heavy drinking a plan was hatched to rob Rea the following morning. When it turned out that Rea had very little money on him, one of the men in the group decided to take his watch and then proceeded to kill him.243 Although several of the men involved were AOH members, it appears entirely implausible to suggest that any organizational decision was behind this incident, and Kenny concludes that “whiskey and money”,244 rather than secret society politics, were the central motives.
240 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 112–117 241 Bulik 2015, p. 262 242 Cf. Ibid., p. 252. It is to be noted that Kelly’s testimony is unreliable, as he downplayed his own role in the events, and was serving a prison sentence before being freed in exchange for his testimony. For further discussion on informers, see chapters 5.3 and 5.4. 243 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 110 244 Cf. Ibid., p. 189
49 Neither such inconsistencies nor the view of the Pennsylvania Bureau of Industrial Statistics, which praised the union for pacifying the region and improving labor relations in its 1873 report,245 however, troubled another key antagonist of the Molly Maguire affair that would emerge in the late 1860s: Franklin B. Gowen. Like Bannan, he came from an Ulster Protestant family, but his antipathies were far more class-based than cultural or religious. Having begun his career as an unsuccessful independent coal operator in the 1850s, he turned to the practice of law and soon became the corporate lawyer of the Reading Railroad, which was gaining increased significance in the coal trade of the region.246 In an example that would further illustrate the fusion of corporate power with state power, he was elected district attorney for Schuylkill County in 1862 – incidentally, running as a Democrat, with overwhelming support from the Irish mining communities, carrying the two precincts of Cass Township with margins of 10:1 and 3:1 respectively.247 Gowen’s views of business relations, too, differed starkly from Bannan’s. Instead of small, independent operators, he envisioned a plan of large-scale mobilization including supply routes in order to guarantee stable prizes. After the Civil War, he got an opportunity to do so. Having been a lawyer for the ailing Reading Railroad, he advanced to the company’s presiding office in 1869, and used it to build an empire. However, the Reading Railroad’s charter forbade it from operating coal mines, so Gowen sought to have the charter altered by the State Senate. He failed twice, but succeeded on a third vote that was more likely than not the result of bribery. Three senators who had voted against the bill earlier the same day were mysteriously absent, and a fourth one had changed his mind.248 Gowen would play an instrumental role in the publicist and legal campaign against the Molly Maguires. Wilfully blurring the distinction between the WBA, which he saw as a threat to his monopoly ambitions, and the Molly Maguires, he was able to build on the narratives created by Bannan and reinforced by the wartime authorities: that any attempt at unionization, particularly involving the Irish, was ultimately a murderous conspiracy. It should be noted that Gowen, when he first made this allegation on a public stage, was under investigation by the state legislature over illicit business practices. Accused of price-fixing, he took advantage of the Molly Maguire scapegoat to derail the hearing, and succeeded.249 Like the financial motives of the Pinkertons, this motive of Gowen, too, has to be considered when judging his role in the affair. Two more assassinations ascribed to the Molly Maguires would occur in the early 1870s. The first of them was Patrick Burns, a foreman killed in Tuscarora on the 15th of April 1870. During the trials, it was alleged that one John Kane, his immediate subordinate, was behind the murder.
245 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 130 246 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 163 247 Cf. Ibid., p. 113 248 Cf. Ibid., p. 267 249 Cf. Dray 2010, pp. 89ff. 50
Kane and Burns had supposedly quarreled over wage-related issues before, but the details of the case are rather shadowy. Kenny suspects that it may have revolved around issues of workplace discrimination against Irish laborers. Morgan Powell, the second victim, was a superintendent killed at Summit Hill, Carbon County, on December 2nd, 1871. Likewise, little is known about this case other than some vague allegations of workplace discrimination. Powell, of Welsh descent, allegedly had given preferential treatment to his compatriots and passed over Irish miners for skilled and better-paid positions.250 Pinkerton claimed that one Jack Donahue was responsible for it, but even he presented this as mere hearsay.251 Other than that, there was little recorded activity and no fatal incident ascribed to the Molly Maguires – until 1874, the year that, coincidentally or not, another central character of the affair entered the Schuylkill County stage: James McParlan.
5.3 The Pinkertons become involved
In October 1873, Franklin B. Gowen hired the Pinkertons to infiltrate the Molly Maguires. Gowen had worked with the Pinkertons before, and there is a record of correspondence between the agency and Gowen preceding the investigation. It is an interesting detail that in Pinkerton’s authorized account of the events, this prior correspondence is entirely absent. Rather, Pinkerton claimed to have visited Philadelphia on entirely unrelated and not further specified reasons, when he received an unexpected invitation by Gowen, who informed him of Molly Maguire activities in the Pennsylvania coal fields. Pinkerton’s narrative then suggests that, after some deliberation, he accepted the task.252 In fact, it was probably the Pinkerton agency who had pitched the idea of an undercover operation among the Molly Maguires to Gowen, who had then accepted, as was detailed in chapter 4.2.253 Pinkerton then selected James McParlan (some agency records give his name as James McParland, this is however a later alteration) for the job, a 29-year-old Irishman from County Armagh. McParlan had considerable knowledge on the subject of Irish secret societies, as a preliminary report he wrote for Pinkerton illustrates, but whether he gained said knowledge through preparatory studies or actual involvement or contact in his youth is unclear.254 McParlan had emigrated from Ireland to England in 1863 before coming to New York in 1867. He
250 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 190f. 251 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 403 252 Cf. Ibid., p. 13–16 253 See also appendix B. 254 Cf. Reading Company file molly_m_021
51 established himself as a detective in Chicago in 1868, first working for W. S. Beaubien & Co before joining the Pinkertons in 1872.255 McParlan, under the alias of McKenna, made his way to Pottsville, where he gained the friendship and trust of Pat Dormer, a tavern-keeper affiliated with the AOH, and made a name for himself through drinking, singing, and tavern-brawling. He gained the confidence of rougher elements of Irish working-class society by claiming that he was wanted in Buffalo for murder, and that he came to the coalfields to lie low for a while and find employment. In this, the sources are fairly consistent, except for some rather obvious embellishments of his antics in Pinkerton’s book. In December 1873, McParlan met John Kehoe in Girardville, and subsequently became acquainted with other leading AOH figures.256 John Kehoe, then bodymaster in Girardville and AOH county delegate from summer 1874 onwards, was an “atypically successful Irish immigrant,”257 one of the few who achieved upward social mobility in a period of net downward mobility for Irish immigrants.258 Born in County Wicklow in 1837, he had come to Pennsylvania at the age of thirteen. After twenty years of working as a miner, he was able to establish himself as a successful tavern- keeper, was a highly influential figure in local politics, and was elected constable of Girardville for two consecutive terms.259 In either late January or early February 1874, McParlan established his headquarters in Shenandoah, first boarding in the tavern of local AOH bodymaster Muff Lawler, the Hibernia House, then renting a room elsewhere in the town, where he resided until March 1876.260 There is some discrepancy between Pinkerton’s book (January 31st)261 and the court records (February 10th)262 regarding the date of his arrival in Shenandoah, but the reports on this episode are otherwise consistent. Why he chose Shenandoah is not clear, although some evidence regarding the abolition of tax breaks for coal property by the local authorities would create a motive for Gowen to have that particular locality targeted.263 McParlan joined the local lodge of the Ancient Order of Hibernians on April 14th, 1874, under the leadership of Lawler.264 He subsequently traveled through the adjacent counties, returning to Shenandoah in early July, where he was elected secretary of the local AOH division on the 18th of the month. Frank McAndrew, a close associate of McParlan, was
255 Cf. West 1876, p. 42ff. 256 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 97–101 257 Kenny 1998, p. 222 258 Cf. Meagher 2005, p. 81f. 259 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 222 260 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 127 261 Cf. Ibid., p. 123 262 Cf. West 1876, p. 15 263 Cf. Miners’ Journal, March 2nd, 1874 264 Cf. Ibid., pp. 14.f 52 elected bodymaster, further increasing the degree of influence the detective held in the local AOH division.265 At this time, the region was quiet. Only one piece in the Miners’ Journal, from September 1873, had even so much as hinted at a Molly Maguire presence in Mahanoy City.266 In the public image, the Molly Maguires were alleged to have a presence in some neighboring counties,267 but to be a thing of the past in Schuylkill County. In late 1874, however, violence would resume abruptly. The tensions during this period are impossible to understand without the wider context of gang culture that developed in the 1870s. The Molly Maguires were not the only alleged notorious troublemakers but had at least two rivals: the Sheet Iron Gang and the Modocs. The Sheet Iron Gang was made up of Irish miners, many of whom were said to be from County Kilkenny, thus often with mining experience before their immigration, and accordingly higher on the professional hierarchy. Kenny alleges that many of them may have been Protestants, Bulik however relays a contemporary assessment stating that the Kilkenny miners were once part of the AOH but left due to a factional divide to set up their own, rival organization. While it is impossible to ascertain which is accurate, the two versions are mutually exclusive since the AOH did not admit Protestants. Bulik adds that the story makes more sense if one understands ‘Kilkenny’ not so much as a geographical description, but a regiolect synonym for a skilled miner.268 It would be a conflict with the Sheet Iron Gang, on August 2nd, 1874, that brought the Molly Maguires back to the public attention in Schuylkill County. In large numbers, the two factions clashed on Dane’s Patch, a small mining settlement near Shenandoah, resulting in the first mention of Molly Maguire activity in the area in almost a year.269 The Modocs were a gang of Welsh miners, and at least two probable members (Gomer James and William ‘Bully Bill’ Thomas) were hardened criminals who will feature prominently in chapters 5.4 and 6.2. Little is known about their origin story. Kenny links their name to a Native tribe in the West, which was engaged in a bloody war with the Army in the 1870s, but it appears more plausible to suggest that their name was derived from Madog ab Owain Gwynedd, a Welsh prince who, according to local folklore, sailed to America in 1170 and is thus claimed to have been the first European on the continent. Madog is often anglicized as Madoc, and it is easy to see how this could have become Modoc over time in an American context. That Madog and his family, according to legend, mixed with the Native population, and rumors of Welsh-speaking tribes were
265 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 202 266 Cf. Miners’ Journal, September 11th, 1873 267 Cf. Miners’ Journal, August 7th, 1874 268 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 263. Kilkenny, Tipperary and Antrim were the only counties of Ireland which had significant mining industries in the 19th century, therefore immigrants from those counties were more likely to have experience and thus had greater chances at upward social mobility. 269 Cf. Miners’ Journal, Augst 4th, 1874
53 abundant, also makes an intended double meaning plausible.270 And, while a conflict with the Sheet Irons heralded the return of the Molly Maguires, it would be the Modocs that emerged as the main antagonist. On October 31st, Chief Burgess George Major was shot amidst a sectarian riot in Mahanoy City. Mahanoy City was heavily segregated, with Main Street dividing the town into an Irish and a British part. Both sides of town were served by a respective ethnic fire company, and when a fire broke out on Main Street just before midnight on October 30th, both companies rushed to the scene and clashed with each other. Major, who served as a foreman of the British-ancestry Citizen’s Fire Company, was shot by an unknown person in the crowd when he tried to pacify the rioters. Dan Dougherty was accused of firing the fatal shot, but according to both Pinkerton’s account271 and a McParlan report, 272 he was innocent. While ethnic or sectarian tensions were clearly the cause of this incident, it is very implausible to blame it on any sort of organized, premediated Molly Maguire activity. The fire that sparked the riot, on the other hand, bears the handwriting of an agent provocateur – McParlan was with near certainty not behind it, but the Pinkertons had other operatives in the area. According to Kenny, the fire may have been started deliberately to provoke a confrontation between the two fire companies. The suspect, Dougherty, was tried and acquitted, and Kenny cites this as a cause of later ethnic disturbances, as Welsh miners allegedly swore revenge.273 This would come to play a significant role in later confrontations, as the Modocs, in the person of one William ‘Bully Bill’ Thomas, would repeatedly attempt to assassinate Dougherty, and in turn become targets themselves.274 The following day, Frederick Hesser, a mine watchman, was killed at Shamokin, Northumberland County, but little is known about this incident.275 Pinkerton makes no mention of this, and no one was suspected of it until 1878, when the bodymaster of the Coal Run (Northumberland County) AOH, Peter McManus, and another local AOH member were accused of beating Hesser to death. No motive can be established.276 At the same time, the conflict between Gowen and the WBA was building up to its final, prolonged act: the Long Strike of 1875. Pinkerton operatives, such as P. M. Cummings, also infiltrated locals of the WBA, providing Gowen with information on planned strike activities.277 Throughout the autumn of 1874, the Reading Railroad, in cooperation with the operators
270 Cf. Wallace 2020, p. 27f. 271 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p 232f. 272 Cf. Reading Company file 1520_1001_02_05, p. 4 273 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 164f. 274 See chapters 5.4, 6.2.2, and 6.3 for further details. 275 Cf. Ibid., p. 190 276 Cf. Pinkerton Archives 103267_007_0001, p. 8 277 Cf. Reading Company file 1520_1001_01_06 54 dependent on it, amassed enough coal to ensure supply throughout the winter months. Seeking confrontation and provoking a strike, the operators then announced pay cuts between 10 and 20 percent, and pegged the wages to a sliding scale of coal prices with no lower minimum. The union responded by shutting down production in the entire lower anthracite region by January 1875. On March 19th, Gowen had all members of the WBA dismissed from the company, promising they would be reinstated if they left the union.278 As levels of violence rose throughout the strike, Gowen and others publicly equated the WBA with the Molly Maguires, thereby ensuring its downfall.279 According to Kenny, this sparked the final wave of Molly Maguire activity: “With the WBA in ruins, the mine workers of Schuylkill County searched for an alternative strategy. Some of them turned to violent action, and the result was the second wave of Molly Maguire assassinations.”280 The allegations regarding the union are easily refuted, however. Cummings’ reports as well as those of other operatives affirm the nonviolent stance of the WBA, 281 with one report detailing a request by members of a union branch to assist in repairs after an explosion at a colliery despite the ongoing strike.282 On April 28th, Allan Pinkerton met with Gowen in Philadelphia to discuss the establishment of the joint ‘Flying Squadron’ between the Pinkertons and the Coal and Iron Police, as mentioned in chapter 3.2. According to Pinkerton’s account, McParlan was present at the meeting as well.283 To mitigate the risk of Linden accidentally exposing McParlan, a meeting was staged between the two, and Linden was introduced to McParlan’s associates as an old acquaintance from Buffalo, who promised to turn a blind eye on certain unlawful activities.284 The presence of the Flying Squadron tightened the control that the agency had over the region, and if nothing else it is somewhat suspicious that the majority of the assassinations of the second wave were to occur after its formation, and in its primary area of operation. What was previously said regarding McParlan’s influence in the Shenandoah AOH is aggravated by the fact that McAndrew, having been unemployed for quite some time, left Shenandoah in early May 1875 to take a job in Wilkes-Barre, leaving McParlan in charge of operations of the order in his absence.285 McAndrew returned on the 23rd of June, but in the meantime, further assassinations were planned.286 On June 1st, a meeting of leading AOH members
278 Cf. Miners‘ Journal, March 20th, 1876 279 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 171ff. 280 Ibid., p. 185 281 Cf. Reading Company file 1520_1001_01_06 282 Cf. Reading Company file 1520_1001_02_03, p. 2 283 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 275 284 Cf. West 1876, p. 256 285 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 292 286 Cf. Ibid., p. 317
55 was held in Mahanoy City. The exact details of this meeting are only known through the reports of McParlan, who alleged that the main objective of this meeting was to address the increasing tensions with the Modocs, and to remove the alleged leaders: William and Jesse Major and William “Bully Bill” Thomas. The two Majors were relatives of George Major, the Chief Burgess of Mahanoy City who had been shot amidst a riot the previous year, and Thomas was a known ruffian who possibly filled some leading role among the Modocs, although, as stated previously, nothing specific is known regarding the structure of that group. McParlan was tasked with putting together a group of assassins.287 According to his testimony in court, he then stalled out the first attempt on June 5th by suggesting it was unwise to try and kill Thomas while the area was swarming with Coal and Iron Police. However, a few weeks later, on June 28th, an unsuccessful attempt on Thomas was made at his workplace at Shoemaker’s Patch, near Mahanoy City. Thomas was hit by three bullets, but survived. No attempt was ever made on the two Majors.288 This incident will be further discussed in chapter 6.2.2. On July 14th, policeman Benjamin Yost was assassinated in Tamaqua. One of the participants, Jimmy Kerrigan, turned informer during the trials and testified that he and another man named Duffy had repeatedly been in conflict with Yost, that Yost had beaten Duffy, and that Duffy had paid Roarity ten dollars to furnish two men and put Yost out of the way.289 As Kenny notes, the story is suspect, a matter as serious as killing a policeman would likely not have been undertaken over a simple brawl, and not for the paltry sum of ten dollars.290 Kerrigan appeared to downplay his own role in the affair, and according to Pinkerton, Kerrigan was in possession of the murder weapon.291 McParlan then left for Tamaqua, under the cover that word had gotten out regarding the crime he claimed to have committed in Buffalo, in order to investigate. Pinkerton claims that he learned McGehan and Boyle were responsible for the act, and McGehan fired the shots. McParlan then returned to Shenandoah on August 8th.292 It is worth noting that according to Pinkerton’s testimony, this was the first actual evidence that he gathered on any specific murders. The next alleged Molly Maguire victim was Gomer James, a miner of Welsh descent, on August 14th, 1875. James was working as a bartender during a picnic when an unidentified assailant walked up to him and shot him in broad daylight, then disappeared among the crowd. Several details of this incident, as reported by Pinkerton, are quite strange. The conflict dated back to an incident in 1873, when James shot an AOH member named Cosgrove. James was tried for murder
287 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 309ff. 288 Cf. West 1876, p. 33–38 289 Cf. Reading Company file mollymag_pams_0005, p. 18f. 290 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 195 291 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 395 292 Cf. Ibid., p. 403–411 56 and acquitted, and the Molly Maguires swore revenge. According to Pinkerton’s narrative, Lawler, then the leader of the Shenandoah division, put together a band of assassins, which included Cosgrove’s cousin. When the latter backed out, the issue was abandoned.293 Why James was killed two years later is entirely unclear, and the circumstances of the case merit separate discussion in chapter 6.2.1. The same night, a fight erupted in a Girardville tavern. When the victim alerted the Justice of the Peace, Thomas Gwyther, the latter was shot dead as he stepped outside his home. In Mahanoy City, Bully Bill Thomas started a gunfight with an Irishman, in which a bystander was fatally shot. Thomas was arrested but not charged, Kenny presumes that this was owed to his cooperation with the Pinkertons.294 On September 1st, mine foreman Thomas Sanger and miner William Uren were shot at Raven Run, just north of Girardville. The motive was never determined, and McParlan is heavily implicated.295 According to eyewitness testimonies, Sanger and Uren were awaited by several men outside the mine where they worked. That newcomers would arrive early looking for jobs was not unusual and created no suspicion. When the two men arrived, they were gunned down and the assassins escaped down the hill, being seen by several residents and fired upon by at least one.296 Two days later, mine superintendent John P. Jones was shot in Lansford, Carbon County, just across the county line near Tamaqua. He held the same job Powell had held when he was killed four years earlier. Kerrigan’s testimony states that Jones had blacklisted some Irishmen working in the mines.297 Moreover, it was alleged that the deaths of Yost and Jones were part of a reciprocal deal to furnish assassins between the Tamaqua and Summit Hill AOH.298 For the first time, arrests were made in the immediate aftermath of the incident, as Kerrigan, Kelly, and Doyle were apprehended by a posse the same day and brought to prison in Mauch Chunk on September 4th.299 With the names of several members leaked, retributive justice also came for the alleged Molly Maguires. On the morning of December 10th, a party of about 30 vigilantes descended on the O’Donnell’s boarding house in Wiggan’s Patch near Mahanoy City. Ellen McAllister, Charles’ pregnant wife, was murdered, as was Charles O’Donnell.300 The Pinkertons were certainly involved to some extent, as they furnished the list of suspects, and internal documents discuss the creation of a vigilante committee through Linden, but which role exactly they played is unclear. Only one
293 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 419 294 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 192 295 Cf. Ibid., p. 198. For further discussion of this incident, see chapter 6.2.2. 296 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 434–437 297 Cf. Ibid., p. 466 298 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 199 299 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 446 300 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 208
57 person was ever apprehended (but not tried) for participating in the vigilante mob, a butcher from Mahanoy City named Frank Wenrich. Bulik has discovered a suspicious note from Wenrich in the Reading archives which suggests that Gowen may have funded the vigilantes. Moreover, there is a considerable personnel overlap between the fire brigade involved in the Major incident and the vigilante committee. The founder of the brigade, E. S. Silliman, also maintained a state militia unit involved in the suppression of the Long Strike, and the vigilante committee appears to have formed in response to Major’s death. Wenrich was represented by a close business associate of Silliman,301 and it appears plausible to suggest that the fire brigade was to the vigilantes what the AOH was to the Molly Maguires: a legal cover from which to carry out unlawful activities. This incident will be discussed further in chapter 6.2.5. During the spring of 1876, McParlan’s true identity was discovered. A train conductor, who had recognized McParlan from his time in Chicago, apparently informed Kehoe of McParlan’s background. The uncovered agent made his escape from Schuylkill County – with the help of Frank McAndrew, the Shenandoah bodymaster he had brought to power a year and a half earlier.302 There are several things to be said in favor of the interpretation that violence in the lower anthracite region resumed organically, and would have done so with or without the Pinkertons. The first among those is the collapse of the WBA. With the union in ruins, and the mining communities reeling from the impact of the failed strike, it appears plausible that some miners resorted to violence, whether to vent frustrations or to try and deter local mine bosses from imposing even harsher conditions. It is similarly plausible that the collapse of the union led to the resurfacing of ethnic tensions between Welsh and Irish miners. The explanation of the failure of the Long Strike and the collapse of the WBA exacerbating violence, however, is inconsistent with the spatial pattern. If the collapse of the WBA deteriorated interethnic relations and created a general climate of frustration and anger among the Irish workforce, that is understandable. A letter from a self-proclaimed Molly Maguire, published by the Miners’ Journal in September 1875, confirms the validity of this interpretation.303 But why did it erupt in such a massive outburst of violence in a very small area around Shenandoah, and only there? Shenandoah had been remarkably quiet before the detective’s arrival, with the Miners’ Journal reporting that before the murder of an Irishman named Cosgrove in 1873, there had not been a single murder for eight years.304 After the murder, a public police force was introduced, and on
301 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 279ff. 302 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 476–490 303 Cf. Miners’ Journal, September 29th, 1875. See also appendix C. 304 Cf. Miners’ Journal, August 15th, 1873. The Cosgrove murder was indeed connected to the Molly Maguires – but through the victim, not the perpetrator. Cosgrove was a member of the AOH, and his alleged killer, Gomer James, would be assassinated in 1875 under dubious circumstances. This incident will be discussed in detail in chapter 6.2.1. 58
September 30th, the Miners’ Journal reported the town to be safe and quiet.305 McParlan’s reports further undermine this theory, as he stated on July 7th, 1875, in the immediate aftermath of the Long Strike, that “the feeling against the bosses seems to be much stronger below the mountain than it is in the Shenandoah district.”306 The spatial pattern is thus an aspect that will have to be investigated further in an upcoming chapter, 6.3. As with many things, the modus operandi and general strategy of the Molly Maguires are difficult to discern, and appear to have varied over time. The first wave was active in draft resistance, some sort of rudimentary trade unionism, intimidation of mine bosses, and the like, while the second was involved in ethnic gang rivalries just as much as in localized activities of labor resistance, particularly sabotage. They would resort to assassinations in some cases, but by and large, they seem to have treated lethal violence as a last resort, preferring to intimidate rather than kill adversaries. This is established by Pinkerton’s narrative on numerous occasions as well.307 For the use of lethal violence, Pinkerton’s narrative gives a general outline of the modus operandi, which – despite the evident bias of this source – is devoid of the usual sensationalist tone and can at least partly be accepted as factual: upon his own decision or request by a member, a bodymaster had the authority to order an assassination, and select men (most commonly groups of three or four) to carry it out. Those had to obey or face expulsion.308 To some extent, they probably used the practice, known from their Irish counterparts, of exchanging assassins between neighboring lodges, so they would not be easily recognized by potential witnesses. This has been alleged in the Yost and Jones cases,309 and while the scope of this practice has likely been overstated, it probably did occur, and it is consistent with practices of agrarian retributive justice in Ireland. It is notable that none of the cultural motifs that accompanied Irish social banditry, which featured so prominently in Ireland and also played a significant role during the incidents of the first wave, are visible here. There is no apparent seasonal pattern, no record of assassins blackening their faces, and no mention of mummery practices in connection with the alleged Molly Maguire activities. Some of this may be due to a simple generational shift, as second-generation Irish Americans took over the helm, but that does not sufficiently explain a complete (as opposed to gradual) disappearance of these motifs. It is even more surprising since Kenny has established that a significant part of the 1870s Mollie suspects were first-generation immigrants from Ulster, particularly from Donegal, and thus must have been familiar with such traditions.310 Unfortunately,
305 Miners’ Journal, September 30th, 1873 306 Cf. Reading Company file 1520_1001_02_16, p. 7 307 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 150f., 302f. 308 Cf. Ibid., p. 212 309 Cf. Pinkerton Archives 103267_007_0001, p. 102 310 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 297 – 302
59 this aspect cannot be explored further in this thesis, as doing so would require extensive analysis of oral history recordings from the region, and in its result would greatly exceed the limits available here. It is to be noted, however, that the disappearance of cultural motifs represents yet another unexplained difference between the first and second wave of Molly Maguirism which is to be investigated in future research. That the 1870s Molly Maguires were a copycat group with no direct ties to the original can however be ruled out based on Bulik’s research, which establishes several personnel continuities.311 The second wave of Molly Maguirism constituting a genuine outgrowth of social banditry which – despite lacking some of the cultural markers – shared important characteristics with its predecessors is further illustrated beyond doubt by a report in the Miners’ Journal dating from December 22nd, 1874. A man and a woman in Shenandoah had both bought the same lot of land, and while the former had made a down payment, the latter had built a house on it and was living there. The man attempted to take possession of the house, and force the woman to leave, until he received a coffin notice urging him to abandon the matter or face consequences. The woman, meanwhile, received an anonymous note containing the sum of the down payment so she could pay off the other claimant to the lot.312 This kind of community mediation characteristic of social banditry illustrates that some level of Molly Maguirism was most certainly genuine, and shared at least some of the characteristics that defined the agrarian secret societies of 18th and 19th century Ireland. However, this side of the Molly Maguire story is difficult to reconcile with the picture that would be painted during the trials.
5.4 Trial by perjury
The Molly Maguire trials, lasting from January 1876 to August 1878, were a farce by all standards; the headline of this chapter has not been chosen lightly. Even the military tribunals of 1864, which had no legal basis to begin with, were arguably fairer, less biased, and conducted their business on more factual evidence than what transpired in the 1870s. Catholics were excluded from the jury, and some of the jurors were not proficient enough in English to follow the trial.313 The judges displayed, at times, blatant and evident bias in favor of the prosecution. This was epitomized by Judge Pershing in Commonwealth vs. Kehoe et al, whose candidacy for Governor had been publicly opposed by none other than the main defendant, John Kehoe, the year prior.314 Most of the
311 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 252 312 Cf. Miners’ Journal, December 22nd, 1874 313 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 217 314 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 282 60 prosecuting attorneys were employees or owners of coal or railroad companies.315 Apart from Gowen himself Charles Albright appeared for the prosecution, the latter in full military uniform as if to reiterate his wartime allegations of treason.316 Evidence, apart from informer and infiltrator testimonies which were in all cases of questionable credibility, was largely nonexistent. Even if the testimonies had been entirely factual, several convictions did not match the crimes alleged in the testimonies.317 The trials before McParlan’s appearance in court, the first of which concerned the Jones assassination, will not be discussed in detail here. It is sufficient to say that Kerrigan, AOH bodymaster of Tamaqua, confessed, implicated Edward Kelly and Michael Doyle, and was granted immunity in return. Based on his confession, a series of further arrests was then made for the murder of Benjamin Yost. The local and national press rejoiced, especially after Kelly and Doyle were sentenced to death for the murder of Jones. With this setting the stage for the trials to come, it is impossible to argue that, even by the standards of the day, even parts of the trials could have been conducted fairly.318 Moreover, Kerrigan’s testimony is highly dubious since a Pinkerton report from August 31st, a month before the murder, names him as the main instigator of the assassination and states that “Kerrigan took the matter in hand.”319 With the Jones case closed, James Carroll, Thomas Duffy, James Roarity, Hugh McGehan, and James Boyle were tried for the murder of Benjamin Yost. Kerrigan had alleged a connection between those assassinations, and this would be the first trial in which McParlan appeared as a witness. On May 6th, 1876, he returned to Pottsville, gave his full name, and stated that he had heard firsthand confessions from two of the defendants (Carroll and Roarity), as well as Kerrigan, with Thomas Duffy being chiefly responsible for the plot. Based on McParlan's testimony concerning the plot against Yost, plus the testimony of Kerrigan, all defendants were eventually sentenced to death for first-degree murder.320 McParlan described the AOH as a large-scale conspiracy, synonymous with the Molly Maguires, and made allegations that he would later repeat, in greater detail, during the trial against John Kehoe et al., where they shall be discussed later in this chapter. Moreover, he stated that Yost was killed because he abused both Duffy and Kerrigan while arresting them, indicating that Kerrigan may have had a larger role in the affair than he admitted in his testimony. The latter stated that although he was bodymaster of Tamaqua, he had not played a significant role in the assassinations, and “Carroll, who kept all the books and did all
315 Most of them had legal training, and state law allowed private individuals to serve as prosecutors. However, conflict of interest statutes, which were in place at the time, were ignored both for prosecutors and for judges. 316 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 215 317 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 283 318 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 220 319 Reading Company file 1520_1001_03_03, p. 8 320 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 221–224
61 the work, was responsible for everything.”321 In addition to similar inconsistencies in the Jones trial and the fact that Kerrigan’s wife testified against him, calling him a rat and a liar and accusing him of the murder322 strongly suggests that it may indeed have been Kerrigan who was responsible, and turned state’s evidence to frame others and avoid a death sentence for himself. Kerrigan, although heavily implicated in the Pinkerton reports, was never tried for his role in either the Jones or the Yost affair. On June 27th, the trial of Thomas Munley for the murders of Thomas Sanger and William Uren opened. Once again, the case against Munley rested almost entirely on the testimony of McParlan. Except for the detective's words, the only other evidence of Munley's guilt came from a woman who testified that she saw Munley at the murder scene, gun in hand. Although several other witnesses testified that they had seen Munley at his home the morning of the assassination, Munley was convicted and sentenced to death.323 The courts then focused their attention on convicting the leadership of the local AOH in a series of highly publicized show trials. Most of these trials concerned lesser crimes than the previous ones, but most of the defendants occupied leading positions. The higher level of public attention and availability of more elaborate printed records makes a thorough analysis of the testimony possible, particularly in the trial regarding the attack on Bully Bill Thomas. John Kehoe, Schuylkill County delegate of the AOH, Dennis Cunning, Northumberland County delegate, Christopher Donnelly, Schuylkill County treasurer, James Roarity, bodymaster at Coaldale, John Donahue, Tuscarora Body Master, Michael O’Brien, Mahanoy City Body Master, Frank McHugh, Mahanoy City secretary, and John Morris and John Gibbons, members of the Shenandoah division. On May 4th, McParlan appeared in court for the first time. In his testimony, he presented the AOH as a large-scale Molly Maguire conspiracy, which would use county conventions of the order (of which, as the secretary of the Shenandoah division, he would be a part) in order to plan their deeds, and pay the assassins out of county funds.324 He claimed that the assassination was decided upon by order of John Kehoe on June 1st, 1875, and then carried out by Hurley, Gibbons, Morris, and Doyle on June 28th.325 This allegation was not corroborated by the victim, who only identified
321 Cf. Reading Company file mollymag_pams_0005, p. 7–22. Unfortunately, no detailed minutes of this trial are available, only a brief summary, which is why the testimony of McParlan will be analyzed in the section concerning a later trial of which a detailed transcript exists. Based on the summary, his statements in the two trials regarding the AOH can be presumed to be largely identical. 322 Cf. Dray 2010, p. 96 323 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 221 324 Cf. West 1876, p. 29 325 Cf. Ibid., p. 33–38 62
Gibbons and Hurley as his assailants, with no mention of the rest.326 Nevertheless, all of the accused were found guilty of aggravated assault with intent to kill. Although often suspected, the perjury of McParlan in Commonwealth vs. John Kehoe et al. has so far not been conclusively proven. Bulik makes a tentative case for the perjured nature of the testimony in pointing out that McParlan denied having any prior knowledge of the AOH before coming to Schuylkill County, a statement that is evidently false given his detailed preliminary report to Pinkerton referenced in chapter 5.3.327 However, while false, it is difficult to see how this would have altered the outcome. It somewhat undermines McParlan’s credibility, but it is hardly substantial enough to call the entire testimony into question. It also remains possible – though somewhat implausible – to dismiss this as a mere unintentional error and argue the possibility that McParlan misspoke, or misinterpreted the question as having no prior association with, rather than no knowledge of, the AOH. However, there is much more substantial evidence for perjury. The core of McParlan’s testimony, which in turn was the basis for the statements of Gowen, Hughes, and other prosecuting attorneys, rested on the presentation of the AOH as a large-scale conspiracy, synonymous with the Molly Maguires. McParlan claimed that the terms “Ancient Order of Hibernians”, “Molly Maguires” and “Buckshots” were interchangeable, describing the organization as “The Ancient Order of Hibernians, more commonly called the Molly Maguires,”328 further stating that “it was the general practice [of the AOH] to commit crimes.”329 This, in turn, laid the cornerstone not only for the convictions in Commonwealth vs. John Kehoe et al. but for most of the subsequent trials. As the charge of Judge Walker illustrates, guilt by association or membership was the core aspect of the trial: “That the members formed themselves into a combination for the perpetration of murder, arson, and other crimes, and […] that they were under […] the supreme power of which was the Board of Erin.”330 Membership, not specific actions, was the primary charge, and without the notion that the AOH constituted a large-scale conspiracy, the entire narrative created by the prosecution through McParlan’s testimony would have collapsed. Interestingly enough, Pinkerton’s book contradicts the detective in this regard on numerous occasions, both in quoting third parties and in Pinkerton’s own explanations on the matter. In fact, Pinkerton went to great lengths to establish a distinction. He described the organizational customs of the Molly Maguires as significantly differing from those in other AOH lodges, such as not
326 Cf. West 1876, p. 106–109 327 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 283 328 West 1876, p. 16 329 Ibid., p. 22 330 Ibid., p. 224
63 keeping written membership registries.331 He quoted a Catholic priest, who explained the difference in church responses to the AOH between western and central Pennsylvania by stating that “in the west, […] the order is not managed in the interest of politicians, tavern-keepers, and other bad men. Here it is in the control of a few unscrupulous fellows.”332 On another occasion, Pinkerton explicitly distinguished between the principles and motives of the AOH in this specific region and the order in general, maintaining that in the anthracite mining districts – and not beyond that – “acts of beneficence and charity had been succeeded by scenes of violence and carnage.”333 He further gave the following summary of an AOH convention attended by McParlan, which concerned itself with reforming the image and practices of the order: “the State conventions […] might pass resolutions, and issue orders and commands, and, after all, the small yet potential ring within their circle, encompassing the counties of Schuylkill, Carbon, and Columbia [emphasis by the author], would […] shape results, through the use of the order, to suit themselves”334 – “the real Mollies laughed in their sleeve” 335 at the reform ambitions of the statewide institutions. The County Delegate of Luzerne County, William Kirk, is quoted as describing the Schuylkill AOH as “a disgrace to the Ancient Order of Hibernians.”336 If the contradictions between Pinkerton’s narrative and McParlan’s testimony left any doubt as to the untruthfulness of the testimony, a letter by McParlan from 1914 irrefutably proves the point. In writing to superintendent George H. Bangs regarding a recent publication on the Molly Maguire affair, he stated that
during the first trials, […] Gowen asked me a question, namely, if I had investigated, or knew to my own knowledge as to whether or not the Molly Maguires were a branch of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, or had any affiliation with that Order. My reply was that I had fully investigated that part of the case and was prepared to swear that the Ancient Order of Hibernians had no affiliation, pro or con with the Molly Maguires.337
He went on to support this assessment much in the same way as Pinkerton’s narrative, citing an incident in which a Molly Maguire from Shenandoah had visited an AOH lodge in Chicago, only to have his membership card torn up and being thrown out, as the local AOH wanted nothing to do with him.338 This amounts to nothing less than evidence, beyond any reasonable doubt, that McParlan’s testimony was perjured. The Molly Maguires, far from being a nationwide conspiracy synonymous
331 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 143 332 Ibid., p. 103 333 Ibid., p. 147 334 Pinkerton 1877, p. 209 335 Ibid., p. 208 336 Ibid., p. 187 337 Pinkerton's National Detective Agency Records, Box 30, 102595_007_0001, p. 99f. 338 Cf. Ibid., p. 100. See also appendix B for the full letter. 64 with the vast network of the AOH, were a small but locally influential group that used AOH structures but whose influence at no point in time extended beyond the three aforementioned counties, and McParlan knew this to be the case when he testified. This description of the AOH, of course, is the scholarly consensus on the matter,339 but no scholar so far has established the fact that there is evidence in writing, both from Allan Pinkerton and McParlan himself, exposing the court testimony as an outright lie. A further glaring contradiction between McParlan’s court testimony and Pinkerton’s narrative concerns McParlan’s claim that he did not serve as acting bodymaster in McAndrew’s absence. During cross-examination, McParlan stated the following:
Q: […] Then you could act just as well as McAndrew could, in his absence, could you not? A: I had no authority except from the authority of the county delegate. There is a misunderstanding on your part. […] Q: Then in the absence of the body master, you had no power to act at all unless you had the authority to act through the county delegate? A: Yes, that is the idea.340
This is contradicted strongly in Pinkerton’s narrative, which explicitly describes McParlan as “acting Bodymaster of Shenandoah division.”341 Moreover, the same narrative relays that McParlan organized a meeting in Shenandoah, on the evening of June 3rd, 1875, and that he made far- reaching, autonomous decisions including the relocation of the meeting from the usual hall in Shenandoah to the woods outside of town. These decisions, according to the narrative, were neither sanctioned by nor ever discussed with Kehoe.342 The defense likewise pointed out numerous inconsistencies between McParlan’s statements at a previous hearing (of which, unfortunately, no written record exists) and what he said in court, and strongly suggested that he was an agent provocateur.343 Nevertheless, on the evening of August 12th, the jury reached a verdict of guilty, and the defendants, except for McHugh, who had testified, were sentenced to seven years in prison.344 Throughout the latter part of 1876, the trials continued. One of them, the only trial concerning the death of Gomer James, merits a brief discussion due to its relevance in chapter 6.2.1. Once again, the accused were among the higher echelons of the local AOH. John Kehoe, Chris Donnelly, Jack Donahue, and James Roarity, Patrick Dolan Sr. (Big Mine Run bodymaster),
339 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 234; Bulik 2015, p. 262 340 West 1876, p. 52f. 341 Pinkerton 1877, p. 302 342 Cf. Ibid., p. 312f. 343 Cf. West 1876, p. 134ff. 344 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 223
65 Francis O'Neil (bodymaster of St. Clair), and Patrick Butler (Lost Creek bodymaster), and three more absent, fugitive defendants, were accused of conspiring to reward Tom Hurley for his shooting of Gomer James at a meeting in Tamaqua on the 25th of August 1875; nobody was ever tried for the actual killing as Hurley had fled the region.345 In this trial, the defense also deviated from their previous strategy by having the defendants testify on the stand. One of them, Patrick Butler, confessed and admitted his guilt, leading to a conviction of all the defendants as accessories after the fact. However, several details of this confession are quite remarkable and ambiguous. Butler alleged that it was McParlan who brought up the subject of a reward for Hurley, and that he had never heard of the matter before or after the fact through anyone else but McParlan. He first confessed to a crime unrelated to the Gomer James case, a planned but not executed shooting in Raven Run in 1873. From this point on, it became even more curious. Butler partly retracted his previous statement on McParlan and stated that he had known for about half a year that Hurley was chasing after James, that Hurley had told him he killed James, and that the deed was done with a pistol McParlan obtained from Linden. From there, the testimony trailed off to entirely unrelated matters again, with Butler alleging that Kehoe had once secured funds for a fugitive on a different occasion. Even after his confession, he maintained however that he had only heard McParlan talk about rewarding Hurley, and that Kehoe had not made an expression of support.346 Not only did this implicate McParlan more heavily than any previous testimony, it also did nothing to implicate any of the defendants in a conspiracy to reward Gomer James beyond the shadowy allegation that Kehoe had done something of the sort before. How this was interpreted as a victory for the prosecution is incomprehensible – and yet, the defendants were found guilty.347 With the more recent cases closed, the prosecution turned to the older incidents from the 1860s. Out of the eight Molly Maguire trials over the next two years, only one (the conviction of Dennis Donnelly in December 1877 as an accessory before the fact in the Sanger and Uren case) concerned an incident of the second wave of Molly Maguire activity. All seven other trials concerned old cases, but invariably secured convictions. John ‘Yellow Jack’ Donahue, Thomas Fisher, Patrick McKenna, Patrick O'Donnell, Alexander Campbell, and John Malloy were tried for the murder of Morgan Powell in 1871, and Donahue, Fisher, and Campbell, three more leading members of the AOH, received death sentences. This effectively wiped out the AOH leadership in adjacent Carbon County.348
345 Cf. Broehl 1964, p. 329 346 Cf. West 1876, p. 250–262 347 Cf. Broehl 1964, p. 329 348 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 226 66
With most of the leadership out of the way, the attention of the prosecution turned back to the alleged “King of the Mollies”, John Kehoe, accusing him of killing Frank W. Langdon in 1862. Kehoe was already serving a prison sentence for his alleged role in the Bully Bill Thomas case, but the prosecution, which included Gowen and Albright, intended to get rid of him once and for all. There are serious doubts whether he even was at the scene, and even if he was in fact guilty, the circumstances of the case would not amount to first degree murder. The attack was not premeditated, and it is unclear whether Langdon died of his injuries or due to an ill-judged treatment by his doctor. To make matters even more dubious, someone else had confessed to killing Langdon. Nevertheless, a verdict of first-degree murder was reached.349 This may have been largely due to the influence of Judge Pershing, who – in a final display of the underlying bias – went to great lengths to instruct the jury that the prosecution’s claim of premeditation was accurate, and a conviction for first-degree murder thus appropriate. On April 16th, Kehoe was sentenced to death.350 In the summer of 1877, the executions began. On June 21st, or Black Thursday, as it would be known throughout the region for decades to come, ten alleged Molly Maguires were hanged in Pottsville and nearby Mauch Chunk. Kenny describes the executions as a “powerful ritual of intimidation”,351 in which – while nominally the age of public executions had ended – every detail was publicized through the press and via a select crowd of the social elite that had gained admission to the prisons in order to view the spectacle. The Reading Railroad in particular did its part in adding to the affair by organizing special trains into Pottsville for the occasion.352 Over the following two years, ten more alleged Molly Maguires would be executed. In the end, almost the entire former leadership of the AOH in Schuylkill, Columbia, and Carbon County was either dead, in prison, or had fled the region. It would have been unthinkable in any other context, i.e. if the defendants had not been working-class and racialized, and the judicative not so thoroughly under the control of coal operators, for these trials to pass the way they did. Outside of the testimony of McParlan and a few informers, evidence was largely nonexistent. The credibility of McParlan’s testimony has been severely undermined by inconsistency and outright perjury. Virtually the entirety of the other evidence is of little validity as well. The two most important informers, Jimmy Kerrigan and Daniel Kelly, were under particularly great pressure to bend or even fabricate their testimony according to the wishes of the prosecution, and both appeared to downplay their role in the respective events.353
349 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 282f. 350 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 228 351 Ibid., p. 246 352 Cf. Ibid., p. 245–249 353 Cf. Ibid., p. 230
67 Without the testimonies of McParlan, Kerrigan and Kelly, what remains might not have been enough to convict even a single one of the defendants of first-degree murder under the circumstances of a fair trial. The deficient character of the surviving evidence renders any deliberation on the actual guilt or innocence of the accused moot, but it is in many cases (particularly Kehoe, Roarity, Duffy and Hester) quite clear that they were not guilty as charged. Some of the defendants were with equally near certainty involved in some of the violence that pervaded the coalfields,354 but to which extent cannot be reconstructed, and the courts did not trouble themselves with such nuances.
5.5 Aftermath
The trials may have wiped out the AOH leadership, and ended the existence of genuine retributive justice in the Pennsylvania coalfields, but the mythical Molly Maguire proved harder to kill. In the immediate aftermath, the creation of legends began, and well into the 20th century, a dual representation of ‘Molly Maguire’ would justify the actions of law enforcement on one hand, and working class militancy on the other.355 The Pinkertons maintained a presence of agents in the anthracite coal region, as a report from 1878 illustrates. The ongoing use of private policing justified itself, drumming up fears of resurgent Molly Maguires and renewed strikes.356 The name ‘Molly Maguires’ would become identified, in many cases, with labor activism and Irish associations per se. Various business elites eagerly seized the opportunity to present labor activism of every possible association and trade, from locomotive engineers to glassworkers, with acts of terrorism, and to justify the use of lethal violence against them. The first indication of this came just weeks after the first ten Molly Maguires were executed, during the great strike of 1877. In Shamokin and Scranton, peaceful assemblies of miners were gunned down, and in the latter case, the National Guard – echoing the fusion of corporate and state power exhibited during the trials – prevented the arrest of the perpetrators, only to proceed to recruit said perpetrators into the National Guard. This, too, was justified in the press by labeling the strikers as ‘Molly Maguires’.357 A pamphlet from 1877, circulated among railroad managers, called the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers the “Molly McGuires of the Foot Board”, and urged railway managers to “combine in the use of […] strategy, legislation, or force, and crush them out.”358 There is a clear
354 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 213f. 355 Cf. Ibid., p. 39f. 356 Cf. Reading Company file 1520_1001_04_04 357 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 284 358 Reading Company file mollymag_pams_0001, p. 3 68 discursive continuity between the language of this document and the seeds Benjamin Bannan had sown thirty years before, as the document echoes the sentiment of collective bargaining being dictatorial in character.359 The tendency of associating any and all labor activism with the Molly Maguires also notably included regions where the Irish were present only in small numbers, if at all, such as New Albany, Indiana, where the intimidation of a strikebreaker during a glassworkers’ strike in 1880 was ascribed to the Irish secret society.360 The Molly Maguire affair thus represents – along with the equally dubious Haymarket bombing in 1886, which is also widely thought to have been the work of an agent provocateur – probably the most decisive event in the retrenchment of labor relations that would characterize the so-called Gilded Age. Some of the ideological continuities that would be forged in the years to come already echo in Pinkerton’s narrative, which at one point compares the Molly Maguires to the Commune of Paris and calls them “communists”.361 In the aftermath of the trials, shop regulations were tightened, as the operators increasingly used the powers of private policing not only to thwart any attempt at organization, but to introduce a strict workplace regime. Kenny notes that already in the wake of the failed strike of 1875, an increasing amount of regulations particularly with regards to the use of time was put in place at the mines of the Reading, which at this point had achieved a near-monopoly. By 1880, the workplace autonomy miners once enjoyed was largely gone.362 However, Gowen’s victory was a pyrrhic one. In his hasty monopolization effort, he had overstretched the company’s budget, and a few years later, the Reading Railroad was fast approaching bankruptcy. Gowen was ousted as president of the Reading in 1881, and his attempts at a comeback were unsuccessful. On December 13th, 1889, he committed suicide in a hotel room in Washington, D.C.363 The use of private detective agencies to bring down strikes, often by blatantly unlawful means up to and including murder, would become common. Particularly, the practice of using Coal and Iron Police commissions to bring in detectives, combined with infiltrators, was a pattern that the Pinkertons and their competitors would come to use on a regular basis.364 Exercised to deadly effect in the 1892 Homestead Strike,365 the Mine Wars of Appalachia in 1920, in which agents of another private detective agency, Baldwin-Felts, murdered a local sheriff in broad daylight on the steps of a courthouse because he had broken with the tradition of public policing collaborating with private
359 Cf. Reading Company file mollymag_pams_0001, p. 2 360 Cf. New Albany Ledger, Feb 18th, 1880 361 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 334 362 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 181 363 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 287 364 Cf. Weiss 1986, p. 92 365 Cf. Dray 2010, p. 169–175
69 forces at corporate bidding,366 and the aptly named Bloody Harlan of the 1930s,367 the methods devised in Schuylkill County would continue to leave a trail of blood in their wake. Public agencies, during the Anarchist panic at the turn of the century and the two waves of Red Scares, adopted similar tactics and made frequent use of the agent provocateur,368 further underlining the notions of co-evolution of private and public policing discussed in chapter 4.1. McParlan would continue to play a decisive role in this development, advancing his career to eventually become the head of the Pinkertons’ western department based in Denver, Colorado. There, however, he eventually met his match. Following the assassination of Frank Steunenberg, Idaho’s anti-union governor, in 1905, McParlan was involved in a plot to abduct Charles Moyer and Bill Haywood, two leaders of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), from Colorado to Idaho.369 In a way that bears a striking resemblance to the Kerrigan and Kelly testimonies, he convinced the main suspect, Harry Orchard, to allege a large-scale conspiracy of an inner WFM circle, and implicate Moyer and Haywood in planning the assassination. Defense attorney Clarence Darrow, building some of his argument on McParlan’s track record in the Molly Maguire affair, succeeded in convincing the jury that McParlan had manipulated Orchard, and secured acquittals for Moyer and Haywood.370 The use of legal provisions to thwart organized labor, established in the coalfields of Schuylkill County during the Civil War years, also became a nationwide blueprint.371 The disastrous Pullman affair of 1894, during which at least 30 people lost their lives in riots, escalated to this extent mainly for two reasons: Pullman had assumed a totalitarian control over daily life in his namesake company town on the outskirts of Chicago, and his lawyers made rather creative use of federal legislation, the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, to have the strike declared illegal and prompt a federal military intervention in Chicago against the explicit will of Chicago mayor John Hopkins and Illinois governor Peter Altgeld.372 But for all that was stacked against it, organized labor in Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal fields would not die with the Mollies. An attempt to revive the WBA in 1880 had its roots in Cass Township. It was unsuccessful, but the region remained a stronghold of every subsequent labor movement, from the Knights of Labor in the late 1880s to the United Mine Workers (UMW) the
366 Cf. Nida 2013, p. 57 367 Cf. Kahn 2012 368 Cf. G. Marx 1974, p. 422f. 369 Cf. Jeffreys-Jones 1972, p. 244 370 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 283 371 There were earlier precendents, dating back to 1806. Certain traditions of English common law easily lent themselves to defining unions as an illegal “combination” (cf. Dray 2010, p. 48f.). However, it was not until the late 1870s that the practice would achieve the systematic, often deadly form that characterized the following decades. 372 Cf. Dray 2010, p. 213–220 70 following decade.373 When the UMW organized a statewide strike in 1902, in which 140.000 miners turned out, Schuylkill County was once again the epicenter of events. The entire Pennsylvania National Guard along with 3.000 Coal and Iron policemen could not bring down the strike, and this time, federal political power would not do the operators’ bidding as it had in 1894. Angered by their “extraordinary stupidity and bad temper”,374 President Theodore Roosevelt set up the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission, and effectively forced a compromise which stopped short of official recognition of collective bargaining, but strong-armed the operators into ceding to some of the union’s demands.375 Finally, when the region’s coal miners responded to the closure of mines during the Great Depression by digging bootleg mines on company property, no local, state, or federal agency was willing to intervene. The Coal and Iron Police, since 1929 banned by law from operating outside of company property, dynamited the makeshift mines, but to no avail. The miners simply opened 4.000 more in a matter of weeks and fought any attempts at eviction in a way that echoed the Civil War-era committees, organizing militant self-defense units with the aid of the Communist Party. This was tacitly supported by the authorities from the local sheriff all the way up to the lieutenant governor Thomas Kennedy, who happened to be an Irish American UMW official. When Michael Kozura, a researcher, visited the region to interview the bootleggers, nearly every one of them cited the Molly Maguires as inspiration.376 The bootlegging caused an estimated loss of $32 million annually, and in 1937, the Reading Coal and Iron declared bankruptcy, in no small part due to the bootleg losses. Almost exactly sixty years after Black Thursday, the ghost of Molly Maguire would have her revenge.377
6. On the ‘agent provocateur’ theory
In this chapter, the possibility of McParlan being an agent provocateur will be explored. Based on the evidence discussed in chapters 5.3 and 5.4, it appears implausible that the second wave was entirely orchestrated by outside influence. As Kenny states, “the assassinations committed in the 1870s were not contingent on the presence or absence of a single Pinkerton detective.”378 However, based on what has been presented in chapters 4.2, 5.3 and 5.4, there is sufficient ground to suspect that foul play was involved in the conduct of the agency and its operatives. The perjury alone makes
373 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 292 374 Roosevelt cit. Grossmann 1975, p. 24 375 Cf. Dray 2010, p. 242 376 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 292–295 377 Cf. Ibid., p. 296 378 Kenny 1998, p. 200
71 a plausible case; no one perjures themselves for no reason whatsoever. The very extent of it strongly indicates that something about the agency’s conduct was foul. Moreover, as the James-Younger affair illustrates, the Pinkertons did not hesitate to commit crimes and harm innocent bystanders. This is underlined further by the vigilante murders in Schuylkill County in December 1875, in which the Pinkertons verifiably had a hand. The agency had a strong financial motive, as was illustrated in chapter 4.2. With McParlan taking a leading role in the Shenandoah division of the AOH, they also had plenty of means and opportunity. The basic investigative criteria are thus fulfilled, and the suggestion that the Pinkertons used agent provocateur tactics is plausible on that ground. However, merely demonstrating plausibility was not the objective of this thesis. The following chapter will thus attempt to ascertain how likely it is that McParlan was an agent provocateur. To this end, inconsistencies in the source material, some of which have already been highlighted in chapter 5.3, will be discussed, and a statistical and spatial analysis of Molly Maguire activity will be conducted. The sources for this analysis are the same as for the previous chapter: the Pinkerton case files, as well as a court transcript providing McParlan’s testimony and Pinkerton’s narrative of the events. Moreover, chapter 6.3 will rely on the entirety of the Miners’ Journal from 1873 to 1875 to reconstruct a database of incidents.
6.1 Existing literature
Apart from some earlier works, the two main works of research concerning the Molly Maguires are Kevin Kenny’s 1998 Making Sense of the Molly Maguires and Bulik’s 2015 The Sons of Molly Maguire: The Irish Roots of America’s First Labor War. These works have been the basis for a substantial part of chapters 3 and 5, which merits a brief discussion of their respective strengths and weaknesses, and their stance on the agent provocateur question. Kenny’s work was groundbreaking since it came after thirty years of relative silence on the topic, and took a step back from the openly partisan, ideological approach that characterizes some earlier attempts at revision. In many ways, it is still state of the art. Particularly Kenny’s characterizations of the hostile environment and the social conditions that Irish miners in Pennsylvania faced, as well as his general criticism of the official narrative and his analysis of the discursive representation of ‘Molly Maguire’ in America are second to none. However, he is remarkably silent on the agent provocateur question. He does not investigate the accusations made by the defense during the Molly Maguire trials, nor does he provide a sufficient explanation for the fact that Shenandoah became the center of Molly Maguire activity after McParlan had arrived there and taken a leading position within the local AOH lodge (five of the eight killings attributed to the 72
Molly Maguires in 1874 and 1875 occurred within a five mile radius of Shenandoah, while the first wave of violence during and after the Civil War had been much more evenly distributed across the whole lower anthracite region),379 a fact that would lend a certain degree of credibility to the theory that McParlan had a more active role in the assassinations than Kenny argued. Kenny himself acknowledged this in a later essay, stating that McParlan was “almost certainly” an agent provocateur.380 In an e-mail exchange, Kenny confirmed that this came from a desire not to be too speculative, and to move beyond the hagiographic discourse featuring McParlan as either the hero or the villain of the story: “There is little doubt in my mind that McParlan was an agent provocateur. […] My reason for not pursuing the matter […] was that I could neither prove nor disprove it definitively.”381 In Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, Kenny’s assessment of the agent provocateur question is as follows:
Did McParlan allow Sanger and Uren to be killed so that he could accumulate evidence against the Molly Maguires? Was the detective an agent provocateur? Like so much else in the Molly Maguire story, these questions cannot be answered definitively. Even without McParlan, there would have been plenty of violence in the anthracite region, especially in the wake of the Long Strike. The assassinations committed in the 1870s were not contingent on the presence or absence of a single Pinkerton detective. Their origins are to be found in wider social developments, especially the defeat and fragmentation of the labor movement. Yet, there is no doubt that McParlan participated in the planning of some of the Molly Maguire assassinations, that he knew about several of them in advance, and that he did little to prevent them or to warn the victims. The weight of the evidence in the Sanger, Uren, and Jones cases is that McParlan let these killings go ahead in order to accumulate evidence. Strictly speaking, that may not make him an agent provocateur, but it speaks volumes about the measures that were taken to bring the Molly Maguires to justice in the violent summer of 1875.382
While Kenny states that this would not make McParlan an agent provocateur, according to Gary Marx’ definition, it would fulfill the criteria.383 And as convincing as his assessment of the role of the WBA may be, it does not account sufficiently for the massive, unprecedented escalation that characterized the years of 1874 and 1875. That there would have been some violence after the failed Long Strike without the Pinkertons’ presence is beyond question, but the sheer extent of it requires a more thorough assessment. Either way, however, it has to be conceded that this is a borderline case where, precisely as Marx describes, the distinctions between an infiltrator and an agent provocateur become blurry.384 It remains to be determined, therefore, whether anything more systematic can be established that would place McParlan’s actions in these cases more clearly on the side of the agent provocateur.
379 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 3 380 Kenny 2014, p. 24 381 Kenny, via e-mail, April 8th, 2021 382 Kenny 1998, p. 200 383 Cf. G. Marx 1974, p. 405 384 Cf. Ibid.
73 Bulik’s monograph, the latest publication on the Molly Maguires, provides some new results but ultimately falls short of the standard established by Kenny. Bulik makes a much more detailed case regarding the cultural origins of Molly Maguirism. He argues that the Mollies’ form of retributive justice was closely connected to the practice of mummery, a holiday tradition common in rural Ireland where laymen actors would dress up as women and/or paint their faces, visit all households in the area, and enact their play, being paid for the performance and using the money they raised for communal festivities. Bulik observes that there is a remarkable connection between the dates of some of the murders in Pennsylvania and traditional Irish festivals, which might make the connection to a tradition like mummery much more pronounced than Kenny assumes.385 Indeed, during the first wave of alleged Molly Maguire attacks, at least three of the eight fatal incidents – plus an additional one that Bulik claims to have identified – can be linked to some sort of festive season, while this pattern is absent for the second wave.386 However, in the later chapters of the book, he leans at times towards too great an acceptance of the characterization of the AOH as synonymous with the Molly Maguires, and in this regard his work is clearly weaker than Kenny’s. Several of Bulik’s assessments on the later period of Molly Maguirism can only be ascribed to sloppiness – such as the failure to recognize that the unnamed “R.J.L.” in Pinkerton reports is obviously Robert J. Linden, head of the Reading Coal and Iron Police squadron.387 As insightful and valuable as his accounts on the cultural origins of the Molly Maguires and the Civil War period are, as much do his interpretations of the later period or the motive behind some of the murders have to be taken with a grain of salt. While Bulik does occasionally make the mistake of taking Pinkerton narratives or court records too easily at face value, he is not as naïve regarding the general character of the agency. His assessment of the agent provocateur question, somewhat more elaborate than Kenny’s, is worth quoting in full:
Much has been written about accusations that McParlan served as an agent provocateur during his years undercover. Regardless of what he did or did not do to prevent specific acts of bloodshed, a few points are certain. The first is that Molly assassinations had been reduced to little more than a memory at the time McParlan joined the Hibernians. The second is that within months of his induction, longtime Hibernian leaders who had kept a lid on violence were removed, a process in which the detective played at least some small part. The third is that they were replaced by men more willing to spill blood.388
Recent research thus leans towards a cautious, unspecified affirmation of the agent provocateur theory. While both Bulik and Kenny remain somewhat skeptical, they allege that the use of agent
385 Cf: Bulik 2015, pp. 27ff. 386 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 8 387 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 274 388 Cf. Ibid., p. 272 74 provocateur tactics by the Pinkerton agency is, at the very least, a strong possibility. However, Aurand and Gudelunas in 1982 posed some important challenges to be considered when evaluating this theory. The authors argue that among the competing interpretations of events may all find pieces of evidence to support their respective claims, and that
it is impossible to conclusively determine whether McParlan's role was either that of an agent provocateur or that of a passive collector of information. […] Even if the role of agent provocateur is assumed, it cannot be established whether McParlan was acting on orders as part of a conspiracy or merely advancing his own ambitions.389
As demonstrated in chapter 4.3, these roles are not mutually exclusive. However, to prove the first statement wrong and make a qualified judgment regarding McParlan’s role, the second statement has to be taken very seriously. In evaluating said role, this paper will have to go beyond his own actions, and demonstrate that there was a systematic pattern of suspicious activity that extended beyond McParlan himself.
6.2 Assessing the evidence
In this chapter, several aspects of the Molly Maguire affair in which the Pinkerton agency is implicated in suspicious circumstances, or where evidence has been found that demonstrates that its representation of the events is untruthful, will be evaluated further. These include the case of Gomer James, which has been identified as the most questionable of the 1874/75 incidents, several other cases, and a discussion of the changes in AOH leadership as potential evidence for agent provocateur activity. Moreover, the question of vigilantism will be discussed. To describe the role of the infiltrator in an undercover context, it may once again be referred to the study of Gary Marx, which maintains that dynamics inherent in the role may lead him to fabricate evidence, or take baseless militant rhetoric at face value.390 Also, the assessments of Walton and Jeffreys-Jones discussed in chapter 4.3 can be recalled, according to which private detectives have additional motives to both fabricate and exaggerate evidence in order to secure present and future employment of their services.391 This – as was demonstrated in chapter 5.4 – is something that McParlan was most certainly doing during the trials, confirming the conclusions of the aforementioned research. However, said research also stresses both the difficulties and the importance of establishing a distinction between informant and agent provocateur, which makes it crucial to establish a working definition for the
389 Aurand & Gudelunas 1982, p. 101 390 Cf. G. Marx 1974, p. 420 391 Cf. Jeffreys-Jones 1972, p. 246; Walton 2015, p. 124
75 upcoming chapter. According to Gary Marx, a serviceable definition of an agent provocateur is someone who
go[es] along with the illegal actions of the group, […] provoke[s] such actions, or [sets] up a situation in which the group appears to have taken or to be about to take illegal actions. This may be done to gain evidence for use in a trial, to encourage paranoia and internal dissension, and/or to damage the public image of a group.392
This definition will be used throughout the following chapter. It can already be established from certain incidents discussed in chapter 5.3 and 5.4 that McParlan probably went along with some of the illegal actions of the group, but whether he did so consistently and whether he did more than that stands to be determined.
6.2.1 The case of Gomer James
Among all the deaths ascribed to the Molly Maguires in 1874 and 1875, the case of Gomer James is certainly the one surrounded by the most dubious circumstances. Nobody was ever convicted of the deed itself,393 although Pinkerton’s narrative and McParlan’s reports394 name several accessories before the fact as well as the alleged killer. Of course, the alleged assassin Thomas Hurley was never caught, but the alleged accessories were at hand. No clear motive can be established, and in fact none of the AOH leaders are in any way to be implicated in it. In this regard, a reading against the grain of Pinkerton’s narrative provides valuable insight. There is a crucial episode in which the planned assassination of James is discussed, about a year before the incident, and several Mollies are quoted on the matter. While the dialogue is of course fictional, there is no reason to assume that the underlying sentiments are made up.395 The alleged Mollies saw James as an enemy and loathed him for his fatal attack on a man named Cosgrove in 1873,396 but the entire leadership in 1874 appeared to be either outright opposing the idea of killing him, or to have previously considered and abandoned it. Muff Lawler was alleged by Pinkerton to have put together a group of men to avenge the death of Cosgrove, but after Cosgrove’s cousin, who was among the group, backed out, he decided to abandon the endeavor.397 This did not change under the leadership of Frank McAndrew later in 1874; he is cited
392 G. Marx 1974, p. 405 393 Several men were convicted for conspiring to reward the assassin after the fact (for a brief description of the trial see chapter 5.4) but no one was ever charged with the murder itself. 394 Cf. Reading Company file 1520_1001_02_16, p. 3 395 It is difficult to argue that Pinkerton could have forged the general sentiments behind these dialogues, given the fact that they indicate what he adamantly denies: that the Molly Maguires were not bloodthirsty psychopaths willing to murder for no reason, and that McParlan may have had an active role in at least this particular case. 396 Cf. Miners’ Journal, August 14th, 1873 397 Cf. Reading Company file 1520_1001_01_04, p. 9 76 with referring to the decisions made by Lawler and Cosgrove’s cousin and considering it final, stating that it was undue for strangers to the victim to resume the feud after such a long time.398 Similarly, Kehoe is cited as supporting McParlan’s authority over the division in McAndrew’s absence, and backing the decision of letting the matter rest.399 Some men within the Shenandoah division, namely McHugh, Gibbons, and Hurley, are cited as pushing for retribution against Gomer James, but here the text is incredibly vague. Nothing is said regarding the motive of these men, there is no explanation for their disagreement with both the former and the current head of the division.400 McHugh alleged during the trial concerning the attempt on Bully Bill Thomas that Hurley was brought into the AOH by McParlan.401 While this cannot be verified, Pinkerton’s narrative documents an unusually close association between Hurley and McParlan beginning in early 1874.402 Moreover, neither McHugh, Gibbons, nor Hurley held any position of authority at any point. It is difficult to see how they could have acted entirely on their own, especially with Pinkerton claiming that such affairs were generally decided by the leadership, and “very few of the Mollies in Shenandoah were generally aware of the fact that Gomer James was to be put out of the way.”403 Why Gomer James was assassinated more than a year after virtually the entire Molly Maguire leadership, as well as the next of kin of James’ victim, agreed to abandon the feud is thus entirely unclear. The vagueness in motive for the assassination, when contrasted with the clear elaboration of the motives of the leadership opposing it, is striking. Both McParlan and Pinkerton suggest that a monetary reward was given to the alleged assassin, Hurley,404 but who promised this reward is not made clear and, in any case, it would be a stark deviation from the modus operandi in all other instances of which the Molly Maguires have been accused. When McParlan presented the affair in court (during the trial against Kehoe et al.), he alleged that the reward was agreed upon after the fact.405 However, in the Yost trial he alleged that for a member to initiate an assassination, they had to present a grievance to the bodymaster406 – as documented, the elected bodymaster of the Shenandoah division was opposed to killing James, and the acting bodymaster in his absence was McParlan. It is thus highly plausible that the detective who had inserted himself into the society and reported the first signs of the Gomer James question flaring up again in the precise moment
398 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, pp. 221f. 399 Cf. Ibid., p. 303 400 Cf. Ibid. 401 Cf. West 1876, p. 116 402 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 210, 250 403 Cf. Ibid., p. 423 404 Cf. Ibid., p. 427 405 Cf. West 1876, p. 100 406 Cf. Reading Company file mollymag_pams_0005, p. 10
77 when he had taken office within the Molly Maguires was indeed the one who lobbied for it. The fact that McParlan was formally in charge of the division for more than a month in McAndrew’s absence, and that most of the planning for the Gomer James assassination appears to have occurred in that period, further strengthens the probability that this incident was the result of agent provocateur tactics. McAndrew, upon his return, appeared to have changed his mind and support the assassination – again, his reasons for doing so are entirely unclear. After his return, McParlan’s reports implicate McAndrew as an accessory before the fact, yet the latter was never charged with any crime.407 The monetary reward, which all sources describe as having been decided after the fact, is not a plausible motive. It is simply outlandish to claim that anyone would kill for a merely hypothetical reward without any further motivation. Personal grievances can be established, but whether those would have been enough to warrant murder in the eyes of the alleged Molly Maguires without the explicit consent of the injured party is equally doubtful. None of the killings during the first wave appear to have been exclusively motivated by personal grievances – while these played a role, Kenny has noted how consistently this role has been overstated and that the motive and the deed always had a collective character.408 Even Pinkerton’s account concedes that the Molly Maguires did not typically involve themselves in personal vendettas.409 The murder of Cosgrove appears to have been a purely individual affair, and as stated before, both the AOH leadership and the relatives of Cosgrove opposed retaliation. Additionally, there are substantial discrepancies in the source material regarding attempts to prevent the assassination. While Pinkerton claims that attempts were made to warn Gomer James, through Captain Linden of the Reading Coal and Iron Police, Linden’s reports in the weeks before the murder make no mention of this, while warnings issued to other potential targets are mentioned.410 The same holds true for McParlan’s reports, which mention a warning issued to Foresythe, another potential target, but not James.411 Most likely, no such warnings were ever issued to James – as the following chapter will demonstrate, this is part of a larger pattern. McParlan returned to Shenandoah on August 8th, six days before James’ death. Pinkerton’s narrative states that a monthly meeting of the Shenandoah AOH was held between his return and the assassination, and as much as Pinkerton tries to deflect any notion of involvement by stating that “[McParlan] thought it strange he heard nothing more of the Gomer James affair, but
407 Cf. Reading Company file 1520_1001_02_16, p. 7 408 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 9 409 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 260 410 Cf. Reading Company file 1520_1001_03_03 411 Cf. Reading Company file 1520_1001_02_16, p. 5 78 concluded the feud had subsided”412 – this statement just adds to the suspicion. That a planned assassination would not be brought up at a meeting just a few days prior is not credible, and even if that were true, the claim that McParlan gave it no further thought and assumed the feud had just abated on its own is downright preposterous. McParlan was nothing if not a skilled detective, and both his court testimony413 and Pinkerton’s narrative allege on numerous occasions that a target once decided upon would not simply be abandoned.414 Pinkerton’s claim that McParlan learned about Gomer James’ death – which had occurred in Shenandoah, his place of residence, while he was allegedly absent again – two days later by reading a newspaper is similarly outlandish.415 McParlan’s court testimony in this regard, moreover, contradicts this claim, as he admits to having learned of the successful assassination from Hurley himself.416 Finally, Patrick Butler’s court testimony as a defendant accused of conspiring to reward Hurley for killing Gomer James strongly and repeatedly suggests that McParlan was the only one who suggested paying such a reward. Butler even went as far as suggesting that McParlan had procured the murder weapon through Linden.417 It is quite apparent that Butler was not the most credible witness, and the latter claim appears somewhat questionable, but the repeated and unaltered allegation that it was McParlan who suggested paying the reward is nonetheless as severe as it is plausible – especially since no one else was ever accused of it. In light of this, Pinkerton’s outlandish attempts to distance his detective from any direct knowledge of the events surrounding the murder after detailing so much of the earlier planning only make it more plausible that McParlan was directly involved in the death of Gomer James. Given the fact that all relevant leaders of the AOH are recorded as opposing an attempt on James, that the question had resurfaced shortly after McParlan was elected to office, that a significant part of the planning had occurred when he was in charge of the Shenandoah division, and that he was explicitly accused of suggesting a monetary reward for Hurley and furnishing the murder weapon, the evidence strongly suggests that McParlan was responsible for the assassination as the main instigator. Moreover, Gomer James was an ideal target for the use of agent provocateur tactics. Himself a gang member with a history of deadly gunfights, no reason would have held the Pinkertons back, especially given the fact that up to this point, as Pinkerton freely admits, they had nothing substantial on the Shenandoah division.418
412 Pinkerton 1877, p. 411 413 Cf. West 1876, p. 34 414 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 435, 441 415 Cf. Ibid., p. 418 416 Cf. West 1876, p. 101 417 Cf. Ibid., p. 250 – 261 418 Pinkerton’s narrative states that the first substantial testimony McParlan acquired was that surrounding the killers of Yost, a few weeks prior to the death of James, but that concerned the Tamaqua division, which means that at this
79 6.2.2 Other cases
While it is the most straightforward one, the Gomer James case is far from the only incident which offers grounds for suspicion of agent provocateur activity. Numerous other incidents – the attempted murder of Thomas, the assassination of Sanger and Uren, the death of Jones and the murder of Yost are also suspect either regarding motive, contradictions in the source material, or otherwise. On the attempted murder of Bully Bill Thomas, McParlan testified that the meeting of the Shenandoah division in which this matter was discussed occurred on June 1st, 1875. This falls into the period of McAndrew’s absence from Shenandoah, thus McParlan was in charge of the division at the time of the planning. However, the initial plan of killing Thomas fell to naught, with McParlan claiming he dissuaded the men from the attack due to the presence of the National Guard in town.419 That his role in the affair was rather unsavory, however, is supported even by a historian as sympathetic towards the Pinkertons’ view as Broehl, who establishes that according to some of the defendants, McParlan had immediately and vocally supported the idea of putting Thomas out of the way, that he had taken a leading role in the first attempt, and that he had known of the second attempt without trying to warn Linden or Franklin.420 As was established in chapter 5.4, McParlan was probably untruthful in his claims regarding his position of authority in the Shenandoah division during McAndrew’s absence, with Pinkerton’s narrative explicitly contradicting his claim that he was not the acting bodymaster.421 A further notion of suspicion arises from the fact that Frank McAndrew, the Shenandoah bodymaster, was never charged with any crime, even though McParlan’s court testimony alleges that he was an accessory before the fact in the attempted murder of Thomas.422 Broehl argues that this was due to the help he provided to McParlan.423 The evidence in the Thomas case suggests – a bit further than Kenny has argued regarding the Sanger/Uren and Jones cases – that at the very least McParlan strongly encouraged the plan, and then let it go ahead without making any attempts to prevent it or warn the intended target, and that the agency protected an accessory before the fact due to his assistance in McParlan’s activities. His evasive and with near certainty false claims in court, downplaying his role in the Shenandoah division at the time of the planning, suggest that he might have had an even more active involvement, but no evidence could be found to verify such a suspicion.
point the agency had nothing connecting the Shenandoah division to any crime beyond the occasional sabotage, cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 402–411. 419 Cf. West 1878, p. 31f. 420 Cf. Broehl 1964, p. 326f. 421 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 302 422 Cf. West 1876, p. 36 423 Cf. Broehl 1964, p. 321 80
As for the death of John P. Jones, the evidence is likewise that the Pinkertons knew about it well in advance and made no attempt to prevent it. McParlan learned in early July that Jones was being targeted424 and in early August knew details regarding planned location and approach.425 This is corroborated by Linden’s reports as well. Various reports by Linden, dating from July and August 1875, reveal detailed knowledge of the plans – including strategy, number of assailants, and planned site of the attack. On August 5th, Linden reported that “Jones is the boss who is to be assassinated, but it has been postponed until the last of the month.”426 Linden also knew by mid-August that Kerrigan and Duffy were to be involved in the murder, and reported that “J. Mc-P. [James McParlan] had volunteered to accompany [the assassins] and was accepted.”427 While the report mentions warnings issued to other potential targets, once again no warnings to Jones are recorded. On August 28th, just days before the murder, Linden sent a warning to a mine superintendent named John Reese notifying him that he was being targeted – but not to Jones.428 As suggested by Kenny, the evidence in the Jones case is that the Pinkertons knew of it well in advance and deliberately lead it go ahead. However, the collective character of this knowledge – not only McParlan, but at the very least Linden and Franklin were informed of the plans well in advance – makes the inaction of the Pinkertons appear systemic and calculated; it cannot purely be ascribed to McParlan as an individual. In the case of Sanger and Uren, the most striking issue is the absence of any clear motive. Money was not a factor, and there is no evidence for Sanger or Uren having been involved in any sort of ethnic rivalry. McParlan knew about the planned assassination at least a day in advance, as a report dating from August 31st makes abundantly clear,429 and he was with the assassins right before the deed, as he testified in court that Michael Doyle borrowed a grey coat from him on the night before the respective incident.430 Again he made no attempt to notify Linden or deliver a warning to Sanger. Unfortunately, Linden’s reports, which concern themselves largely with witness statements after the death of Sanger and Uren, provide nothing of interest in this regard.431 In this case, nothing beyond a possibly deliberate inaction can be held against McParlan, and no evidence suggests he attempted to conceal his role in the affair, or that he knew about it more than a day in advance. Still, he knew, and he did not attempt to warn Sanger or to prevent the assassination.
424 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 384 425 Cf. Ibid., p. 414 426 Reading Company file 1520_1001_03_03, p. 4 427 Ibid., p. 8 428 Cf. Ibid., p. 9 429 Cf. Kenny 1998, 200 430 Cf. West 1865, p. 65 431 Cf. Reading Company file 1520_1001_03_03
81 The circumstances of the Yost assassination are likewise suspicious. No evidence exists to corroborate the testimony of the informer Kerrigan, and core facts of said testimony are far- fetched. The killing of a policeman is always a direct affront to state power and will not be undertaken lightly. Kerrigan’s claim that Yost was assassinated over roughing up a Molly Maguire named Duffy for the measly sum of ten dollars is simply not credible. Moreover, Kerrigan apparently downplayed his role in the incident.432 However, there is absolutely no evidence tying McParlan to the affair. All sources establish clearly and without any suspicious discrepancies that he had not been in Tamaqua in months before the murder, and there is no record of him being in contact with Kerrigan in the months prior to the incident outside of the general meeting in Mahanoy City on June 1st.433 It can be said with near certainty that McParlan knew nothing of the Yost affair in advance, and was not involved in its planning in any way. McParlan is thus to be implicated as a possible instigator and accessory before the fact in the attempted murder of Thomas, the Pinkerton agency collectively let the Jones assassination go ahead despite having detailed information well in advance, and there is a tentative, although significantly weaker case to be made for a similar role in the Sanger and Uren case. While outwardly claiming to protect potential targets, the Pinkertons allowed them to be killed in order to accumulate evidence. Along with the Gomer James case, this implicates the agency in four of the eight deaths of the second wave plus one attempted assassination – and indeed, five of seven actual assassinations, attempted or successful, as the deaths of George Major and Thomas Gwyther occurred amidst ongoing riots and were clearly not premeditated, the death of the former was possibly accidental. The only two remaining assassinations in which there is no evidence to implicate the Pinkertons are those of Benjamin Yost and Frederick Hesser.
6.2.3 Changes in leadership
Within months of James McParlan joining the AOH, several crucial changes in leadership occurred, in which the detective played an active role. According to Pinkerton’s narrative, Michael Lawler hesitated to initiate McParlan into the order because of the aspirations of Frank McAndrew, whom McParlan had befriended. McAndrew was vying for the position of bodymaster, and Lawler was accordingly reluctant to strengthen his rival’s position by admitting a new member who was likely to support the latter. After learning that Lawler had ambitions to replace Barney Dolan as AOH county delegate for Schuylkill County, McParlan remedied this situation by pledging his assistance
432 Cf. Reading Company file mollymag_pams_0005, p. 18f. 433 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 341 82 to Lawler with regards to that position. Shortly after, and based on this promise, he was initiated into the Shenandoah AOH.434 In July 1874, Lawler was duly replaced as bodymaster of the Shenandoah AOH by McAndrew. Pinkerton relays that, with McAndrew being illiterate, he greatly relied on McParlan to read to him and teach him the proper protocol related to his new office.435 Lawler had objected to McAndrew’s leadership aspirations mainly on the grounds of the latter’s illiteracy, and it is quite plausible that McParlan furthered McAndrew’s ambitions to have an easily controllable puppet in the highest local office while avoiding the spotlight himself.436 Moreover, there is ample record in Pinkerton’s accounts that the Shenandoah division was in a poor state before McParlan’s arrival, with a shutdown imminent, and that it prospered under McAndrew’s (and, presumably, McParlan’s) leadership.437 As he had promised to Lawler, McParlan then attempted to oust Dolan as county delegate. Once again, Pinkerton’s account gives a very detailed description of his approach. Upon a visit in neighboring Carbon County, McParlan overheard a conversation in a tavern in Summit Hill, regarding Dolan having cursed a Catholic bishop. The state secretary of the AOH was present, and McParlan was eager to weigh in that Dolan should have been more respectful, and such behavior clearly merited the punishment of expulsion from the order.438 At the county convention in summer 1874, Dolan was thus expelled from the AOH, and fined $500. It is not possible to ascertain how big the role of McParlan in this decision was, but in a rather telling statement, Pinkerton’s narrative establishes that “this summary action fell hard on Barney, [but] it was not unexpected by McKenna.”439 McParlan’s promise to help install Lawler as county delegate fell flat, however, and John Kehoe was elected instead. Pinkerton’s narrative alleges that Kehoe was successful in swaying a large share of votes by posting bail for several members of the order who had been engaged in a brawl with the Sheet Iron Gang near Raven Run.440 Like many aspects of the story, whether Kehoe’s election contributed to the violence cannot be ascertained. Bulik argues that Kehoe was more willing to spill blood than Dolan, but there are severe doubts regarding the former’s framing as the bloodthirsty “King of the Mollies”. Both Pinkerton’s book and various reports indicate that Kehoe’s leadership style was wholly inconsistent with the kind of hot-headed gang warfare that would have led to the assassinations of Yost and James in particular. One report from August 1874,
434 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 139f. 435 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 204f. 436 Cf. Ibid., p. 139 437 Cf. Ibid., p. 216f. 438 Cf. Ibid., p. 191 439 Cf. Ibid., p. 208 440 Cf. Ibid., p. 209f.
83 for instance, indicates that Kehoe was furious over AOH members engaging in a brawl at Connor’s Patch, and intended to expel the parties responsible.441 Likewise, the documents record Kehoe’s vocal opposition to incitement of violence during parades, by pain of expulsion from the order.442 He is also recorded to have explicitly opposed the planned assassination of Gomer James.443 It is difficult to reconcile the picture painted of Kehoe in this source material with Bulik’s assessment. On the level of the local lodge, however, it can be established that the change in leadership brought an increased willingness to spill blood to the fore. Lawler had clearly kept a lid on the violence, as is evident through his stance on the Gomer James affair as detailed in chapter 6.2.1. Within months after his replacement, the division became more engaged in violent affairs, and although McAndrew was initially opposed to the James assassination as well, he changed his mind, and played an active role in tracking the victim, as is evident from McParlan’s reports.444 With regards to changes in leadership, the evidence thus shows that McParlan actively intervened in the politics of the AOH, and that in doing so he replaced a bodymaster who was rather averse to violence with one who was both easily manipulated and later showed an increased willingness to resort to violent means. This is once again consistent with Gary Marx’ theories on the role of the infiltrator, according to which they always, whether deliberately or not, influence movement politics,445 but the methodical political intrigue detailed by Pinkerton in this regard suggests a high level of premeditation, thereby placing McParlan more on the side of the agent provocateur than that of the passive observer.
6.2.4 Ethnic tensions
There is a significant difference in victim type between the first and second wave of Molly Maguirism: while the first wave targeted primarily mining officials regardless of ethnic background, the second wave expanded to include public officials and shows a remarkable tendency towards Welsh targets. Only one victim of the first eight (Morgan Powell in 1871), was Welsh, while three victims of the years 1874 and 1875 were Welsh. Another attempted assassination in 1875 brings the total of Welsh targets to four.446 One aspect that renders the emergence of ethnic tensions, at least in this intensity, quite suspicious is the fact that in the political and publicist arena, the inflammatory rhetoric of the 1850s and 1860s was on the decline. Bannan, the region’s leading nativist demagogue, had sold his Miners’
441 Cf. Reading Company file 1520_1001_01_04, p. 4 442 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 282 443 Cf. Ibid., p. 302 444 Cf. Reading Company file 1520_1001_02_16, p. 7 445 Cf. G. Marx 1974, p. 405 446 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 189 84
Journal in 1873 to his longtime companion Robert Ramsey,447 who, while not significantly differing in ideology otherwise, did not share the former’s nativism and anti-Catholicism. Even in December 1875, at the peak of the Molly Maguire fervor, the paper unequivocally condemned a case of anti- Catholic sectarianism among schoolteachers.448 Politics, too, was becoming less ethnically partisan, with none other than John Kehoe switching his allegiances to the Republican Party in the 1875 election, a move that would have been unthinkable just ten years earlier. The rise of the WBA, with its multi-ethnic composition, had further dampened ethnic rivalries. Of course, workplace discrimination was still widespread, with Welsh and American-born miners often occupying higher positions, and probably displaying a certain degree of favoritism towards their kinsmen. That this resulted in violence, especially in the desperate, starved conditions in the wake of the Long Strike, is entirely plausible.449 However, in the Pinkerton reports from operatives spying on the labor union during the Long Strike of 1875, signs of ethnic divisions are quite absent. A report from St. Nicholas, near Mahanoy City, in February 1875 lists a mix of German and Irish names, with no indication of dissent between them.450 Another report from St. Clair notes dissent between the rank and file members and the leadership, namely Siney, but explicitly states that “English, Irish, Dutch and Welsh are all cursing Siney.”451 As late as June 1875, Pinkerton’s narrative describes that “Welsh, English, Germans and Poles […] heartily joined hands with the Irish.”452 Insofar as quarrels between Irish and Welsh are recorded at all in the reports, it is usually on an individual level, as in one account from October 1874.453 The feud between the Modocs and the Molly Maguires, likewise, appears to have been a largely individual issue at first, which escalated through the death of George Major and the subsequent mutual escalation. There is evidence suggesting collusion between the Coal and Iron Police, the Pinkertons and the Modocs. This is first made apparent in an event relayed in Pinkerton’s account, which once again provides an involuntary glimpse into the affairs of policing in Schuylkill County. At a meeting of the AOH in Mahanoy City on June 1st, 1875 – the same meeting in which the attempt on Bully Bill Thomas was allegedly planned – it was relayed that Thomas, along with the Jesse and William Major, searched a train operated by the Reading on the previous night. The men were said to have been armed and their presence was allegedly tolerated by the Coal and Iron Police.454 The possibility of collusion is further supported by the fact that George Major, half a year before he was killed,
447 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 274 448 Cf. Miners‘ Journal, Dec 20th, 1875 449 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 188f. 450 Cf. Reading Company file 1520_1001_02_03 451 Reading Company file 1520_1001_02_01, p. 2 452 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 329 453 Cf. Reading Company file 1520_1001_01_04, p. 14 454 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 309
85 took up a commission of the Reading Coal and Iron Police, which both underlines the fusion of private and public policing and – although before the formation of the ‘Flying Squadron’ – shows that there was at least some overlap between the Welsh milieu associated with the Modocs and the private police forces.455 Moreover, the fact that Thomas was never charged for his attempt to shoot an Irishman named McAneeny in March 1875,456 nor his attempt on Dan Dougherty’s life two months later,457 nor his deadly shooting of a bystander in August 1875,458 suggests that he was granted immunity for his willingness to cooperate with the Coal and Iron Police and the Pinkertons. This is supported by a recorded meeting between Linden and Thomas on July 27th, 1875, in which Thomas identified a man named Haley as one of his assailants. Haley was not part of the trial in that case. Linden then instructed Thomas to wait before making the matter public.459 It can thus be suspected that ethnic tensions, too, were exacerbated by outside influence. There are plenty of examples documenting that doing so was a standard tactic for private detective agencies in labor conflicts.460 The fire that preceded the altercation in which Major was shot is a case in point. As noted in chapter 5.3, Kenny suspects that the fire was started deliberately to provoke a fight. However, whether Pinkerton agents were connected to this incident cannot be determined.
6.2.5 Vigilantism
Although not directly connected to the agent provocateur question, it can reliably be demonstrated that the Pinkertons did instigate at least one more murderous incident in Pennsylvania’s anthracite region. There is evidence that Pinkerton was behind the organization of a vigilante committee, which was then responsible for the murders described in chapter 5.3, and that he at the very least suggested that his agents resort to lynching methods themselves. “If Linden can get up a vigilance committee that can be relied upon, do so. When M.M.s meet, then surround and deal summarily with them. Get off quietly”, a letter to George Bangs dated August 29th, 1875 advocates.461 The letter suggests specific measures, such as being heavily masked, that were followed to the letter by the actual vigilantes.462 Moreover, a list of names that the Pinkertons passed on to the vigilance committees has survived, which includes the names and addresses of the victims. It is to be noted
455 Cf. Miners’ Journal, April 23, 1874 456 Cf. Miners’ Journal, March 23, 1875 457 Cf. Miners’ Journal, May 25th, 1875 458 Cf. Miners’ Journal, August 16th, 1875 459 Cf. Reading Company file 1520_1001_03_03, p. 2f. 460 Cf. Walton 2015, p. 58 461 Pinkerton National Detective Agency Archive, Family Directors File, Letterpress Copybooks v.1, p. 566 462 Cf. Ibid., p. 567f. 86 that McParlan abhorred this approach, and even tendered his resignation because an innocent woman had been killed.463 But precisely this response strongly suggests that he knew of a causal relationship between the agency and the murders. Moreover, the only person who was ever apprehended (but not tried) for participating in the vigilante mob, a butcher from Mahanoy City named Frank Wenrich, adorned his business with a variation of the Pinkerton eye – a curious choice for a butcher shop, but one that suggests, if nothing else, a deep admiration for the agency and its methods.464 A suspicious note delivered by an associate of Wenrich to one of Gowen’s agents, which Bulik discovered, further adds to this interpretation. The note states that Wenrich had “Mahanoy Township orders amounting to about one hundred and Seventy Five Dollars. Can you pay them or don’t you want to have anything to do with them?”465 A butcher shop bill of $175 in such wording is curious enough, and even more so since the Miners’ Journal, which was usually well posted on such affairs, recorded no major banquets or festivities in Mahanoy Township during the weeks before the murders. It is thus very plausible that someone funded the vigilantes through Gowen’s business dealings, whether with or without the knowledge of the latter is speculative. Moreover, Pinkerton, in his official narrative, defended the vigilante murders, stating that “it looked natural that this should be so. There was a breach of the law, it is true, but it was in the interests of humanity and the law, and […] had a wonderfully tranquilizing effect upon the society.”466 That Pinkerton would relish in this incident and consider the murder of a pregnant woman to be ‘in the interests of humanity and the law’ shows, if not direct involvement, a blatant, calculating contempt for human life that lends a much greater deal of validity to all other accusations to be made against the agency. With a philosophy like the one transpiring from these sentences, it becomes very difficult to argue that there would have been any ethical restraints holding Pinkerton back from having his agents commit severe crimes if he thought it beneficial towards the company’s ends.
6.3 GIS analysis
Another striking moment of suspicion regarding possible outside instigation is the stark difference in spatial pattern. The following map, contrasting the two waves, demonstrates said difference:
463 Cf. Kenny 1998, p. 207–211 464 Cf. Bulik 2015, p. 279 465 Carter cit. Bulik 2015, p. 279 466 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 458
87 Figure 3: Comparison of the spatial distribution of Molly Maguire assassinations
The first wave is scattered. There appears to be no visible cluster around Cass Township, the reported stronghold of the Molly Maguires in the 1860s. Beyond the two assassinations in Cass Township, not a single one occurred within a ten-kilometer radius of Cass. This is consistent with Kenny’s assessment of the Molly Maguires, which maintains that they “engaged in a sporadic pattern of violence that focused on individual and local concerns and lacked a coherent strategy or stable institutional base.”467 The second wave, however, is heavily centered in the area around Shenandoah, which accounts for five of the eight killings attributed to the Molly Maguires. For 1874 and 1875, the pattern of Molly Maguire activity is locally concentrated, and it is intense unlike ever before. Pinkerton himself deemed it necessary to counter allegations of agent provocateur tactics by stating that three or four murders had been committed in the vicinity of Shenandoah between the time of McParlan’s arrival and his induction into the AOH.468 This claim will serve as the basis of the following analysis. Based on the entirety of the Miners’ Journal from 1873 to 1875, a crime statistic has been reconstructed, which includes all reported
467 Kenny 1998, p. 10 468 Cf. Pinkerton 1877, p. 149. This is probably outright fabrication. The review of the Miners’ Journal produced three murders in total for the period from January to April 1874 – two of which occurred in the Pottsville area. The only homicide recorded in the area north of the mountain during that period, in Ashland, was the result of a tavern brawl between two Germans and is thus entirely unrelated to the Molly Maguires, cf. Miners’ Journal, March 13th/April 3rd, 1874. 88 incidents that fit the description of Molly Maguire activity: cases of murder, including attempts, arson, rioting and similar public violence, industrial sabotage, and threats. Cases in which it is clear from the circumstances that the Irish community was not involved (e.g. when both parties involved in an incident had German surnames), or that are of a clearly unrelated nature (such as murders in the context of domestic violence) have been excluded. While it is clear that this statistic is not comprehensive, as some incidents may have gone unreported, arrest figures for the timeframe in question, which might complement the picture, are not available and have to be presumed lost.469 The use of a single daily newspaper with county-wide coverage will approximate actual crime patterns closely enough for the purpose of this analysis. However, areas outside Schuylkill County had to be excluded for precisely this reason. From this, a database of 128 incidents has been created, which has then been mapped using QGIS. Figure 4: Incidents from first quarter of 1873 through second quarter of 1874
469 Some official crime statistics for Schuylkill County, including arrest data, exist for the years of 1853–1870 but the years of 1870–1875 appear to be missing. Cf. Gido et al. 2006, p. 265
89 Figure 5: Incidents from third quarter of 1874 through fourth quarter of 1875
Based on these maps, it becomes apparent that incidents relating to Molly Maguirism did not play a significant role before late 1874. Most of the incidents included in this statistic are probably unrelated, as it is difficult to separate ordinary crime from genuine Molly Maguire activity, especially when the suspects are not known. Only one pair of incidents in 1873, at Mt. Laffee, where a coffin notice was posted and a mine boss attacked at the Beechwood colliery, has a clear secret society handwriting. By and large, retributive justice did not play a role in the area. Indeed, this is supported by the Miners’ Journal, which in August 1874 identified “Centralia, Locust Gap and Shamokin”470 as hotspots of Molly Maguire activity. Neither of these places are in Schuylkill County. Before the autumn of 1874, only two incidents in Schuylkill County were ascribed to the Molly Maguires at all. In the second half of the surveyed period, however, Ribbon-style violence in Schuylkill County surged. Reported arson incidents doubled, homicides almost tripled (three of the 13 incidents in Fig. 5 indicate double murders, bringing the total to 16), sabotage and threats became common. Levels of street violence and rioting appear relatively constant, but that may be due to underreporting of minor events in the turbulent year of 1875. Unlike in previous years, many of these incidents bore a clear handwriting of the patterns of retributive justice.
470 Miners‘ Journal, August 7th, 1874 90
The map also clearly shows an uneven distribution of nearly all types of incidents: in the area ‘below the mountain’, around Pottsville, murders remained constant, with two in each 18-month period. In northern Schuylkill, however, they more than tripled in the second period. Moreover, acts of sabotage were centered in the north, while threatening notices were more prevalent in the southern parts – however, the latter aspect may again be due to underreporting. Certain boroughs, moreover, appeared to be hotspots of specific activities. Mahanoy Plane recorded four arson incidents and nothing else, while the area around Shenandoah accounted for almost half the recorded occasions of railway sabotage. This indicates, for one, that the Pinkertons’ claim of McParlan having specifically tried to prevent railway sabotage is likely false and he may just as well have instigated them. Moreover, it partly supports Kenny’s argument that the Long Strike of 1875 and the subsequent collapse of the WBA led to militant responses of a Ribbonite fashion – but these responses differed in important ways. In the West Branch region, around St. Clair and Cass Township, they mostly found the expressions of rioting in a way that reminisced the ‘Committee’ activities of the Civil War years, arson, and the occasional coffin notice, but they did not usually escalate into lethal violence in the way they did further north. The West Branch recorded two murders and three attempted murders over that period, opposed to eleven murders and five attempts in the Girardville – Shenandoah – Mahanoy City triangle alone. Another striking feature is that while violence increased in all coal mining boroughs in the county, the regional pattern was consistent: places that were hotspots in 1873 and early 1874 usually remained troubled, and quiet places usually remained relatively quiet – with one visible exception: Shenandoah. A quantitative chart will illustrate this further. Table 1: Incidents by period and area Location Population (1870)471 Incidents 73/74 Incidents 74/75 Change Schuylkill County 116.428 41 87 +112,2% …northern n.a. 472 22 58 +163,6% …rest n.a. 19 29 +52,6% Pottsville 12.384 4 6 +50% St. Clair 5.726 2 5 +150% Mahanoy City 9.400 4 17 +325% Tamaqua 5.960 5 9 +80% Girardville473 5.905 2 5 +150%
471 Cf. United States Census Bureau, 1870 Census 472 Since some borough boundaries run through the geographical distinction between the area “north of the mountain” and the rest of the county, it is impossible to calculate these numbers from the census data. 473 All numbers for Butler Township, of which Girardville was the largest settlement.
91 Ashland 5.714 2 2 +0% Frackville 1.707 1 0 -100% Shenandoah 2.951 2 12 +500%
A further breakdown of the types of incident also illustrates that this is more than a mere quantitative increase. Before the summer of 1874, Shenandoah had seen one homicide in nine years. By the end of 1875, there would be four more, along with four incidents of rioting and large- scale fighting (up from one in the eighteen months prior), two arson incidents (was 0), and two acts of railroad sabotage (was 0). This is rivaled only by Mahanoy City, which saw four homicides, three attempts, six large-scale riots or fights, three cases of arson, and one case of railroad sabotage. However, Mahanoy City was more than three times larger, had been a hotbed of unrest before, and there is an additional factor to be considered: Mahanoy City was the birthplace of interethnic violence, sparked by the riot that led to the death of George Major in November 1874. Between January 1873 and October 1874, there had only been four recorded incidents with a possible background of ethnic tensions according to the Miners’ Journal, and all but one of those (a gunfight involving the notorious ‘Bully Bill’ in January 1874)474 had been minor scuffles. Beginning with the aforementioned riot, they spread in rapid succession first in Mahanoy City and then to the surrounding areas, as the following detailed maps will illustrate: Figure 6: Incidents in northern Schuylkill, October-December 1874
474 Cf. Miners’ Journal, January 14th, 1874 92
The two incidents in Mahanoy City, marked in yellow, denote the riot in which George Major was killed and a further riotous confrontation, on December 12th, between the Modocs and Irish miners. It also becomes apparent from the map that around this time, coffin notices started to emerge again, with one each in Ashland, Shenandoah, and St. Clair, but Mahanoy City was clearly the epicenter of violence. This suggests that Ribbonite tactics made a genuine comeback, and would have done so without outside influence, but the same cannot be said for the extent of lethal violence. Figure 7: Incidents in northern Schuylkill, first half of 1875
In the first half of 1875, it is apparent that Mahanoy City remained the epicenter of ethnic violence, even as incidents throughout the rest of northern Schuylkill County increased. At this time, the incidents elsewhere concerned mostly sabotage and arson. Figure 8: Incidents in northern Schuylkill, second half of 1875
Only in the second half of 1875 did ethnically motivated violence spread beyond Mahanoy City. This makes Kenny’s conclusion that the collapse of the WBA furthered ethnic tensions appear somewhat questionable, since the expansion did coincide with the collapse, however interethnic violence apparently never became widespread anywhere but in Mahanoy City and its immediate vicinity. In this locality, it had been sparked by the death of George Major and was probably unconnected to the collapse of the union.
93 Based on this analysis, three conclusions are therefore possible. First, that the presence of the Reading Coal and Iron Police, which was centered on the area north of the mountain, was an escalating rather than pacifying factor. Second, that the presence of James McParlan was probably at least partly responsible for the unparalleled escalation of violence in Shenandoah. Third, that the death of George Major in November 1874 was the root cause of ethnic violence, which emerged from Mahanoy City and spread out somewhat to the surrounding areas, but remained locally confined. The collapse of the WBA was probably a factor, but unlike Kenny has argued, it may not have been the most decisive one. These conclusions are not mutually exclusive; however it has to be taken into account that the escalation in Mahanoy City may have played a part in the events in neighboring Shenandoah.
7. Conclusion
The objective of this thesis was to investigate how the use of private policing impacted the Molly Maguire affair, and in the course of this investigation, the background and development of the Molly Maguires, the possible use of agent provocateur tactics, and the accuracy of the surviving testimony have been assessed. The notion that the incidents in the anthracite coal region constituted a genuine phenomenon of social banditry, a strain of agrarian retributive justice transplanted to the industrial context of Pennsylvania, is easily upheld. Most of Kenny’s and Bulik’s conclusions in this regard were confirmed. The Molly Maguires were, as Kenny describes, “a rare, transatlantic strand of a pattern of violent protest characteristic of different parts of the Irish countryside.”475 They were able to establish themselves as a result of harsh working conditions, net downward mobility476 and nativist hostility affecting Irish mining communities. It must be stressed that the extent of lethal violence for which they were responsible has been consistently overstated. Even for the first wave, which was not complicated by the presence of the Pinkertons, only three of the eight deaths ascribed to the Molly Maguires (the assassinations of Smith, Muir and Dunne) plus the death of James Bergen, which was never connected to the Molly Maguires during the trials, bear a clearly identifiable handwriting of agrarian retributive justice in both motive and modus operandi. For two more, the Burns and Powell cases, too little evidence exists to make a qualified judgment. However, a wide range of non-lethal incidents for both the periods of 1862–1871 and 1873–1875 leaves no doubt regarding the genuine character of the phenomenon.
475 Kenny 1998, p. 8 476 Cf. Meagher 2005, p. 81f. 94
Concerning the use of agent provocateur tactics, the evidence during McParlan’s AOH tenure implicates the Pinkertons profoundly and systematically. The agency had a motive to produce spectacular results, as established in chapter 4.2, and the evidence strongly suggests that they did just that. McParlan had a decisive role in replacing the head of the Shenandoah AOH with someone easily manipulated and then willing to spill blood. The agency systematically let planned assassinations, of which it had in at least three cases477 detailed prior knowledge including location and perpetrators, go ahead to accumulate evidence. Moreover, the suspicious circumstances of the James and Thomas cases strongly suggest that McParlan likely had an active role in the preparation and planning of both assassination attempts, in the James case, he may well have been the chief instigator. The fact that Shenandoah was, relative to its population, by far the biggest hotspot of incidents during McParlan’s tenure, and only then, complete the picture. On the other hand, very little exculpatory evidence has been found, and none of it is decisive. The Pinkertons were probably not involved in the Yost case, and the pattern of ethnic violence spreading and expanding from Mahanoy City throughout 1875 makes a different interpretation of the causes for the escalation of violence in that area possible, which could even partly account for the unusually high number of incidents in Shenandoah. However, nothing alleviates or contradicts the evidence on McParlan’s role in the James, Thomas, and Jones cases as detailed in chapters 6.2.1 and 6.2.2. Other explanatory factors highlighted in the existing literature, such as the collapse of the WBA, appear less convincing based on the findings in chapter 6.3. Regarding the character of the testimony, the findings demonstrate that court testimonies were deliberately false on a systematic scale. In just one trial, three false statements478 could be identified, one concerning the most central aspect of the testimony. The evidence that McParlan’s perjury was systematic, premeditated, and in all likelihood coordinated with Gowen, adds a dimension that will be impossible to ignore. The Pinkerton sources, henceforward, will have to be treated with even greater skepticism; they are not only questionable and biased, as previous historians have assumed, but contain massive intentional falsifications. However, it must be stressed that the findings of this thesis do not lend themselves to a return to some of the older interpretations of labor movement historiography that allege a large- scale industrial conspiracy.479 Even if McParlan was an agent provocateur, as the findings here
477 Bully Bill Thomas, Gomer James and John P. Jones, see chapters 6.2.1 and 6.2.2. Additionally, McParlan had prior knowledge of the Sanger and Uren assassination, but the case here is clearly too weak to suggest active involvement or even just systematic inaction. 478 Denial of prior knowledge, misrepresentation of the AOH, and misrepresentation of the role McParlan had in the absence of McAndrew. See chapter 5.4 and appendix B. 479 The most prominent example of this is Bimba, who alleged that “a campaign of vituperation was started; the label “Molly Maguire”, with all its ruling-class distortions, was created [and] spies, provocateurs and gangsters were put to
95 strongly suggest, the detective did not act in a vacuum. Agent provocateur tactics depend on a complex relationship between political movements and policing agencies, as was detailed in chapter 4.3. To suggest that the entirety of lethal violence was the result of Pinkerton instigation would strain credibility. The desperation and anger among miners of the anthracite region after the failure of the Long Strike was undoubtedly real, and it did lead to violent reactions. The Pinkertons were responsible for exacerbating violence, and – as the case of Gomer James and the vigilante murders of December 1875 illustrate – they were probably chiefly responsible for a part of it, but they did not create it. McParlan’s letter from 1914 proves a certain degree of conspiracy during the trials, as his perjury was clearly coordinated with Gowen and possibly done at Gowen’s request, but there is absolutely no evidence of conspiracy before the trials. On the contrary, Gowen’s late shift of targets – he was blaming the union, not the AOH, for the violence well into 1875, only to completely reverse his course during the trials480 – indicates that there was no coordination on falsifying evidence prior to early 1876. Moreover, the absence of nuance from Pinkerton reports to Gowen, which refer, for instance, to Molly Maguires from Pittsburgh,481 indicates that the agency may have attempted to exaggerate the threat, and thus would have been the driving force behind the conflation of the Molly Maguires and the AOH. Of course, the fact that Gowen’s correspondence is missing leaves a significant gap in the understanding of his motives and his role in the affair, and in case his letters were to be found, parts of this conclusion might have to be revised. If McParlan was an agent provocateur, which is most likely the case, it appears much more plausible to assume that he acted on Pinkerton’s orders alone, without the knowledge or involvement of Gowen. This is consistent with the established research on the motive of private detective agencies in using agent provocateur tactics as detailed in chapter 4.3. Moreover, this interpretation of events also resolves some of the critical questions that Aurand and Gudelunas have posed with regards to the agent provocateur theory. Their criticism rests on the assumption that Gowen was involved, and under this assumption, it has merit: If Gowen intended to frame someone for Molly Maguirism, why would he choose the AOH and not the union? If Gowen wanted to remove political adversaries, why would he target Kehoe and not someone with more influence?482 Yet, if Pinkerton acted on his own, without the knowledge of Gowen, these points become obsolete. The use of agent provocateur tactics if decided by the agency itself would not need to follow exactly Gowen’s political considerations and priorities. While his satisfaction with work” (Bimba 1932, p. 11) by the employers and specifically alleges that the entire affair was the result of a “plan agreed on between Gowen and Pinkerton in 1871–1872” (ibid., p. 77) 480 Cf. Broehl 1964, p. 328 481 Cf. Reading Company file 1520_1001_01_04, p. 6 482 Cf. Aurand & Gudelunas 1982, p. 101 96 the outcome would have been an issue to consider, the agency would mainly have been concerned with producing a case as spectacular as possible, following no other interest than advertising its brand in the process. A revised interpretation must therefore assume that, while Gowen certainly played an active role in the fraudulent trials, he was not part of any prior conspiracy to frame the defendants. Moreover, the theory of the Pinkertons acting on their own account, rather than being part of some sort of industrial conspiracy, is supported by a great deal of research on the character of detective agencies – notably by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, who concludes that
private detectives were not, in fact, agents of an American ruling class. They neither opposed trade unionism as a principle, nor working men as a class. They simply saw an opportunity to make money out of conflict, physical and psychological. […] The industrial sleuth was out for himself.483
This interpretation is seconded by John Walton, who notes that it would explain the apparent contradiction between Pinkerton’s role and his prior involvement in the Chartist movement, or his competitor Burns’ vocal support of labor unions in principle.484 In the same way, this assessment also helps to explain the rather sympathetic portrayal of Irish agrarian resistance in McParlan’s preliminary report to Pinkerton in 1873,485 or McParlan’s later indignation at sensationalist claims on the Molly Maguires as a sectarian anti-Protestant force.486 Industrial conspiracies, price-fixing, and coordinated union-busting most certainly existed – as both the examples of the Reading Railroad and the events that caused the Great Strike of 1877 illustrate487 – but private detective agencies were not necessarily a part of their planning. Conversely, they had an agenda of their own, which in parts of course overlapped with the industrial elite, but whose parts that diverged from the latter they cultivated on their own account. Their end goal was not to eradicate organized labor, but to create a perpetual demand for their services by either exaggerating or exacerbating threats, as established in chapter 4.3. When this pattern is applied to the situation in the anthracite coalfield, the conduct of the Pinkerton agency makes sense. They had a vested interest in exacerbating and provoking violence, and their most prolific detective was placed in a prime position to do so. Their interest in violence, however, did not neatly align with Gowen’s. Therefore, alleging a large-scale conspiracy – even with McParlan’s 1914 letter stating that he had informed Gowen of the true character of the AOH – is not plausible without conclusive evidence. Rather, as the title of this paper suggests, the violence of private policing and gang violence (not limited to the Molly Maguires) were contingent
483 Jeffreys-Jones 1972, p. 245f. 484 Cf. Walton 2015, p. 28 485 Cf. Reading Company file molly_m_021 486 Cf. Pinkerton's National Detective Agency Records, Box 30, 102595_007_0001, p. 123 487 Cf. Dray 2010, p. 106f.
97 on each other through a complex network of interrelations, ranging from agent provocateur tactics to active cooperation, and reinforced each other. The possible collusion between the Pinkertons and the Modocs, for which some tentative evidence has been found, further supports this understanding. Through this interpretation of events, it becomes possible to explain why Ribbonite methods made a comeback throughout Schuylkill County in 1875, but were drastically less violent and infinitely less lethal in the West Branch coalfield, which had a much smaller presence of private police forces. The unique combination of methods used here uncovered decisive new evidence which was overlooked by previous research. Using approaches of criminological history, it was possible to highlight severe inconsistencies in the Pinkerton source material which demonstrate with near certainty that McParlan was an agent provocateur, and prove with absolute certainty that his testimony was perjured. The use of GIS uncovered varieties in the local patterns of violence that have never before been addressed. A reading against the grain of Pinkerton’s narrative provided highly valuable insight and enabled a reconstruction of the motives of historical actors. However, the findings of this paper pose several questions for future research. The exact relationship of the Molly Maguires to their Irish predecessors could not be established, and the abrupt disappearance of cultural markers during the second wave of activity is reason for further inquiry. Moreover, the tentative evidence regarding collusion between the Pinkertons and the Modocs leaves a crucial gap regarding the agency’s role in fomenting ethnic tensions in the region that likewise will need to be addressed. To gain a more complete picture of the events, future research should also attempt to gain a better understanding of the Modocs and the Sheet Iron Gang in general.
98
8. Sources and literature
8.1 Unpublished sources
Hagley Museum, Wilmington, Delaware Reading Company file related to the Molly Maguires. https://digital.hagley.org/1520pinkerton_molly_m accessed 20.04.2021. Library of Congress, Washington D. C. Historical Map of Schuylkill County, 1870s. Louisville Journal (1840-1866). Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency Records. Newspaperarchive.com Daily Pittsburgh Gazette (1851–1866). https://newspaperarchive.com/browse/us/pa/pittsburgh/pittsburgh-daily-pittsburgh- gazette/, accessed 07.05.2021. New Albany Ledger (1851–1937). A https://newspaperarchive.com/browse/us/in/new- albany/new-albany-ledger/ , accessed 14.05.2021. Miners’ Journal (1828–1869). https://newspaperarchive.com/browse/us/pa/pottsville/pottsville- miners-journal-and-pottsville-general-advertiser/, accessed 05.05.2021. Schuylkill County Historical Society, Pottsville, Pennsylvania Miners’ Journal (1873–1875). Microfilm reels, rolls 18–24. United States Census Bureau, Suitland, Maryland 1870 Census. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/decade/decennial- publications.1870.html, accessed 05.05.2021.
8.2 Published sources
Pinkerton, Allan, 1877. The Molly Maguires and the Detectives. New York. https://archive.org/details/mollymaguiresdet00pink, accessed 08.05.2021. West, R. A., 1876. Report of the Case of the Commonwealth vs. John Kehoe Et Al., Members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, Commonly Known as “Molly Maguires.” Indicted in the Court of Quarter Sessions of the Peace, for Schuylkill County, Penna., for an Aggravated Assault. Pottsville, PA. Ed. Yale Law Library, s.a.
99 8.3 Literature
Adamic, Joel, 1931, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America. London: J. Cape. Aurand, Harold & Gudelunas, William, 1982, “The Mythical Qualities of Molly Maguire”, in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 49 (2), 91–105. Boonstra, Omno W.A., 2009, “No Place in History – Geo-ICT and Historical Science”, in Henk J. Scholten, Rob van de Velde & Niels van Manen (eds.), Geospatial Technology and the Role of Location in Science. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 87–101. Broehl, Wayne G., 1964, The Molly Maguires. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bulik, Mark, 2015, The Sons of Molly Maguire. The Irish Roots of America's First Labor War. New York: Fordham University Press. Canales, Katie, 2020, “Amazon is using union-busting Pinkerton spies to track warehouse workers and labor movements at the company, according to a new report.” Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-pinkerton-spies-worker-labor-unions-2020-11 (accessed 25.3.21). Christianson, Gale E., 1972. “Secret Societies and Agrarian Violence in Ireland, 1790–1840”, in Agricultural History 46:3, 369–384. Churchill, David, 2017, “Towards Historical Criminology”, in Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies 21:2, 379–386. Churchill, David, Janiewski, Dolores & Leloup, Pieter, 2020, “Introduction”, in David Churchill, Dolores Janiewski & Pieter Leloup (eds.), Private Security and the Modern State. New York: Routledge, 1–19. Churchill, Ward, 2004, “From the Pinkertons to the PATRIOT Act: The Trajectory of Political Policing in the United States, 1870 to the Present”, in CR: The New Centennial Review 4:1, 1– 72. Cleaves, Wallace, 2020, “From Monmouth to Madoc to Māori: The Myth of Medieval Colonization and an Indigenous Alternative”, in English language notes 58:2, 21–34. Cohen, Michael, 2007 ““The Ku Klux Government”: Vigilantism, Lynching, and the Repression of the IWW”, in Journal for the Study of Radicalism 1:1, 31–56. Coleman, James W., 1936, The Molly Maguire Riots: Industrial Conflict in the Pennsylvania Coal Region. Richmond, VA: Garrett & Massie. Congleton, Betty, 1965, "George D. Prentice and Bloody Monday: A Reappraisal", in Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 63:3, 220–239. Connolly, S.J., 2003, “Jacobites, Whiteboys and Republicans: Varieties of Disaffection in Eighteenth-Century Ireland”, in Eighteenth-Century Ireland / Iris an dá chultúr 18, 63–79. 100
Cunningham, David & Soto-Carrión, Roberto, 2015. “Infiltrators”, in Jan W. Duyvendak, & James M. Jasper (eds.), Breaking Down the State, Protestors Engaged. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 157–178. Donnelly, James S., 1983, “Irish Agrarian Rebellion: The Whiteboys of 1769–76”, in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. Section C: Archaeology, Celtic Studies, History, Linguistics, Literature 83C, 293–331. Donnelly, James S., 1981, “Hearts of Oak, Hearts of Steel”, in Studia Hibernica 21, 7–73. Donnelly, Richard C., 1951, “Judicial Control of Informants, Spies, Stool Pigeons, and Agent Provocateurs.”, in The Yale Law Journal 60:7, 1091–1131. Dray, Philip, 2010, There is Power in a Union. The Epic Story of Labor in America. New York: Doubleday. Eads, Valerie. 2006, “Means, Motive, and Opportunity. Medieval Women and the Recourse to Arms”. Paper Presented at The Twentieth Barnard Medieval and Renaissance Conference: War and Peace in the Middle Ages & Renaissance (2006) https://www.medievalists.net/2011/01/means- motive-opportunity-medieval-women-and-the-recourse-to-arms/ , accessed 07.02.2021. Edelberg, Peter & Simonsen, Dorthe G. 2015, "Changing the Subject: Epistemologies of Scandinavian source criticism", in Scandinavian Journal of History 40:2, pp. 215–238. Fisher, Ronald P., Vrij, Aldert, & Leins, Drew A., 2013, "Does Testimonial Inconsistency Indicate Memory Inaccuracy and Deception? Beliefs, Empirical Research, and Theory", in Barry S. Cooper, Dorothee Griesel & Marguerite Ternes (eds.). Applied issues in investigative interviewing, eyewitness memory, and credibility assessment. New York: Springer, 173–190. Föhr, Pascal, 2018, „Historische Quellenkritik im digitalen Zeitalter.“ Dissertation. Philosophical- Historical Faculty, University of Basel. https://edoc.unibas.ch/64111/1/F%C3%B6hr_Pascal- Historische_Quellenkritik_im_Digitalen_Zeitalter-2018.pdf , accessed 09.05.2021 Garvin, Tom, 1982, “Defenders, Ribbonmen and Others: Underground Political Networks in Pre-Famine Ireland”, in Past & Present 96, 133–155. Gido, Rosemary L., Castle, Tammy, Dodson, Kimberly D., McDonald, Daniel, Olsen, Christine Y. & Boyd, Rebecca J., 2006, “The Irish in Schuylkill County Prison: Ethnic Conflict in Pre- and Post-Civil War Pennsylvania”, in The Prison Journal 86:2, 260–268. Grossmann, Jonathan, 1975, “The Coal Strike of 1902: Turning Point in U.S. Policy.”, in Monthly Labor Review 98:10, 21–28. Harper, Leslie A., 2011, “Lethal Language: The Rhetoric of George Prentice and Louisville’s Bloody Monday.”, in Ohio Valley History 11:3, 24–43.
101 Hobsbawm, Eric, 1981, Bandits. New York: Pantheon Books. Hogg, J. Bernard, 1944, “Public Reaction to Pinkertonism and the Labor Question.”, in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 11:3, 171–199. Hutcheon, Wallace S., 1971, “The Louisville Riots of August 1855.”, in The Register - Kentucky Historical Society 69:2, 150–172. Perry, Jay M., 2013, “The Irish Wars: Laborer Feuds on Indiana’s Canals and Railroads in the 1830s.”, in Indiana Magazine of History 109:3, 224–256. Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri, 1972, “Profit over Class: A Study in American Industrial Espionage.”, in Journal of American Studies 6:3, 233–248. Kahn, Si, 2012, “Organizing, Culture, and Resistance in Appalachia: Past, Present, and Future.”, in Journal of Appalachian Studies 18:1/2, 8–24. Karp, Matthew, 2016, This Vast Southern Empire. Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy. Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press. Kenny, Kevin, 1995, “The Molly Maguires in Popular Culture”, in Journal of American Ethnic History 14:4, 27–46. Kenny, Kevin, 1998, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires. New York: Oxford University Press. Kenny, Kevin, 2014, "The “Molly Maguires,” the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and the Bloody Summer of 1875.", in Pennsylvania Legacies 14:2, 18–25. Lewis, Arthur H., 1964, Lament for the Molly Maguires. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace & World. Lukas, J. Anthony, 2012, Big Trouble. A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America. New York: Simon & Schuster. Marx, Gary T., 1974, “Thoughts on a Neglected Category of Social Movement Participant: The Agent Provocateur and the Informant.”, in American Journal of Sociology 80:2, 402–442. Marx, Karl, 1887. Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I. London. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf [05.05.2021] McMahon, Cian, 2015, The global dimensions of Irish identity: race nation, and the popular press, 1840– 1880. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Meagher, Timothy, 2005, The Columbia Guide to Irish American History. New York: Columbia University Press. Miller, Wilbur R., 2013. “A State within ’The States’ : Private Policing and Delegation of Power in America.”, in Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies 17:2, 125–135. Murray, A. C., 1986. “Agrarian Violence and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: The Myth of Ribbonism.”, in Irish Economic and Social History 13:1, 56–73.
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103 Vaughan, William E, 1994, Landlords and Tenants in Mid-Victorian Ireland. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Vermeulen, Pieter; Craps, Stef; Crownshaw, Richard; de Graef, Ortwin; Huyssen, Andreas; Liska, Vivian & Miller, David, 2012, “Dispersal and redemption: The future dynamics of memory studies – A roundtable”, in Memory studies 5:2, 223–239. Walton, John, 2015. The Legendary Detective: The Private Eye in Fact and Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weir, Robert E., 2013, Workers in America. A Historical Encyclopedia. Volume I: A-L. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Weiss, Robert P., 1986. “Private Detective Agencies and Labour Discipline in the United States, 1855–1946”, in The Historical Journal 29:1, 87–107. Wilsford, David, 1994, “Path dependency”, in Journal of Public Policy 14:3, 251–283. Whelehan, Niall, 2012, “Labour and agrarian violence in the Irish midlands, 1850–1870”, in Saothar 37, 7–17. Wynne, Catherine, 2015, The Colonial Conan Doyle: British Imperialism, Irish Nationalism, and the Gothic. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
104
9. Appendix
Appendix A: Membership list of the AOH
List of AOH members based on McParlan’s investigation, circulated in late 1875. Reading Company file, molly_m_015
105
106
107 Appendix B: Letters
Allan Pinkerton to Cpt. Fitzgerald, August 13th, 1872. Evidence for the agency’s financial troubles at the time. (Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency Records, Letterpress Copybooks v.1, p. 26)
108
Allan Pinkerton to George H. Bangs, May 18th, 1873 (extract). On the lower half of the page, the idea of pitching an investigation to Gowen is mentioned. (Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency Records, Family Directors File, Pinkerton v.1, p. 354)
109 James McParlan to George D. Bangs, February 10th, 1914. This letter, as quoted in chapter 5.4, proves McParlan’s perjury regarding the relationship of the Molly Maguires and the AOH. The relevant section is on the second and third page. (Pinkerton's National Detective Agency Records, Box 30, 102595_007_0001, p. 98 – 102)
110
111
112
113 Appendix C: Newspaper clippings
Miners’ Journal, March 2nd, 1874. This item adds an interesting dimension to a potential motive of making Shenandoah the target of the investigation. A drastic increase of tax might have spurned Gowen to task the Pinkertons with specifically investigating the town.
114
Miners’ Journal, December 22nd, 1874. This incident, mentioned in chapter 5.3, illustrates the genuine characteristics of social banditry present in the second wave of Molly Maguire activity.
115 Miners’ Journal, September 29th, 1875. This item illustrates the rationale of some miners resorting to Ribbonite tactics under the label of Molly Maguire.
116
Appendix D: Database of incidents for chapter 6.3
Date Location Type Description Date of paper Jan 01 1873 New PhiladelphiaViolence Rioting, shots fired, no03. casualties. Jan Irish suspects. Jan 03 1873 Shenandoah Violence Man named Thomas 06.Waters Jan badly beaten outside his house by drunk men Jan 08 1873 Silver Creek Arson Breaker set on fire 09. Jan Jan 11 1873 Porter TownshipMurder Man named Ketner shot13. Jandead, assailants not named Jan 14 1873 Gilberton Murder Man named Casey shot15. dead,Jan motive unknown Jan 14 1873 Pottsville Violence Frank Gehring badly beaten17. Jan by three men Jan 24 1873 Pottsville Violence Young man named Kopp27. Janbeaten up near courthouse by unknown assailants Jan 27 1873 Ashland Murder Man named August Strale28. Jan beaten to death by unknown parties Jan 31 1873 Mahanoy City Arson Fire, speculated incendiary03. Feb Mar 15 1873 Bear Run Violence Man visiting the17. area Mar gets into an altercation with local roughs, is shot through the leg Mar 17 1873 Mahanoy City Arson Anthracite hotel18. burned Mar down, suspected incendiary Mar 31 1873 Schuylkill HavenViolence Report on "roughs" from03. Apr Port Carbon beating up local citizens Apr 18 1873 Girardville Violence German miner named21. Lenner Apr beaten by three men May 11 1873 Pottsville Arson Attempted arson12. in May Pottsville, near Fourth and Laurel. May 18 1873 Tuscarora Arson Fire in the store20. of May Bernard O'Hare, suspected arson May 26 1873 Auburn Arson Arson attempt28. at passengerMay train depot June 11 1873 Tamaqua Violence Minor fighting on the12. streets Jun of Tamaqua, stone thrown at deputy June 30 1873 Mahanoy PlaneArson New hotel building setJul on 21 fire July 14 1873 Mt. Laffee Attempted murderJ.S. Hoskins, foreman atJul a 21 Reading mine, attacked by three men who attempted to shoot him. July 16, 1873 Mt Lafee Threat Coffin notice posted at18. beechwood Jul colliery Aug 04, 1873 St. Clair Arson East Pine breaker set05. on Aug fire Aug 09 1873 Pine Grove Arson No details provided 11. Aug Aug 12 1873 Shenandoah Murder Gomer James shooting14. Cosgrove, Aug is arrested Aug 16 1873 Ashland Violence Street brawl, one man18. shot Aug Sep 9 1873 Girardville Violence Fight erupts at Hibernia10. House,Sep kept by John Kehoe, after a funeral. One man severely wounded. Sep 10 1873 Mahanoy City Attempted murderShots fired at Edward11. Burke Sep standing outside hotel, a few days later (Sep 22) it is alleged that MM were behind it Oct 7 1873 Tuscarora Attempted murderShots fired at Squire10 oct Stephen Ringer near Tuscarora depot Oct 15 1873 Pottsville Violence A. Durkin attacked16 oct by a young man named Murray with a stone, allegedly because the former voted Republican. Oct 14 1873 Mt Pleasant Violence Martin Brennan17 attacked oct by a man named Burns, motive is supposed to be political Oct 27 1873 Frackville Violence, ethnicBrawl between29 German oct and Irish Oct 28 1873 Tamaqua Violence Four men bearing29 oct Irish surnames arrested for assault and battery of one John McFadden Nov 13 1873 Newkirk Violence Bernard O'Hare, teacher,14. Nov attacked in his schoolhouse by three unknown assailants Jan 14, 1874 Mahanoy City Violence Disturbance in 19.01.1874a bar involving Bully Bill and Patrick Ryan, Ryan shot at Jan 24 1874 Minersville Murder William Bradley26.01.1874 shot by Thomas Farrell, former army comrade, after a funeral Feb 17 1874 Tuscarora Violence Riot at a polling station,20. Febshots fired, alleged instigator named Kerrigan Feb 23 1874 Tamaqua Arson Arson attempt on the24. house Feb of one August Baabe Feb 23 1874 Cressona Violence, possiblyScuffle ethnic on the train, knives25. Feb were drawn, Bully Bill involved Apr 10 1874 Tamaqua Arson Aaron Myer's storage17. burnt Apr down, two carriages and a few barrels of whiskey destroyed
117 May 17 1874 Cressona Violence Pres. German man22 May attacked by 5 young men on the way home from church June 4 1874 Minersville Violence Mail carrier attacked 05.by 4Jun men on the train platform June 14 1874 St. Clair Violence Group from Port Carbon19. Jungets in fight with locals, riot ensues Aug 2 1874 Colorado Violence, ethnicFight between Sheet 04.Iron Aug Gang and Molly Maguires on Danes Patch near Colorado Aug 21 1874 Tuscarora Arson Several houses burned22. by Aug incendiary, including that of Bernard O'Hare, although it seems he was not the target. Aug 31 1874 Ringtown Violence Rioting breaks out after02. aSep foot race, attended by large crowd from surrounding area. Sep 3 1874 Pottsville Violence Pat Dormer, known AOH04. Sep member, goes on a drunken spree, shooting at a man from StClair but missing. Sep 14 1874 Port Carbon Violence Man named Hayes badly18. Sep beaten, assailants unknown Sep 02 1874 Tamaqua Arson Attempt to burn down05. the Sep American Hotel Sep 23 1874 Mahanoy PlaneArson Several houses burned24. down Sep Oct 2 1874 Coaldale Murder, att. Several shots fired03 oct at policeman who had arrested suspects in Morgan Powell case, suspected MM Oct 8 1874 Wadesville Threat Coffin notice posted09 oct at Wadesville colliery, warning inside boss to leave within one month Oct 10 1874 Tamaqua Arson Attempted arson12 octat the Tamaqua railway depot Oct 11 1874 Fishbach Murder James Hirst, of13 Mt. Oct Laffee, attacked with a stone and beaten to death by unknown assailants. Oct 17 1874 Tamaqua Arson House and shop19 of oct one Mr. Haber burned to the ground Oct 31 1874 Mahanoy City Murder George Major shot amidst02. Nov riot Nov 6 1874 Mt. Laffee Violence Gunfight involving Irish09. participants, Nov nobody hit. Nov 15 1874 St Clair Arson House burned to the17. ground Nov Nov 16 1874 Minersville Violence Man beaten and stabbed19. Nov by unknown assailants Nov 23 1874 Mahanoy City Violence, ethnicRiotous confrontation25. between Nov Modocs and pres. Irish, Reading Railroad officer attacked Dec 12 1874 Mahanoy City Violence Another severe14 riot, Dec several persons wounded by bullets Dec 13 1874 Mahanoy City Murder A railroad repairman14 Dec named Golden found dead in house owned by Flanigan, the latter disappeared Dec 17 1874 Ashland Threat Phillip Hughes,18 boss Dec at Locust Run colliery, received coffin notice Dec 18 1874 Girardville Murder, att. Attempted assassination21 Dec of one Michael Ryan between Girardville and Colorado Dec 1874 Shenandoah Threat Coffin notice posted22 Dec to a man telling him to let his property to a woman who had built a house on it 22 Dec 1874 Pottsville Violence Man named John23 DecBenedict attacked by five unknown assailants 24 Dec 1874 HeckschervilleViolence Attack on officer24 whoDec was on the way to serve an arrest for Patrick Britt 25 Dec 1874 Phoenixville Violence Another officer28 shot Dec while trying to serve an arrest, target possibly Irish 27 Dec 1874 Mahanoy City, MurderCraig's Patch James McCormick20 Mar shot 1875 by Michael Flanagan 31 Dec 1874 Girardville Violence Chief Burgess Swansdown07. Jan fired upon after dispute of multiple parties outside his home 05 Jan 1875 Mt Carbon Threat Strikebreakers at an ice12. company Jan threatened with "Molly Maguire" 19 Jan 1875 St. Clair Threat Coffin notice sent to one22. JanMartin Dormer, reasons unknown 22 Jan 1875 Pottsville Threat Coffin notice sent to an27. unnamed Jan recipient, apparently on the matter of a relationship the sender did not approve of 14 Feb 1875 St Clair Arson West Norwegian breaker15. Feb burned down 22 Feb 1875 Mahanoy City Violence Fighting breaks out after23. FebWashington birthday parade, two men stabbed 27 Feb 1875 Glen Carbon Arson Unoccupied house1. Mar burned down by incendiaries 13 Mar 1875 Mine Hill Gap Murder Man shot dead15 after mar an altercation at Mine Hill Gap 17 Mar 1875 Mahanoy City Violence, ethnicBully Bill Thomas23 firedmar at an Irishman named McAneeny 28 Mar 1875 Port Carbon, SchuylkillThreat HavenSeveral coffin notices31 mar sent. 31 Mar 1875 Port Carbon Sabotage Rock rolled onto the tracks01. Apr before an incoming Reading Railroad train Apr 2 1875 Tuscarora Arson Attempt to burn PRR 03.depot Apr Apr 2 1875 Mahanoy City Sabotage Attempt to derail train03. by Apr manipulating switch Apr 2 1875 Mahanoy PlaneSabotage Train stoned and shot05. at Aprbetween Mahanoy Plane and Shenandoah Apr 8 1875 Tamaqua Threat Coffin notice posted at09. colliery Apr Apr 12 1875 Shenandoah Sabotage Railcar deliberately left14. on Apr the tracks attempting to provoke a collision May 4 1875 Gordon Sabotage Rope structure06 cut may May 5 1875 Big Mine Run Sabotage Attempt to derail06 maya train
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May 8 1875 Mahanoy City Violence, possiblyTwo ethnic Frenchmen10 attacked may and beaten in a tavern May 8 1875 Cressona Threat Coffin notice posted10 may in an attempt to deter man from operating a machine in one of the mines May 11 1875 Mt Laffee Violence Mine boss at Beechwood12 may colliery beaten May 18 1875 Newkirk Violence Strikebreakers 19shot may at, one severely wounded May 18 1875 Mahanoy City Arson Severe fire in the19 maycity May 19 1875 Mahanoy PlaneArson Signal tower at20 colliery May set on fire May 20 1875 Shenandoah Arson Building belonging21 may to one James Riles on Centre Street set on fire May 23 1875 Mahanoy City Murder, att. Dan Dougherty,25 alleged may killer of Major, shot but survived June 3 1875 Mahanoy City violence Severe rioting in Mahanoy04. Jun City June 3 1875 Shenandoah Sabotage Attempt to derail a train04. Jun June 4 1875 Mahanoy City Arson Attempt to burn building05. Jun June 4 1875 Shenandoah Violence Firefight between miners05. Jun and Coal and Iron Police June 3 1875 Mahanoy PlaneArson Attempt to burn a breaker07. Jun June 12 1875 Forestville Murder, att. Two strikebreaking miners14. Jun shot on their way from work June 14 1875 Minersville Arson Fire at colliery 15. Jun June 28 1875 Mahanoy City, Murder,Shoemaker's att. PatchAttempt to kill Bully Bill29. Thomas Jun July 6 1875 Tamaqua Murder Yost assassination 07. Jul July 7 1875 Shenandoah Arson Ferguson's Hall burned12. by Jul incendiary July 15 1875 Mahanoy City Murder, att. Another attempt on Bully17. JulBill Aug 1 1875 Mahanoy PlaneArson Breaker burned at Bear02. RidgeAug colliery Aug 14 1875 Girardville Riot, murder Payday riot, resulting16. in deathAug of Squire Gwyther Aug 14 1875 Shenandoah Murder Murder of Gomer James16. Aug Aug 14 1875 Mahanoy City Violence, ethnicShooting affair between16. AugBully Bill and one Irishman, innocent bystander killed Aug 16 1875 Shenandoah Violence More shooting in the17. streets, Aug two people wounded Sep 1 1875 Raven Run Murder Shooting of Sanger and02. Uren Sep Sep 3 1875 Shenandoah Murder A young man fires at 04.policemen Sep under unknown circumstances, shot dead Sep 6 1875 Tamaqua Threat Coffin notice 09. Sep Sep 7 1875 Shenandoah/StViolence Nicholas Shooting attack at a mine10. Sep near Lanigan's Patch Sep 17 1875 Tamaqua Arson Building on centre street18. Sep burned Sep 21 1875 Pottsville Violence A. Miller beaten up by20. two Sep Irishmen Sep 30 1875 Tamaqua Arson Attempt to burn a mill30. Sep Sep 29 1875 Wadesville Murder, att. Attempted assassination05 oct of a miner named Edward Miles, by a man who had been fired recently Oct 6 1875 Tower City Arson Breaker burned08 at oct Brookside colliery Oct 10 1875 Mahanoy City Arson Store burned down11 oct Oct 10 1875 Shenandoah Murder, violence,Multiple ethnic shootings,11 oct violence, two men dead Oct 11 1875 New PhiladelphiaMurder, att. Watchman shot12 at oct mine by his predecessor who was dismissed for being drunk Nov 2 1875 Minersville Murder, att. Shooting, Irish suspects,03. Novone man badly wounded Nov 9 1875 Bear Ridge, ShenandoahSabotage Attempt to derail train10. by Nov manipulating switch Nov 17 1875 Pottsville Violence Attack on a watchman18. at Nov the Reading depot, depot robbed Nov 17 1875 Girardville Murder, att. Attempted murder of20. W. Nov Canfield by Thomas Donahue Nov 24 1875 Shenandoah Violence Fighting breaks out in27. a ShenandoahNov tavern and spreads, severe beating of a man named Delaney Dec 10 1875 St Nicholas, Wiggan'sMurder Patch Vigilante murder11 ofDec O'Donnell Dec 21 1875 New PhiladelphiaArson Breaker burned22 Dec
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