Molly Maguires

For the movie, see The Molly Maguires (film).

Location of the counties of the Molly Maguires, in northeastern Pennsylvania

Molly Maguires is the name commonly applied to members of a secret organization that originated in Ireland and — according to many, but not all historians, and considerable newspaper reportage — was present in the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania in the United States from approximately the time of the American Civil War until a series of sensational arrests and trials that occurred in the years 1876−78. While crimes in the U.S. that were attributed to the Mollies — murders, brutal assaults, robberies, arson, and sabotage — were undoubtedly committed, the evidence that a group calling itself the Molly Maguires was responsible for these coalfield crimes rests largely upon the allegations of one powerful industrialist, and the testimony of one Pinkerton detective. The testimony is bolstered by an assortment of prisoners pressed to testify against the alleged perpetrators under threat of prosecution for their own crimes, with promises of freedom and, in at least one case, the inducement of financial reward.

Violence during the period of the Molly Maguires sensation was widespread, with the Irish Catholic miners who made up the secret order frequently falling victim. There is little doubt that some Irish miners conspired to commit crimes, some of which were violent. That the coal, iron, and railroad trusts focused almost exclusively upon that group for criminal prosecution cannot be divorced from a simple reality: Irish miners made up a core of militant union activism during a bitter strike provoked by a twenty percent wage reduction.

Some aspects of the investigations, trials, and executions are unseemly. Information passed from the Pinkerton detective, intended only for the detective agency and their client — the most powerful industrialist of the region — apparently found its way into the hands of vigilantes who ambushed and murdered miners identified as Molly Maguires. The killing did not spare the miners' families. The industrialist, standing to gain financially from the destruction of the union upon which he had personally forced a strike, was also the prosecutor of some of the Molly Maguires at their capital trials.

Yet much remains uncertain, for the Molly Maguires left virtually no evidence of their own existence, and nearly everything that we know about them was written by hostile contemporary observers. Therefore Molly history is sometimes presented as the investigation, prosecution, and subsequent punishment of a purely evil underground movement that targeted mine bosses and authority figures for personal vendettas, with complicity hidden behind conspiratorial alibis. It is sometimes presented as a simple struggle between a militant union and powerful industrial forces. The truth is almost certainly somewhere in between.

Mollies in Ireland

The Molly Maguires originated in Ireland, where secret societies with names such as Whiteboys, Peep O'Day Boys, and others, were a commonplace phenomenon beginning in the Eighteenth Century and continuing through most of the Nineteenth Century. In Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, historian Kevin Kenny traces "some institutional continuity" from the Molly Maguires, back to the Ribbonmen, and previously, to the Defenders. Another organization — the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), with which the Molly Maguires have sometimes been associated — was founded in the United States, and is properly described as a fraternal organization. Although some, particularly their historical detractors, have concluded that Molly Maguires, Ribbonmen, and Ancient Order of Hibernians are different names for the same organization, Kenny has cast some doubt on such sweeping linkages, describing the practice of conflating these names as a strategy which "provided an important rationale for [the Molly Maguires'] eventual destruction." Kenny observes that most of the Ireland-based equivalents of the AOH were secret societies, and some were violent. Kenny describes a process of leaders from north-central and northwestern Ireland "[adapting] their AOH lodges to classic 'Ribbonite' purposes."

Although there was a specific organization called the Society of Ribbonmen, the term Ribbonism became a catchall expression for rural violence in Ireland. The Ancient Order of Hibernians was extended to Ireland by the Ribbonmen, according to the official history of the AOH. Kenny believes, "If the AOH was a transatlantic outgrowth of Ribbonism, it was clearly a peaceful fraternal society rather than a violent conspiratorial one." In some areas the terms Ribbonmen and Molly Maguires were used interchangeably. However, some have drawn distinctions between the Societies of Ribbonmen, who were regarded as "secular, cosmopolitan, and protonationalist," and the Molly Maguires who were "rural, local, and Gaelic."

The history of agrarian rebellion in Ireland can be traced primarily to local concerns and grievances relating to land usage, particularly as traditional socioeconomic practices such as small-scale potato cultivation were supplanted by the fencing and pasturization of land. Agrarian resistance and violence often took the forms of fence destruction, night-time plowing of croplands that had been converted to pasture, and killing, mutilating, or driving off livestock. In areas where the land had long been dedicated to small-scale, growing-season leases of farmland, called conacre, opposition was conceived as "retributive justice" that was intended "to correct transgressions against traditional moral and social codes." The Mollies believed that they were carrying out "a just law of their own in opposition to the inequities of landlord law, the police and court system, and the transgressions of land-grabbers." The Mollies' reaction to "land-grabbers" of the 1840s — surreptitiously digging up the land to render it useful only for conacre — followed similar practices by Whiteboys in the 1760s, and by another group called the Terry Alts in the 1820s and early 1830s.

One area of Molly Maguires activity was Donegal, where the agrarian practice of rundale, in which land was divided for tenant usage by traditional practices of the tenants themselves, rather than according to the landowner's dictates. For example, the concept of "a cow's grass" acted as a measure of the land which was necessary to sustain one cow through summer grazing and winter fodder. The subdivision of land took into account the quality of grazing, and while some lots of land were frequently subdivided generationally among family members, other land was held in common. Although such practices had existed from "time immemorial," there were no written leases to protect the tenants. As landlords implemented new ways to use the land, such as "highly disruptive" experiments with intensive sheep farming, some tenants in Donegal and elsewhere were moved to resistance.

Most landlords and their agents were Protestant, while the Molly Maguires were Catholic — an exacerbating factor that complicated relations and often added a dimension of religious hatred. The victims of agrarian violence were frequently Irish land agents, middlemen, and tenants. Merchants and millers were threatened or attacked if their prices were too high. Landlords' agents were threatened, beaten, and assassinated. New tenants on lands secured by evictions also became targets.

Local Molly Maguires leaders were reported to have sometimes dressed as women, representing the Irish mother begging for food for her children. The leader might approach a storekeeper and demand a donation of flour or groceries. If the storekeeper failed to provide, the Molly Maguires followers would enter the store and take what they wanted, warning the owner of dire consequences if the incident was reported.

There are a number of folk tales about the source of the Molly Maguires name. Molly may have been a widow who was evicted from her house, inspiring her defenders to form a secret society to exact retribution. Molly Maguire may have been the owner of a shebeen, an illicit tavern, where the society met. Another story suggests that Molly Maguire was a fierce young woman who led men through the countryside on nighttime raids.

Kevin Kenny believes that the most likely explanation is simply the practice of men dressing up like women, taking a female name as part of such a practice. While the Whiteboys were known to wear white linen frocks over their clothing, the Mollies blackened their faces with burnt cork. Kenny notes similarities — particularly in face-blackening and in the donning of women's garments — with the practice of mummery, in which festive days were celebrated by mummers who travelled from door to door demanding food, money, or drink as payment for a performance. The Threshers, the Peep o'Day Boys, the Lady Rocks, and the Lady Clares are other Irish groups that disguised themselves as women.

Mollies in USA

Many historians believe that Irish immigrants transplanted a form of the Molly Maguires organization into America in the nineteenth century, and that it continued its activities as a clandestine society. They were located in a section of the anthracite coal fields dubbed the Coal Region, which included the counties of Lackawanna, Luzerne, Columbia, Schuylkill, Carbon, and Northumberland County, Pennsylvania. Irish miners in this organization employed the tactics of intimidation and violence previously used against Irish landlords in violent confrontations against the anthracite, or hard coal mining companies in the 19th century.

Historians disagree about the Mollies

A heritage of agrarian violence in Ireland undoubtedly contributed to the crimes in the Pennsylvania coal fields, which continued for well over a decade in the late 19th century. But historian Aleine Austin believes,

The facts show that there was much more terror waged against the Mollys than those illiterate Irishmen ever aroused.

Although a legitimate self-help organization for Irish immigrants existed in the form of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), most mainstream writers accept that the Molly Maguires existed as a secret organization in Pennsylvania, and that they used the AOH as a "front." Yet historians are not even in agreement on this last point. For example, Joseph Rayback's 1966 volume A History of American Labor states that the "identity of the Molly Maguires has never been proved."

Even authors who accept the existence of the Mollies as a violent and destructive group acknowledge a significant scholarship that questions the entire history. In The Pinkerton Story, authors James D. Horan and Howard Swiggett write sympathetically about the detective agency and its mission to bring the Mollies to justice. Yet they observe,

The difficulty of achieving strict and fair accuracy in relation to the Mollie Maguires is very great. Sensible men have held there never even was such an organization... We do believe, however, that members of a secret organization, bound to each other by oath, used the facilities and personnel of the organization to carry out personal vendettas...

Such disagreements over a period when "labor was at war with capital, Democrat with Republican, Protestant with Catholic, and immigrant with native," are, perhaps, to be expected.

Media attention

In Labor's Untold Story, Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais put the responsibility for creating the Molly Maguires on industrialist Franklin B. Gowen, observing that,

A good number of historians now concede that there was never any organization in Pennsylvania known as the Molly Maguires—although any militant miner might have been called a Molly Maguire after the newspapers had spread Gowen's charge far and wide.

Gowen, who was wealthy, powerful, and the District Attorney for Schuylkill County, contributed to such perceptions when he declared,

The name of Molly Maguire being attached to a man's name is sufficient to hang him.

Although newspapers sensationalized accounts of the Mollies, not all media accepted the popular reports. The New York publication The Irish World denied that any secret fraternity existed in Pennsylvania, and declared that such an organization was the creation of railroad leaders and the Pinkertons. The Labor Standard, a newspaper of the Workingmen's Party, suggested that Pinkerton agent James McParlan, who infiltrated and testified against the Mollies, was an agent provocateur.

History

During the 1870s, powerful financial syndicates controlled the railroads and the coalfields. Coal companies had begun to recruit immigrants from overseas, luring them with "promises of fortune-making." Herded into freight trains by the hundreds, these workers often replaced English-speaking miners who, according to George Korson,

"...were compelled to give way in one coal field after another, either abandoning the industry altogether for other occupations or else retreating, like the vanishing American Indian, westward..."

Frequently unable to read safety instructions, the immigrant workers,

...faced constant hazards from violation of safety precautions, such as they were. Injuries and deaths in mine disasters, frequently reported in the newspapers, shocked the nation.

Twenty-two thousand coal miners worked in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. Fifty-five hundred of the mineworkers in the county were children between the ages of seven and sixteen years who earned between one and three dollars a week separating slate from the coal. Injured miners, or those too old to work at the face, were also assigned to picking slate at the "breakers" where the coal was crushed into a manageable size. Thus, many of the elderly miners finished their mining days as they'd begun in their youth.

The miners lived a life of "bitter, terrible struggle."

The daily routine of the miner was to crawl in the dim light of his lamp, in mud and trickling water, surrounded by coal dust and perhaps powder smoke... the struggle was a difficult one.

Disaster strikes

Wages were low, working conditions were atrocious, and deaths and serious injuries numbered in the hundreds each year. On September 6, 1869, at the Avondale Mine in Luzerne County, a fire took the lives of one hundred and ten coal miners. The families blamed the coal company for failing to finance a secondary exit for the mine.

...the mine owners without one single exception had refused over the years to install emergency exits, ventilating and pumping systems, or to make provision for sound scaffolding. In Schuylkill County alone 566 miners had been killed and 1,655 had been seriously injured over a seven year period...

The miners also faced a speedup system that was exhausting. In its November, 1877 issue, Harper's New Monthly Magazine published an interviewer's comments,

A miner tells me that he often brought his food uneaten out of the mine from want of time; for he must have his car loaded when the driver comes for it, or lose one of the seven car-loads which form his daily work.

As the bodies of the miners were brought up from the Avondale Mine disaster, John Siney, head of the Workingmen's Benevolent Association (WBA), climbed onto a wagon to speak to the thousands of miners who had arrived from surrounding communities:

Men, if you must die with your boots on, die for your families, your homes, your country, but do not longer consent to die, like rats in a trap, for those who have no more interest in you than in the pick you dig with.

He asked the miners to join the union, and thousands of them did so that day.

Some miners faced the additional burden of prejudice and persecution. In the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s, twenty thousand Irish workers had arrived in Schuylkill County. The Molly Maguires were Irish and Catholic in a time and place where signs in employment windows often declared, "No Irish need apply." It was a time of rampant beatings and murders in the mining district, some of which were committed by the Mollies.

Six years of depression

The period from 1873 to 1879 was marked by one of the worst depressions in the nation's history, caused by reckless speculation and wholesale stock watering. By 1877 an estimated one-fifth of the nation's workingmen were completely unemployed, two-fifths worked no more than six or seven months a year, and only one-fifth had full-time jobs. But not everyone had been suffering equally:

Labor angrily watched "railway directors (riding) about the country in luxurious private cars proclaiming their inability to pay living wages to hungry working men."

Mine owners move against the union

Franklin B. Gowen, the President of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, and of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company, a first generation Irish American protestant and "the wealthiest anthracite coal mine owner in the world," hired Allan Pinkerton's services to deal with the Molly Maguires. Pinkerton selected James McParlan, a native of County Armagh, to go undercover against the Mollies. Using the alias of James McKenna, he became a trusted member of the organization, and became a secretary for one of its local groups. McParlan's assignment was to collect evidence of murder plots and intrigue, passing this information along to his Pinkerton manager. He also began working secretly with a Pinkerton agent assigned to the Coal and Iron Police for the purpose of coordinating the eventual arrest and prosecution of members of the Molly Maguires.

Although there had been fifty "inexplicable murders" between 1863 and 1867 in Schuylkill County, progress in the investigation was slow. There was "a lull in the entire area, broken only by minor shootings."

McParlan wrote:

I am sick and tired of this thing. I seem to make no progress.

The union had grown powerful; thirty thousand members—eighty-five percent of Pennsylvania's anthracite miners—had joined. But Gowen had built a combination of his own, bringing all of the mine operators into an employers' association known as the Anthracite Board of Trade. In addition to the railroad, Gowen owned two-thirds of the coal mines in southeastern Pennsylvania. He was a risk-taker and an ambitious man. Gowen decided to force a strike and showdown.

Union, Mollies, and Ancient Order of Hibernians

One of the burning questions for modern scholars is the relationship between the Workingmen's Benevolent Association, the Mollies, and their alleged cover organization, the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Historian Kevin Kenny notes that all of the men who were convicted were members of the AOH. But "the Molly Maguires themselves left virtually no evidence of their existence, let alone their aims and motivation."

Relying upon his personal knowledge before commencing an investigation, James McParlan believed that the Molly Maguires, under pressure for their activities, had taken the new name "Ancient Order of Hibernians" (AOH). After beginning his investigation, he estimated that there were about 450 members of the AOH in Schuylkill County. While Kenny observes that the AOH was "a peaceful fraternal society," he does note that in the 1870s the Pinkerton Agency identified a correlation between the areas of AOH membership in Pennsylvania, and the corresponding areas in Ireland from which those particular Irish immigrants emigrated. The violence-prone areas of Ireland corresponded to the areas of violence in the Pennsylvania coalfields.

In his book Big Trouble, which traces James McParlan's history, Anthony Lukas has written,

The WBA was run by Lancashire men adamantly opposed to violence. But [Gowen] saw an opportunity to paint the union with the Molly brush, which he did in testimony before a state investigating committee... "I do not charge this Workingmen's Benevolent Association with it, but I say there is an association which votes in secret, at night, that men's lives shall be taken... I do not blame this association, but I blame another association for doing it; and it happens that the only men who are shot are the men who dare disobey the mandates of the Workingmen's Benevolent Association."

Of the 450 AOH members that Pinkerton Agent McParlan estimated were in Schuylkill County, about 400 belonged to the union. Yet Kenny observes that,

Molly Maguireism and full-fledged trade unionism represented fundamentally different modes of organization and protest.

Kenny also notes that one contemporary organization, the Pennsylvania Bureau of Industrial Statistics, clearly distinguished between the union and the violence attributed to the Molly Maguires. Their reports indicate that violence could be traced to the time of the Civil War, but that in the five year existence of the WBA, "the relations existing between employers and employees" had greatly improved. The Bureau concluded that the union had brought an end to the "carnival of crime." Kenny further notes that the leaders of the WBA were "always unequivocally opposed" to the Molly Maguires.

Kenny continues,

Most Irish mine workers belonged to the WBA and roughly half the officers of its executive board in 1872 bore Irish names. But, in addition to the WBA, there existed a loosely organized body of men called the Molly Maguires, whose membership appears to have been exclusively Irish... Both modes of organization... tried to improve conditions of life and labor in the anthracite region. But the strategy of the trade union was indirect, gradual, peaceful, and systematically organized across the anthracite region, while that of the Molly Maguires was direct, violent, sporadic, and confined to a specific locality.

Kenny observes that there were frequent tensions between British miners, who held the majority of skilled positions, and the mass of unskilled Irish laborers. However, in spite of such differences, the WBA offered a solution, and for the most part "did a remarkable job" in overcoming such differences.

All mine workers, regardless of craft status, national origin, and religious background, were eligible to join the WBA. As a result, the WBA must have included some "Molly Maguires" among its ranks; many of its rank and file were members of the AOH, and there is evidence that some disgruntled trade union members favored violence against the wishes of their leaders, especially in the climactic year of 1875. But there were no Mollys among the leaders of the WBA, who took every opportunity they could to condemn the Molly Maguires and the use of violence as a strategy in the labor struggle. While the membership of the trade union and the secret society undoubtedly overlapped to some extent, they must be seen as ideologically and institutionally distinct.

Whatever the relationship between the WBA and the Molly Maguires, their fates were intertwined — at least in part because there were many in positions of power who chose to see no distinctions.

Vigilante justice

F.P. Dewees, a contemporary and a confidant of Gowen, wrote that by 1873 "Mr. Gowen was fully impressed with the necessity of lessening the overgrown power of the 'Labor Union' and exterminating if possible the Molly Maguires." In December, 1874, Gowen led the other coal operators to announce a twenty percent pay cut. The miners decided to strike on January 1, 1875.

From the first it was war, Gowen trying for the absolute extermination upon which Dewees wrote he was determined. Led by the president of the Philadelphia and Reading, the operators unleashed a reign of terror, hiring an armed band of vigilantes who took the name of the "Modocs" and who joined the corporation-owned Coal and Iron Police in waylaying, ambushing, and killing militant miners.

According to Lucas, the Modocs were "a gang of Welsh miners" with whom the Molly Maguires sometimes skirmished.

Edward Coyle, a leader of the union and of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, was murdered in March. Another member of the AOH was shot and killed by the Modocs led by one Bradley, a mine superintendant. Patrick Vary, a mine boss, fired into a group of miners and, according to the later boast by Gowen, as the miners "fled they left a long trail of blood behind them." At Tuscarora a meeting of miners was attacked by vigilantes who shot and killed one miner and wounded several others.

Pinkerton Agent Robert J. Linden was brought in to support McParlan while serving with the Coal and Iron Police. On August 29, 1875, Allan Pinkerton wrote a letter to George Bangs, Pinkerton's general superintendent, recommending vigilante actions against the Molly Maguires:

The M.M.'s are a species of Thugs... Let Linden get up a vigilance committee. It will not do to get many men, but let him get those who are prepared to take fearful revenge on the M.M.'s. I think it would open the eyes of all the people and then the M.M.'s would meet with their just deserts.

On December 10, 1875, three men and two women were attacked in their house by masked men. Lukas observes that the attack "seems to reflect the strategy outlined in Pinkerton's memo." The victims had been secretly identified by McParlan as Mollies. One of the men was killed in the house, and the other two Mollies were wounded but able to escape. A woman, the wife of one of the Mollies, was shot dead.

McParlan was outraged that the information he had been providing had found its way into the hands of indiscriminant killers. When he heard some details of the attack at the house, McParlan protested in a letter to his Pinkerton supervisor. He did not object that Mollies might be assassinated as a result of his labor spying — they "got their just deserving." But McParlan resigned when it became apparent the vigilantes were willing to commit the "murder of women and children," whom he deemed innocent victims. His letter stated:

Friday: This morning at 8 A.M. I heard that a crowd of masked men had entered Mrs. O'Donnell's house... and had killed James O'Donnell alias Friday, Charles O'Donnell and James McAllister, also Mrs. McAllister whom they took out of the house and shot (Charles McAllister's wife). Now as for the O'Donnells I am satisfied they got their just deserving. I reported what those men were. I give all information about them so clear that the courts could have taken hold of their case at any time but the witnesses were too cowardly to do it. I have also in the interests of God and humanity notified you months before some of those outrages were committed still the authorities took no hold of the matter. Now I wake up this morning to find that I am the murderer of Mrs. McAlister. What had a woman to do with the case—did the [Molly Maguires] in their worst time shoot down women. If I was not here the Vigilante Committee would not know who was guilty and when I find them shooting women in their thirst for blood I hereby tender my resignation to take effect as soon as this message is received. It is not cowardice that makes me resign but just let them have it now I will no longer interfere as I see that one is the same as the other and I am not going to be an accessory to the murder of women and children. I am sure the [Molly Maguires] will not spare the women so long as the Vigilante has shown an example.

There appears to be an error in the detective's report (which also constituted his resignation letter) of the vigilante incident: he failed to convey the correct number of deaths. James "Friday" O'Donnell and Charles McAllister "were wounded but able to escape." In the note, McParlan reported that these two had been killed by vigilantes. Such notes, possibly containing erroneous or as-yet-unverified information, were forwarded daily by Pinkerton operatives. The content was routinely made available to Pinkerton clients in typed reports.

McParlan believed his daily reports had been made available to the anti-Molly vigilantes. Benjamin Franklin, McParlan's Pinkerton supervisor, declared himself "anxious to satisfy [McParlan] that [the Pinkerton Agency has] nothing to do with [the vigilante murders.]" McParlan was prevailed upon not to resign.

A man named Frank Wenrich, a first lieutenant with the Pennsylvania National Guard, was arrested as the leader of the vigilante attackers, but was released on bail. Then another miner, Hugh McGeehan, a twenty-one year old who had been secretly identified as a killer by McParlan, was fired upon and wounded by unknown assailants. Later, the McGeehan family's house was attacked by gunfire.

Union leadership imprisoned

The state militia and the Coal and Iron Police patrolled the district. Union leaders were "excoriated by the press," and were "denounced from altar and pulpit." On May 12, John Siney, the union leader who had addressed miners at the Avondale disaster, and who favored arbitration and had opposed the strike, was arrested at a mass meeting called to protest the importation of strike breakers. An organizer for the miners' national association by the name of Xingo Parkes was also arrested, along with twenty-six other union officials, all on a charge of conspiracy. Judge John Holden Owes instructed the jury that,

...any agreement, combination or confederation to increase or depress the price of any vendible commodity, whether labor, merchandise, or anything else, is indictable as a conspiracy under the laws of Pennsylvania.

When he sentenced two of the union officials, Judge Owes addressed them,

I find you, Joyce, to be president of the Union, and you, Maloney, to be secretary, and therefore I sentence you to one year's imprisonment.

The strike fails

The union was nearly broken by the imprisonment of its leadership and by attacks conducted by vigilantes against the strikers. Gowen "deluged the newspapers with stories of murder and arson" committed by the Molly Maguires. The press produced stories of strikes in Illinois, in Jersey City, and in the Ohio mine fields, all inspired by the Mollies. The stories were widely believed.

In Schuylkill County the striking miners and their families were starving to death. A striker wrote to a friend,

Since I last saw you, I have buried my youngest child, and on the day before its death there was not one bit of victuals in the house with six children."

In his history of the American coal miner, Andrew Roy recorded,

Hundreds of families rose in the morning to breakfast on a crust of bread and a glass of water, who did not know where a bite of dinner was to come from. Day after day, men, women, and children went to the adjoining woods to dig roots and pick up herbs to keep body and soul together...

After six months the strike was defeated and the miners returned to work, accepting the twenty percent cut in pay. But miners belonging to the Ancient Order of Hibernians continued the fight. McParlan acknowledged increasing support for the Mollies in his reports:

Men, who last winter would not notice a Molly Maguire are now glad to take them by the hand and make much of them. If the bosses exercise tyranny over the men they appear to look to the association for help.

Lukas observes that the defeat was humiliating, and traces the roots of Molly frustration in the aftermath of the failed strike:

Judges, lawyers, and policemen were overwhelmingly Welsh, German, or English... When the coalfield Irish sought to remedy their grievances through the courts, they often met delays, obfuscation, or doors slammed in their faces. No longer looking to these institutions for justice, they turned instead to the Mollies... Before the summer was over, six men—all Welsh or German—paid with their lives.

Boyer and Morais argue that the killing wasn't all one-sided:

Militant miners often disappeared, their bodies sometimes being found later in deserted mine shafts.

McParlan penetrates the "inner circle"

After months of little progress, McParlan reported some plans by the "inner circle."

Pinkerton Detective Agency detective James McParlan, seen here some time in the 1880s

Gomer James, a Welshman, had shot and wounded one of the Mollies, and plans were formulated for a revenge killing. But the wheels of revenge were grinding slowly. And there was other violence:

November was a bloody month what with the miners on strike... In the three days around November 18, a Mollie was found dead in the streets of Carbondale, north of Scranton, a man had his throat cut, an unidentified man was crucified in the woods, a mining boss mauled, a man murdered in Scranton, and three men of [another Molly Maguires group] were guilty of a horror against an old woman, and an attempt to assassinate a Mollie, Dougherty, followed and [Dougherty] at once demanded the murder of W.M. Thomas, whom he blamed for the attempt.

On the last day of the month, with Gowen's strikebreakers pouring in, the Summit telegraph office was burned, a train derailed, and McParlan advised [his Pinkerton supervisor] to send in uniformed police to preserve order.

A plan to destroy a railroad bridge was abandoned due to the presence of outsiders. The Irish had been forbidden by the English and Welsh to set foot in a public square in Mahanoy City, and a plan for the Irish to occupy it by force of arms was considered then abandoned.

In the meantime a messenger reported that Thomas, the would-be killer of one of the Mollies, had been killed in the stable where he worked. McParlan reported that he, McParlan, had been asked to supply the hidden killers with food and whiskey. Horan and Swiggett write,

The probability is that as a man, Bully Bill Thomas, a Welshman, was no better than his enemies, but he was remarkable in other ways. His killers, leaving him for dead in the stable door, were not aware until two days later that he had survived.

Another plan was in the works, this one against two night watchmen, Pat McCarron and [Borough Patrolman Benjamin Yost]. Accused Mollies Jimmy Kerrigan and Thomas Duffy were said to despise Yost, who had arrested them numerous times. Yost was shot as he put out a street light, which at that time necessitated climbing the lamp pole. Before he died, he reported that his killers were Irish, but were not Kerrigan or Duffy.

McParlan recorded that a Molly by the name of William Love killed a justice of the peace by the name of Gwyther in Girardville. Unknown Mollies were accused of wounding a man outside his saloon in Shenandoah. Gomer James was killed while he tended bar. Then, McParlan recorded, a group of Mollies reported to him that they had killed a mine boss named Sanger, and another man who was with him. Forewarned of the attempt, McParlan had sought to arrange protection for the mine boss, but was unsuccessful.

While there was concern whether enough evidence was collected on reprisal killings and assassinations that sufficient arrests of the Mollies could be made, McParlan's identity had been discovered.

The trials

Franklin B. Gowen (1836-1889), District Attorney for Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, and of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company

When Franklin Gowen first hired the Pinkerton agency, he had claimed the Molly Maguires were so powerful they had made capital and labor "their puppets." When the trials of the alleged puppet-masters opened, Gowen had himself appointed as special prosecuter. He thus put himself in the position to personally ask the state, in courtrooms that were guarded by militia with bayonets fixed, to execute the union men that had struck his coal mines.

The first trial of defendants McGeehan, Carroll, Duffy, James Boyle, and James Roarity for the killing of Benjamin Yost commenced in May, 1876. Yost had not recognized the men who attacked him. Although Kerrigan has since been described, along with Duffy, as hating the night watchman enough to plot his murder, Kerrigan became a state's witness and testified against the union leaders and other miners. However, Kerrigan's wife testified in the courtroom that her husband had committed the murder. She testified that she refused to provide her husband with clothing while he was in prison, because he had "picked innocent men to suffer for his crime." She stated that her speaking out was voluntary, and that she was interested only in telling the truth about the murder. Gowen cross-examined her, but could not shake her testimony. Others supported her testimony amid speculation that Kerrigan was receiving special treatment due to the fact that James McParlan was engaged to his sister-in-law, Mary Ann Higgins. This trial was declared a mistrial due to the death of one of the jurors. A new trail was granted two months later. During that trial Fanny Kerrigan did not testify. The five defendants were sentenced to death. Kerrigan was allowed to go free.

The trial of Tom Munley for the murder of mine foreman Thomas Sanger and his friend, William Uren, relied entirely upon the testimony of James McParlan, and the eyewitness account of a witness. The witness stated under oath that he had seen the murderer clearly, and that Munley was not the murderer. Yet the jury accepted McParlan's testimony that Munley had privately confessed to the murder. Munley was sentenced to death.

Another four miners were put on trial and were found guilty on a charge of murder for which they had previously been found innocent. The testimony against them came from only two sources: James McParlan, and "Kelly the Bum." McParlan had no direct evidence, but had recorded that the four admitted their guilt to him. Kelly the Bum was being held in a cell for murder, and he had been quoted, "I would squeal on Jesus Christ to get out of here." In return for his testimony, the murder charge against him was dismissed.

A " coffin notice", allegedly posted by Molly Maguires in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. It was presented by Franklin B. Gowen, along with other similar coffin notices, as evidence in an 1876 murder trial.

In November McAllister was convicted.

McParlan's testimony in the Molly Maguires trials helped to send ten men to the gallows. The defense attorneys repeatedly sought to portray McParlan as an agent-provocateur who was responsible for not warning people of their imminent deaths. (Kenny 232-33) McParlan testified that the AOH and the Mollys were one and the same, but most historians disagree. (Kenny 234-5)

Many years later in preparation for a different trial, James McParlan would tell another witness, a confessed mass murderer by the name of Harry Orchard, that Kelly the Bum not only had won his freedom for testifying against union leaders, he had been given one thousand dollars to "subsidize a new life abroad." McParlan was attempting to convince Orchard to accuse the leadership of an entirely different union, the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), of conspiracy to commit another murder. Unlike in the case of the Molly Maguires, the union leadership of the WFM was acquitted. Orchard alone was convicted, and spent the rest of his life in prison.

The executions

On June 21, 1877, six men were hanged in the prison at Pottsville, in Schuylkill County, and four were hanged at Mauch Chunk, in Carbon County. A scaffold had been erected in the Carbon County prison. State militia with fixed bayonets surrounded the prisons and the scaffolds. Miners arrived with their wives and children from the surrounding areas, walking through the night to honor the accused, and by nine o'clock "the crowd in Pottsville stretched as far as one could see." The families were silent, which was "the people's way of paying tribute" to those about to die. Tom Munley's aged father had walked more than ten miles from Gilberton to assure his son that he believed in his innocence. Munley's wife had arrived a few minutes after they closed the gate, and they refused to open it even for close relatives to say their final good-byes. She screamed at the gate with grief, throwing herself against it until she collapsed, but she was not allowed to pass.

Four members of the Molly Maguires, Alexander Campbell, John "Yellow Jack" Donohue, Michael Doyle and Edward Kelly, were hanged on June 21 1877 at a Carbon County, Pennsylvania prison in Mauch Chunk (renamed Jim Thorpe in 1953), for the murder of mine bosses John P. Jones and Morgan Powell, following a trial that was later described by a Carbon County judge, John P. Lavelle, as follows:

The Molly Maguire trials were a surrender of state sovereignty. A private corporation initiated the investigation through a private detective agency. A private police force arrested the alleged defenders, and private attorneys for the coal companies prosecuted them. The state provided only the courtroom and the gallows.

Michael J. Doyle and Hugh McGeehan were led to the scaffold. They were followed by Thomas Munley, James Carroll, James Roarity, James Boyle, Thomas Duffy, Edward J. Kelly, Alexander Campbell, John Donahue, .

Ten more of the condemned men, Thomas P. Fisher, John Kehoe, Patrick Hester, Peter McHugh, Patrick Tully, Peter McManus, Dennis Donnelly, Martin Bergan, James McDonald and Charles Sharpe, were hanged at Mauch Chunk, Pottsville, Bloomsburg and Sunbury over the next two years.

James Ford Rhodes' account of the Mollies

Many accounts of the Molly Maguires that were written during, or shortly after, the period offer no admission that there was widespread violence in the area, that vigilantism existed, nor that violence was carried out against the miners.

In 1910, industrialist and historian James Ford Rhodes published a major scholarly analysis in the leading professional history journal:

Many of the Mollies were miners and the mode of working the mines lent itself to their peculiar policy. Miners were paid by the cubic yard, by the mine car, or by the ton, and (in the driving of entries) by the lineal yard. In the assignment of places, which was made by the mining boss, there were "soft" jobs and hard. If a Molly applied for a soft job and was refused, his anger was aroused and not infrequently in due time the offending boss was murdered. If he got employment, there was a constant chance of disagreement in measuring-up the work and in estimating the quality of the coal mined, for it was the custom to dock the miners' wages for bad coal with too much slate and dirt, and a serious disagreement was apt to be followed by violence. Little wonder was it that, as the source of the outrages was well understood, mining bosses refused to employ Irishmen, but this did not ensure their safety, as they might then be murdered for their refusal. A good Superintendent of any colliery would, in his quality of superior officer, support an efficient mining boss and would thus fall under the ban himself. John T. Morse, Jr., who made a contemporaneous study of the Molly Maguires, wrote in his vivid account of their operations: "The superintendents and 'bosses' in the collieries could all rest assured that their days would not be long in the land. Everywhere and at all times they were attacked, beaten, and shot down, by day and by night; month after month and year after year, on the public highways and in their own homes, in solitary places and in the neighborhood of crowds, these doomed men continued to fall in frightful succession beneath the hands of assassins."

The murders were not committed in the heat of sudden passion for some fancied wrong: they were the result of a deliberate system. The wronged individual laid his case before a quasijudicial tribunal demanding the death, say, of a mining boss and urging his reasons. If they were satisfactory, as they usually were, the murder was decreed; but the task was not assigned to the aggrieved person or to any one in his and the victim's neighborhood: perhaps directly-aggrieved parties might be tempted to use more force or more cruelty than necessary. Two or more relatively disinterested Mollies from a different part of the county or even from the adjoining county were selected to do the killing because, being unknown, they could the more easily escape detection. Refusal to carry out the dictate of the conclave was dangerous and seldom happened, although an arrangement of substitution, if properly supported, was permitted. The meeting generally took place in an upper room of a hotel or saloon and, after the serious business, came the social reunion with deep libations of whiskey.

In attempting to give precise figures, some writers have undoubtedly exaggerated the number of murders by this order from 1865 to 1875; but no one can go through the evidence without being convinced that a great many men were killed to satisfy the vengeful spirit of the Molly Maguires. Some of the victims were men so useful, so conspicuous, and so beloved in their communities that their assassinations caused a profound and enduring impression. In some cases, so Dewees (who has written a very useful story) asserts, robbery was added to murder: superintendents, who were carrying the money for the monthly pay of the miners and laborers, were waylaid as they drove along some lonely road in the desolate country. While the murders were numerous, still more numerous were the threats of murder and warnings to leave the country written on a sheet of paper with a rude picture of a coffin or a pistol and sometimes both. One notice read: "Mr. John Taylor — We will give you one week to go, but if you are alive on next Saturday you will die." Another, to three bosses, charged with "cheating thy men" had a picture of three pistols and a coffin and on the coffin was written, "This is your home." In other mining districts and in manufacturing localities, during strikes and times of turbulence similar warnings have been common and have been laughed at by mining bosses, superintendents, and proprietors; but, in the anthracite region between 1865 and 1876 the bravest of men could not forget how many of his fellows had been shot and suppress a feeling of uneasiness when he found such a missive on his doorstep or posted up on the door of his office at the mine. Many a superintendent and mining boss left his house in the morning with his hand on his revolver, wondering if he would ever see wife and children again.

The young men of the order were selected for the commission of murder; above them were older heads holding high office and, in a variety of ways, displaying executive ability. They were quick to see what a weapon to their hand was universal suffrage, and, with the aptitude for politics which the Irish have shown in our country, they developed their order into a political power to be reckoned with. Numbering in Schuylkill county only 500 or 600 out of 5,000 Irishmen in a total population of 116,000, the Molly Maguires controlled the common schools and the local government of the townships in the mining sections of the county. They elected at different times three county commissioners and came near electing one of their number, who had acquired twenty thousand dollars worth of property, Associate Judge of the Court of Oyer and Terminer. In one borough a Molly was Chief of Police; another in Mahanoy township, Jack Kehoe, was High Constable. In the elections were fraudulent voting, stuffing of the ballot-boxes and false returns; in the administration of the offices, fraud and robbery. In Mahanoy township, $60,000 were drawn for the schools and eleven-twelfths of it stolen. Exorbitant road taxes were a fruitful means by which township officials robbed the taxpayers and put the money in their own pockets. In August 1875 an ex-county commissioner, a Molly, and two commissioners then in office, not actually belonging to the order but in sympathy with it, had been convicted of stealing the county funds and each had been sentenced by a full bench [September 6] to two years' imprisonment. At the fall election for governor in this year [1875] the Molly Maguires, who were naturally Democrats, foresaw Republican success and sold their vote in Schuylkill and Luzerne counties to the Republicans for a certain amount of money in hand and an implied agreement that these convicted commissioners and other criminals who were called by a leading Molly "our men" should be pardoned. It is hardly to be supposed that the Republican politicians who made this bargain were aware of the thoroughly criminal nature of the Molly Maguires, for they had astutely covered themselves with a virtuous cloak, securing from the Legislature in 1871 a charter for the Ancient Order of Hibernians whose motto was "Friendship, Unity and Christian Charity." On October 10, 1875, in a letter to the Shenandoah Herald Jack Kehoe denied with indignation that the Molly Maguires were synonymous with the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which latter was "composed of men who are law abiding and seek the elevation of their members." Kehoe was crafty enough to see the advantage of throwing dust in the eyes of the public and, when the outside world was bargained with, the A.O.H. was put forward; but, as matter of fact, it was the old story of ravening wolves in sheep's clothing.

— James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States from Hayes to McKinley 1877 - 1896 Volume 8 of the series History of the United States of America, From the Compromise of 1850 to the McKinley-Bryan Campaign of 1896 published October, 1919, The Macmillian Company, New York. Chapter II, pp 52 - 58

The question of justice

Some have declared unequivocally that justice was done. An industrial spokesman proclaimed after the last trial,

Peace once more reigns in the anthracite coal regions. Mollie Maguireism is practically dead. The inhabitants of the anthracite coal regions are now enjoying the blessed peace which has recently come to them. God rules, justice must reign, and right must triumph.

Others do not seem so certain. Horan and Swiggett, ever supportive of the Pinkerton cause that is the subject of their book, declare that "evil men had conspired for years to do evil things and the law had at last overtaken them." Yet a footnote suggests that their verdict concerning the trials that condemned the Molly Maguires is heavily qualified. They write, "There was much, of course, in the practices and outlook of the times which is abhorrent today." The footnote to this observation explains,

At the trials, special assistants to the district attorneys were supplied by the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, the Lehigh and Wilkes Barre, and the Lehigh Valley. Professor Schlegel in his Ruler of the Reading (1947) calls "the Mollie trials and their aftermath among the least creditable incidents of [Gowen's] life." Professors Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager of Columbia University, both distinguished scholars, concur in the veracity and soundness of Professor Schlegel's research and conclusions.

Horan and Swiggett also note that others have argued,

...punishment had gone too far, and that the guilt of some of the condemned was that of association more than participation and but half established by other condemned men seeking clemency for themselves.

Boyer and Morais wrote,

McParlan agreed to testify, and did testify, that all those whom Gowan wanted removed had freely and voluntarily confessed to him that they had committed various murders. His word was to be corroborated by various prisoners at various of the county's jails, freedom the reward for corroboration. Among those who buttressed McParlan's testimony at the ensuing trials was a prisoner known as Kelly the Bum, who admitted that he had committed every crime in the calendar. This person was another prisoner was one Jimmy Kerrigan whose wife testified that he himself had committed the murder with which he was charging the miners of the AOH.

Joseph G. Rayback, author of A History of American Labor, has observed:

The charge has been made that the Molly Maguires episode was deliberately manufactured by the coal operators with the express purpose of destroying all vestiges of unionism in the area... There is some evidence to support the charge... the "crime wave" that appeared in the anthracite fields came after the appearance of the Pinkertons, and... many of the victims of the crimes were union leaders and ordinary miners. The evidence brought against [the defendants], supplied by James McParlan, a Pinkerton, and corroborated by men who were granted immunity for their own crimes, was tortuous and contradictory, but the net effect was damning... The trial temporarily destroyed the last vestiges of labor unionism in the anthracite area. More important, it gave the public the impression... that miners were by nature criminal in character...

The union point of view is expressed by the Miners' Journal of June 22, 1877, which asked simply:

What did they do? Whenever prices of labor did not suit them, they organized to proclaim a strike.

The aftermath

When organized labor helped to elect Terence V. Powderly mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania two years after the Molly Maguire trials, the opposition vilified his team as the "Molly Maguire Ticket." One of victims stated that he was innocent and that his hand print would stay there forever. It still there today in Jim Thorpe, PA.

In popular culture

• A movie based on these events called The Molly Maguires, starring Sean Connery and Richard Harris, was released in 1970.
• The Sherlock Holmes novel The Valley of Fear is partly based on the Molly Maguires.
• George Korson, a folklorist and journalist whom became fascinated with the livelihood of Pennsylvania's miners, wrote several songs and other writings regarding the topic -- best showcased in his composition "Minstrels of the Mine Patch", which has a section specifically on the Molly Maguires: "Coal Dust on the Fiddle".
• Irish folk band The Dubliners refer to the Molly Maguires in one of their songs, "Molly Maguires".
• Irish-American Folk Band "The Irish Balladeers" wrote and recorded "The Sons of Molly" based on this history. This song was later covered by the Irish-Canadian band "The Peelers".
• The Irish folk music/ska band Molly from Sweden was originally called "Molly Maguire".
• A popular Irish/Bluegrass/Cajun band in Liverpool, UK 1990 were named after The Molly Maguires.
• A musical was performed near Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania that told the story of the Molly Maguires. It was very popular in the area.
• A bar in Olyphant, Pennsylvania bears the name Molly Maguires.
• In the 2003 computer game Freelancer, the Mollies are a group of former asteroid miners turned criminals who fight for control of the gold fields in the Dublin system.

Further reading

Scholarly secondary sources

• Adams, Sean Patrick. "The US Coal Industry in the Nineteenth Century." EH.Net Encyclopedia, August 15 2001 scholarly overview
• Broehl, Jr., Wayne G. The Molly Maguires. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1964; excellent scholarly study
• Gudelunas, Jr., William Anthony, and William G. Shade. Before the Molly Maguires: The Emergence of the Ethnoreligious Factor in the Politics of the Lower Anthracite Region: 1844-1872. New York: Arno Press, 1976. ISBN 978-0405093395. On local politics and ethnic conflicts
• Kenny, Kevin. Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (1998)
• Kenny, Kevin, "The Molly Maguires in Popular Culture," Journal of American Ethnic History (1995) 14(4): 27-46. Looks at 8 novels and a film to show how popular depictions have moved from negative to positive.
• Kenny, Kevin. "The Molly Maguires and the Catholic Church," Labor History 1995 36(3): 345-376. Reports the bishops vigorously attacked the Mollies and the AOF (Hibernians) to expel violence from the Irish community and make it law-abiding.
• Morn, Frank. The Eye that Never Sleeps: A History of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency ;;(1982)
• James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States of America, From the Compromise of 1850 to the McKinley-Bryan Campaign of 1896: Vol 8: 1877-1896 (NY: Macmillan, 1919) Chapter 2. online version
• Bimba, Anthony, "The Molly Maguires. New York: International Publishers, 1970
• Foner, Phillip, "A History of the Labor Movement in the United States." 4 vols. New York: International Publishers, 1947-1964.

Popular books

• Samuel P. Orth, The Armies of Labor (1920)-Chapter 4 has a good overview of late 19th century labor history.
• Zinn, Howard, "A People's History of the United States (1492-Present)" (1980; 2003)

Primary sources

• Dewees, Francis P. The Molly Maguires: The Origin, Growth, and Character of the Organization (1877; 1964)

External links

• History and scholarly resources
• Brief history of the Molly Maguires
• Coal mining, mine fires and the Molly Maguires
• Mining History of NY,NJ,PA,CT
• History and Ritual of Irish Fraternal Organizations: Ancient Order of Hibernians, Molly Maguires, Orangemen, and Royal Black Knights of the Camp of Israel
• Trial in Pottsville
• Eckley Miners' Village
• Website with detailed information on Eckley Miners' Village
• Ohio State University historical article on the Pinkerton infiltration
• Mollies and Black Diamonds
• Notes on Molly Maguires (film from Paramount Pictures)
• Source: Allan Pinkerton, The Molly Maguires and the Detectives (1877)—American Social History Project.
• The "Eerie Handprint" of Molly Maguire Alexander Campbell in the Old Jim Thorpe Jail proclaiming eternal innocence. The handprint never goes away, June 21,1877

Notes

Sotech