Pinkerton’s organization expanded rapidly following the Civil War, and an office was opened in New York in November 1865 under Bangs, and in Philadelphia the following May. At the same time, the agency was establishing a broad reputation for success. Part of this was due to results, but part was also due to excellent self-promotion, such as the wide distribution of a picture of Pinkerton with Lincoln and Major General John McClernand at Antietam and the company’s famous motto “We Never Sleep,” shown under an unblinking eye—the origin of the term “private eye.”43
The agency also gained respect, in some quarters, for the practices, ethics, and code of conduct to which its owner insisted his employees abide. Corrupt behavior had long given police, particularly detectives, a shady reputation, and to combat this Pinkerton decided that his staff would use the term “operative” rather than “detective” and that he himself would be known as the “principal.” More important, he launched a plan to create a favorable public image of the private detective while at the same time professionalizing the occupation. To do this he began producing pamphlets that would teach his employees his philosophy and also provide a positive representation to the public.44
The most significant of these was the 1867 pamphlet General Principles and Rules, in which he established company guidelines. “The profession of the Detective is a high and honorable calling,” he wrote. “Few professions excel it. He is an officer of justice and must himself be pure and above reproach. The public . . . have a right to know that their lives and property are to be guarded by persons . . . of whose integrity there can be no question.” Further, he outlined a set of principles governing what kind of cases would be accepted by the agency: “Only such business will be undertaken as is strictly legitimate and right, and then only for the purpose of furthering the ends of justice and bringing Criminals to punishment.”45 This meant that Pinkerton’s would not: investigate public officials in the performance of their duties; accept employment from one political party against another; shadow jurors; investigate the morals of women nor handle cases of divorce or a scandalous nature; or accept contingent fees, gratuities, or rewards.
What Pinkerton’s did take on were high-profile cases brought about by an upsurge in lawlessness following the Civil War. Key among these were attempts to curb the new breed of train and bank robbers that sprang from groups of raiding irregulars, such as the Reno and James-Younger gangs. The agency also continued to receive work from the federal government, including conducting an investigation into any potential breach of neutrality or military interventionism by American citizens supporting the Cuban struggle for independence from Spain, in what became known as the Ten Years’ War (1868–78).46
Pinkerton’s reputation continued to rise at the beginning of the new decade, by which time the agency employed more than twenty operatives and about sixty members of Pinkerton’s Protective Patrol, a uniformed private police force created in 1858 and used primarily to guard warehouses and plants.47 In 1871, the year after the founding of the Department of Justice, the U.S. Congress appropriated fifty thousand dollars so the department could establish a unit devoted to “the detection and prosecution of those guilty of violating federal law.” However, discovering that the fund was insufficient to found a new investigative unit, it was decided to contract out the services to Pinkerton’s.48
Despite such work, Pinkerton’s struggled financially, and the Philadelphia office went into the red, draining the other centers’ reserves. Pinkerton’s older son, William, at that time a rising executive in the Chicago office, suggested the Philadelphia branch be closed, but instead the principal moved some of its operatives to New York and sent others out to hustle business. In 1871, depressed about his lack of success, George Smith, the Philadelphia superintendent, resigned.49 But that was nothing compared to the devastating setback that Pinkerton—like McParlan—suffered later that year when the Chicago fire gutted the agency’s main premises. Included in the materials destroyed were approximately four hundred volumes of criminal records and the only copy in existence of the complete records of the Secret Service of the Army of the Potomac, which the government had already offered to purchase for thirty thousand dollars, which would have eliminated Pinkerton’s economic problems.50
In the next year, business worsened considerably. Pinkerton hired Benjamin Franklin, the former chief of detectives of the Philadelphia police, as that office’s superintendent, and the new operative began using his connections to pull in jobs.51 But by August 1872, Pinkerton was facing a critical shortage of cash. “We are in great want of money,” he wrote to one of his Chicago operatives. “On every hand I am in debt, yet I cannot get any person to help me, but everyone whom I owe a shilling to are calling me on it.”52
The financial situation became progressively more troubled, and two months later Pinkerton wrote to Bangs in New York, telling him to: “collect all your Bills without one moment’s delay, as things are coming right on us. Let business stand for the moment—go to work and collect Bills, sacrifice everything to get money, discount at any price. . . . [A]ny day whatever there may be a crash around us that we little suspect.”53
In November 1872, Pinkerton was forced to take a loan from his employees, and then to mortgage personal property. The total carried the company into the next year but was not enough to turn the corner, and hopes for improvement appeared doomed. In fact, it would not be long before Pinkerton’s prediction about a crash proved accurate, as the depression known as the Panic of 1873 set in following the collapse of Jay Cooke and Company, one of the chief financiers of the Union war effort.54 The Cooke debacle set off a chain reaction of bank failures and the closing of the New York stock market. Pinkerton lost even more in the latter event, as the value of his railroad stocks plummeted.
On May 18, 1873, Pinkerton admitted his worries to Bangs: “I can scarcely tell which way to go, and many a time I am perfectly bewildered what to do. . . . I am afraid.” Desperate, he continued: “go to Franklin Gowan [sic]. . . . Suggest some things to Mr Gowan about one thing and another which would be feasible and I have no doubt he will give us work.”55
The timing of the suggestion proved extremely fortunate. Gowen, the president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad (commonly referred to as the Reading) and its subsidiary, the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company, was indeed receptive to the help Pinkerton could offer. Gowen was a man of great ambition and determination, and one unwilling to let anything interfere with the successful attainment of his objectives. And at that moment there were several obstacles in the way of his economic and political goals—organizations that would therefore have to be subdued or eliminated. One of these—notorious in the press for having engaged in murder, mayhem, and destruction—was popularly known as the Molly Maguires.56
• • •
Franklin Benjamin Gowen was still relatively young in 1873, but he had already proven to be a formidable and resourceful figure in Pennsylvania business and politics.57 Born in 1836 in Mount Airy, then a community on the edge of Philadelphia, he was the fifth child of an Irish Episcopalian immigrant who had become wealthy as a grocer and wine merchant before retiring to be a gentleman agriculturalist. At the age of nine young Gowen was sent to the elite John Beck’s Boys’ Academy in the Moravian village of Lititz, Pennsylvania, where he rubbed shoulders with the patrician classes while receiving the advanced elements of a nineteenth-century education—astronomy, chemistry, algebra, German, natural philosophy, and etiquette. However, at thirteen he was taken out of school and apprenticed to Thomas Baumgardner, a dry-goods merchant in Lancaster County. Three years later Baumgardner and his brother sold their business and entered the coal trade, taking Gowen with them.
At the age of twenty-one, with his unrelenting father demanding he become a successful businessman, Gowen and a partner signed a ten-year lease for two collieries at Mount Laffee, just north of Pottsville. He and his young bride became a part of Pottsville�
�s expanding social scene, and Gowen organized a literary society. But things were not as positive on the business front—within a year one of the mines had to be flooded to put out a fire, and the owners had to pay to pump out the water. Their funds quickly disappeared, and in October 1859 the company’s property was auctioned to pay its debts.
Gowen now turned to law, in which two of his brothers had preceded him. He studied throughout the winter and spring in the office of a Pottsville attorney, and in May 1860 was admitted to the Schuylkill County bar. He quickly showed a natural oratorical eloquence, sprinkling his speeches with flowery images and classical references and demonstrating techniques that allowed him to guide his listeners down any path he chose. When combined with his good looks, remarkable memory, and personal magnetism, his speeches proved spellbinding.
Building on these talents, in 1862 he was elected the county’s district attorney. His tenure encompassed a period in which riots and other violent antiwar activities coincided with an upsurge of labor troubles—murder, beatings, and vandalism popularly attributed to the Molly Maguires. Although Gowen has been lambasted for doing little to prosecute these crimes, such arguments tend to show a lack of understanding of the American legal system of the time.
For much of the period before the Civil War, criminal or civil prosecutions were carried out by private prosecutors. Victims of crime could either take their complaint to a magistrate, who could issue a bench warrant for the defendant’s arrest, or they could go directly to a grand jury, which, after investigating, might issue a presentment or an indictment. Under either of these scenarios the victim or his representative could then prosecute an individual before a petit jury, at the victim’s expense.58
The primary difference between a civil and criminal prosecution was that the latter theoretically involved the public interest, and not just that of the victim. For that reason, a state attorney general could either prosecute the case or assign the task to a local attorney, typically at the expense of the State.59 In Pennsylvania, the position of county district attorney was created in 1850 in order to have a public official who could prosecute criminal cases as opposed to private lawyers. However, as with most states, Pennsylvania provided inadequate funds for public prosecutors, and for more than twenty years did not allow them to hire outside investigators.60
Under these restrictions it is easy to see that Gowen did not necessarily lack diligence; without any funding or investigative assistance, he simply could not prove an individual had the motive, intent, and opportunity to commit murder or other crimes. Obtaining convictions was made even more difficult, since Schuylkill County was well-known as a place in which committing perjury to provide alibis was essentially a way of life. In the long run, this last point would prove of huge significance, because the “ease with which the alibis were produced convinced . . . Gowen of the existence of a criminally oriented power elite in Schuylkill County.”61
After two frustrating and undistinguished years in public service, Gowen resigned to concentrate on his private practice, which in 1864 had made him the second-highest-paid lawyer in the county.62 While in public office, he had cultivated influential friends who helped in his appointment as Pottsville counsel for the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad. Gowen’s reputation within the company soared after he won an important case before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and in 1867 he became the Reading’s general counsel. He moved back to Philadelphia, where he showed a brilliant grasp of the railroad’s legal issues, an in-depth understanding of company finances, and, most important, the ability to impress the directors of McCalmont Brothers and Company, of London, the Reading’s majority stockholders. In 1869, when company president Charles E. Smith took leave for health reasons, Gowen was named acting president. The following year, with Smith unable to return, Gowen was elected president in his own right.
At the age of only thirty-three Gowen now had day-to-day control of a powerful corporation that owned 706 miles of double-track, 1,385 miles of single-track, some two hundred locomotives, and more than twenty-two thousand train cars that hauled approximately 180,000 tons of coal each week.63 But he envisioned something much larger, richer, and more powerful—a railroad that “owns its own traffic, is not dependent upon the public and is absolutely free from the danger of competition from rival lines.”64 As time passed, he convinced McCalmont Brothers of the soundness of his plan to win complete control over the Schuylkill County anthracite coal industry, including its production, transportation to point of sale, and distribution. To do this he would need to eliminate any competition from other entities that had desires to oversee aspects of the industry: the small, independent mining operators; the few companies offering alternative means of transport out of the region; the middlemen who controlled coal marketing in Philadelphia; and the union representing the mine workers. He believed that with appropriate financial backing he could control or crush the first three of those sets of competitors.
That left only the union—the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association (WBA)65—which hoped to control the amount of coal mined and therefore its distribution and, ultimately, price, which would mean long-term, stable pay for the miners. The WBA had already led a series of strikes in the Schuylkill County coalfields, and although Gowen had triumphed over each, he had realized that it would take more than simple economic repression to break the union. So at some point in early 1871—after what he considered to be a breach of faith by the WBA—he decided on an additional method that would, in conjunction with forceful economic measures, bring the miners to heel. His chosen course was to make an implicit connection between the union and the Molly Maguires. Gowen hoped that by tarring the WBA with the Molly Maguire brush—that is, by establishing in the minds of others that the two were related and intertwined—he might deal the union a setback from which it would never recover.
• • •
It is possible that the letter from George Bangs in May 1873 helped make clear to Gowen just how the final steps of his plan could be carried out a great deal more forcefully than even he had previously imagined. In the preceding two years he had taken control of virtually all aspects of the mining operation in Schuylkill County. However, the early months of 1873 had seen a dramatic increase in violence—with attacks on mine superintendents, fires at collieries, and derailment of railroad cars—actions publicly attributed to the Molly Maguires. If its members could be caught and convicted, and Gowen could link them to the WBA, it would do more than weaken the union—it might destroy it once and for all. Pinkerton’s was noted for its undercover work in a variety of settings, and what better way to obtain the proof needed, Gowen must have thought, than to have Pinkerton’s insert agents directly into the organizations under investigation.
In his General Principles pamphlet, Pinkerton had addressed the ethics of such a situation, stating that devious or seemingly underhanded means could legitimately be used in the enforcement of justice. Indeed, secrecy was a prime condition for a detective’s success. “It frequently becomes necessary for the Detective, when brought in contact with Criminals, to pretend to be a Criminal,” he had written, because “the Detective has to act his part, and in order to do so, he has, at times, to depart from the strict line of truth, and to resort to deception.”66
Inherent in this concept was the befriending of suspects as a means of gaining information to implicate them in crimes. “Moralists may question whether this be strictly right,” Pinkerton wrote, but then noted that although the technique was distasteful, “it is a necessity in the detection of Crime, and it is held by the Agency that the ends being the accomplishment of justice, they justify the means used.”67
Thus, Pinkerton’s had the necessary ethos to institute Gowen’s plan. In fact, its operatives had been employed as early as 1863 by the Reading to spy on conductors. Gowen himself had hired them for similar work in January 1870 after receiving a letter from a passenger who complained that he had been cheated by a conduct
or. Riding the line anonymously, Pinkerton’s men had uncovered numerous instances of conductors stealing fares or failing to collect them from acquaintances.68
So now Gowen again brought in Pinkerton’s. A number of operatives—generally referred to in reports only by their initials—invaded the mining region, where they gathered information while keeping watch on trains and switch and signal boxes.
Several incidents occurred in September 1873 in the vicinity of Glen Carbon—a mining settlement about nine miles northwest of Pottsville—culminating in the burning of a large coal tipple. Benjamin Franklin of Pinkerton’s Philadelphia office therefore decided to concentrate his operatives in that area. And it was from there that a report on October 9 first linked Gowen’s target to the ongoing trouble: “The operatives report the rumored existence at Glen Carbon of an organization known as the ‘Molly Maguires,’ a band of roughs joined together for the purpose of instituting revenge against any one of whom they may take a dislike. The operatives have been unable to learn who any of the members are.”69
In the following weeks the operatives remained as stumped as a local man they had interviewed: “He could give no particulars in regard to the society, or who belonged to it. He said he had been trying to find out the leading members, but had failed.”70
Meanwhile, spurred on by the damage to Reading property, Gowen met Pinkerton and Franklin at the Reading’s plush Philadelphia offices. No reliable record of the meeting exists, but, according to Pinkerton’s undoubtedly embellished account, Gowen instigated the meeting because “The coal regions are infested by a most desperate class of men, banded together for the worst purposes—called, by some, the Buckshots, by others the Mollie Maguires—and they are making sad havoc with the country.”71
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