by Philip Dray
By giving hard-luck miners a voice in their conditions of work, Siney and the WBA brought relative stability and a respite from terrorism. There had been fifty unsolved murders in Schuylkill County in the years 1863 to 1867, but crime fell sharply during the years of the union’s operations, 1868–1874. A highlight of the WBA’s tenure came in July 1870, when the union and the regional operators’ association, the Anthracite Board of Trade, signed the nation’s first written pact between mine operators and miners. Since the WBA’s thirty thousand members represented 85 percent of the coal region miners, the contract was a significant recognition of the WBA and might have served to further pacify labor relations. Siney and his union, however, had a determined nemesis in Franklin B. Gowen, the president of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad. Gowen, whose dynastic vision and heavy-handed tactics soon came to dominate the region, wanted no trouble from labor unions or Molly Maguires, and he would eventually find ways to undermine both.
Although raised in Pennsylvania, Gowen hailed from a family of Confederate sympathizers, and had purchased a substitute to take his place in the Union army. He was well educated, charming in a blustery way, and devoted to such elitist pastimes as cricket and translating German poetry. After a stint as a coal trader he tried his hand at operating a mine, then served as district attorney for Schuylkill County; he worked as a lawyer for the Reading before becoming its president in 1869 at age thirty-two. As historians are fond of observing, Gowen’s swift advancement brought him the ultimate symbol of Gilded Age status—a private railcar.
Coal being not only the essential fuel for his railroad but a profitable cargo, Gowen set out to control the anthracite mines so as to monopolize its transport. Under the Reading’s state charter the railroad was not allowed to own coal mines, but Gowen got around this by creating land-holding entities to do so. The Reading also bought the Schuylkill Canal, which carried coal barges and small passenger boats from Schuylkill County to Philadelphia, and ordered it closed, thus making the region more dependent on rail. Once the Reading controlled the means and could set the rates charged for bringing coal off the mountain to market, it could also determine the price of coal tonnage and, by extension, miners’ wages. This positioned Gowen as the “arbiter of labor relations in the anthracite region,” striking bargains with the mine operators and Siney’s WBA to fix the wage scale to fluctuating coal prices.69
But this much authority proved insufficient. Even though the WBA was functioning in the best spirit of labor unionism, and opposed Molly Maguirism, Gowen willfully blurred the distinction between the two by playing on prevailing stereotypes of the working Irish. Press and public knew them as natural agitators who enjoyed their liquor and thought with their fists, and mine operators disliked them because they often took the lead in the most fractious labor battles; Gowen’s contention that they all were incorrigible outlaws thus fed a ready-made preconception, enabling interests inimical to the WBA to conflate legitimate union activities with membership in the AOH and the specter of the Molly Maguires. He had a key ally in editor Bannan of the Miners Journal, who accepted Gowen’s argument that the WBA was likely thick with “Mollie terrorists.”
Gowen also managed to manipulate the state legislature when, in March 1871, it convened an investigation into the Reading’s price fixing. In a lengthy and theatrical speech, Gowen turned scrutiny away from his own possible misdeeds to alleged obstructionism on the part of the WBA, painting an elaborate word-portrait of intrigue in Schuylkill County, in which tyrannical union leaders worked secretly with Molly Maguires, who used violence and threats to keep workers in line. Gowen was convincing in outlining a conspiracy that
votes in secret at night that men’s lives shall be taken, and that they shall be shot before their wives, murdered in cold blood…. There has never been, in the most despotic government in the world, such a tyranny before in which the poor laboring man has to crouch like a whipped spaniel before the lash, and dare not say that his soul is his own…. I do not charge the [WBA] with it, but I say there is an association which votes in secret, at night, that men’s lives shall be taken … for daring to work against the order.70
The legislators, brought around by Gowen’s lurid tale, pivoted the focus of their inquiry and called Siney to testify. He adamantly denied any link between the WBA and the Mollies. “I wish to be placed upon my oath,” he said. “As workingmen we are stigmatized as a band of assassins; anything coming from our lips is supposed not to be believed … [but] we are an organization … first chartered by the county, next by the legislature; today we have neither sign, password, oath nor pledge.”71 But Siney’s defense of his union failed in the face of Gowen’s hyperbole, and the idea that the WBA and Molly Maguirism were connected took hold.72
That same month Gowen pushed through the legislature his scheme to allow the Reading to buy up coal land. Within three years the Reading—through its front company, the Laurel Run Improvement Company—would own one hundred thousand acres and control extensive mining operations; as a result many mine owners chose to sell to the increasingly omnipotent Reading, those who stayed on serving as mine superintendents or land agents for the company. Two years later the railroad’s grip tightened further when Gowen and the heads of four other regional railroads met in New York City and fixed the price of transporting coal at $5 a ton. The consortium also agreed on limits to how much coal would be carried by each railroad, thus granting the roads more leverage in determining coal operators’ profits. Bannan of the Miners Journal now grew concerned about the power Gowen had acquired. An old-line free labor advocate, he regretted seeing the region’s smaller coal operators forced aside, leaving only large capital to vie with the local miners, a struggle he saw as hopeless.73
Another paradoxical result of Gowen’s reckless ambition was that by weakening the “treacherous” WBA, he spurred a resurgence of actual Molly Maguirism. After a relative lull during the years of greatest WBA activity, there were new reports of mine bosses being roughed up, suspected arson at mine sites, railcars being vandalized, as well as threatening notices left on miners’ doors:
This is to give you the Gap men a cliar understanding that if you don’t quit work after this NOTICE you may preper for your DETH. You are the damdest turncoats in the State—there is no ples fit for you bute Hell and you will be soone there.
MOLLY
Sind by the real boys this time—so you better loocke oute.74
Because of such disruptions, Gowen in 1873 asked the legislature to allow the Reading to create its own law enforcement agency, the Reading Coal and Iron Police. Equipped with their own train car, the Coal and Iron cops were capable of responding quickly and aggressively to reports of strikes, worksite violence, or vigilantism. But to break the insurrectionary spirit of Irish resistance once and for all, Gowen decided he would also need to work from the inside.
THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY DETECTIVE Allan Pinkerton was a Scottish immigrant and barrel-maker once active in the abolition movement in Illinois, who built a second career in law enforcement by coordinating teams of “spotters” on Illinois railroads to catch conductors who embezzled ticket proceeds. He went on to become chief of security for the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad, where, in early 1861, he claimed to have discovered a plot to assassinate President-elect Abraham Lincoln as Lincoln’s train passed through Baltimore en route to his inaugural in Washington. The genuineness of the plot has been questioned by some historians, but Lincoln himself—who had been a railroad attorney and knew Pinkerton from Illinois—believed it was real, and in any case Pinkerton did manage to get Lincoln safely to the capital.75 He was soon hired by General George B. McClellan to lead the Union military’s secret service. After the war, when city police forces were often substandard and law enforcement was inadequate along remote rail lines away from urban centers, a number of detective and protective agencies appeared to offer security services. Pinkerton’s “cinder dicks” distinguished themselves on the sprawling railroads, includ
ing the Reading, and increasingly were hired for workforce-oriented espionage and union-busting.76 Like Franklin Gowen, Pinkerton chose to see little difference between unions and criminals, only perhaps that union men were less scheming than simply foolish. In his view, workers who formed “associations for compelling from their employers what their employers cannot afford to yield, assume[d] a position of open antagonism to the existence of the very interests upon which they are utterly dependent for their own sustenance.”77
Now Gowen sought out the renowned sleuth for a special assignment. A cutthroat group known as the Molly Maguires, he explained, infested the coal region, “making sad havoc with the country.” Municipal laws, county sheriffs, and local police were helpless to bring the culprits to heel.78 Pennsylvania, the entire nation, “wherever anthracite is employed,” Gowen explained, remained in “the vise-like grip of this midnight, dark-lantern, murderous-minded fraternity.”79 Pinkerton, who was said to have “an almost personal hatred for all criminals,” listened carefully to Gowen’s description of the deadly Mollies. After brief deliberation he chose to send to the troubled coal hills one of his most promising young agents, James McParlan, a twenty-nine-year-old Irish immigrant who had worked the Chicago streetcars, gathering evidence against dishonest conductors. McParlan was to blend in with the Mollies and learn their secrets.80
McParlan entered Schuylkill County under the alias James McKenna and obtained work in a mine, making himself conspicuous at suspected Mollie roadhouses by singing Irish ballads and dancing jigs, brawling with local bullies, and drinking to realistic excess. To fool the desperadoes he hoped to entrap, he devised the compelling cover story that he was laying low for having committed a murder in Buffalo, and was living off disability payments from his Civil War service and occasionally “passing the cheat” (circulating counterfeit money). McKenna’s outlaw bona fides, his convincing roughness, and his ardent love of the mother country eventually endeared him to his new coal country friends. He became a confidant of several “bodymasters,” alleged ringleaders of the region’s criminal underworld, including Patrick Dormer, a saloon keeper in Pottsville, and John Kehoe, a tavern owner in Girardsville known as “The King of the Mollies.” Michael “Muff” Lawler, so nicknamed because he had two beards, one on each side of his chin, welcomed McKenna into his home as a boarder. In April 1874 Lawler, believing McKenna might be helpful to the AOH because he could read and write, inducted the detective into the Order. Soon McKenna was made an officer of the group.
Later that year, in December, a showdown ensued between Gowen and the WBA when the rail baron announced a 20 percent wage cut in Reading-controlled mines, prompting the WBA miners to strike as of January 1, 1875. Management fought back with scabs imported and protected by the Coal and Iron Police, while twenty-six members of the WBA leadership were arrested on trumped-up charges. Conditions in the mining towns were atrocious that winter, as the bosses worked to literally starve the strikers and their families into submission. During the course of what became known as “the Long Strike,” which lasted from January through June 1875, the WBA finally weakened and collapsed. With the union’s influence in the region now obliterated, a new round of violence broke out between former WBA rank and file and Gowen’s police and vigilantes. An anonymous note sent to a local newspaperman stated:
I am against shooting as mutch as ye are. But the union is Broke up and we Have got nothing to defind ourselves with But our Revolvers and if we dount use them we shal have to work For 50 cints a Day. And I tell ye the other nationalateys is the same as we are onley thay are to Damd cowardley. Ye can think and say what ye Like it is all the same to us. But I have told ye the Mind of the children of Mistress Molly Maguire.81
McKenna had meanwhile gathered information on several crimes, including the murder of Tamaqua police chief Benjamin Yost, as well as the killing of miner William Uren and mine bosses Thomas Sanger and John Jones at SM Heaton & Company’s colliery at Raven Run. Yost, who had been warned that his head would be made “softer than his ass” for poking around in AOH affairs, was killed early one morning while dousing the Tamaqua streetlamps.82 Sanger’s final transgression had been to ignore a “coffin notice” warning him to leave Schuylkill County. He, along with Uren and Jones, had died in a blaze of gunfire at the hands of five strangers who showed up at SM Heaton’s mine pretending to seek work.
The undercover detective ultimately provided Gowen with the names of 347 people he suspected of involvement in various criminal plots. Using this intelligence, Gowen in September 1875 ordered two dozen men arrested and accused them of belonging to a terror group known as the Molly Maguires. The first case prosecuted, a January 1876 conviction of Michael Boyle for the murder of John Jones, did not require McParlan’s testimony, but suspicions had been aroused among the Mollies that someone was talking. A secret AOH membership list had mysteriously been made public, suggesting a spy was at work, and early in 1876 a railroad conductor who had had a previous run-in with McParlan recognized and exposed him as a Pinkerton. In March 1876 a very lucky “McKenna” managed to slip out of the region before the Mollies he’d double-crossed could lay hands on him.
The first of what would be a series of show trials began in spring 1876 featuring the testimony of McParlan (whose true identity was now revealed), and that of a Mollie turncoat, Jimmy Kerrigan, who stood only four feet eleven inches and was known even to his own wife as “a little rat.” She testified that it had been her husband who had murdered Officer Yost, not the men accused of the deed.
By now the story of McParlan’s undercover feat and the shady workings of a clandestine gang of Irish outlaws had reached New York and Philadelphia, and big-city reporters were drawn to the Schuylkill County Courthouse in Pottsville (“Murder County,” Miners Journal editor Bannan had dubbed the community). Much as disturbing tales of Southern Ku Klux Klan violence had once titillated newspaper readers, the Molly Maguires and the intrepid detective who’d fooled them in their lair also made for compelling copy. The appeal of the Molly Maguire allegations, of course, as Gowen well knew, was that they piqued existing public fears that labor organizations, particularly clannish ones based on ethnic identity, were radical and probably dangerous. The Irish World and the Labor Standard denounced the “Molly” stories, suggesting the gang’s alleged exploits had been concocted by the Pinkertons and the railroads, and Terence Powderly, Grand Master Workman of the Knights of Labor, asserted that the accused men might have in fact been led by McParlan, “under the guise of friendship,” to commit “deeds of desperation and blood.”83 Gowen himself was likely surprised at how effectively his evocation of Irish brigands riding the Pennsylvania hills played with the press, for a few years earlier he had tried with far less success to peddle the story that the Hibernians were “Communists.” As for Powderly’s allegation, it’s never been entirely clear how much of McParlan’s reporting was accurate, or whether Gowen helped embellish some of the tales. Perhaps, as one scholar suggests, “the world believed it all because it was just too good to be false.”84
At the time a private citizen had the right to serve as prosecutor in a criminal case, and Gowen announced that he, a former district attorney, would lead the prosecution. He proceeded to fill the jury box with Pennsylvania Dutch, conservative farm folk known to regard the working-class Irish as hooligans. The height of the melodrama came on May 12, 1876, during the trial of Tom Munley for the murders of Thomas Sanger and William Uren, when Gowen delivered a stirring oration that bordered on the hallucinatory but effectively sealed the fate of the Molly Maguires. He declared:
This very organization that we are now, for the first time, exposing to the light of day, has hung like a pall over the people of this country. Behind it stalked darkness and despair, brooding like grim shadows over the desolated hearth and the ruined home, and throughout the length and breadth of this fair land was heard the voice of wailing and of lamentation…. Nor is it alone those whose names that I have mentioned, but it is the hundreds of unkn
own victims, whose bones lie mouldering over the face of this county.
Gowen, pacing before the jury, made a mournful face and indicated with a sweep of his arm the world beyond the courtroom, saying, “In hidden places and by silent paths, in the dark ravines of the mountains, and in secret ledges of the rocks, who shall say how many bodies of the victims of this order now await the final trump of God?”
But, he warned:
There is not a place on the habitable globe where these men can find refuge and in which they will not be tracked down. Let them go to the Rocky Mountains, or to the shores of the Pacific; let them traverse the bleak deserts of Siberia, penetrate into the jungles of India, or wander over the wild steppes of Central Asia, and they will be dogged and tracked and brought to justice, just as surely as Thomas Munley is brought to justice today.85
Gowen ended his three-hour lecture with the ludicrous proposal that if any of the Mollies present wished to assassinate him as they had so callously snuffed out the lives of decent policemen and mine officials, they should do so now. The speech sold briskly in pamphlet form.
Several additional cases were heard, McParlan’s testimony leading to the conviction of eleven men for murder and arson. In addition to Jimmy Kerrigan’s perjured testimony, a convict known as Kelly the Bum, who was already in prison on a murder charge, was brought forth to offer incriminating evidence against alleged Mollies in exchange for leniency in his own case. It was reported that he had confided to a cellmate at the trial, “I would squeal on Jesus Christ to get out of here.”86
Against the onslaught of public outrage, rigged testimony, and Gowen’s theatrics, lawyers for the accused men faced an almost impossible task. “For God’s sake give labor an equal chance,” one defense attorney exhorted the jury. “Do not crush it. Let it not perish under the imperial mandates of capital in a free country.”87 But the juries’ verdicts were a foregone conclusion. On June 21, 1876, ten Mollies were hanged in Pottsville and in nearby Mauch Chunk, the executions heavily guarded by armed soldiers to discourage possible rescue. Soon after, nine other men were executed and two dozen sent to prison.