When also colored by the age-old Irish loathing of the informer, the traditional American support for the “little man,” and a long espoused view of Pinkerton’s as an archenemy of the labor movement, many recent works have been one-dimensional narratives that, when not supported by the facts, use conjecture and innuendo. They justify the violence of the Molly Maguires, portraying them as innocent and oppressed while demonizing those who opposed them, the legal system of the time, and especially McParland, whom they pronounce an unscrupulous liar and informer who betrayed his fellow Irish Catholics for money.5
This is a far cry from other portrayals of McParland as a benefactor of the honest people of Schuylkill County and Pennsylvania.6 Thus, there is a clear need for a reassessment of the Great Detective. Only through thorough study can a deeper understanding be gained of a man whose public persona was so divergent that he was once said to have “performed one of the greatest services that has ever been rendered to the Catholic Church” but at another time to be the “most horrible Gorgon of this monster-bearing age.”7
• • •
The genesis of this book can be traced back more than four decades to when, still in high school, I first saw the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. As the mysterious posse thundered after the characters portrayed by Paul Newman and Robert Redford, I was gripped by the outlaws’ oft-repeated question, “Who are those guys?” I found myself wondering if “Mr. E. H. Harriman of the Union Pacific Railroad” really did send an all-star team of lawmen after them. Forty years ago there were few books about the Wild Bunch,8 but I hunted them down in an effort to learn more not only about the outlaws, but about the grim, determined men on their trail.
What I discovered, late in James D. Horan’s classic account Desperate Men, was that the hunt was organized not by the Union Pacific but by a man “feared by the post-Civil War thugs and confidence men as a relentless, dogged type of detective,”—the superintendent of Pinkerton’s Denver office, “J.P. McPharland.”9
Coincidentally, it was only the next year that, interested because of his roles as James Bond, I went to see Sean Connery in a movie named The Molly Maguires. But it wasn’t Connery’s portrayal of John Kehoe that struck me—it was that of Richard Harris as the Pinkerton’s operative James McParlan. Surely, I thought, despite the difference in spelling, this must be the same man who later led the hunt for the Wild Bunch. So again I headed for the library to read about the Molly Maguires. Afterward I felt confident that he was the same man, but I found myself with many more questions because of the different images presented of him.
Several years later, while working on a paper for a college course on the American West, I was directed by a friendly librarian to a well-written, highly intelligent, and thought-provoking account of the 1907 trial of several union leaders for the assassination of the former governor of Idaho.10 And to my amazement, the Pinkerton operative heading the investigation was none other than James McParland. The man seemingly would just not leave me alone.
As the years passed I witnessed the ebb and flow of many reputations. As new materials became available, the images of people changed, including those of the lord protector Oliver Cromwell; the Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his African counterpart Henry Morton Stanley; the South African political activist and statesman Nelson Mandela; and, most recently, Penn State football coach Joe Paterno. Throughout these reassessments I kept returning to the question of who James McParland really was, not least because the books in which he was mentioned failed to tell his full story or to address his historic milieu, and therefore they became little more than crude caricatures.
Finally, tiring of waiting for someone to conduct the research and write the definitive account of this most mysterious and complex individual, I decided to tackle it myself. It was obvious from the beginning that finding the real James McParland would not be easy. Nor would it be simple to place him in the context of his times, cultural background, and chosen profession. But little did I know just how difficult or lengthy the process would actually be.
I started my investigation from scratch, with no particular preconceptions and no agenda other than to tell McParland’s story, based on the evidence. As before, my initial research raised more questions than answers. Could McParland’s role in the Molly Maguire story be separated from what are considered the unfair aspects of the trials? How unusual were those trials compared to others of the time? How different was McParland’s behavior throughout his career from that of members of other law-enforcement agencies of his time, or of today? What could be learned about him during the years between his two most famous cases? Had his personal moral code, and therefore his behavior, changed after he submersed himself in deceptive tactics? Given that his testimony under oath was so widely different from one trial to another, could anything he ever said be believed? Did he have his own distinctive code of honor that explains his actions? Was he a nice man, or had his undercover work soiled him irretrievably? Would I want to have dinner with him, or invite him into my home?
I had high hopes of finding an abundance of materials, as the Library of Congress had recently opened the Pinkerton’s archives, which had been closed to most researchers for more than eighty years. Unfortunately, although the holdings are massive, there is precious little in the McParland files—and virtually nothing from the Denver office, of which he was in charge. The papers had been culled by Pinkerton’s many years before.11 However, I was successful in finding material elsewhere, as his trail took me to archives and libraries in Pennsylvania, Delaware, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Virginia, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Texas, Oklahoma, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and New Zealand.
As I familiarized myself more with the man and his period, McParland—and the ethos of Pinkerton’s—slipped seamlessly into the mentality of his time, one far different from today. Life was not gentle in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania in the 1870s, and it was just as tough in the American West in the decades thereafter. And in both places it was cheap. Violence was an accepted part of day-to-day existence to many men who worked the mines: They were hard drinking, short tempered, unwilling to back down, and unafraid to die. They came to the taverns with knives, handguns, and a passionate hatred for foreigners, those of other religions, or strangers.12 McParland testified in one Molly Maguire trial that he met some of the defendants “on the main street of Mahanoy City, a little east of the dead line.”13 Such was the mentality of the time that few thought it odd that there should be a dead line—a boundary marking an ethnic divide beyond which it was unsafe for the inhabitants of one side to pass to the other at night.
During his career, McParland experienced many more places where there was a fine line between going home and going to the morgue. Criminals and lawmen alike were quick to drink, quick to draw, and quick to take offense; rule breaking and rule enforcing could be so closely intertwined as to be nearly indistinguishable. To deal with such men one had to be just as rough and mean as they were, and perhaps that is why it is difficult to tell the heroes from the villains. This was not a society in which Robert Redford and Katharine Ross were made into lovely sepia prints, but one that was vicious, dirty, and cruel. This was highlighted in the struggles between the men who owned the railroads, mines, and ranches and those who worked them.
And yet understanding McParland still remained as slippery a proposition as grabbing an eel. It was not only the basic difficulty in getting to know a long-dead individual. Nor was it just the challenge thrown out by defense attorney Lin Bartholomew in his final summation at the trial of four alleged Molly Maguires: “Whenever you undertake to analyze the motives of men, when you undertake to go behind the shirt bosom and get into the heart, whenever you undertake to analyze the workings of the mind, that moment you are at sea.”14
No, despite Pinkerton’s c
ulling policy, it began to feel as though someone had covered this particular detective’s tracks. Not only could almost no copies of his original reports from the Molly Maguire investigation be found, even the edited versions for many of the most significant dates were missing. Similarly, most of the records about his operations in Kansas, Colorado, and Minnesota had disappeared without trace.15 McParland remained an enigma.
Oh, there are lots of stories about him—many probably first told by McParland himself. A few might even be true. Historian Kevin Kenny once damned the book Lament for the Molly Maguires—upon which the Sean Connery movie was based—as “a peculiarly misleading mixture of speculation, invented dialogue, interviews, and documented, undocumented and mis-documented historical ‘facts.’”16 The book contains numerous tales of McParland’s adventures that appear nowhere else, all supposedly confided by McParland to a friend and passed down through the friend’s family. Yet, while Kenny rightly regarded the stories as inaccurate, that doesn’t mean they were not told by McParland. In his later years the Great Detective loved to brag and fantasize about his exploits, sometimes telling contradictory stories. One of his most outrageous anecdotes was repeated shortly after his death:
While the Civil War was on, Secretary [of War Edwin] Stanton visited the head of the Pinkerton detectives and asked for a man to go to England to find whether the English people were not building ships for the Confederates. McParland, a boy of 18, was chosen. He was called into conference at the White House with President Lincoln, Secretary [of State William H.] Seward and Secretary Stanton. Stanton wished him to take passage on the best boat he could get. McParland said he intended to go over on a tramp steamer. Stanton was rather nettled that a mere boy should question the wisdom of his course, but Lincoln, rising to his seven feet height, said: “Perhaps the boy is right.” McParland went over on a tramp steamer, secured work in a shipyard, and got positive proof of England’s duplicity, on which the Alabama claim was later based.17
Never let it be said that McParland—a youth still living in Ireland when this incident was supposed to have occurred—let the facts get in the way of a good story. And realizing that is one of the keys to understanding him and judging his testimony through the years. Other important traits were that he was extraordinarily quick-witted and had a natural aptitude for the necessities of undercover work. For example, he showed the ability to charm, to form instant friendships, and to gain the trust of those from whom he might prize information. And despite being bespectacled and not large of stature, he was a man’s man who could drink, brawl, and intimidate with the best of them, and he was able to impose his will on those not as clever, cunning, or forceful as he was.
It is also important to bear in mind the difference in McParland between when he began to conduct his investigations in Schuylkill County at the age of twenty-nine and when he was hunting the heads of the Western Federation of Miners, as a portly man in his sixties who walked with a cane. A darker character had appeared by the end of his career, one who perhaps drank too much and was inclined more than ever to exaggerate and fabricate, a believer in his own infallibility, disliking intensely anyone who challenged him, and a follower of Allan Pinkerton’s notion that “the ends being the accomplishment of justice, they justify the means used.”18 All these traits had been accentuated by McParland’s long involvement in undercover operations and labor espionage.
Not that this was unique to McParland. The life of an undercover agent or spy is rarely easy or glamorous, and the pressure and psychological demands can be overwhelming both mentally and physically (as McParland experienced in Pennsylvania, when his hair fell out and he was bedridden with a gamut of stress-related illnesses). The moral ambiguity of betraying one’s friends is exacerbated by the incongruity of attempting “to do good by doing bad—preventing crime or apprehending criminals by resorting to lies, deceit, trickery; preventing crime by facilitating it; seeking to reduce crime by unintentionally increasing it; preventing harm at a cost of uncertainty about whether it would in fact have occurred . . . seeing criminal informers act as police.”19
These experiences ultimately tend to make even the most good-natured, amiable men sour.20 And this lifestyle has turned some men away from the righteousness with which they began or, as Samuel Johnson put it: “Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off.”21
For such reasons there has always been hostility and repugnance toward men who report on the activities of others, whether they are called undercover agents, spies, or informers. For some, this antipathy was leavened by fascination and curiosity, and by an acknowledgment that such unsavory tasks are a necessary evil in society. There were also those who justified undercover techniques, and not just because, as the seventeenth-century “intelligencer” Dudley Bradstreet noted, there is a little of the spy in everyone.22 Just as there has always been the tendency to damn the enemy spy for his duplicity and perfidy, the spy on the home side is a hero working for justice and the greater good. Moreover, to many, even negative practices or personal attributes of such investigators were long accepted, because “you cannot expect a detective to be an angel of light. . . . [I]f our detectives only associated with merchants . . . they would not be in a position to detect lawbreakers and bring them to justice.”23
Despite such justifications, McParland was so despised that one socialist journalist wrote of how he followed him for days in order to murder him.24 Yet his adventures so intrigued Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that in 1914 the author gave the detective the highest of compliments by having him meet Sherlock Holmes in one of his novels.25 To much of the hero-worshipping public it was apparent that the greatest fictional detective had met his even greater living counterpart.
Thus, the story of the Great Detective is marked by widely varying opinion, belief, interpretation, and assessment, yet it is one that has never been told before in all its component pieces. What follows here is that tale—one of paradoxes, ambiguity, and mystery. It can be seen as a story of duplicity or honor, of good or evil, of morality or treachery, of a hero or a villainous brute. It is the story of the conundrum that was James McParland.
CHAPTER 1
THE MAKINGS OF A DETECTIVE
There was little about his birth or formative years to suggest that the man baptized as James McParlan would become a celebrated detective.1 But his earliest days did start with what he would love throughout his life: a murky mystery. He was born in the rural townland of Drumachee, Mullaghbrack Parish, County Armagh, in the northern Irish province of Ulster—but without the date being officially recorded.2 Throughout his career McParlan claimed that he did not know his exact birth date—he usually said he thought it was 1844, although he once declared it as early as 1839.3 Yet his tombstone gives it as March 22, 1844. So, was that the date? Did he actually know all along but simply refuse to acknowledge it?
To add to the uncertainty, the parish register at the Catholic Church of St. James in Mullaghbrack shows that his baptism took place on April 6, 1845, more than a year after the birth date on his grave. At a time of very high infant mortality, would a Catholic family have risked denying a son “the priceless grace of becoming a child of God were they not to confer Baptism shortly after birth”?4
The answer, as for so many other questions about McParlan, remains elusive. According to historian Eugenio Biagini of the University of Cambridge: “It is quite plausible that a person of that period might grow up without knowing his birth date,” and without his family making any record of it. “Furthermore, although more surprising, it would not be altogether implausible for the family to postpone the child’s baptism.”5 On such inconclusive evidence are mysteries built.
One thing that is well-known, however, is that McParlan was still an infant when a disaster overtook not only his family but all of Ireland. The funguslike oomycota microorganism Phytophthora infestans, having spread from Mexico to North America to Europe,6 severely damaged the Irish potato crop of 18
45 and devastated it in the following years. With at least one third of the population of Ireland almost entirely dependent on the potato for food, a catastrophic period of mass starvation and accompanying disease ensued, the effects of which were exacerbated by political, social, and economic decisions and indecision. About a million people are estimated to have died as a result of the Great Famine, and between one and two million to have emigrated as a consequence of it.7 Despite living in an area that lost about a quarter of its population in the 1840s,8 the family of Eneas and Mary McParlan continued to grow, with James the fifth son and seventh child of a throng that eventually numbered eight boys and four girls.9 Although originally tenant farmers on lands owned by the Earl of Charlemont, the rich soil of their holdings meant the family was better off than average, and Eneas eventually left the two sons who stayed on the farm with him—Patrick, the eldest, and Henry, the youngest—three ample pieces of arable land in his will.10
The McParlans were Catholics in a heavily Protestant area, and with no Catholic school nearby, James and his brothers went to a Presbyterian one. There they were given the basic elements of an education. James also was taught many passages from the Bible, which allowed him, in behavior more representative of Presbyterians than Catholics of the time, to quote freely from it for the rest of his life.11 Despite the Protestant influence, family members later stated that McParlan was, from his earliest days, an active and dutiful member of the Catholic Church, and that in times of trouble it was his faith in God and his devotion to the Church that sustained him.
In October 1863, by then a young man hoping for a future better than being a junior member of a large farming family, McParlan left for new opportunities in England. Walking the first twenty-one miles to the rail station in Lisburn in order to save on the fare, he took a train to Belfast, from where he crossed the Irish Sea to Whitehaven in Cumberland. Thence, with one companion, he made his way to Carlisle, tramped thirteen miles to Low Row Station on the old Newcastle and Carlisle Railway, and caught a train to the bleak industrial city of Gateshead on the south bank of the River Tyne, opposite Newcastle.
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