Pinkerton’s Great Detective

by Beau Riffenburgh

  But Gowen’s skillful denunciation of the WBA and its leadership did not end there. “There has never been, in the most despotic government in the world, such a tyranny,” he declared, “before which the poor laboring man has to crouch like a whipped spaniel before the lash.” Then, without mentioning the Molly Maguires by name or making a direct accusation, he intimated that the WBA was actually either the same as that secret society or overlapped it to such an extent that the distinction was irrelevant:

  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, and that they shall be shot before their wives, murdered in cold blood, for daring to work against the order. . . . 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 disobey the mandates of the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association. [emphasis in the original]49

  By the time Gowen was done, all Siney and the other stunned WBA leaders could do was try to defend themselves and their organization against having been “stigmatized as a band of assassins.”50 Any hope of a real investigation into Gowen’s actions or the powers of the Reading vanished once Gowen linked violence in the coalfields and the role of the WBA in an overriding conspiracy. It was a huge and shocking loss for the WBA. At the end of the hearings the increased rail rates remained, the union’s reputation had been tarnished, and Gowen was unhindered in his march toward total control of the Schuylkill anthracite fields.

  • • •

  After the legislative investigation was concluded, the operators and union agreed to settle their standoff by arbitration, in which the basis was set at $2.75. Although this might have seemed like a victory for the WBA, it was actually just another in a string of triumphs for Gowen, as the pay rate still decreased as the cost of coal dropped below the basis.

  One of Gowen’s most public successes was the full-throated support given to his assertions about the WBA by Bannan, who in 1869 had added a daily newspaper to his weekly. When The New York Herald, the largest newspaper in America, ran a story about a series of shootings in Schuylkill County, Bannan took exception. “He [The Herald correspondent] says that the Molly Maguires do not belong to the WBA,” he wrote. “This is not true; they all belong, because they could not get any work whatever if they did not.”51 This public assertion of Gowen’s key strategy for undermining the union was a crucial victory.

  In late March, Gowen’s political allies submitted a bill to the legislature to obtain a charter for a new corporation—the Laurel Run Improvement Company. Deep in the document’s obscure language were clauses indicating that the company would be a coal-owning subsidiary of the Reading. Gowen had tried the same strategy only six weeks previously, but the charter for his proposed Franklin Coal Company had been defeated by Senator Esaias Billingfelt—a lifelong opponent of monopolies. Once again, the senator saw through the ruse and argued persuasively against the Reading obtaining such power; by a vote of 17 to 15, the clause granting coal-mining rights was deleted. But at the lunch break, Gowen showed his covert political skills. When the Senate reconvened in the afternoon, a motion was introduced to reinstate the clause and, with three of those voting against it suddenly absent and one changing his vote, the bill passed with the clause restored. The Reading now had the power not only to buy its own coal land but, due to the passage of another measure, to borrow an unlimited sum of capital needed for the purchases.52

  Gowen wasted no time in accumulating these lands. By the end of the year his shell company—renamed the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company—had purchased 65,605 acres. By 1874, the Reading owned more than 100,000 acres of coal land—double that of any other organization—and controlled more than one hundred collieries.53 Although eventually this rapid-fire series of investments would lead to economic disaster, for the time being it meant Gowen controlled one more phase of the mining operation.

  As Gowen gobbled up coal land, he also moved to take over marketing and distribution. He first aimed at the coal “factors”—the men who retailed it in Philadelphia at a profit of 25¢ per ton, a return so large that Gowen characterized them as “sitting at the water’s edge like leeches, sucking the lifeblood of a healthy trade.”54 He established large retailing centers in Philadelphia, where the coal was sold directly to the public at a rate below that set by the factors. He then brought the remaining independent operators in the southern region in with him by selling their coal at a fee of only 10¢ per ton. Thus undercut, the factors went out of business.55

  Gowen’s next major step was to determine, in conjunction with the corporations selling coal to New York, the volume that could be distributed to the entire market, because unless the total volume was controlled, producers and shippers from any one region could undercut the others. In early 1873, Gowen met with a group of railroad and coal company presidents, who jointly agreed to fix the New York price of coal at $5 per ton wholesale. This cartel’s price-fixing arrangement—the first industrywide case in American history and “the first attempt to revise the old law of laissez-faire to meet the conditions of a new industrial world”56—was followed by an agreement to limit the tonnage that each company could ship to a percentage of an agreed total. Under this arrangement, the Reading was to have 25.85 percent of the market, the Delaware and Hudson 18.37 percent, the Jersey Central 16.15 percent, the Lehigh Valley 15.98, the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Hudson 13.80 percent, and the Pennsylvania Coal Company 9.85 percent.57

  The establishment of the shipping quota left Gowen only one major stumbling block: organized labor. The WBA’s position had been weakened at the legislative hearings, it had meekly agreed to a drop in the basis from $2.75 per ton in 1871 to $2.50 in 1872, and Gowen had tried to undercut one of its platforms by establishing his own scheme of company benefits and welfare.58 But Siney and his organization still remained thorns in Gowen’s side, and eliminating them would allow Gowen to consolidate his control and impose his desired order over the lower anthracite region. So when, for the first time in several years, rumblings of activities by the Molly Maguires surfaced again in 1873, Gowen determined to destroy both organizations, which could best be accomplished by proving they were a single entity.

  Gowen’s active opposition to the WBA at a time when Molly Maguire violence was on the rise seems contradictory. The union was clearly opposed to such outrages and helped keep them in check. The period between the founding of the WBA in 1868 and the beginning of 1873 had been notable for the cessation of most crime and for peaceful interactions with the owners. Robberies and assaults had decreased, and only two murders officially attributed to the Molly Maguires had occurred: Patrick Burns, foreman at the Silver Creek Colliery in Tuscarora, in 1870, following the closing of the southern fields, and Morgan Powell, a Welshman who had risen through the ranks to become a superintendent for the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company (see Appendix A for the list of murders recognized by the State as being by Molly Maguires; the appendix can be found at www.penguin.com/PinkertonsGreat Detective or www.susannagregory.com/beauriffenburgh/pinkertons-great -detective). Powell had been shot in the chest at about 7:00 P.M. on December 2, 1871, as he left a store in Summit Hill, Carbon County. Immediately thereafter, numerous newspapers, including the WBA’s The Anthracite Monitor, roundly criticized the assassins, who were said to be Molly Maguires.59

  With disorder again reigning in Schuylkill County, Gowen saw the opportunity to condemn all labor activists as terrorists, murderers, arsonists, robbers, and politically corrupt, whether Molly Maguires or leaders of the WBA. So, despite the longtime peaceful stance of the union, he determined to move ahead with his master plan. He would need help to link the two groups and, more important, help to destroy them both. He believed that he could not rely on local law enforcement: “Municipal detectives, employed by the police authorities of cities, who operate only for rewards, are the last per
sons to whom you could trust an enterprise such as this.”60 So he must have been relieved and pleased following his meeting with Allan Pinkerton, knowing he had found an agency capable of seeing the task through to its successful conclusion.

  CHAPTER 3

  A NEW IDENTITY

  Allan Pinkerton had a problem. He had received a commission from Franklin Gowen, but, try as he might, he could not settle on an operative who fit the requirements for the job. “It is no ordinary man that I need in this matter,” he remarked to Gowen. “He must be an Irishman, and a Catholic, as only this class of persons can find admission to the Mollie Maguires. . . . He should be hardy, tough, and capable of laboring, in season and out of season.”1

  More than that, Pinkerton’s agent had to be sociable, charming, discreet—and therefore able to hold his liquor—and definitely a bachelor, as Pinkerton would not allow a man to take the job who, if killed, would “leave his mate and their helpless innocents to the cold charity of an unfeeling world.” He also needed a man who, despite being initiated into an “oath-bound brotherhood, would yet remain true to me; who could make almost a new man of himself, take his life in his hands, and enter upon a work which was apparently against those bound to him by close ties of nationality, if not of blood and kindred; and for months, perhaps for years, place himself in antagonism with and rebellion against the dictates of his church.”2

  As an Irishman the operative would come from a culture in which, because of the long history of Irish insurrection being riddled with those in the pay of the British, few were despised more than informers. As a Catholic he would be concerned that the Church had threatened to excommunicate the Molly Maguires because of their violence and for belonging to a secret society. And by the very nature of his work and the people with whom he would associate, he would acquire a reputation for evil that might follow him even after his tasks were completed. Robert Pinkerton, the founder’s younger son and later one of the agency’s two principals, recognized that these conditions meant the agent had to have an extraordinary sense of mission.

  “It required something more than mere pecuniary reward to secure the right sort of person for this task,” he wrote. “The man had to feel that he was serving his church, his race and his country; otherwise it would be impossible to get anyone to undertake a work which invited death by assassination.”3

  Initially, these exacting requirements made the search seem fruitless—one of the agency’s operatives who would otherwise have been perfect had several small children; another was soon to be married; and yet others had not been with the company long enough to engender Pinkerton’s total trust. But on October 8, 1873, Pinkerton boarded a streetcar on the west side of Chicago, and there, serving as the conductor, was James McParlan, an undercover agent assigned to determine if cable car employees were pocketing fares. As Pinkerton considered the man, his hopes soared. McParlan, then twenty-nine years old, fit the physical requirements. He was about five feet eight and a half inches tall, with a wiry but muscular build and slightly stooped shoulders, auburn hair with a somewhat darker mustache and beard, a ruddy complexion, and hazel-colored eyes over which he wore glasses, because he was extremely nearsighted.4 There was nothing special about his looks—not a bad thing for a detective trying to remain inconspicuous. He was also able to mingle easily with people he did not know, and had a sharp sense of humor, a cordial manner, and the ability to tell a story in his slight brogue, dance a jig, or sing a fetching song. Now Pinkerton had only to determine if he was “mentally correct,”5 so when he reached his office he sent a message to the operative, directing him to come to the agency after work.

  McParlan must have been nervous when he was ordered to meet with the principal, because the company was struggling financially and he had not demonstrated the total loyalty Pinkerton so valued and required. He had been hired a year and a half before, in April 1872, and his early days likely consisted of testing—undercover work exposing dishonest railroad employees—as such investigations provided Pinkerton’s with the bulk of its business at the time. He must have distinguished himself in some way, because later that year, when the agency felt the crunch of the economic downturn, he was not released, as some other operatives were. Then, in November, Pinkerton’s entire testing program was jeopardized and severely scaled back.6

  At the same time, further financial belt-tightening was implemented throughout Pinkerton’s, and McParlan’s pay almost certainly decreased to less than that of a Chicago policeman. He also likely was pulled from other duties and sent out to collect bills, not a task that, despite his ability to use strong-arm tactics, he would have found stimulating. Therefore, in January 1873, McParlan left for a position as a conductor on Chicago streetcars until he found a better business opportunity. It had not materialized, and in August he went back to Pinkerton hat in hand to apply for reinstatement. Taken on again, he was sent straight back to the streetcars to observe his coworkers for illicit behavior.7 Thus, when Pinkerton considered him for the task of investigating the Molly Maguires, McParlan had already been engaged in an assignment that required him to report on his colleagues.

  Now, to McParlan’s amazement, Pinkerton talked confidentially and at great length to him about a major assignment. Before any details were settled, however, Pinkerton sent him home to write a report about everything he knew regarding Irish secret societies and the Molly Maguires.

  On October 10, McParlan submitted a tightly spaced, seven-page report, showing a spidery scrawl and a weak grasp of punctuation, grammar, and spelling.8 Its substance was more striking than its form, however, as it laid out a surprisingly comprehensive history of the Irish societies, particularly those in the north. The Whiteboys, Threshers, and Ribbonmen had been formed in opposition to the Orangemen, he wrote, and “being secret & having no other object in view But the breeding of di[s]cord were streniously opposed by the Catholic Clergy & to the Credit of the Irish people it may be said few or none of the educated or Respectable Catholics ever belonged to the last named Societies it was principally composed of the poor & Ignorant classes with a few agitators who duped them into it for political or other purposes.”

  When the Famine devastated the country, McParlan continued, the Molly Maguires were organized to “take from those who had abundance & give to the poor who were then dying by Hundreth with hunger.” Sadly, this Robin Hood attitude did not last long, and “Instead of performing the simple Acts of taking from the rich & giving to the poor the[y] commenced hostilities something after the fashion of the Ku Klux Klahn [sic] . . . but, as the[y] had no Negroes to kill the[y] commenced by shooting down Landlord’s Agents Bailiffs or any unoffending neighbour who might not coincide with their views.” Eventually, due to government action, the Ribbonmen emigrated to England or Scotland and thence to the United States. As “the name Ribbonman or Molly McGuire was now considered treason this Society assumed a new name which was called the Ancient Order of Hibernians.”

  McParlan’s letter showed he was familiar with the various organizations and their actions in the old country. Not surprisingly, as an Ulster Catholic, his view of Irish secret societies concentrated on religious affiliation—the Orange movement and Catholic opposition to it. Even more important in the long run was an issue mentioned near the end—the connection of the Molly Maguires and the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Before he ever went to the anthracite region, McParlan believed the two organizations were identical. This was not uncommon: The Catholic Church—most notably in the person of Bishop James Wood of Philadelphia—condemned the AOH both because it required its members to swear a secret oath of loyalty, and due to the assumption that it was a cover for the Molly Maguires. In addition, many newspapers equated the two.9 But McParlan’s belief would prove more significant, because it would guide the early investigation, and his view of the link between the AOH and the Molly Maguires would influence the way the members of those organizations would eventually be prosecuted.

  • • •


  Impressed with McParlan’s report, Pinkerton decided that he had found his man. He offered McParlan an assignment “For the purpose of investigating and finding out as to who belonged to a supposed organization called Mollie Maguires; to see what kind of outrages they committed, and who committed them.”10 Acknowledging the many dangers that would face him in the field, Pinkerton told McParlan that although he would be disappointed if he did not take on the task, he would not hold the decision against him. With little hesitation, McParlan accepted the mission.

  One has to wonder what swayed McParlan to accept an assignment so riddled with perils. It could not have been the standard detective’s salary of “$12 a week and found,” although he could save his entire income because “found” included “board, railroad fares, all expenses, clothing, if I needed it, washing, and everything else.”11 However, this was plainly not a large enough sum to explain his decision on the basis of mere greed. Although it has been speculated that he was promised much larger payments or promotion, not only would payments based on results go against everything that Pinkerton always practiced, there is simply no hard evidence to indicate either of these were true.12