Pinkerton’s Great Detective

by Beau Riffenburgh

  Shortly after the operation, McParland suffered a stroke. On May 14, it was noted that he “is apparently sinking rapidly. He has absolutely no control of himself whatever, and the physicians are under the impression that he had another stroke last Sunday, and it is possible that he may pass away at any time.”40

  That time came at 6:20 A.M. on Sunday, May 18, 1919, when McParland slipped away “after extreme suffering during the entire night,” dying from what was officially diagnosed as “apoplexy.”41 On his death certificate, Mary listed his date of birth as the same highly uncertain date on his tombstone: March 22, 1844. Where it came from no one knows, but it did allow McParland to go out just as he would have liked—a man of mystery, first, last, and forever.

  • • •

  At nine o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, May 20, a Solemn Requiem Mass for James McParland was held at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Denver, where, years before, “No man bore a more radiant smile than he at the dedication ceremonies.”42 According to press accounts, “the Cathedral was crowded to capacity with friends and acquaintances of the widely-known detective, and the Elks and fourth degree Knights of Columbus . . . were present in a body.”43 He was then buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery, immediately adjacent to the grave of his beloved nephew Eneas.

  In the following days, messages of condolence poured in to Mary, a High Mass was held in McParland’s honor at the Annunciation Church in Denver, and the Pinkertons and Bangs agreed that the agency would pay the funeral expenses and medical bills of their “faithful employe [sic] and friend,” as well as give his widow a handsome pension of one thousand dollars per year.44

  At the same time, the process of hagiography—long before started by the press and Allan Pinkerton—moved full speed ahead. McParland “performed one of the greatest services that has ever been rendered to the Catholic Church in America,” the Denver Catholic Register claimed.45 “Once on the trail he never gave up,” an editorial in The Rocky Mountain News stated. “He would disappear for weeks at a time, lost to his agency, winding after his man thru city street and mountain trail. . . . By nature he was endowed with an instinctive knowledge of human nature, particularly where it fell into the crooked path.”46

  Another source that gave generous praise to the man it called “the most picturesque and one of the ablest detectives in the history of wholesale American crime” was The Minneapolis Journal: “James McParland’s methods were his own. So successful were they that heads of foreign government’s detective bureaus studied them constantly and often conferred with him.”47 According to both friends and enemies, it declared, McParland “understood the psychology of the wholesale slayer better than any man of his time. His ability to size up the hunted man’s mind and thoughts was almost uncanny. Today, in many a big case, the methods of McParland are being used. They were not then particularly new methods, but the Irishman had developed them to a degree of fineness that was almost perfection.”

  McParland had paid a heavy price for his services to law and order, the Minneapolis newspaper continued, noting that “the McParland of the Colorado trials was a man with gray hair and heavy glasses,” but was truly a man’s man. “A miner’s bullet had ripped off half the right ear. . . . In his body were 38 bullet and knife wounds, each one of which had been given him by a miner in his long life fight against murder and terrorism,” proving that he had long lived “in greater danger of assassination, probably, than any man hunter of his time.”

  This effusive praise was widespread. His life was eulogized throughout the country, his virtues extolled. And although there were publications that disagreed, many Americans went to bed just a little less comfortably, knowing that the Great Detective was no longer there to protect them.

  Most of those who had known McParland best—his friends, family, professional colleagues, and enemies—did not last many more years themselves. William Pinkerton died of a heart attack on December 11, 1923, in a hotel room in Los Angeles, where he had gone to preside over a series of law-enforcement conferences.48

  Five years later, on October 18, 1928, McParland’s closest colleague, Charlie Siringo, died of a coronary at his son Lee Roy’s house in Altadena, California. Snappish and cantankerous until the end, Siringo had for years waged legal battles with Pinkerton’s over three books that he wrote about his detective career.49 Siringo’s old pal and a man McParland trusted as much as any—Doc Shores—died where he had lived for so long, in Gunnison, Colorado, in October 1934, just short of his ninetieth birthday.50

  The members of McParland’s family with whom he had been closest all passed away in the decade following his death. Edward, a bitter man who had never come to terms with living in the shadow of his older brother, died on July 3, 1926, in Manitou Springs, Colorado, where he had served for a number of years as a justice of the peace, and had told many stories about how he and his brother were responsible for breaking up the Molly Maguires.51

  Not long after her husband’s death, Mary moved back to Chicago to be close to her sisters. She died in November 1928, and was buried with McParland at Mount Olivet Cemetery. As a seemingly fitting tribute to the mystery about her husband’s date of birth, her inscription on their joint tombstone reads “Died Nov. 20, 1928,” despite the fact that her death certificate showed the date to be November 19.52

  McParland’s brother Charles, long his dearest sibling, had flourished, and in 1911 was elected an Illinois state representative. Later a successful real-estate agent, he died on December 15, 1928, in Chicago, where he had come decades before at his brother’s recommendation.53

  Meanwhile, Big Bill Haywood succeeded Vincent St. John as the head of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1915. Three years later he was convicted of violating the Espionage Act of 1917—which had been passed with the U.S. entry into World War I—and was sentenced to prison. While out on appeal in 1921, he fled to the Soviet Union, where he remained until his death from a stroke on May 18, 1928.54

  Five weeks later—June 24, 1928—Frank Gooding, who in 1921 had joined Borah as a U.S. senator, died in office.55 And a little more than a year after that, on August 3, 1929, James Hawley, who had served as the ninth governor of Idaho from 1911 through 1913 before returning to his law practice, died in his beloved Boise. William E. Borah was reelected to the U.S. Senate five times, serving on numerous committees before dying in office on January 19, 1940.56

  The lead attorney on the opposing side of the Haywood trial is not remembered nearly as well as the other major players, because his career was tragically cut short. In May 1911, Edmund Richardson was killed at the age of forty-eight when a car in which he was a passenger plunged down an embankment near Louisville Junction, Colorado.57

  McParland’s greatest adversary—Clarence Darrow—went on to conduct some of the most famous defense efforts in U.S. legal history, including the Leopold and Loeb “thrill kill” trial, the “Scopes Monkey Trial,” and the murder trial of Ossian Sweet.58 He died in Chicago on March 13, 1938—two years after historian J. Walter Coleman inaccurately used him to “prove” his points about McParland’s role in the Molly Maguire trials, thus starting a revisionist interpretation of McParland that has influenced opinion about him through the present day.59

  • • •

  So was James McParland one of America’s greatest heroes: a man who liberated the anthracite fields from a reign of terror; who hunted down robbers, murderers, and bad men wherever they dared to attack civilized society; and who was “the most resourceful and dare-devil product of the American system of developing men to cope with the wit and daring of super-criminals”?60 Or was he “the rottenest sonafabitch America ever produced, not barring Sacco and Vanzetti’s Judge Thayer or Joe McCarthy”?61

  Not surprisingly, he was, in reality, something in between. Many mine owners, bank tellers, directors of big businesses, shopkeepers, and state and local officials thought he left America a better place because of
his life’s work. But thousands of mine workers, union organizers, and labor leaders disagreed wholeheartedly. And it is safe to say that even today McParland and Pinkerton’s are still very much symbolic of the mistrust, hatred, and violence between owners and workers during the growth of labor unions.

  On a more personal level, McParland served as a model and inspiration for subsequent generations of undercover detectives and other law-enforcement officers. He was long remembered as a larger-than-life link to the past, an icon of a previous rough and rowdy age, and a grand old man telling tall tales—some probably too tall—of events that could no longer happen in the modern world. The statue Gowen spoke of so glowingly might not have existed, but the memory of the Great Detective served the same purpose.

  Yet others remembered or learned of him as the epitome of evil, a man who did more damage to labor than any other non–mine owner ever had. This image is certainly what Darrow focused on when he attacked McParland, portraying him, Pinkerton’s, and the entire detective profession as unethical, immoral, and unworthy of trust or belief. But in assessing Darrow’s arguments, it should be remembered that the task of trial lawyers is to convince and influence the jury by any means available, whether accurate, honest, or not. McParland provided a focus by which Darrow could divert the jury from weaknesses in the defense’s case—as a recent biographer noted: “With a target like McParland at hand, Darrow would not neglect one of his guiding dictums: the jury needs a villain.”62

  Darrow further argued that McParland was not just a liar, but a man who had lived with lies so long that he could not distinguish them from the truth. This was a brilliant strategy, because McParland’s frequent shadowy role—hunting for the truth while living a lie—made it easy to see in him a man for whom the truth and lies were so closely intertwined that they became indistinct. And thus it was a manufactured image of McParland’s acts, rather than any true behavior, that helped dictate how he has since been viewed.

  Similarly, many assessments of McParland have been based on his perceived role in the Molly Maguire investigation and trials. But such one-dimensional caricatures—whether positive or negative—cannot convincingly produce a true portrait of any man. McParland’s actions have been interpreted in so many different ways that most appraisals are tainted with suspicion. For example, McParland has often, with more bias than calm evaluation, been taken to task as an agent provocateur. Yet, as the classic article on the subject stated: “It is impossible to conclusively determine whether McParlan’s role was either that of an agent provocateur or that of a passive collector of information.”63

  McParland has also been damned as being “an informer” who testified against men with whom he had broken bread and in whose homes he had stayed. But if those convicted were guilty, should McParland not have testified? Have not the critics who claim that murder, attempted murder, and assault are not as wicked as being an informer simply lost their perspective, just as the defense lawyers did when they suggested that McParland’s failure to prevent the murders made him worse than the killers? Thus, as with those who have criticized McParland for his role in the Haywood trial, most of those who have evaluated his character based on what he did in relation to the Molly Maguires have not truly produced assessments that withstand impartial analysis of the full facts.

  • • •

  If one begins with a belief that James McParland was a noble hero on the side of the angels, a man who fought for right, one can find “facts” to support the notion. Similarly, if one begins with a belief that McParland was a villain lacking a conscience, and that time and again his testimony was a pack of lies, one can find “evidence” to support that, too.

  However, no one can ever truly know what was in the mind or heart of a man a century ago—particularly one as complex and mysterious as McParland. The reality is that we will never know for certain what he believed, what he felt, why he acted as he did. He was certainly not a saint. He probably betrayed his sister-in-law in order to gain financially, he certainly perjured himself on the witness stand more than once, and he used dubious means to force Adams to support Orchard’s confession. But he was human, too—he took pity on a destitute ex-convict looking for help, he was appalled by the vigilante killing of Ellen McAllister at Wiggans Patch, he was frightened and unsteady in the most hair-raising parts of his undercover work with the Molly Maguires, and he was generous to his church. He was also extremely loyal, as proven in many instances.

  So what does all this say about James McParland? He did seem to have his own moral code, which allowed him to do anything, say anything, go to any extreme, to “get his man.” When that objective was to secure a conviction, this made him dissimilar only in scale to other law-enforcement agents of his time, or, in some respects, to the police today, who are confined to much narrower legal and ethical limits than McParland was. He was willing to lie, even when under oath, to secure a conviction, and his letters and reports show an unattractive certainty of his own rectitude that at times verged on the fanatical.64

  There was also a streak of contempt and vicious retribution that differentiated him from many other law-enforcement officers. This came out at times such as when he gleefully gloated that “it will cost Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone and as many more their lives.”65 It is hard to know if he believed they had done what they were accused of, or if his dealings with union men had convinced him that even if they weren’t guilty of the crimes for which they were charged, they were guilty of others, and the country would be better off without them.

  Perhaps the development of such an attitude was inevitable, as many of the men whom he dealt with were brutal, contemptible characters. Killing, beating, robbing, blowing up buildings and people—these were things McParland investigated on a regular basis. Moreover, he worked in places where life was cheap, and in a rough, violent society in which poverty, drink, and the wretched conditions of the mines were unlikely to bring out the best in anyone. So it should not be unexpected that he became as tough, as determined, as merciless as the men he faced. Perhaps it was those precise attributes that made him so very good at his job.

  His success rate was also enhanced by the fact that he was extremely self-confident, could bluff like a professional card player, and had an innate sense of what buttons to push in verbal jousts, whether with men he was interrogating or when the role was reversed in court. However, this attitude seems to have reached the point of arrogance late in his career—he sometimes seemed to feel that he didn’t just represent Pinkerton’s, but that he was Pinkerton’s—and some of his self-serving responses might well have hurt the prosecution’s case. Was McParland’s ego so inflated because he had earned such fame so early? Because he truly never did miss getting a confession? Or was he just naturally pompous? Whichever, such smug self-satisfaction cannot have made him easy to work for or with, and it would not have always endeared him to juries, or others.

  In many biographies, the subject’s true character can be glimpsed from his private life, but this is impossible with McParland. No personal letters, diaries, or written confidences with friends or family are known to exist. Records show he was generous to his Church, but none show if he was really just “buying off” God for his bad acts. Did he believe he could do that? Did his generosity give him a confidence in his standing in Heaven, so much so that he was serious when he said, “[I]f I killed you, Mr Cary, in this room this minute I would not consider I would have to ask the forgiveness of God Almighty for doing so,”66 or was it just a figure of speech? We simply don’t know.

  There is also no proof of what McParland was like as a husband, a father, a brother, or a son. There are no emotionally charged documents illustrating how he reacted to the tragic loss of two young daughters or how he felt about the premature death of his first wife. Did he ever become truly close to anyone—even Mary—after that? Did he ever write a “love letter”? Was he a delight—or a misery—at a dinner party?

  As a
lways with James McParland, there are more questions than answers. It is just this elusiveness that is the essence of the Great Detective, who was, is, and will forever remain, an enigma.

  James McParlan was considered one of the most dangerous Molly Maguires in Schuylkill County during his undercover operation.

  Allan Pinkerton, founder of Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency and the man who chose McParlan for the Molly Maguire investigation.

  Franklin Gowen, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and its subsidiary, the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company.

  Benjamin Franklin, the head of Pinkerton’s Philadelphia office and McParlan’s direct supervisor, annoyed Pinkerton by claiming too much credit for the Molly Maguire operation.

  Hibernian House, John Kehoe’s tavern in Girardville. Kehoe’s great grandson, Joseph Wayne, continues to operate it today.

  John “Black Jack” Kehoe, Schuylkill County delegate for the Ancient Order of Hibernians and, according to McParlan, head of the Molly Maguires.

  George Kaercher was the young district attorney for Schuylkill County and one of the key prosecutors during the trials of the Molly Maguires.

  A threatening coffin notice typical of those sent to mine bosses and owners.