Pinkerton’s Great Detective

by Beau Riffenburgh

  15. Of course, even though these reports are not known to exist, they still might lay hidden or forgotten. Other papers have turned up like this. For example, in April 2001, a previously unknown set of letters between McParland and attorney A. Russell Smith was sold at an estate auction. And the author traced some of McParland’s original reports—only once before ever seen by researchers—to the descendants of the public prosecutor in a number of the Molly Maguire trials.

  16. Kenny, “The Molly Maguires in Popular Culture,” p. 40; Lewis, Lament for the Molly Maguires. This assessment is actually true for a great deal of the material written about both McParland and the Molly Maguires.

  17. Denver Catholic Register, July 10, 1919.

  18. AP, General Principles and Rules, p. 8.

  19. Marx, Undercover, p. xix.

  20. See, for example, Borovik, The Philby Files; Girodo, “Personality, Job Stress, and Mental Health in Undercover Agents”; Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage; Marx, Undercover; Taylor, Dudley Bradstreet.

  21. Smallwood, The Johnson Quotation Book, p. 105.

  22. Taylor, Dudley Bradstreet, p. 111.

  23. The Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 22, 1895.

  24. Shoaf, Fighting for Freedom, p. 69.

  25. Doyle, The Valley of Fear.

  Chapter 1: The Makings of a Detective

  1. Baptismal records, parish registers of the Catholic Church of Ireland, Diocese of Armagh, Parish of Ballymore & Mullaghbrack (Tandragee), microfilm P.5586. Since McParlan spelled his name without the concluding “d” for the first thirty-four years of his life, it will be spelled that way in this book until the period when he changed it.

  2. A lack of birth records was common in Ireland, where civil registration of births became required only in 1864, and even then was not truly universal. The biographical material about McParlan has been drawn from numerous sources, including: CAC, pp. 493–95, 561–62; Dewees, The Molly Maguires, pp. 79–83; LoC, boxes 30–31, 140; RCK, pp. 39–45, 68–69; SIA, vol. 2, pp. 866–70; and his testimony during the trials of the Molly Maguires as recorded in The Daily Miners’ Journal.

  3. For example, JM, testimony in the first trial of James Carroll et al., as reported in The Daily Miners’ Journal, May 9, 1876; JM, in DvC, p. 276; JM, in RCK, p. 39. For the claim of 1839, see JM, in SIA, vol. 2, p. 866.

  4. United States Catholic Conference, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition, para. 1250.

  5. Eugenio Biagini, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, personal communication, July 21, 2011.

  6. Niederhauser, “Phytophthora Infestans, the Mexican connection”; Bourke, “Emergence of Potato Blight.”

  7. Donnelly, The Great Irish Potato Famine; Kinealy, This Great Calamity; Kinealy and Parkhill, The Famine in Ulster.

  8. Edwards and Williams, The Great Famine, Fig. 2, p. 260.

  9. Baptismal records, parish registers of the Catholic Church of Ireland, Diocese of Armagh, Parish of Ballymore & Mullaghbrack (Tandragee), microfilm P.5586. In these records, McParlan’s father’s last name was spelled both McParlin and McParlan, and his mother’s maiden name was given as Loughran, Lougheran, and Lougheron.

  10. Griffith’s Printed Valuation Books, microfiche MF2/2; Will (and One Codicil) of Eneas M’Parland, late of Drumachee County Armagh; farmer who died July 12, 1889, wills calendar, 1889, pp. 541–46.

  11. Campbell, A Molly Maguire Story, p. 69; Patrick Campbell, personal communication, June 10, 2011.

  12. Quote: JM, in CAC, p. 562. The name of his first employer at the Tyne Chemical Works has long incorrectly been listed as Christopher L. Hewson & Sons because apparently the stenographer in the first trial of John Kehoe et al. misunderstood when McParlan said, “Christian Allhusen and Sons” and transcribed it the former way (see RCK, p. 41). It was correctly recorded in McParlan’s notes in Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, History of Detectives: James McParlan, October 16, 1880 (LoC, box 30). McParlan also tended to think of companies as bearing the names of their owners, so, for example, he indicated in his Pinkerton’s forms that he worked for “Stephenson’s Chemical works,” thinking of James Cochran Stevenson, who was one of the managers of the Jarrow Chemical Company at the time he was there.

  13. JM, in Lewis, Lament for the Molly Maguires, p. 46.

  14. United States Customs Service, passenger lists of vessels arriving at New York, New York, 1820–97: microfilm roll M237_282, line 50, list number 709.

  15. RCK, p. 42; SIA, vol. 2, p. 866.

  16. The New York Herald, 1853, cited in Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, p. 147; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1867.

  17. Quoted in Anbinder, Five Points, p. 27.

  18. JM, in RCK, p. 68.

  19. JM, testimony in first trial of James Carroll et al., quoted in The Daily Miners’ Journal, May 9, 1876; JM, in CAC, p. 493c.

  20. Thale, “Police.”

  21. McParlan’s talents in sales must have been vastly better than his judgment of time, because his recollection of how long he remained at various jobs does not add up. He later testified that he kept his liquor store for “probably a couple of years” (CAC, p. 493d). When combined with the periods that he stated he held his positions with W. S. Beaubien, the city police, and Dodge and Brothers the total does not add up to the correct amount of time between July 1868 and October 1871. Moreover, the Ninth U.S. Federal Census, taken in the Ninth Ward of Chicago on June 16, 1870, shows that he was already recording his occupation as “saloon keeper.” That was less than two years after he joined Beaubien, to which would have to be added the time with the police and eight months with Dodge and Brothers. It is another case of McParlan being a little loose with accuracy. See: U.S. Federal Census, Ninth Census of the United States, Ninth Ward, Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, 1870, microfilm roll M593_204, p. 50B.

  22. For updated assessments on how the fire was started, see Bales, The Great Chicago Fire; Cromie, The Great Chicago Fire.

  23. The biographical material about Pinkerton and the early history of his detective agency has been drawn from numerous sources, including: AP, Criminal Reminiscences and Detective Sketches; AP, Professional Thieves and the Detective; AP, Thirty Years a Detective; Horan, The Pinkertons; Horan and Swiggett, The Pinkerton Story; Lavine, Allan Pinkerton; LoC, boxes 1–4; Mackay, Allan Pinkerton; Morn, The Eye That Never Sleeps; Rowan, The Pinkertons; and numerous local newspaper accounts.

  24. Chase, Chartism; Williams, John Frost.

  25. Mackay, Allan Pinkerton, pp. 53–54; The Chicago Daily News, May 27, 1931.

  26. AP, Criminal Reminiscences, pp. 25–49.

  27. Richardson, The New York Police; Roots, “Are Cops Constitutional?”

  28. Hall, “Legal and Social Aspects of Arrest Without a Warrant”; Steiker, “Second Thoughts About First Principles.”

  29. Quote from Babington v. Yellow Taxi Corp., 150 NY 14, 164 NE 726. See also Roots, “Are Cops Constitutional?” p. 692.

  30. Roots, “Are Cops Constitutional?,” p. 692.

  31. The Daily Democratic Press, October 4, 1854.

  32. The railroad companies were the Illinois Central, the Michigan Central, the Michigan Southern and Northern Indiana, the Chicago and Galena Union, the Chicago and Rock Island, and the Chicago Burlington and Quincy. The Illinois Central’s “Agreement with Pinkerton & Co, February 1, 1855” is held in the Illinois Central Railroad Company Archives, the Newberry Library, Chicago.

  33. Morn, The Eye That Never Sleeps, p. 54.

  34. The Daily Democratic Press, April 12, 1855.

  35. Smith, Trial of Oscar T. Caldwell.

  36. The Daily Democratic Press, March 17, July 2, 1855; Chicago Daily Tribune, March 17, 1855; Chicago Weekly Times, July 19, 1855.

  37. Chicago Weekly Times, April 19, 1855.

  38. Denniston, America’s Silent Investigators, p. 30.

&nb
sp; 39. The New-York Times, Sept. 15, 1883.

  40. Hassler, General George B. McClellan; Sears, George B. McClellan.

  41. See AP, History and Evidence of the Passage of Abraham Lincoln. In his biography of Lincoln, Ward Lamon denied that a plot had existed and implied that Pinkerton had fabricated the entire story (The Life of Abraham Lincoln, pp. 511–26). However, the first person to indicate knowledge that there was a conspiracy was not Pinkerton but Samuel Felton, president of the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad. Norman B. Judd, an Illinois politician traveling with Lincoln’s party, confirmed that Felton first revealed the plot (see Edwards, Sketch of the Life of Norman B. Judd). Pinkerton described Felton’s revelation in detail in The Spy of the Rebellion. The Pinkerton reports about the plot can be found in Cuthbert, Lincoln and the Baltimore Plot 1861.

  42. Pinkerton has long been criticized for the excessive estimates of Confederate troop strengths that he supplied to McClellan. However, it has also been suggested that his intelligence networks intentionally overestimated to confirm McClellan’s initial assessments. Pinkerton admitted in his own reports that he “estimated large,” and gave the impression that he might have been instructed to do so. See Mackay, Allan Pinkerton, and, for Pinkerton’s own account, see The Spy of the Rebellion.

  43. Although Pinkerton’s version of the unblinking eye became famous in his trade, it was not the only time such a concept was used. The San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1851 and 1856 also used the symbol of the eye, sometimes accompanied by the slogan “Nunquam Dormio,” meaning “Never Sleep” (Ethington, The Public City, chapts. 2–3). It is not known if Pinkerton’s or the vigilance committee used the slogan first, but either or both might have been influenced by the Masonic all-seeing eye, which was a popular symbol of the time.

  44. For example, AP, Special Rules and Instruction to Be Observed in Testing Conductors; AP, Tests on Passenger Conductors. See also Morn, The Eye That Never Sleeps, pp. 57–58.

  45. AP, General Principles and Rules.

  46. GHB, letter to AP, Dec. 23, 1870: LoC, box 46, GHB letterpress copybook, vol 1; Navarro, History of Cuba, pp. 43–51.

  47. Morn, The Eye That Never Sleeps, pp. 53, 92.

  48. U.S. Congress, Appropriations to the Budget; Churchill, “From the Pinkertons to the PATRIOT Act,” p. 3; Lowenthal, The Federal Bureau of Investigation, pp. 6–10.

  49. GHB, letter to AP, Dec. 29, 1870: LoC, box 46, GHB letterpress copybook, vol. 1.

  50. The New-York Times, Nov. 14, 1871.

  51. GHB, letter to AP, May 27, 1872: LoC, box 46, GHB letterpress copybook, vol. 2.

  52. AP, letter to Captain Fitzgerald, Aug. 15, 1872: LoC, box 47, AP letterpress copybook, vol. 1.

  53. AP, letter to GHB, Oct. 17, 1872: LoC, box 47, AP letterpress copybook, vol. 1; emphasis in original.

  54. Larson, Jay Cooke; Lubetkin, Jay Cooke’s Gamble.

  55. AP, letter to GHB, May 18, 1873: LoC, box 47, AP letterpress copybook, vol. 1.

  56. The portrayal of the Molly Maguires has changed dramatically over the past 135 years, just as the image of McParlan has.

  The revisionist process by which individuals or groups have been posthumously transformed into myths that can be utilized to validate an ideological position, to explain or rationalize a social agenda, or to lend credence to a historical interpretation has been clearly demonstrated; see, for example, Helly, Livingstone’s Legacy; Jeal, Livingstone; MacKenzie, “Heroic Myths of Empire.” Every myth requires a mediator to construct, develop, and interpret it, and in this case the different accounts have presented clear representations of both the Molly Maguires and those in opposition to them, in each case demonstrating the concerns, values, and political, social, and legal agendas of the mediator.

  The initial narratives about the Molly Maguires reflected the perspective of the powers that had put them on trial—the government, railroad companies, and other big businesses—and were not friendly toward organized labor. The Molly Maguires were represented in these publications as violent Irish Catholic terrorists who ran roughshod over the coalfields until being brought to justice by the heroic McParlan. The examples of this viewpoint include Pinkerton’s semifictional The Molly Maguires and the Detectives, Dewees’s The Molly Maguires, Lucy’s The Molly Maguires of Pennsylvania, McCabe’s The History of the Great Riots, and the anonymously written History of Schuylkill County. They also comprise numerous articles or pamphlets, including one in the prestigious American Law Review (Morse, “The ‘Molly Maguires’ Trials”) and one the title of which left no doubt about its assessment: The Molly Maguires: A Thrilling Narrative of the Rise, Progress, and Fall of the Most Noted Band of Cut-Throats of Modern Times. This interpretation remained dominant for half a century in journalistic, historical, and fictionalized accounts of the events: for example, in Moffett, “The Overthrow of the Molly Maguires”; Rhodes, “The Molly Maguires in the Anthracite Region of Pennsylvania” and History of the United States, vol. 8; and Doyle, The Valley of Fear.

  In the 1930s, new viewpoints of the Molly Maguires and McParlan were introduced. Anthony Bimba, a fiery Lithuanian immigrant and member of the American Communist Party, had already been tried in Massachusetts in 1926 for sedition and blasphemy for a speech he gave attacking the Lithuanian political regime, supporting Bolshevism, and denouncing capitalism and the Catholic Church (see Wolkovich, Bay State, Blue Laws and Bimba). Bimba wrote The Molly Maguires as one of a number of strongly anticapitalist books and pamphlets. He indicated that the concept of the existence of the Molly Maguires had been fabricated in the course of the class battle, and that when one swept aside the lies of the mine owners, it became apparent that the efforts of the ruling bourgeoisie were simply to destroy the miners’ union, and that to do so “a campaign of vituperation was started; the label ‘Molly Maguire,’ with all its ruling class distortions, was created; spies, provocateurs, and gangsters were put to work.” The Molly Maguires were not, he concluded, criminals of any kind but simply innocent martyrs of the class struggle.

  Four years later, in The Molly Maguire Riots, J. Walter Coleman similarly placed the Molly Maguires in the context of a struggle between labor and management, although without Bimba’s extreme polemics. Coleman’s contextual argument and attention to detail about the Molly Maguires and the mining industry were considerably stronger than those made previously. However, he did introduce a major failing—which was followed by many later writers—by attempting to demonstrate McParlan’s long-term dishonesty and lack of ethics. To do this, Coleman inaccurately portrayed the “meaning” of the verdict of the 1907 trial of William Haywood, and then extended that flawed interpretation to his assessment of the detective’s role vis-à-vis the Molly Maguires.

  Coleman’s argument indicated that defense attorney Clarence Darrow easily undermined the testimony of key witness Harry Orchard during the Haywood trial by showing that Orchard could not have committed several murders he claimed he had carried out. Then, in a classic closing argument lasting eleven hours, Darrow “proved” McParlan to be a heinous creature: “a spy, a traitor, a liar” with methods more odious than any crime, “who never did anything in his life but lie and cheat and scheme, for the life of a detective is a living lie, that is his business; he lives one from the time he gets up in the morning until he goes to bed; he is deceiving people, and trapping people and lying to people” (quoted in Darrow’s “Speech in the Haywood Case,” p. 30). Thus, the story went, by “exposing McParlan’s underhand tactics in his treatment of both the Molly Maguires and Harry Orchard, Darrow won the case and secured Haywood’s freedom” (Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, p. 283). The authors of the accounts subscribing to this theory have thereby led their readers to assume that the verdict purposefully affirmed Haywood’s innocence.

  The argument of Coleman and his followers then proceeded to the notion that if McParlan’s tactics in the Haywood trial were dishonest, then his
investigation and testimony in the earlier Molly Maguire trials were equally dubious. This has led to several books stating that McParlan’s “entire career was based upon tactics so questionable that he can no longer be dismissed with merely a prayer of thanks for ridding the country of a gang of cutthroats”; see, for example, Coleman, The Molly Maguire Riots, p. 171, quoted in Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, p. 4.

  However, the above argument falters for three reasons. First, even were McParlan guilty of unscrupulous behavior in the Haywood case, it would not necessarily mean he had engaged in similar actions three decades before. Second, the arguments are based on only two cases, without assessing the thirty years between, so “entire career” is clearly overstated. And third, and most important, the account given of the Haywood trial is simply inaccurate. Several jurors afterward said they were thoroughly convinced by Orchard’s testimony and thought Haywood was guilty—and Judge Fremont Wood agreed (Samuel D. Gilman, in The Idaho Daily Statesman, July 29–30, 1907; George Powell, in Capital News, July 29, 1907; Davis, Released for Publication, pp. 42–44; Grover, Debaters and Dynamiters, pp. 255–61). However, Wood’s instructions to the jury largely invalidated the testimony of Orchard and led several jury members to feel that regardless of their beliefs, only a “not guilty” verdict could be returned (Samuel D. Gilman in The Idaho Daily Statesman, July 29–30, 1907; George Powell, in Capital News, July 29, 1907; Grover, Debaters and Dynamiters, pp. 255–61). Thus, Coleman’s assessment was flawed, as are those that adhere to it, as their conclusions are derived from equally insufficient or inaccurate information.

  In the aftermath of the Bimba and Coleman books, numerous accounts continued to depict the Molly Maguires as labor heroes and McParlan as a villain. Labor’s Untold Story by Boyer and Morais (1955) credited the Molly Maguires with being innocent laborers carrying on the struggle of the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association after that union collapsed. In The Labor Wars (1973), Lens indicated that they were martyrs to the cause of labor framed by capitalists. Similar theses were expounded by Reilly in Rebels in the Shadows (1962)—an account that includes wholly fictitious scenes “proving” McParlan to be guilty of perjury—by Weiss, who wrote in the article “Private Detective Agencies and Labour Discipline” (p. 91) that the Ancient Order of Hibernians “had been at the centre of the guerrilla warfare resistance since the strike”; by Young, in Harp Song for a Radical (1999); and in the 1970 film The Molly Maguires, in which John Kehoe was portrayed as a noble, peace-loving, and principled crusader, much the opposite of McParlan.