by H. W. Brands
The stoppage shut down nearly all production in the anthracite region by January 1875. This timing would have favored the union—demand for coal peaked in winter—had Gowen and the Reading not been stockpiling coal for many months, partly on account of its low price but partly in preparation for a strike. The strike elicited surprising solidarity among the workers, given their ethnic and occupational divisions. The union also enjoyed considerable support among Pennsylvanians at large. This reflected the distrust of corporations in general and railroads in particular that was beginning to characterize large segments of the American population; it also reflected, paradoxically, the success of the Reading’s stockpile strategy, which prevented Pennsylvanians from shivering for lack of fuel.
The workers held out for six months, a long time in the coal industry, where strikes typically lasted no more than weeks. (The 1875 strike would often be called simply the “Long Strike.”) By late spring the lack of wages was telling severely on workers and their families. One union official, later recalling the hardship of this period, testified, “Hundreds of families rose in the morning to breakfast on a crust of bread and a glass of water.… Day after day men, women, and children went to the adjoining woods to dig roots and pick up herbs to keep body and soul together.” Finally most workers gave in, and by the beginning of July nearly all the mines were back in operation, on Gowen’s terms.7
YET THE STRUGGLE hadn’t ended. Among the Irish miners was a mysterious network of radicals calling themselves “Molly Maguires.” Who they were, how many they numbered, and how closely they conspired were questions that exercised the American legal imagination at the time and the American historical imagination afterward. Without doubt the Molly Maguires drew on a tradition of radicalism with roots in the Irish countryside, where secret societies of “Whiteboys,” “Ribbonmen,” and “Molly Maguires” protested evictions and other attacks on the rights and privileges, as the protesters interpreted them, of ordinary folk. The protesters responded with attacks of their own, including arson, assault, and even murder. Because the evictors were often British (or Irish in league with the British) and the protesters Irish, the movement acquired ethnic, cultural, and nationalistic overtones.
The radical tradition crossed the Atlantic with some of the Irish immigrants. In America it lost its nationalistic edge, though some of the anti-British feeling remained, exacerbated by the occupational differences in the coalfields between British and Irish miners. But the primary focus of the radicals was the management of the mines, and beginning in the 1860s foremen, superintendents, and the occasional mine owner fell victim to fatal assault. For years no one knew who the murderers were, or even whether the murders were related. Yet when the period of the Long Strike produced a rash of killings—eight attributed to the Molly Maguires between October 1874 and September 1875—the Pennsylvania authorities and the mine operators made apprehending the killers their first priority.
For help they turned to Allan Pinkerton, a former Chicago police investigator who in the decade after the Civil War transformed an ordinary detective agency into the intelligence arm of capitalist management. The Reading’s Franklin Gowen, writing a retainer check to Pinkerton, told him to go after the Molly Maguires by any means necessary. “What we want, and everybody wants,” he said (by Pinkerton’s later account), “is to get within this apparently impenetrable ring; turn to the light the hidden side of this cruel and dark body.”
Pinkerton accepted the challenge and considered what was required. “It is no ordinary man that I need in this matter,” he explained to Gowen. “He must be an Irishman, and a Catholic, as only this class of persons can find admission to the Mollie Maguires. My detective should become, to all intents and purposes, one of the order, and continue so while he remains in the case before us. He should be hardy, tough, and capable of laboring, in season and out of season, to accomplish, unknown to those about him, a single absorbing object.”8
The agent he assigned to the task was a reasonable approximation to the ideal. James McParlan was a native of Ulster who had worked in a chemical factory and a textile warehouse before emigrating to America just after the Civil War. In 1871 he joined the Pinkerton agency, and two years later Pinkerton put him on the Molly Maguire case. Pinkerton arranged for McParlan to assume the identity of one James McKenna, a drifter who wended his way to the anthracite district. Evidence indicated that Patrick Dormer, a Pottsville innkeeper, might be a Molly, and so McParlan, alias McKenna, made Dormer’s inn a haunt. He treated the house to drinks, which pleased the proprietor as well as the customers, and he let slip that he was on the run from the law for counterfeiting—“shoving the queer,” he called it—and murder. When his new friends insisted, he showed them samples of his handiwork, which looked just like the real money it was. Pinkerton helped McParlan establish credibility by sending around detectives asking about him. McParlan helped his own case by striking up a romance with Mary Ann Higgins, the sister-in-law of another suspected Molly, Jimmy Kerrigan; the wooing gave McParlan an excuse for spending time around the Kerrigan house. Before long he had insinuated himself among what seemed to be the leadership of the secret organization.
Yet the closer he got, the greater the compulsion he felt to join. He accepted initiation into the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the Irish fraternal group to which all the Mollies seemed to belong. And he was drawn into planning for some of the attacks on the Reading management. At this point he faced the mole’s dilemma: whether to inform the intended victim and thereby risk being discovered or to keep silent in the interest of the continuing investigation and perhaps let the victim die. By Pinkerton’s account, McParlan sent warning in the case of at least one man targeted for death, who then escaped (temporarily). By his own admission, in another case McParlan failed to give effective warning, and people died.9
Though McParlan thought he knew the men behind some of the murders, he realized there was much he didn’t know. And neither he nor Pinkerton had any confidence that what he did know would stand up in court. The Irish were famously loyal, one to the other, and amid a strike they stuck even closer together. Pinkerton doubted that any jury in the coal country would convict an Irish mine worker for killing a manager, almost regardless of the evidence. Those who didn’t sympathize with the defendants would be intimidated by those who did.
So Pinkerton suggested an application of that standby of frustrated citizens, vigilante action. He circulated a handbill around the coal country. “The followings are the FACTS for the consideration of the Vigilance Committee of the Anthracite Coal Region, and all other good citizens who desire to preserve law and order in their midst,” the handbill began. It proceeded to recount the late murders and attempted murders, and it listed the names of those it said were responsible for the crimes. Some of the men named were under arrest; others were at large. Pinkerton never acknowledged printing the bill, but textual evidence—misspellings consistent with misspellings in agency documents—pointed his way.
Pinkerton had reason to cover any connection to the handbill after masked men burst at night into the Wiggans Patch home of one of those on the list. The homeowner managed to escape, but another of those listed was murdered in the most brutal fashion. More shocking to many was the killing, apparently by mistake in the dark, of the wife of the homeowner.
The Wiggans Patch murders jolted everyone touched by the coalfield violence. The Catholic Church, which till now had equivocated on the Molly Maguires, was forced to take a stand. The local bishop excommunicated the Mollies. “Beware of the Molly Maguires,” his right-hand priest explained. “If you have a brother among them, pray for his repentance but have nothing further to do with him—and remember that he is cut off from the Church.”
Shortly thereafter the trials of three men previously arrested as Mollies began. The prosecution chose to try the cases separately, starting with the least sympathetic suspect. The state summoned 122 witnesses, who built a powerful circumstantial case against Michael Doyle. To the astonish
ment of nearly all observers, the defense didn’t call a single witness, instead merely pointing out weaknesses in the prosecution’s argument. The jury—which, tellingly, and by the prosecution’s successful design, included no Irish—returned a guilty verdict. Three weeks later the judge sentenced Doyle to be hanged.10
As the prosecution had hoped, this initial verdict prompted reflection in the remaining prisoners. One, Jimmy Kerrigan, the kin of James McParlan’s sweetheart, decided to turn state’s evidence; he implicated several more Mollies, who were arrested shortly.
The trials continued. The second defendant, Edward Kelly, was convicted in April 1876 and sentenced to join Doyle on the scaffold. Jimmy Kerrigan got off in exchange for his testimony, but the prosecution of the other prisoners proceeded. As the evidence against these men was less convincing than that against Doyle and Kelly, the state’s attorneys pressed Pinkerton to make McParlan take the stand. McParlan was predictably unhappy at having to reveal himself; he’d be useless for similar work in his chosen field, assuming he survived the likely assassination attempts by the Mollies or their friends. But McParlan’s identity was leaked to the defense, apparently by a Catholic priest who differed with his bishop on the culpability of the Mollies, and McParlan had no choice but to testify.11
By this time the Molly Maguire prosecution was national news. Correspondents arrived from all over the country to report the trial. McParlan was the star witness for the prosecution, portraying the Mollies as a conspiracy dedicated to ruling the coal country by violence and intimidation. The defense strove to impeach McParlan’s testimony. It portrayed him as an agent provocateur, demanding to know why he hadn’t tried to save the men targeted for death. “Why did you not go over yourself, from Columbia House, five miles to save the life of a man you knew was going to be assassinated?” the defense counsel asked.
“I was afraid of being assassinated myself,” McParlan replied.
“You would not take that risk to save the life of John P. Jones?”
“I would not run the risk of losing my life for all the men in this Court House.”
“You were playing the part of a detective and yet you would not take that much trouble to walk five miles?”
“Walking the five miles was nothing. I would walk twenty.… It was the saving of my own life I was looking to.”12
McParlan’s honesty apparently appealed to the jury, which seemed ready to convict the prisoners until one of jurors fell ill with pneumonia and died. The judge was compelled to declare a mistrial.
In the court of public opinion, however, the Mollies had already been convicted. “When the inner history of the Molly Maguires shall have been written,” the Philadelphia Inquirer predicted, “it will embody the harrowing details of a conspiracy such as the world has rarely known. This history has been making itself through years of lawlessness, bloodshed, plunder and general anarchy.” The Irish terrorists had done their best to blight the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. “What Providence intended for a harvest of peace and plenty, the devilish ingenuity of banded cut-throats turned into a harvest of death and rapine.… Capital was fettered, honest labor held by the throat, and Red-Handed Murderers, Reeking with the blood of their victims, held high carnival over the prostrate form of Justice, blind and bleeding.” The New York Times was slightly less wroth but no less convinced that the guilty must pay: “The Pennsylvania authorities owe it to civilization to extirpate this noxious growth, now that its roots have been discovered.”13
New trials began and continued through the autumn of 1876 and into the new year. Beyond the men charged with murder, many others were prosecuted for conspiracy. Earlier fears of jury intimidation diminished as the jurors delivered one guilty verdict after another. By the beginning of June 1877, ten men had been convicted and sentenced to death for the coalfield murders.
The executions were scheduled for June 21. Six of the condemned would hang at Pottsville, four at Mauch Chunk. The sheriff at Pottsville initially wanted to dispatch all six of his prisoners at once, for maximum exemplary effect, and even had a special scaffold built. But for reasons unclear, he changed his mind and decided to execute them by pairs. Thousands of people gathered about the yard where the execution would take place. Some came for vicarious vindication; others wept for the doomed prisoners. A letter to one of the prisoners, James Roarity, from his father back in Ireland was printed in the local papers:
Dear Loving Son:
I sit to write you the last letter that I’ll ever write.… Don’t be afraid to meet your doom or your Judge. If you are going to suffer innocent, I’m sure God will spare your soul, and it’s far better to suffer in this world than in the world to come.… Before you die, declare to your Judge and to the world whether you are guilty or innocent.… And when your dear wife sees you, and the children, give them good encouragement, and keep yourself up. Certainly we are sorry, but what is the use? I did not tell your mother about it so far.
The first two men carried roses to the scaffold. When the boards swung away beneath their feet and the ropes snapped tight about their necks, the scarlet petals scattered upon the ground. The next two, including James Roarity, proclaimed their innocence as the hangman prepared to repeat his work; then they also had their necks broken by the noose. Thomas Duffy had been kept till the last; the prosecutors apparently had less confidence in his conviction than in the others, and they wanted to leave open the possibility that a scaffold confession by one of the others would clear him. But none of them obliged, and he and the sixth prisoner went to their grim fate, too.
The Mauch Chunk executions were held indoors. The prisoners were manacled and hooded before the nooses were placed around their necks. Attending priests led them in prayer till the last moment, when the floor fell away beneath them all simultaneously. Two had their necks snapped cleanly; the others struggled before falling unconscious and finally strangling.
After the executions the Reading Railroad provided special trains to transport the bodies, packed in ice, to their homes for burial, and to take friends and relatives to the memorial services. The Catholic bishop, having proscribed the Molly Maguires, relented so far as to allow the executed men to be buried in consecrated ground. He wished he hadn’t when the relatives of at least one of the men held a traditional Irish wake, of the pre-Christian sort the Church had been trying to stamp out in the old country for centuries. Far into the night the keening that had sent ancient Gaels into the afterlife drifted down the blackened valleys of the anthracite district.14
“THE STRUGGLE IS OVER,” the Miners’ Journal lamented in the wake of the coalmen’s strike against Franklin Gowen and the Reading. “The war between Capital and Labor is ended, and Labor is not victor. It is not even the drawn battle signified by compromise; it is an unconditional surrender, a capitulation of all the army, and relinquishment of all the claim for which it fought.” A miners’ minstrel put the outcome to verse:
Well, we’ve been beaten, beaten all to smash
And now, sir, we’ve begun to feel the lash,
As wielded by a gigantic corporation,
Which runs the Commonwealth and ruins the nation.15
A few unions, though, lived to fight on. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers represented drivers, brakemen, and other operating personnel on various railroads. The Reading, the Penn, the Erie, and the Baltimore & Ohio, after slashing one another with rate cuts following the Panic of 1873, called a halt to the competition in a series of secret meetings during the spring of 1877. “The great principle on which we all joined to act was to earn more and spend less,” Hugh Jewett of the Erie reported to an approving J. P. Morgan. The greater earnings would come from customers, who would be compelled by the cartel’s new rate structure to pay more; the lesser spending would come from the railroads’ employees, who would be forced to accept pay cuts.16
The engineers on the Reading were the first to respond when the owners announced the cuts. In April 1877 the engineers’ brotherhood called a strike, and
half the drivers walked off the job. But Franklin Gowen, flushed with his victory over the miners and the Molly Maguires, quickly struck back. He ordered his managers into the cabs and cabooses and paid bonuses to those regular engineers who stayed at work. When short-staffed trains derailed and wrecked, he blamed the brotherhood for sabotage and persuaded various editors to print his explanation. Within weeks the strike collapsed, breaking the union on the Reading and demoralizing its members elsewhere. The pro-management New York Times applauded the result. “The Brotherhood is destroyed as a dictatorial body,” the paper proclaimed. “Neither railroad nor engineer will fear it henceforth or regard its ukases.”17
Yet the Reading was a small fish in this particular pool. The whale was the Penn, which had outgrown the state of its name to become a transportation empire, with tracks that ran from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and from the Great Lakes to the Ohio. Capitalized at nearly $400 million, it was the largest corporation in America. Tom Scott, its president, had won political friends for the line during the Civil War by moving Union troops swiftly and surely; after the war he remembered his friends and they him.
But Scott had to contend with John Rockefeller, who was currently launching his revolution of oil transport. Rockefeller was starting to purchase pipelines; Scott warned him to stick to refining and let the shippers handle the carrying trade. When Rockefeller ignored the warning, Scott fired a larger shot across his bow by having a Penn ally, the Empire Transportation Company, enter the field of refining. This succeeded in getting Rockefeller’s attention. He went straight to Scott and demanded that he desist. The Empire had no business in refining, Rockefeller said. He added that Scott had a choice: immediate withdrawal or industrial war. Scott refused to back down, and America’s biggest railroad and its largest oil company locked in combat. Rockefeller canceled his contracts with the Penn and transferred his business to Scott’s railroad rivals. To help them handle the shipments he placed a rush order for six hundred new tank cars. He closed his refineries in Pittsburgh, a Penn-dominated city, and increased production in Cleveland, controlled by the Penn’s competitors. He undercut the Empire in every market where that company sold kerosene. The effect was dramatic. Between the shrunken traffic and the lost sales, the Penn began hemorrhaging cash. By the beginning of June 1877 it had bled a million dollars.18
