REBUTTING THE CANON: PENNSYLVANIA'S "MOLLY MAGUIRES"

By A. Flaherty - January 16, 2020

“It is now established that there was no society in America calling itself the Molly Maguires, that this name was tagged to the Ancient Order of Hibernians by the commercial press whose purpose it was to help the coal operators crush all organization in the mining industry; that the Philadelphia and Reading Company hired the Pinkerton spy agency not to save society from a band of terrorists but to spread terror ... .” Philip Foner, 1947

This paper traces the origins and use of the “Molly Maguire” epithet in the United States during the nineteenth century, and its ongoing use by scholars into the twenty-first century. The term, initially the purview of nativist editors, came into prominence during the trials of the late 1870s. “Molly Maguire” prosecutors worked tirelessly to embed the taunt into the national consciousness and the historical accounts of the day. This paper traces this campaign of deliberate distortion and its ongoing influence in today’s descriptions of the Irish Catholic men prosecuted in Pennsylvania.

Today’s Canon

From 1877 to 1879, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania hanged twenty-one Irish Catholic men as alleged “Molly Maguires.” All belonged to the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), a benevolent order chartered in March 1871 with the Pennsylvania state legislature. Many defendants were AOH officers.

The trials’ chief witness was James McParlan, an operative for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency employed by Franklin Gowen, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and Coal and Iron Company. Several AOH men charged as “Mollies” served as prosecution witnesses. They corroborated McParlan’s testimony and subsequently received pardons.

Most scholarly treatments of the conflict adhere to the theory that Pennsylvania’s alleged “Mollies” brought with them from Ireland to Pennsylvania an organized form of resistance to oppression. In 1998, Oxford University Press published Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, authored by historian Kevin Kenny. “Kevin Kenny has certainly done historical justice to his fascinating, if elusive, topic,” Michael Kazin wrote in a review in the Washington Post. Of Kenny’s conclusions, Kazin said: “Transplanted to Pennsylvania, the Mollies seem to have devolved into a gang of unskilled, Gaelic-speaking laborers that rose and fell with the fortunes of trade unionism.”[1]

Google Books says of Kenny’s Making Sense: “this work examines new archival evidence from Ireland that establishes that the American Molly Maguires were a rare transatlantic strand of the violent protest endemic in the Irish countryside.”[2] Kenny’s work itself, on page 37, posits: “Significant numbers of the Irish immigrants in Pennsylvania came from a preliterate Gaelic culture, marking them off as fundamentally different not only from the Welsh and the English, but also from the people of eastern and southern Ireland … It was these Irish-speakers, and not the Irish in general, who became ‘Molly Maguires’ in Pennsylvania.”[3]

Extensive research into coal region newspapers suggests otherwise. It shows many of Pennsylvania’s alleged “Mollies” as community leaders: influential businessmen who served in elected office as tax assessors and collectors, township supervisors, and constables. At least five alleged “Mollies” served as school directors: Patrick Dolan Sr. in Butler Township, Christopher Donnelly in New Castle, Patrick Hester in Mount Carmel, Cornelius McHugh in Mauch Chunk, and John Slattery in Schuylkill Township. These Irish American men, some of them immigrants to the United States, embraced the opportunities offered to them by the government of a free republic.

At the time of his arrest, alleged “King of the Mollies” John Kehoe, 1872 Democratic hopeful for Pennsylvania's State Assembly, served as high constable of Girardville. “‘You will find the leaders of this society the prominent men in the townships,’” Gowen told the jury in the trial of alleged “Molly” Thomas Munley. “‘Through the instrumentality of their order, and by its power, they were able to secure offices for themselves.’”[4]

Kenny's work focused in particular on the western section of County Donegal to promote the theory of “the sense of alienation and rootlessness so evident among the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania.”[5] Kenny described this section as “one of the poorest and most isolated places in Ireland and the birthplace of many of the American Molly Maguires.”[6]

Again, research in coal region newspapers refutes Kenny’s theory. The commonwealth executed five natives of County Donegal as alleged “Mollies,” and imprisoned many more. Executed Donegal men showed deep ties to their communities.

Liquor distributor and hotelkeeper Alex Campbell was born in 1833 in Dungloe, County Donegal. Campbell, married and the father of an infant and an unborn child at the time of his arrest, served the year before his arrest as Democratic Party delegate to Pennsylvania’s Carbon County.

In April 1875, miner and tavern-keeper Hugh McGehan, married a month before his arrest, headed a peaceful parade of four hundred miners through Tamaqua in Pennsylvania’s Schuylkill County. There, during the height of the region’s “Long Strike,” Donegal-born McGehan brokered an agreement with area coal operators to supply the town with coal during the ongoing wage dispute. “This man,” an area paper said after McGehan’s arrest, “had since his arrival at Summit Hill always possessed considerable influence over his fellows and among them was always a leader.”[7]

Carbon County AOH delegate Thomas Fisher, a third native of County Donegal, owned the Rising Sun Hotel at Summit Hill. Fisher, a former miner and an older married man, had no children. His nephew Joseph Fisher, who supported Fisher steadily after his arrest, served as permanent secretary to Carbon County’s Greenback Labor Party. In 1875 Carbon County’s Democratic delegates considered Fisher, a longtime Democratic operative, among prospective nominees for county commissioner. Four months before his arrest as an alleged “Molly,” a local paper reported interest in Fisher for county tax collector. “Tom is a good man,” the article said, “and deserves reward at the hands of the party he has long and faithfully served.”[8]

On page 239 of Making Sense, Kenny states: “Other than [Cornelius] McHugh, no trade union leader was ever indicted for a Molly Maguire crime.” Newspaper coverage rebuts this as well. Four additional alleged “Mollies” served as trade union officers.

In March 1872, alleged “Molly” Thomas Fisher served as officer and accounts auditor for the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association (WBA) of Carbon County.[9] The same year, alleged “Molly” John Donahue identified himself as president of WBA District 10, Tuscarora. At the same time, Donahue identified alleged “Molly” John Slattery, a Democratic candidate that year for associate judge, as the first WBA president of District 10, Tuscarora. “Mr. Slattery was one of the most active in organizing this district of the W.B.A.,” Donahue said of his fellow union officer, “at a time when unionism met with formidable opposition from those whose interest it was to crush it in its infancy.”[10]

In 1871, alleged “Molly” Michael Lawler served as delegate to WBA Grand Council proceedings at Mauch Chunk. The New York Herald characterized that group as an “Immense Politico-Industrial Organization—A New Power Forming in the Land.”[11] The Shenandoah Herald said at the time: “Mr. Lawler’s devotion to the Union is … well known … he is the most outspoken member in the district … in defending the men he has frequently incurred the displeasure of operators.”[12]

Kenny is one in a long line of chroniclers who characterized Pennsylvania’s alleged “Mollies” as violent Irishmen, whose violent tendencies had roots in Ireland. The prosecutors in the “Molly” trials took great pains to promote this theory and to codify its legitimacy in subsequent histories. The promoters of the trials counted among them many disappointed Democratic operatives, including three candidates for the highest office in Pennsylvania.

Building the Canon – The White Supremacists

The intensely political nature of the “Molly Maguire” conflict has received little scrutiny. Three successively defeated Democratic gubernatorial candidates in Pennsylvania, all with white supremacist leanings, took part in these trials. In 1868, in support of Horatio Seymour’s presidential bid, their party chose as its slogan: “This is a White Man's Country; Let White Men Rule.”

In 1876, Lehigh Valley Railroad president Asa Packer, defeated in 1869 for Pennsylvania’s governorship, sent his corporate counsel to Mauch Chunk to craft prosecution strategy for the “Molly” trials. Charles Buckalew, described by one coal region observer as Franklin Gowen’s “right hand man,”[13] lost the race for governor in 1872. Five years later, Buckalew served as a special prosecutor in Bloomsburg. The Schuylkill County court of Judge Cyrus Pershing, defeated for governor in 1875, condemned more alleged “Mollies” to death than any other court.

Francis Hughes, another pivotal special prosecutor during the trials, enthusiastically backed Pershing’s bid for governor in 1875. In 1862 Hughes, as chairman of Pennsylvania’s Democratic State Central Committee, denounced “the devilishness of Abolitionism.”[14] During the Civil War, Hughes urged Pennsylvania’s secession from the Union and its establishment as the Confederacy’s “great manufacturing workshop.”[15] Hughes’s elitist, pro-slavery views intersected with his anti-union stance. Both informed his stint as special prosecutor in the “Molly Maguire” trials.

The politics of Pennsylvania’s alleged “Mollies” threatened their prosecutors’ commercial holdings. British capital backed much of Pennsylvania’s hard coal industry. The McCalmont Brothers, a London firm, financed Franklin Gowen’s coal and railroad enterprises. The Irishmen embraced Labor Reform Party tenets, including a strong pro-union stance and a call for the exclusion of British capital from U.S. industry.

Gowen’s service as special delegate to Pennsylvania’s 1873 constitutional convention, including his personal, successful effort to remove the governor’s authority to grant pardons, underscores the political cast of the trials. Gowen’s wholesale use of Pinkerton operatives to conduct the caseload underscores his treachery.

In May 1873 Allan Pinkerton, president of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, stood on the edge of bankruptcy. Pinkerton urged George Bangs, his New York superintendent, to solicit business from Gowen. In October 1873, Pinkerton operative James McParlan entered the coal region undercover. Nine murders followed. These, along with a number of earlier, unsolved murders, served as the basis for Gowen’s “Molly Maguire” caseload. McParlan served as the trials’ chief prosecution witness. Several AOH men charged as “Mollies” corroborated McParlan’s testimony.

Gowen charged defendants not as individuals, but as members of an Irish terrorist organization. The official transcript for John Kehoe’s 1876 trial reads “THE COMMONWEALTH vs. JOHN KEHOE ET AL., MEMBERS OF THE ANCIENT ORDER OF HIBERNIANS, COMMONLY KNOWN AS ‘MOLLY MAGUIRES.’”[16]

Building the Canon – The Yellow Press

Decades of yellow press coverage trumpeting the criminality—and the political influence—of alleged “Molly Maguires” in the United States preceded the Pennsylvania trials. In fall 1857, almost twenty years before the trials began, a spate of such coverage arose from Philadelphia.

A long history of AOH activity in the United States predated the trials. In 1836, Hibernians in New York City and Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, applied to executive members in Ireland and Great Britain for the first U.S. AOH charter. “‘You must love without dissimulation, hating evil, cleaving to good,’” the 1836 U.S. charter advised.[17] Over the years the benevolent order, headquartered in New York City, grew in strength, numbers, and influence. At the height of the “Molly” trials, it numbered more than seven hundred thousand U.S. members, and by one official source, more than sixty thousand in Pennsylvania.[18] The New York officers retained their ties with Pennsylvania’s coal region. In January 1875, the year before his arrest, John Kehoe hosted national AOH officers from New York at his coal region tavern, Girardville's Hibernian House.

Almost two decades before that, on September 23, 1857, a Washington paper published a reprint from the Philadelphia Sun. “Who is ‘Molly Maguire?’” the article asked. It described “an alien organization in this country, sworn to act in determined hostility to the citizens of American birth.” The organization, the Sun claimed, arose from “hordes of lawless aliens, in every portion of these United States, whose sworn purpose was to deprive the American born of a fair voice and place in the affairs of the nation.” The Sun claimed further that the order arose from the Irish organization known as “‘Ribbonmen,’” whose members vowed “the stealthy murder of every Protestant who became an object of their hatred.” The purpose of the order in the United States, the Sun maintained, was “to govern the dominant political party of the Union, by casting its entire power as if it were a single person. … They are sworn to move in a body, whether it be to control Democratic nominations or to secure profitable places for their fellows.”[19]

A few weeks later, on October 3, 1857, the coverage filtered to Pennsylvania’s hard coal region. Benjamin Bannan, editor of the Miners Journal in Pottsville, quoted similar coverage from the Philadelphia Transcript. Bannan warned readers in Pottsville, future site of nine “Molly” executions, of “the order of ‘Molly Maguires,’ a secret Roman Catholic association, which the Democracy is using for political purposes.’” The order’s Philadelphia members, the Transcript’s coverage said, “‘would march to the polls, almost in regular army and would cast a solid vote for the judges, inspectors or, delegates whom they had previously selected.’”[20]

Nativist editors in South Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio picked up the coverage. From Missouri, the Glasgow Weekly Times warned of the spread of “A New Secret Order” throughout the United States. “Some of the Democrats are indignant,” it said, “and talk of calling a convention of true Democrats to crush out the ‘Molly Maguires,’ who are looked upon as a kind of foreign ‘know nothing’ order.”[21] From Tennessee, the Weekly Clarksville Chronicle quoted the Philadelphia Bulletin: “‘The officers were all Irishmen, and the prominent members are among the most conspicuous wire-workers in the party.’”[22] From Steubenville, Ohio, the True American said: “They are so well organized that already they defy the democratic party to reject any of the candidates presented by Molly Maguire. Thus the Democrat of American birth finds himself in the hands and in the power of a secret order of foreign Catholics, a thousand fold more dangerous to Democracy than the dreaded Know Nothings.”[23]

“Stripped of all disguise,” the Raftsman’s Journal said from Clearfield, Pennsylvania, “its purpose is to acquire Political Power, and to secure offices and influence in the government. … this viper, the venom of whose bite would subvert and endanger our free, Protestant institutions, is lovingly embraced by the Democracy.”[24]

Fifteen years later, as coal region AOH men worked to place their candidates in office, coverage of fictional “Molly Maguire” outrages appeared in force. From 1872 to 1873, nativist editors in Boston, Chicago, and New Orleans; in Charleston and Columbia, South Carolina; in Knoxville and Nashville, Tennessee; in Virginia, Ohio, New York, and throughout Pennsylvania ran such coverage.

In 1874, the same year Allan Pinkerton started a dime novel press, the nativist propaganda accelerated dramatically. Three days before Pinkerton’s undercover operative James McParlan joined a coal region AOH lodge, such coverage appeared in the Chicago Tribune, from the city where Pinkerton kept his home office. “THE ‘MOLLIE MAGUIRES,’” this headline ran. “Terrorism in the Coal Regions of Pennsylvania—Wholesale Assassination by a Regularly-Organized Band out Outlaws.”[25] The inflammatory press appeared at a time of quiet in the coal region, with coal region AOH men actively swaying political races for national office.

On August 3, 1874, Christopher Donnelly, AOH treasurer for Schuylkill County, served as delegate to the Democratic convention at Pottsville. There, Donnelly delivered thirty-nine votes to the nomination of James Reilly, a young Irish Catholic, to U.S. Congress. Reilly secured the nomination and, in November, the congressional seat. The day after Reilly secured the nomination, the New York Herald ran fictional coverage. “THE COAL REGIONS,” this column read. “General Prevalence of Riot, Robbery and Murder. BODIES HORRIBLY MUTILATED. Ku Klux Notices Served on Obnoxious Citizens.”[26]

As the Herald and other papers ramped up the lurid coverage, rebuttals appeared. From Schuylkill County’s Mahanoy City, Father Charles McFadden wrote to deny “the existence of such a society, much less a single member of such an organization as the ‘Molly Maguires.’”[27] The New York Tribune sent its reporter to investigate. “STORIES OF MINERS’ OUTRAGES DENIED,” the Tribune concluded. “STORIES OF ORGANIZED LAWLESSNESS SAID TO BE WHOLLY UNTRUE—SENSATION TALES OF THE ‘MOLLY MAGUIRES.’”[28]

At the height of Gowen’s trials, with newspapers countrywide glutting newsstands with sensational accounts, the New York Sun published an article. “A SOCIETY OF MURDERERS,” this account read. “THE LEAGUE OF POLITICIANS AND THUGS IN PENNSYLVANIA. The History of the Molly Maguire Organization from the Time it was Chartered by a Republican Legislature—A Horrible List of Crimes—President Gowen’s Testimony.”[29]

At the time the New York Sun ran this coverage, John Swinton served as chief of the paper’s editorial staff. After the “Molly” trials ended, Swinton addressed a group of fellow pressmen at a dinner in New York. “The business of the New York journalist,” he told them, “is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his race and his country for his daily bread. You know this and I know it, and what folly is this to be toasting an ‘Independent Press?’ We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping- jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”[30]

Today, the online “Molly Maguire” page for the Library of Congress reference service “Chronicling America” sends researchers to numerous yellow press articles of “Molly Maguire” coverage. The page uses this descriptor: “An Irish secret society known as the Molly Maguires is thought responsible for a string of violent attacks in the Pennsylvania coal fields.”[31]

Building the Canon – The “Molly Maguire” Prosecutors

During the “Molly Maguire” trials from 1876 to 1878, the prosecution, along with McParlan, pounded the theory of Pennsylvania’s “Molly Maguire” terrorism as an outgrowth of dissent in Ireland. For their text, they chose the work of William Steuart Trench, an Anglo-Irish land agent. Trench's work was the poisoned well from which future theories sprang.

Trench described Ireland’s alleged “Mollies” in a work published in 1869. “These ‘Molly Maguires,’” Trench said, “were generally stout, active young men, dressed up in women’s clothes, with faces blackened, or otherwise disguised … [they] sometimes smeared themselves in the most fantastic manner with burnt cork about their eyes, mouths, and cheeks. In this state they used suddenly to surprise [rent agents], and either duck them in bog-holes, or beat them in the most unmerciful manner …the ‘Molly Maguires’ became the terror of all our officials.”[32]

As with the fictional yellow press coverage, Trench’s work drew rebuttals. From New Orleans, the Morning Star and Catholic Messenger derided “the falsifications and truculency of this agent of Irish landlords.”[33] A reviewer for the Chicago Tribune scoffed: “If we are to judge of the peasantry of Ireland by his descriptions, every peasant is a Celt in a savage condition, with a stubble-covered face … and a half-savage, half-sneering smile … always insolvent, insolent, reckless, desperate, intemperate, rebellious, ready to murder his next friend … making it the prime object of his life not to pay rent or give up his land.”[34]

The New York Herald said: “Mr. Trench is not only an Irish Protestant, but he is also a ‘born aristocrat.’ … evidently one of those Irishmen who have resolved to forgive their Catholic neighbors for the centuries of ill-treatment which they have compelled them to suffer. … Mr. Trench, however, does not tell us this: Whence arose the necessity for his book.”[35]

Seven years after Trench’s book appeared, Franklin Gowen told the jury in the trial of alleged “Molly” Thomas Munley: “get a little book called Trench’s Realities of Irish Life … you will find the history of this organization.  … an organized resistance in Ireland to the payment of rents. The malcontents became known as Ribbonmen, and they generally made their attacks upon the agents … Their object was to intimidate and hold in terror all those to whom they owed money … As a branch of this society … sprang the men known as Mollie Maguires.”[36]

Special prosecutor Francis Hughes doubled down on the theory, telling jurymen of “the Ribbon Men of Ireland … outrages by beating, by ducking in the bog-ponds, and afterwards by murder. … inside of that organization … a body of men known as Mollie Maguires. … They used to blacken their faces and put on bonnets and frocks, and go out at nights and seize a bailiff or an agent … if they did not kill him, they would beat him, or duck him … thus they inspired a feeling of terrorism.”[37]

James McParlan, chief prosecution witness during the “Molly” trials, restated Trench’s theories. “THE MURDERERS’ LEAGUE,” the New York Herald reported of McParlan’s testimony. “DAMNING EXPOSURES OF THE INNER WORKINGS OF THE MOLLIE MAGUIRES—DIABOLICAL INTRIGUES—BARTERING BLOOD.”[38] “The Mollie Maguires,” the New York Times said, “he [McParlan] testifies, are a branch of the society known as the Ancient Order of Hibernians. … a secret, oath-bound association … the order has its origin and fountain-head in Ireland. … the bloody purposes of the Mollie Maguires have been grafted upon the Pennsylvania branch of the organization by the men whose crimes have just been exposed. This explanation seems reasonable.”[39] 

The prosecution took great pains to control the writing of the “Molly Maguire” canon. The work of Francis Dewees, nephew of special prosecutor Francis Hughes, appeared while trials remained ongoing. Dewees’s book, titled The Molly Maguires: The Origin, Growth, and Character of the Organization, also referred readers to Trench’s Realities of Irish Life. Dewees restated Trench’s fantasias of cross-dressing, with men’s faces blackened “or otherwise disguised, with … fantastic masks, or with burnt cork about their eyes, mouths, and cheeks. … the very name of Molly Maguire inspired terror.”[40]

The same year Dewees’s book appeared, Allan Pinkerton, still in Gowen’s employ, published a semi-fictional work titled The Mollie Maguires and the Detectives. Pinkerton’s book included Gowen’s speech from the trial of Thomas Munley, including Gowen’s admonition to jurors to “‘get a little book called Trench’s Realities of Irish Life.’”[41]

Extending the Canon – The Scholars and the Filmmaker

In 1892, after the arming of Pinkerton guards at Andrew Carnegie's Homestead steel mill led to violent confrontation and death, Congress stepped forward. The New York Sun reported the Senate investigation at Washington. “‘These forces,’” Illinois Democrat John Palmer said of the Pinkertons, “‘are responsible neither to God nor man, only to those who hire them. … They ought to be hounded down by such means as are employed against enemies of mankind.’”[42] In March 1893, the federal Anti-Pinkerton Act went into effect. By 1899, more than half of U.S. states or territories had enacted similar legislation.

In 1936, almost six decades after the “Molly” trials ended, historian J. Walter Coleman published The Molly Maguire Riots: Industrial Conflict in The Pennsylvania Coal Region. “The worst that might be said,” Coleman concluded, “of the prosecutors of the Molly Maguires is that they entered into a deliberate conspiracy to manufacture evidence with which to convict their enemies, the labor leaders, a charge which, obviously, cannot be proved. … the conspiracy theory is so far within the realm of possibility that it deserves consideration.”[43]

In 1947, historian Philip Foner rebutted all former “Molly Maguire” propaganda. Regarding supposed “Molly” terrorism in Pennsylvania’s coal region, Foner said: “It is now established that there was no society in America calling itself the Molly Maguires, that this name was tagged to the Ancient Order of Hibernians by the commercial press whose purpose it was to help the coal operators crush all organization in the mining industry; that the Philadelphia and Reading Company hired the Pinkerton spy agency not to save society from a band of terrorists but to spread terror ... .”[44]

Foner based his conclusions in part on the actions of defense attorney Clarence Darrow. In 1906, Darrow successfully defended officers of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), including William Haywood, against James McParlan’s accusations against them of conspiracies to commit murder. Those accusations included the 1905 bombing death of former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg. As the Pinkertons had done against AOH men in Pennsylvania, McParlan used perjured testimony backed by perjured corroboration to press his western cases against the WFM men.

In the Idaho trial of Haywood, Darrow characterized McParlan as “the chief perjury manufacturer in this case.” McParlan, Darrow said, had instructed his prosecution witness Harry Orchard to swear to “a piece of testimony which is as worthless, as crooked, as valueless as any figment that ever went before a jury.”[45]

In a 1908 Colorado trial that flowed from McParlan’s accusations, defense attorney Orrin Hilton described the Pinkertons as “‘human jackals,’” the “‘most abandoned criminal organization of the country.’” Hilton instructed the jury: “‘I want to hold up to your gaze the work of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Don’t you know perjury and false witness always follows in its trail?’”[46]

Foner’s 1947 rebuttal of “Molly Maguire” nativist propaganda, like the rebuttals of the 1870s, was largely overlooked. In the late 1950s, Dartmouth historian Wayne Broehl Jr. took on the “Molly Maguire” study. In 1964, Harvard University Press published Broehl’s The Molly Maguires. To craft his work, Broehl relied heavily on prosecution documents, including McParlan’s reports and Allan Pinkerton’s dime novel. In his acknowledgements, Broehl named four key manuscript collections, including those of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, the Reading Railroad, and Mrs. George Keiser of Pottsville, Pennsylvania.

Mrs. George Keiser, born in 1886, was the daughter of George Kaercher, district attorney for Schuylkill County during the “Molly Maguire” trials. She was the granddaughter of Francis Hughes. Hughes, a special prosecutor during the trials, was the uncle of Francis Dewees, the first “Molly Maguire” chronicler. Through Broehl’s lens, the prosecution was again writing the “Molly Maguire” history.

“So very many of the Molly Maguire tactics in the coal fields,” Broehl concluded, “stemmed directly from closely similar tactics in Ireland. … If one were a determinist in his brand of historical philosophy, he could easily conclude that the whole Pennsylvania development had about it a classic inevitability.”[47]

Broehl’s conclusions swept aside both Foner’s assessment from two decades before and the work of three stellar defense attorneys—Darrow, Hilton, and Edmund Richardson—who in the early 1900s had successfully exposed McParlan’s corrupt machinations and the entire Pinkerton courtroom strategy. With Broehl’s work, published under Harvard’s imprimatur, Pennsylvania’s “Molly Maguires” again rose up as transplanted Irish terrorists.

“Broehl has gathered much useful new material and raised important questions,” historian Herbert Gutman said in a review published the year after Broehl’s work appeared. “But he has not used the material well nor answered the questions adequately.”[48] Of Broehl’s reliance on Pinkerton sources, Gutman said: “entire events—including significant meetings and acts of violence and murder—are reconstructed from these Pinkerton sources and nothing else.”[49] Gutman concluded of Brohel’s effort: “the entire narrative is unbalanced. It is almost as if one wrote of anti-British agitation in Boston between 1763 and 1776 and relied mainly on reports from British spies, loyalist memoirs, courts of admiralty, and the loyalist press.”[50]

Today, the online catalog for Harvard University Press lists Brohel’s work for purchase. “The Molly Maguires,” its description reads, “were direct descendants of clandestine organizations that proliferated in the Irish homeland and it was this heritage that inspired the vengeful and bloody tactics they employed to gain their social and economic objectives.”[51]

Martin Ritt’s 1970 film The Molly Maguires, based on a screenplay by Walter Bernstein, further clouded the canon. Once again, the alleged “Mollies” were portrayed as oppressed mineworkers driven to violence through draconian working conditions. “The Molly Maguires,” a film review in the New York Times said of Ritt’s effort, “were a secret society of Irish-American coal miners who in the second half of the 19th century fought by sabotage and murder against their overseers and for better pay in the mines.”[52]

Pinkerton intervention colored even Ritt’s film. Nine decades after Allan Pinkerton published his dime novel, attorneys representing the Pinkertons exercised control over Ritt’s work. They demanded, and got, script approval from Paramount. In December 1968, at a private screening in New York, Pinkerton representatives viewed Ritt’s film before its release. In late January 1870, Paramount released the film with “their blessings.”[53]

Almost three decades later, Oxford University Press published Kevin Kenny’s Making Sense of the Molly Maguires. Kenny again pressed the theme of transplanted Irish violence. “Accustomed to oppression,” Kenny said in 1998 of Pennsylvania's alleged “Mollies,” “but not to its industrial form, the immigrants responded with a type of violence that had its roots in the Irish countryside.”[54] Kenny’s work reinforced the specter of Irish American terrorism.

On page five of his introduction, Kenny said: “The Molly Maguires themselves left virtually no evidence of their existence, let alone their aims and motivation.”[55] Along with their record of union and political activity, including the election of five union officers and five school directors, Pennsylvania’s alleged “Mollies” left behind a state-sanctioned document that they themselves may have authored.

In March 1871, at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s AOH men filed a revised charter with the state legislature. The same month, New York’s AOH officers filed an almost identical revised charter. This document defined the order’s structure and its administration. At the office of the Shenandoah Herald, AOH delegate John Kehoe oversaw the printing of these charters for distribution in Schuylkill County. All AOH initiates, including Pinkerton operative James McParlan, during his sham initiation in April 1874, received a copy of the document.

In August 1876, at the height of Gowen’s “Molly Maguire” trials, the Philadelphia Times said of the revised AOH charter: “The constitution book, it is alleged, until lately had printed in it, after the conclusion of the by-laws, the names of the framers of the charter of the organization. The books, as printed at present, contain no such names. It is merely hinted that this is because some of the framers of the charter are at present awaiting trial or sentence for murder.”[56] Pennsylvania’s alleged “Mollies” may have drafted the charter language.

The language of the revised AOH charter, based on “Friendship, Unity, and True Christian Charity,” is poetic. It is profound. It accords with the trade union philosophy of Pennsylvania’s alleged “Mollies” and with their embrace of Labor Reform Party tenets. Drafted by Irishmen who may have witnessed the horrors of Ireland’s Great Famine, the document informs both the Hibernians’ aims and their motivation.

The introduction advises: “Brethren: It is beyond all doubt that the Supreme Being has placed man in a state of dependence and need of mutual support from his fellow man. Neither can the greatest monarch on earth exist without friendship and society. Therefore, the Supreme Being has implanted in our natures tender sympathies and most humane feeling towards our fellow creatures in distress, and all the happiness that human nature is capable of enjoying must flow and terminate in the love of God and our fellow creatures. So we, the members of this Order, do agree to assist each other, and conform to the following rules …”

The preamble ends with this poem:

These laws though human,
Spring from Love Divine,
Love laid the scheme—
Love guides the whole design.

Vile is the man
Who will evade these laws,
Or taste the sweets
Without sufficient cause.[57]

Along with their constitution and bylaws, Pennsylvania’s alleged “Mollies” left behind numerous protestations of innocence. Some condemned men, in a faint echo of the 1836 AOH charter urging members to “‘love without dissimulation, hating evil, cleaving to good,’”[58] left behind statements of forgiveness for those who had sworn falsely against them.

For those willing to examine the evidence: the charters, the statements, and the actions of Pennsylvania’s alleged “Molly Maguires,” these constitute a substantial record of historical documentation. This record illuminates the aims, the motivation, and the abiding faith of the executed Irish Catholic men. It sets aside contemporary descriptions of the so-called “Mollies,” the film released by Paramount in 1970, accounts published by Harvard in 1964 and Oxford in 1998, and the cross-dressing  “Molly Maguires” conjured by William Steuart Trench in 1869.

This essay was last updated on April 3, 2021. ___________________

Notes

[1] Washington Post, April 19, 1998, “A VIEW OF VIOLENCE.”

[2]https://books.google.com/books/about/Making_Sense_of_the_Molly_Maguires.html?id=b0n77o5-qEgC, accessed January 16, 2020.

[3] Kevin Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (New York, 1998), 37.

[4] Gowen’s speech quoted in Allan Pinkerton, The Mollie Maguires and the Detectives (1877; repr. New York, 1972), 519. See also Philadelphia Times, July 25, 1876.

[5] Kenny, Making Sense, 36.

[6] Ibid., 31.

[7] Shenandoah Herald, March 10, 1876.

[8] Mauch Chunk Democrat, May 27, 1876. For Kevin Kenny’s reference to Thomas Fisher in Democratic politics, see Making Sense, 291.

[9] Report of WBA executive board meeting, Anthracite Monitor (Tamaqua, PA), March 16, 1872.

[10] Pottsville Standard, July 6, 1872 (signed “John Donohoe”).

[11] New York Herald, April 12, 1871. For Lawler’s attendance at this council, see Shenandoah Herald, April 13, 1871.

[12] Shenandoah Herald, April 27, 1871.

[13] Mauch Chunk Coal Gazette, September 13, 1872.

[14] Star of the North (Bloomsburg, PA), August 20, 1862.

[15] Sunbury American (Sunbury, PA), October 11, 1862 (reprinting Miners' Journal, Pottsville, PA).

[16] Report of the Case of the Commonwealth vs. John Kehoe et al., stenographically reported by R. A. West (Pottsville, 1876).

[17] John O’Dea, History of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (New York, 1923), 885.

[18] Boston Pilot, “National Convention of the A. O. H.,” May 22, 1880: “Prior to the Molly Maguire troubles, the Order of Hibernians had a membership of about 63,000 in Pennsylvania.” See also Philadelphia Times, August 28, 1876, letter from AOH divisional secretary, William McIntyre of Philadelphia: “There are over 4,000 members in this county … and over 700,000 in the United States.”

[19] The American (Washington, DC), September 23, 1857 (reprinting Philadelphia Sun; italics in American).

[20] Miners' Journal, October 3, 1857 (quoting Philadelphia Transcript).

[21] Glasgow Weekly Times (Glasgow, MO), October 8, 1857 (italics in original).

[22] Weekly Clarksville Chronicle (Clarksville, TN), October 16, 1857 (quoting Philadelphia Bulletin).

[23] True American (Steubenville, OH), November 4, 1857 (restating Montour American, Montour County, PA).

[24] Raftsman’s Journal (Clearfield, PA), November 4, 1857.

[25] Chicago Daily Tribune, April 11, 1874.

[26] New York Herald, August 4, 1874.

[27] Ibid., November 27, 1874.

[28] New York Tribune, November 24, 1874.

[29] New York Sun, October 22, 1876.

[30] Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, Labor’s Untold Story: The Adventure Story of the Battles, Betrayals and Victories of American Working Men and Women (1955; repr. New York, 2005), 81.

[31] https://www.loc.gov/rr/news/topics/mollies.html, “Molly Maguires: Topics in Chronicling America,” accessed July 17, 2020.

[32] William Steuart Trench, Realities of Irish Life (Boston, 1869), 67-68.

[33] Morning Star and Catholic Messenger (New Orleans, LA), March 6, 1870.

[34] Chicago Tribune, May 23, 1869.

[35] New York Herald, May 1, 1869.

[36] Gowen’s argument reported in Clearfield Republican, August 9, 1876.

[37] Commonwealth versus Patrick Hester, Patrick Tully, and Peter McHugh, Argument of Francis Wade Hughes (Philadelphia, 1877), 18-19.

[38] New York Herald, May 9, 1876.

[39] New York Times, May 14, 1876.

[40] F. P. Dewees, The Molly Maguires: The Origin, Growth, and Character of the Organization (1877; repr. New York, 1969), 44.

[41] Pinkerton, Mollie Maguires, 518.

[42] New York Sun, August 3, 1892.

[43] J. Walter Coleman, The Molly Maguire Riots: Industrial Conflict in The Pennsylvania Coal Region (Richmond, 1936), 168.

[44] Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 1 (1947; repr. New York, 1972), 460.

[45] “Wayland’s Monthly (Girard, KS), “Darrow’s Speech in the Haywood Case,” October, 1907, 78.

[46] Hilton’s argument reported in Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, July 14, 1908.

[47] Wayne G. Broehl Jr., The Molly Maguires (1964; repr., New York, 1983), 361.

[48] Herbert Gutman, “The Molly Maguires, and Lament for the Molly Maguires, by Wayne G. Broehl, Jr. and Arthur H. Lewis,” Book Reviews, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 89, no. 2 (1965): 252.

[49] Ibid., 251 (italics in original).

[50] Ibid., 252.

[51] https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674731547, accessed January 16, 2020.

[52] New York Times, February 9, 1970 (review by Roger Greenspun).

[53] Carlton Jackson, Picking up the Tab—The Life and Movies of Martin Ritt (Bowling Green, 1994), 106.

[54] Kenny, Making Sense, 8.

[55] Ibid., 5.

[56] Philadelphia Times, August 30, 1876.

[57] For AOH charter, see Commonwealth vs. John Kehoe et al., 167-171.

[58] O’Dea, Ancient Order, 885.