By Anne Flaherty
Problems arise from the very first sentence of Wikipedia’s entry on the so-called “Molly Maguires.” The online encyclopedia asserts: “The Molly Maguires was an Irish 19-century secret society active in Ireland, Liverpool, and parts of the eastern United States, best known for their activism among Irish-American and Irish immigrant coal miners in Pennsylvania.”
Contrary to Wikipedia’s assertion, the existence of the so-called “Molly Maguires” in Pennsylvania has never been proved. The controversy over the existence of this so-called “secret society” in Pennsylvania’s nineteenth-century coalfields has raged for a century and a half.
Clouding the issue further, Wikipedia then tells of the so-called “Mollies” in Ireland, and of their counterparts in England. From Ireland, we hear of Whiteboys and Peep o’Day Boys and Ribbonmen; of “small-scale potato cultivation” and of “enclosure”; of “growing-season leases of farmland,” or “conacre”; of agrarian resistance, including the mutilation and killing of livestock; of “retributive justice”; of “Molly” leaders, presumably in the midst of the starvation of Ireland’s Great Famine, going to the trouble of dressing up as women to demand food from storekeepers. We’re then given a description of Liverpool’s “Molly Maguire club,” an association “known for its gangsterism rather than any genuine concern for the welfare of the Irish people.”
That’s quite a lead-in for this Pennsylvania conflict, which is a quintessentially American story.
But Wikipedia maintains its misleading stance, that the so-called “Mollies” did exist as an entity in Pennsylvania, throughout much of its entry. Perhaps its most misleading quote comes from Kevin Kenny’s Making Sense of the Molly Maguires: “‘the Molly Maguires themselves left virtually no evidence of their existence, let alone their aims or motivations.’”
In my two-decades-plus of research into this Pennsylvania conflict, I managed to unearth a mountain of such evidence. I found five alleged “Mollies” who had been elected as township school directors in the anthracite coal region, and four as officers of the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association (WBA), the regional mineworkers’ union. At least two of those elected as school directors had attained that position while continuing to work as miners. I found alleged “Mollies” serving as Democratic Party delegates, as township supervisors and high constables, as tax assessors, tax collectors, and even as overseer of the poor. Free men in a free republic; talented and filled with hope, these Irishmen were working their way out of the mines and into ownership of taverns, boarding houses, and small hotels, and positions of influence within their communities. Their AOH leadership helped them achieve numerous elective offices.
From the twenty-one executed men, I found numerous declarations of innocence: some given on the gallows, and a few published in New York newspapers in what were called “dying statements.” In private correspondence and in press interviews, some of the condemned men expressed a deep religiosity.
I found the charter from 1871 for Pennsylvania’s Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), the benevolent order to which all of the Irish Catholic men charged as “Mollies” belonged. It based its ideology on the tenet “Love guides the whole design.” I found activity, within a month of the charter’s sanctioning by the Pennsylvania legislature, among Schuylkill County’s mineworkers that dovetailed with its ideology: a WBA resolution from the miners of Mahanoy City, home to alleged “Molly king” John Kehoe, offering “To Cut Coal for the Poor for Nothing”; i.e., to cut coal for the poor of the Eastern cities for free during an ongoing work stoppage. Within four years, Kehoe would be elected AOH delegate for Schuylkill County and high constable of Girardville.
I found evidence of involvement by alleged “Mollies” in the era’s Labor Reform movement, including a bill calling for cooperative ownership of the U.S. railway system, introduced in 1874 on the floor of U.S. Congress by John W. Killinger, Kehoe’s “Good old” friend.
As to the aims and motivations of those who prosecuted the AOH men, I found three successively failed Democratic candidates for Pennsylvania’s governorship from 1869 to 1875, the year the “Molly” arrests began: Asa Packer, Charles Buckalew, and Cyrus Pershing. The Labor Reform Party movement helped defeat all three men: Packer, one-time member of Franklin Gowen’s “Coal Combination”; Buckalew, former U.S. senator known as Gowen’s “right-hand man generally”; and Pershing, brought in by Gowen from Cambria County in 1872 and installed, in a dubious election, as president judge of the court of Schuylkill County.
All three failed gubernatorial candidates, along with Gowen, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, then played roles in the “Molly” trials: Gowen and Buckalew as prosecutors, Pershing as the judge whose court sent more Irishmen to the gallows than any other, and Packer as a backer of the Carbon County trials.
As to the aims and motivations of the Pinkertons, they were pecuniary. In May 1873, Allan Pinkerton faced bankruptcy. His generation of the “Molly Maguire” caseload saved his agency from ruin. Pinkerton’s undercover operative in the coal region, James McParlan, went on to a long and corrupt career as a result of his testimony in the “Molly” trials. McParlan’s failed prosecution (as “McParland”) of Western Federation of Miners’ officer “Big Bill” Haywood in the early 1900s drew this resolution from the citizens of Parsons, Kansas: “That we warn the courts and law officers of Idaho to be watchful of every move by James McParland, as we unhesitatingly declare that where there is a money consideration he will do anything no matter how low or evil, to accomplish his purpose.” Parson’s citizens added, “there is not to-day, in the United States outside prison walls, a more conscienceless and desperate criminal than McParland.”
Wikipedia’s “Molly Maguire” entry does make this admission: “This history remains part of local Pennsylvania lore and the actual facts are much debated among historians.” In its scope and its drama, this history deserves much more than relegation to “part of local Pennsylvania lore.” With its weaponization of ethnic hatred through the local, regional, and national press; its seizure of the courts by political and corporate interests, including use of some jurors who spoke little English; its widespread use of private police; its use of Pinkerton agents to draft and issue arrest warrants and advise Pennsylvania’s Board of Pardons; its denial of defendants’ right to testify on their own behalf; its use of potentially perjured testimony to condemn men to death; its conflation by the Catholic clergy of AOH membership with terrorism; and its prosecution of numerous Irish Catholic men holding progressive political views, this history remains a microcosm—and a severe warning—of the potential consequences of the seizure of state authority by monied interests. With the steadfast faith and compassionate advocacy of many of the Irish Catholic defendants, and the probability that many were wrongfully accused and wrongfully executed, this history remains a touchstone for those of Irish Catholic descent.
Immigrants often show a fierce love for their adoptive country. Two young AOH defendants, born in Schuylkill County of Irish parents, decorated the walls of their cells with American flags. On their applications for U.S. citizenship, AOH defendants who emigrated from Ireland renounced their allegiance to the British monarchy. They naively trusted the court system of the U.S. republic, including coal region courts and the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, to shield them from the Pinkertons’ accusations.
But in Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal region in the late 1870s, the “Molly Maguire” label proved lethal. In 1878, a few weeks before his execution, Kehoe told a reporter: “I’ve never had justice. The newspapers and the people are down on me, because they say I’m a Molly; and to say that in Schuylkill County of a man is about as good as signing his death warrant.”
James Ford Rhodes, in an account published in 1919, gave descriptions of Pennsylvania’s so-called “Mollies” as universally violent, drunken, and anti-capitalistic. But despite its extraordinarily negative ethnic bias, Rhodes’s text sometimes hit the mark. Rhodes described Pennsylvania’s AOH anthracite region leaders as “older heads holding high office and, in a variety of ways, displaying executive ability. They were quick to see what a weapon to their hand was universal suffrage, and, with the aptitude for politics which the Irish have shown in our country, they developed their order into a political power to be reckoned with. Numbering in Schuylkill county only 500 or 600 out of 5000 Irishmen [of voting age] in a total population of 116,000, the Molly Maguires controlled the common schools and the local government of the townships in the mining sections of the county.”
In one of the showcase trials, Gowen told the coal region jury: “I have seen this [AOH] organization wield a political power in the State which has controlled the election of a great Commonwealth.” When the trials began, AOH membership in the United States was approaching half a million members. McParlan’s conflation in trial testimony of AOH membership with supposed “Molly Maguire” terrorism helped send twenty-one Irish Catholic men to the gallows in five counties and imprison dozens more. That testimony also achieved the trials’ likely aim: the shattering of the AOH in Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal region, and its severe crippling throughout Pennsylvania and countrywide.
Wikipedia does justice to the plight of nineteenth-century anthracite miners, but gives little mention of the anti-Irish-Catholic prejudice rife throughout the United States during this time. Two New York newspapers, the Times and the Sun, proved especially virulent in their coverage of the so-called “Molly Maguires.” John Swinton served on the editorial boards of both papers. Some years after the trials ended, Swinton spoke with fellow pressmen in New York. He told them:
There is no such thing in America as an independent press, unless it is in the small towns. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. . . . The business of the New York journalist 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.
Wikipedia’s “Molly Maguire” page names Philip Rosen as one of the historians who believed “that Irish immigrants brought a form of the Molly Maguires organization into America in the 19th century, and continued its activities as a clandestine society.” An article documenting a presentation given by Rosen in 2010 notes: “Members of the group would often dress up in women’s clothing and wear makeup while committing their violent acts.”
In the interest of the old expression of truth, justice, and the American way, Wikipedia might do well to revise its “Molly Maguire” entry to include more of the facts and less of the myth. As one of the trial witnesses in the coal region testified, his comprehension of the “Molly Maguire” lore was simple: These were tales that were made up to scare children.
Anne Flaherty is the author of The Passion of John Kehoe and the Myth of the “Molly Maguires,” recipient of the Anthracite Heritage Foundation Book Award for 2025. Available on amazon.com.
This piece was updated on July 24, 2025.
