Wikipedia's "Molly Maguires"

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.

Essay Collection

R

eaders are invited to browse the collection of essays posted here.

“Who Was John Kehoe?” documents finds from my travels to libraries and archives in five states. My family's long-held belief in John Kehoe's innocence and in the political nature of the “Molly Maguire” conflict guided this search.

“Jug-Handled Justice” describes railroad president Franklin Gowen’s usurpation of Pennsylvania's criminal justice system for the duration of the “Molly” trials. At this essay's conclusion John Elliott, the attorney who helped secure John Kehoe's 1979 posthumous pardon, gives a summation of Gowen’s actions. 

“The ‘Mollies’ Were Also School Directors” gives the background of five Hibernians prosecuted as “Mollies” who served in office as school directors. This piece also documents a resurgent tide of nativist feeling that manifested in the northeastern United States in the early 1870s.

“Pennsylvania’s ‘Molly Maguires’: The Surprising Western Caseload,” describes the “Molly” caseload in three western Pennsylvania counties. This effort from 1878 to 1882 involved dozens of defendants, but yielded few convictions and no executions.

“The ‘Molly Maguires’ and the National Labor Union” describes the relationship between alleged “Molly” Patrick Hester and Richard Trevellick, president during the early 1870s of the National Labor Union, a countrywide coalition of tradesmen.

“The ‘Molly Kings’ and Greenback Labor Reform” describes the role of Hibernians charged as “Mollies” in a progressive nineteenth-century financial reform effort. In particular, this essay discusses the relationship between Kehoe and U.S. Congressman John Killinger, a vocal proponent of Greenback Labor Reform efforts in the early 1870s.

The tab labeled “JOHN KEHOE,” located above, offers a bio for Schuylkill County’s AOH delegate.

Newspapers archived through the Library of Congress “Chronicling America” website helped inform this body of work.

A. Flaherty

This post was revised on September 1, 2017.

The Mahanoy City Miners and the Poor of the Cities

On March 11, 1871, officers from Pennsylvania’s Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), an Irish Catholic benevolent order, filed a revised charter with the state legislature. Some evidence suggests that AOH officers later charged as “Mollies” helped with this chartering. 

The new charter's introduction included this sentiment: “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.”

The same month that AOH officers filed the revised charter, miners in Mahanoy City, a heavily Irish town in the heart of the hard coal region, published a resolution. A report drafted by Pinkerton operative James McParlan, working undercover a few years later for railroad president Franklin Gowen, gives some clues to the miners’ motivation. In early 1875, McParlan gave Gowen a count of four hundred-fifty AOH men in Schuylkill County. Four hundred, he stated, were union men—members of the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association (WBA). Mahanoy City housed Irish miners who held combined AOH lodge and WBA union membership.

Of AOH officers later charged as “Mollies,” one had strong family ties to Mahanoy City in 1871. Former coal miner John Kehoe, the father of three at the time, kept a hotel there. Kehoe’s two grown brothers, both mine laborers, lived in town with their parents. Kehoe’s father Joseph, a mineworker, served over the years both as township supervisor for Mahanoy City and as town constable. John would hold the post of high constable in subsequent years in Girardville.

The Mahanoy City miners’ resolution issued from WBA District Five. It addressed the ongoing mineworkers’ strike and the resulting hardship in securing coal. It declared:

“That we, the miners and laborers of this district, hearing that the poor of the Cities of Philadelphia and New York are suffering for the want of coal, will give one or two days’ labor in the mines, free gratis, for the purpose of supplying coal for their pressing need, provided that the operators will give the use of their collieries, and the railroad companies will transport the same free.”

In March 1871, Pennsylvania’s newly revised AOH charter spoke to “humane feeling towards our fellow creatures in distress.” That same month, miners in Mahanoy City, a heavily Irish town and home to future AOH county delegate John Kehoe, offered to work “free gratis”—without pay—to supply the urban poor with coal during wage disputes.

The miners’ offer to supply coal to the poor depended on the matching largesse of the railroads. That winter Franklin Gowen, president of the region’s largest carrier, doubled, and then tripled, his freight rates—an act so outrageous, Governor John Geary called for a legislative investigation into the rate increase. Gowen’s action helped derail the miners’ offer to the poor. The New York Herald declared Gowen's intervention in the legislative investigation “one of the most barefaced frauds that has [ever] characterized the Pennsylvania Legislature.” Four years later, Gowen broke the miners’ union.

The language of the AOH charter, its filing the same month that the miners offered their resolution, and future AOH delegate Kehoe's ties to Mahanoy City suggest that the AOH charter and the miners' resolution flowed from the same spring. In late winter 1871, Christian ideology informed industrial action in Pennsylvania’s hard coal region.

Two and a half years after the AOH filed its revised charter, Gowen brought McParlan into the coalfields. Nine murders followed within a two-year period. Those murders drove Gowen’s early “Molly Maguire” prosecutions.

A few weeks before McParlan entered the region, newspapers in Boston circulated a letter allegedly written from Mahanoy City. It described the town as one of the scenes of the “dark deeds of the Mollies,” subject to “a perfect reign of terror by the gang."

One Mahanoy City priest challenged the image of his town as a hotbed of terrorism. “I have resided and officiated in this town for four years, and have yet to discover the existence of such a society, much less a single member of such an organization as the ‘Molly Maguires,’” Father Charles McFadden told the New York Herald in late 1874. “On the contrary, the people are peaceable, intelligent and law-abiding. … I had charge of souls in Philadelphia and elsewhere, and I must, in justice, say that the people of Mahanoy City are as pious and good citizens as ever I met with.”

This post was revised on September 1, 2017.

Justice Trembling in the Balance

Part 4 of 4: All the Machinery of the Pinkerton Agency

Attorney William Foyle of Towanda used all his persuasive power in December 1878 to convince Pennsylvania Governor John Hartranft to re-open the case of John Kehoe. Against all odds—including false rumors of his death—Kehoe’s wife Mary Ann had located a witness who could testify on her husband’s behalf.

“The witness is worthy of credit,” Foyle told Hartanft of witness Patrick McHugh’s deposition.

Foyle related that McHugh identified himself as collector of taxes for Carbon County's Banks Township at the time of the Langdon killing. McHugh "went over to Audenried the night of the affair, saw Jack Kehoe at William’s Tavern at the time the killing occurred or within five minutes of the time the alarm was given, and afterwards saw him running to the scene of the murder.”

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The Philadelphia Times picked up the case and questioned McHugh’s testimony. Foyle again wrote to Hartranft. The attorney’s frustration streamed through his second letter to Pennsylvania’s governor.

“I shall not doubt the integrity of witness McHugh until some reasonable proof is given that he has sworn falsely produced in some other form than newspaper ‘squibs’ for which no one claims responsibility,” Foyle told Hartranft.

“[A]s I understand it from pamphlets sent me some time since with the compliments of Franklin B Gowen containing the trial of Munly [sic] … it took the Commonwealth aided by that astute lawyer and with all the machinery of Pinkertons Detective agency about fourteen years to obtain the evidence to establish the guilt of Kehoe meager as it was … is it too much to ask that Kehoe should have at least two years to look up evidence to prove his innocence?”

The attorney concluded with a plea: “Asking your pardon for having trespassed so much upon you and with no other apology than a desire to advance the cause of justice and truth in behalf of a condemned man whose life is now trembling in the balance.”

The New York Times reported the subsequent hearing called to discuss McHugh’s testimony. Kehoe’s attorney, Samuel Garrett, made a strenuous effort. Garrett sought to convince the board, through use of a map of the murder scene, of Kehoe’s movements on the night of Langdon’s killing.

“He had expected to bring the map and accompanying documents with him from Pottsville this morning, but they were found to be missing from the court records when he went to get them,” The Times reported. But nothing prevented Garrett from telling the pardon board that from 1876 to 1877 "there was not a fair trial in Schuylkill County; that the jury wheel did not contain the names of four Irishmen.”

Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Internal Affairs and pardon board member General William McCandless, a powerful Democratic state operative, summarily dismissed Garrett’s efforts. “‘If this man Kehoe is not guilty of murder in the first degree, he is guilty of nothing, and I have not changed my opinion as to his guilt,’” McCandless told Garrett. The general told a reporter: “‘We have refused to reopen the case. That’s how the matter stands. Kehoe will swing.’”

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A carefully rigged Board of Pardons. A false statement regarding the death of a defense witness. Important documents placed in evidence during Kehoe’s trial for murder, gone missing from the file.

When it came to procuring a signed death warrant for John Kehoe, it seems nothing was left to chance.

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Coming December 15 - A Message for December: Love Guides the Whole Design

Justice Trembling in the Balance

Part 3 of 4: The Witness is Worthy of Credit

While John Kehoe “languished in durance vile” in Pottsville Prison for two and a half years, the witness who could prove his innocence lived 90 miles away from Kehoe’s hometown. For General Charles Albright, the Lehigh and Wilkes-Barre Coal Company attorney who served as a special prosecutor during the “Molly Maguire” trials—dressed in full Civil War regalia—had circulated the false rumor that Patrick McHugh was dead.

“His brother died in 1874 & Gen’l Albright supposing it to be the witness conveyed a strong impression to the friends of Kehoe,” Towanda attorney William Foyle told Pennsylvania’s Governor John Hartranft ten days before Kehoe’s scheduled execution. “The General was acquainted with the witness and his impressions were incorrect in regard to his death.”

Albright’s incorrect “strong impression” allowed valuable time to slip by, while editors, attorneys and politicians wrangled over the signing of Kehoe’s death warrant.

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“McHugh is shure [sic] Jack Kehoe was not present at the murder of Langdon. McHugh is a man of good character and I believe truthful in every respect,” Foyle told Hartranft urgently. “His affidavit is not trumped up to meet the emergency but in my judgment is entitled to great weight in the final disposition of the case. The witness can produce certificates of character without any trouble.”

Foyle stated Kehoe's case to Hartranft plainly: “I drew the affidavit at the request of Mrs. Kehoe who came into my office yesterday and have no further connection with the case and no interest in it except to see that justice is done. I know this new evidence will withstand the utmost scrutiny and will vindicate your action ... and must satisfy even the Philadelphia Times which is craving for Jack Kehoe’s blood innocent or guilty. It makes no difference to me pecuniarily or otherwise whether Jack Kehoe is hung or not, but it does make a difference to all of us and especially to you Governor as chief executive of the State whether an innocent man shall be hanged in the face of the discovered evidence establishing his innocence.”

“Kehoe’s wife left for Pottsville last night to place the affidavit in the hands of his counsel,” Foyle advised Hartranft, “and I suppose you will be furnished with a certified copy very soon of the affidavit. My object in addressing you is to assure you and the other members of the Court that this affidavit is reliable, and McHugh the witness is worthy of credit. As to myself I am well known to all the people of my county and would not attempt to misrepresent the case in any respect.”

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Coming December 8 - Part 4 of 4: All the Machinery of the Pinkerton Agency