The Enduring Power of Prejudice

“MOLLY MAGUIRE PRISONERS. IF 100 BULLETS WONT FINISH YOU 1000 WILL.”

On February 6, 1875, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper published this cartoon. Leslie’s artist, Joseph Becker, traveled from New York to Pottsville, Pennsylvania, to pen a number of these drawings. Two local murders from the previous fall had left the public unsettled, an easy target for Becker’s "Molly Maguire" cartoons. Becker’s drawings appeared in print one month after the Long Strike of area mineworkers began and one month before Schuylkill’s workingmen traveled to Harrisburg as delegates to the Anti-Monopoly Convention held there.

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A letter written from Pottsville Prison in spring 1878 by John Kehoe, alleged “King of the Mollies,” begins: “Thinking over the Cruelties that has Befallen me, By Bribery Perjury and Pregudise …”

In an interview given the previous June, Kehoe had told his opinion of Pinkerton operative James McParlan.

Kehoe accused McParlan of encouraging murder, of instigating murder, of condoning murder and of committing murder.

When asked why a Pinkerton operative would encourage such criminality, Kehoe said “it served his purpose to let murder go on, so that he could more readily arouse the prejudices of the community and thus break up the organization by hanging a lot of innocent men.”

In the terrible fall of 1875, when eleven violent deaths within as many months had rocked Pennsylvania’s hard coal region, Kehoe wrote to the editor of the Shenandoah Herald. This editor, Thomas Foster, ascribed the region’s “Reign of Terror” to an alleged group of Irish assassins Foster called the “Molly Maguires.”

“We are thoroughly aware that lawless acts have been committed during the past few months,” Kehoe told Foster, “but does the ‘Reign of Terror’ facilitate a return to quietness and good feeling? I am deeply interested in this matter, for I am under the impression, which has been conveyed to my mind from the remarks of various journals, that with them ‘Mollie Maguireism’ is made synonymous with the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which is a chartered organization, recognized by the commonwealth, and composed of men who are law-abiding and seek the elevation of their members.”

Kehoe again counseled nonviolence in a letter written that same month to the Miners’ Journal about a local rabble-rouser who called himself “Americus.” Of this “Americus,” who also called for vigilantism against all alleged “Mollies,” Kehoe advised “it would be more charitable for him or any other correspondent to encourage brotherly love instead of sowing seeds of antagonism which sooner or later lead to bloodshed.”

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In the trial of Hibernians Patrick Hester, Patrick Tully and Peter McHugh for the murder of Alex Rea, defense attorney John Ryon pleaded with the jury. “[I]n spite of all our care," Ryon said, "innocent men are sometimes wrongfully convicted. One conviction of an innocent man goes far to destroy confidence in the judicial power of this county.”

“You are the guardians of human truth and human lives,” Ryon told the jury in Bloomsburg, “and upon you and in your hands are the lives of these three men.”

Attorney Daniel Kalbfus, in the defense of Michael Doyle for the murder of John P. Jones, told the jury: “He is an American citizen, and is innocent until he is found guilty.”

Kalbfus begged the jury in Mauch Chunk to set aside their prejudices. “If it was not necessary,” he said, “why do they appeal to your passions and prejudices, and why did the DA in opening the case say that he would prove to you that the prisoner belonged to an organization known as the Mollie Maguires, an organization whose deeds are too diabolical for conception, and that they require Doyle to be hung as one of that order.” 

Attorney Lin Bartholomew said in defense of Doyle: “For weeks the Coal and Iron Company has been in pursuit of the Molly Maguires … They have given time and money to ferret out the members of that dreaded organization and to crush it because it interferes with their own pecuniary interests. They have caught these men, they imagine them to be Mollies, and in order to crush them and the organization they bring over a hundred witnesses …”

By the time the attorneys addressed these juries, the “Molly Maguire” label had acquired a frightening power. Juries found all of the above-named defendants guilty. Judges condemned all four men to death. 

How did such a cartoonish label come to acquire such a frightening power—a power that for a certain length of time could automatically sentence men to death?

Note to readers: all quotes (including spelling discrepancies, misspellings, grammatical errors) are verbatim.

Coming Next: The Pilot Names a Name

 

This post, first published on May 15, 2013, was the fifth in a series of six offered in support of a lecture series given by A. Flaherty through the OLLI program at UMass, Boston.
 

Did McParlan Lie?

This illustration from Allan Pinkerton’s novel about the so-called "Molly Maguires" gives a likeness of John Kehoe and James McParlan. Kehoe, dressed in a dark suit and topcoat, holds a top hat in his hands. McParlan, standing to Kehoe’s right, wears the clothes of a workingman.

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John Kehoe, alleged “King of the Mollies,” held clearly defined views on the Pinkerton operative, James McParlan, who helped hang 21 Hibernians in five Pennsylvania coal counties.

Kehoe expressed these views in an interview given from Pottsville Prison a week after the mass hanging of six Hibernians there. They hanged the Irishmen in pairs, two at a time.

Prison officials hanged one of Kehoe’s in-laws at Pottsville on June 21, 1877.  James Carroll, an Ancient Order secretary and the father of four small children, was married to Anne O’Donnell, a cousin to Kehoe’s wife Mary Ann.

Kehoe rarely gave interviews. The shock of the recent executions may have shaken his reserve. He spoke in this instance with a reporter from the Philadelphia Times. The reporter noted of Kehoe’s interview that his “closeness and cohesiveness of stating his views … would do credit to a lawyer’s brief.”

“Before McParlan came,” Kehoe said, “they tried to make the detectives keep taverns among us. But they couldn’t find out anything because there was nothing to find out. And then they sent McParlan, who was an Irishman and perhaps a Catholic, and they instructed him to join the society and encourage and commit crime, and when he should get enough into the snare he was to begin hanging them on his own evidence and that of others whom he threatened to hang, and who, to save their necks, would lie on their fellows. After he came among us there were several murders committed, some of which he encouraged, and all of which, if he had been a true man, he could have prevented.”

Kehoe went on at length. As to McParlan’s purpose, the Hibernian said: “it served [McParlan’s] purpose to let murder go on, so that he could more readily arouse the prejudices of the community and thus break up the organization by hanging a lot of innocent men.”

By “the organization,” Kehoe meant the Ancient Order of Hibernians.

Kehoe blamed McParlan for the region’s so-called “Reign of Terror.” “I could fill your paper five times over,” he said, “telling of the actual participation of this man in the crimes for which he now condemns others. He even went through the county in carriages looking for men to go and shoot other men. This I have from those who were in the carriages with him.”

The reporter evidently questioned Kehoe about McParlan’s motive. Kehoe’s response? “His motive must have been pride in his ability to ferret out crime and the well-greased purse-strings of Franklin B. Gowen.”

AOH defense attorney Martin L'Velle echoed Kehoe's convictions about Allan Pinkerton's star operative. During the "Molly Maguire" trials, L'Velle told a jury: "from 1865 to 1873 there was no such thing as a murder case in Schuylkill County, not until the emissary of death, James McParlan, made his advent into this county, and crime since then has been in the ascendant."

Note to readers: all quotes (including spelling discrepancies, misspellings, grammatical errors) are verbatim.

Coming Next: The Enduring Power of Prejudice

This post, first published on May 8, 2013, was the fourth in a series of six offered in support of a lecture series given by A. Flaherty through the OLLI program at UMass, Boston.

Who Should Tell Our History?

By A. Flaherty

John Kehoe’s granddaughters first brought me to the “Molly Maguire” research. Before I began this work in earnest, other events fanned my interest.

Decades ago, before Amazon.com came into being, a neighbor picked up a book at a yard sale for a dollar.

A small, thick book bound in dull, red cloth. So old, the cloth had worn thin.

Published in “MDCCCLXXXVII.”

1887.

"The Molly Maguires and The Detectives,” its title page read. “By Allan Pinkerton, author of ‘The Expressman and the Detectives,’ ‘The Model Town and the Detectives,’ ‘The Spiritualists and the Detectives,’ Etc., Etc. New and Enlarged Edition.” 

Family members looked over this book with the proprietary air of a mother cat with a kitten. But interest in Allan Pinkerton’s “penny dreadful” quickly turned to disgust.

What was this? This was nothing but a dime novel. Its lurid descriptions of gangs of drunken, illiterate Irish thugs rampaging across the countryside to commit “murder and rapine” bore no resemblance whatever to the conversations held late at night by Kehoe’s descendants—individuals close to the source of this conflict.

We knew that Wayne Broehl Jr., an academic historian, had used Pinkerton’s novel to fill in gaps in his authoritative history. Broehl had relied on Pinkerton reports for the balance of his telling.

We realized that history—our country’s history, and Ireland's—was being told, in this instance, through the lens of a dime novel commissioned by Franklin Gowen, the railroad magnate whose Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company had helped fund the “Molly Maguire” prosecutions.

Pinkerton supplied Gowen with numerous operatives to aid in these prosecutions. The year after Gowen hired Pinkerton to oversee the “Molly Maguire” case, Pinkerton, president of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, went into the publishing business. His specialty was dime novels.

The year after Gowen hired Pinkerton, Pinkerton officially hired a staff of writers and artists—and went into the business of writing fiction.

Broehl told the “Molly Maguire” story as Pinkerton portrayed it, in both his novel and his detectives’ reports. Both Broehl and Pinkerton discussed prosecutions in four counties: Carbon, Columbia, Northumberland, and Schuylkill.

If Broehl had tracked the newspaper coverage, he would have discovered a widely ranging campaign against dozens more Irish Catholic men—a campaign that flowed north to Luzerne County and westward to the counties of Allegheny, Fayette, and Westmoreland.

Wherever the benevolent order called the “Ancient Order of Hibernians” had strength in Pennsylvania, the Pinkertons conducted their so-called “Molly Maguire” campaign.

Pinkerton’s dime novel—and Broehl’s retelling of these events—both dramatically undersold the true scope of the Pinkerton Agency’s efforts against the Hibernians.

Both Pinkerton’s dime novel and Broehl’s authoritative history relied heavily for their telling on the reports of Pinkerton operative James McParlan. The credibility of the prosecution’s entire caseload—and the subsequent telling of the “Molly Maguire” history—rested heavily on one remarkably fragile support: the credibility of McParlan’s reports.

Coming Next: Did McParlan Lie?

This post, first published on May 1, 2013, was the third in a series of six offered in support of a lecture series given by A. Flaherty through the OLLI program at UMass, Boston.

The "Mollies" Were (Also) Labor

Kevin Kenny, the most recently published academic author on the “Molly Maguire” prosecutions, denies the participation of Pennsylvania’s Ancient Order of Hibernian (AOH) men who were prosecuted as "Molly Maguires" in organized labor.

In Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, Kenny states: “The leaders of the defeated WBA continued to voice their condemnation of the Molly Maguires as the trials proceeded. Only one, minor official of the WBA was ever implicated in a Molly Maguire crime. Cornelius T. McHugh, the erstwhile president of the WBA branch in Summit Hill, was accused of being involved in the assassination of Morgan Powell. … Other than McHugh, no trade union leader was ever indicted for a Molly Maguire crime.” [“WBA” represents “Workingmen's Benevolent Association,” the regional mineworkers' union.]

Extensive research suggests otherwise.

Extensive research shows that not one but at least three of the AOH officers charged with “Molly Maguire” crimes had served as WBA divisional presidents. A fourth Hibernian, Michael Lawler, WBA delegate from Shenandoah’s District Six, served as one of four signatories to the articles of “arbitration by umpire” drafted by the Miners’ and Laborers’ Benevolent Association (MLBA) at their spring 1871 Grand Council meeting in Mauch Chunk.

Lawler, an alleged “Molly Maguire,” signed and help broker this agreement—one of U.S. history's early collective bargaining agreements.

A Shenandoah reporter traveled to the historic meeting in Mauch Chunk. “Quite a number of the prominent leaders of the W. B. A. of Schuylkill, Northumberland and Columbia counties were on the train,” he said. “Messrs. Michael Lawler of District No. 6, and John Morgan of No. 7, were also among the passengers and in the company of these gentlemen, exchanging opinions on the situation, gleaning intelligence as to the feelings of the men and surmising the probable action of the General Council.”

Seven years later, in a letter written from Pottsville Prison, John Kehoe exhorted a friend to contact, among others, “John W. Morgan” on behalf of Kehoe’s upcoming pardon hearing. These men—these “prominent leaders” of the WBA, union delegates Lawler and Morgan (later a state representative), and Kehoe—these men were all friends together.

The Shenandoah Herald described the men who traveled by train to Mauch Chunk for the Grand Council proceedings—the group that included Kehoe’s friend Morgan and his fellow AOH officer, Lawler.

“A majority of the members of the present Council are young men,” the Herald said, “and are certainly, as a whole, the most intelligent and respectable body of representative miners we have ever seen together, with a few exceptions there is no such thing as gas or blow to be heard from them and from their earnest, serious bearing it is very evident that they appreciate the responsibilities attending their position.”

The Philadelphia Press reported the Grand Council’s proceedings. “The Coal Troubles Over,” it said. “Resumption in the Schuylkill Region. The Articles of Arbitration. Judge Elwell to Determine the Question of Wages.”

A “Committee” of four signed the above-named articles “on behalf of the parties hereto.” Their numbers included “Morgan, Pres’t pro tem, W.B.A.,” and “Michael Lawler.”

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Further research reveals yet more clues. One clip from the Pottsville Standard shows that two alleged “Molly Maguires” served, at different times, as WBA divisional trade union president for District Ten, Tuscarora.

John Slattery, arrested as a “Molly Maguire,” served as that district’s first president. In 1877, a fellow divisional president, John Donohoe (also Donahue, Donohue) was hanged as a “Molly Maguire.” In 1872, Donohoe wrote to the Pottsville Standard to endorse Slattery’s bid for the office of register. Alleged “Molly Maguire” Donohoe signed his letter, a resolution from WBA’s District Ten, Tuscarora, “John Donohoe, President.”

Donohoe wrote: “Mr. Slattery was one of the most active in organizing this district of the W.B.A., at a time when unionism met with formidable opposition from those whose interest it was to crush it in its infancy, and … he was our first President and first member who represented us on the County Executive Board and is yet a member in good standing …”

From the scant evidence that remains of this history, not one but three Hibernians: McHugh, Slattery, and Donohoe, have leapt up as WBA divisional leaders. A fourth, Lawler, helped broker—and signed, with Morgan, as two of four signatories—the historic Mauch Chunk collective bargaining agreement. The commonwealth hanged Donohoe as a “Molly.” Lawler, McHugh, and Slattery, all arrested as “Mollies,” served as prosecution witnesses.

Kenny states: “the trade union and the Molly Maguires were clearly very different modes of labor organization. The Mollys differed sharply from the trade union in their cultural origins, their inchoate organization, and their strategy of direct violent action.”

But further research gives further strong evidence to the contrary. In testimony given during the Morgan Powell trial, it came to light that Thomas Fisher, AOH delegate for Carbon County, had met sometime in 1875 with Charles Parrish, president of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company. Their discussion took place in the Mansion House in Mauch Chunk. Fisher argued passionately on behalf of the mineworkers’ wages. Father James Brehony, one of very few labor priests in this story, sat at Fisher’s side to help press the mineworkers’ claims.

Two years later, the commonwealth hanged Fisher as a “Molly Maguire.”

During the midst of the Long Strike, a young Hibernian named Hugh McGehan led a parade of four hundred miners through the town of Tamaqua. McGehan marched with his miner’s pick on his shoulder—like a lance in a medieval fairy tale. A hostile local paper reported: “everything passed off quietly, and the men dispersed, without even threatening any one.” Eight months later, an unknown assassin targeted McGehan as he returned home from the small tavern where he kept a restaurant.

Two years after McGehan headed the parade through Tamaqua, the commonwealth hanged him as an alleged “Molly Maguire.”

As so many historians over the decades have claimed, Pennsylvania’s “Molly Maguires” were labor.

If that had been the extent of their influence, these Hibernians may have ended their lives at the bottom of mine shafts, victims of the mysterious “accidents” that marked Pennsylvania’s coal region during these days. (Kehoe’s brother, Joseph, died in one such incident. So did a Hibernian named Edward Coyle).

But the influence of Pennsylvania’s Hibernians prosecuted as “Mollies” extended well beyond trade unionism.

Coming Next: Who Should Tell Our History?

This post was the second in a series of six offered in support of a lecture series given by A. Flaherty through the OLLI program at UMass, Boston.

Was It "Political?"

By A. Flaherty

I first heard of John Kehoe, so-called “King of the Molly Maguires,” in conversations around my mother’s kitchen table.

Overheard, really. I was supposed to have been asleep hours ago.

A select group of descendants held these conclaves: my great-aunts, Kehoe’s granddaughters; and my mother, Kehoe’s great-granddaughter. Sometimes my grandmother would be there.

My father would have long since gone to bed. One memorable night, he crept down to the basement and pulled the power in a successful attempt (after the lights went back on) to encourage the ladies to their beds.

The aunts in John Huston’s film version of James Joyce’s The Dead—the ones who hosted the annual Dublin dinner—powerfully resembled our great-aunts, Madge and Marion. (So powerfully that on seeing Huston’s film one of my sisters, living overseas at the time, suffered a bout of homesickness.)

Kehoe’s granddaughters never wavered in their belief in Kehoe’s innocence, or in their belief in the innocence of many, if not all, of Pennsylvania’s alleged “Molly Maguires.”

These ladies would bring up other names at my mother’s table—names plucked from some dark, arcane history. Names that became part of family lore.

Hester. Gowen. McParlan. Archbishop Wood.

And places. Some had the romance of the old Indian names. Tamaqua. Shenandoah. Mauch Chunk.

One place, they always mentioned in hushed tones. Wiggan’s Patch.

“It was political,” Aunt Madge would assert of the motive for these prosecutions. The others would murmur assent.

In their day, these ladies were all staunch supporters of the Democratic Party—the party they saw as the champion of progressive causes. But in the days of the coal barons, Pennsylvania’s Democratic Party played host to its Gilded Age industrialists, its railroad and its coal men. In those late nineteenth-century days, Pennsylvania’s Republican Party was much more likely to champion progressive causes. In those days, the Democratic Party also played host to the majority of Irish Catholic voters—a situation  Kehoe and his fellow Hibernians hoped to rectify by their support of certain Republican candidates.

During one of our Easter dinners some decades ago, someone took a too-generous helping of ham. Aunt Madge laughed. She said: “Don’t be a Republican.”

           

In 1875, she would have said: “Don’t be a Democrat.”

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Over the years, interest in the “Mollies” waxed and waned. Kehoe's descendants shared the news about every new history or novel or film that passed into the canon. As new works came into public view, stories crept out, too.

“They always held their heads up.” They said that of the families of the executed men, and of the Kehoes in particular. “They always held their heads up.”

There were stories of the nun from Ireland who taught my mother in Mount Carmel—the nun who held Kehoe in reverent awe.

And of what my grandmother overheard said of herself as a girl on the streets of Girardville. “There goes a dirty ‘Molly.’”

And the shocking incident of Aunt Marion. Marion, the quintessence of feminine gentility, telephoned one of the published authors after his book came out.

Wayne Broehl Jr.’s book had been recently published—the Dartmouth business historian.

That same year came Arthur Lewis’ Lament for the Molly Maguires.

To Kehoe’s granddaughters, these books—both history and novel—were  inanity piled on inanity.

Madge heard Marion telephone Lewis. “It did not happen the way you portrayed it,” Marion told the author. “Your book is a lie.”

A half decade later, Martin Ritt made a film based on Lewis’ book. The ladies agreed that Sean Connery gave a powerful performance as Kehoe. And they agreed that the film’s characterizations were rooted not in fact, but in fiction. They regarded Ritt’s characterizations of Kehoe and Pinkerton operative James McParlan as an inversion of the truth.

They strenuously agreed on one other fact: Pennsylvania’s “Coal Combination” did not prosecute a group of so-called “Mollies.”

“It was the Ancient Order,” they insisted. “They wanted to destroy the order.”

Ritt’s film portrayed Kehoe as a rough: a compelling leader, but a rough one. A leader who never hesitated to order a good "bashing," and in time, even a killing. In scene after scene, Connery appeared as Kehoe in the grimy clothes of a miner, blacked from head to toe with coal dust.  

“Kehoe was no longer a miner,” my grandmother said after seeing Ritt’s film. “He was a hotelkeeper. And an important man. He was getting ready to run for state assembly.”

Years passed. Kehoe’s granddaughters lived to see Pennsylvania’s Governor Milton Shapp issue Kehoe a posthumous pardon in 1979.

Then the granddaughters, too, passed into history.

My mother’s sister, Ellen, picked up the torch. She began to research in earnest. Ellen lived to see the news clip from the 1870s I found at the historical society in Pottsville the day my car battery died. “Political Announcements,” it said. “For Assembly, Subject to Democratic rules … John Kehoe, Shenandoah.”

Underneath Kehoe’s name came the name of Bernard Dolan as candidate for prothonotary, or chief clerk of the court. Dolan preceded Kehoe as Schuylkill County’s delegate for the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH).

It appeared grandmother was right. These alleged “Molly Maguire” leaders were not oppressed mineworkers.

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When her father was hanged, Kehoe’s daughter Margaret was one month shy of her tenth birthday. What knowledge Margaret had about Kehoe, she passed on to her children—including my grandmother and great-aunts.

And John Kehoe’s granddaughters, with knowledge that came directly from his eldest daughter, said of the reason behind the execution of 21 Hibernians for so-called “Molly Maguire” crimes: “It was political.”

Coming Next: Who Should Tell Our History?

This post, published on March 27, 2013, was the first in a series of six offered in support of a lecture series given by A. Flaherty through the OLLI program at UMass, Boston.