The "Molly Maguires" and the Yellow Press

By A. Flaherty

When reporters for James Gordon Bennett Jr.'s New York Herald stayed with the facts, they left behind some valuable clues into Pennsylvania's “Molly Maguire” events. Some of my best leads came from Herald reporters. One column described railroad president Franklin Gowen's intervention in legislative proceedings as “one the most barefaced frauds that has [ever] characterized the Pennsylvania Legislature.” A second described the contents of John Kehoe's cell on the morning of his execution, including documents that illuminate the Irishman's ideology.

But the Herald's Gilded Age publisher, Bennett, was evidently a law unto himself. His exploits included late-night nude horse-drawn carriage rides. A drunken episode at the family home of Bennett's fiance ended with him, by varying accounts, urinating either into the fireplace or into the grand piano. The stunt caused a duel and ended Bennett's engagement.

Sometimes Bennett's reporters strayed into fantasia. These scenarios ranged from fictional “Molly Maguire” outrages in Pennsylvania to a fictional outbreak of wild animals at Central Park Zoo.

On November 9, 1874, the Herald published an article headlined: “AWFUL CALAMITY. The Wild Animals Broken Loose From Central Park.” It told of ‘TERRIBLE SCENES OF MUTILIATION,” “A Shocking Sabbath Carnival of Death. SAVAGE BRUTES AT LARGE ... THE KILLED AND WOUNDED ... PROCLAMATION BY THE MAYOR.”

The Herald offered specifics: forty-nine people killed, but only twenty-seven identified. Twelve man-eating beasts still on the loose. It named victims, including an “unfortunate sewing girl,” along with the address of the precinct house that held her body. Escaped animals included “Lincoln, the Numidian lion,” a rhinoceros, a puma, a black wolf, and a Bengal tiger. Three regiments had been called out to fight the wild beasts. 

At the article's end, it declared itself fiction. Not everyone read to the end. Some, convinced the mayor had declared a state of emergency, locked their doors and stayed home. Others, brandishing pistols, rushed out to defend their neighborhoods.

The New York Times called Bennett’s fake news a “gross outrage.” Prominent men demanded action from the district attorney. Lawyers discussed whether those responsible for the article could be indicted for conspiracy to defraud.

On August 4, 1874, two months before it ran the zoo hoax, the Herald published a similar article from Scranton, Pennsylvania. Its headline ran: “THE COAL REGIONS. General Prevalence of Riot, Robbery and Murder. BODIES HORRIBLY MUTILATED. Ku Klux Notices Served on Obnoxious Citizens. Vigilance Committees Organized.”

Like the zoo hoax, the article from Scranton described many horrors. It gave victims' names and sites of murders. It named, in particular, Luzerne and Schuylkill counties--two locales where Ancient Order of Hibernian (AOH) lodges were particularly strong.

“All these outrageous proceedings,” the Herald said, “are attributed to the ‘Molly Maguires,’ a band of cutthroats who are said to ply their trade of robbery and murder in the mining country.” The Herald mentioned the Schuylkill towns of Mahanoy City and Shenandoah, noting: “Reports come in from the mountain towns that bodies are found frequently, showing the fearful brutality at the hands of fiends that roam unmolestedly the surrounding country.” A Herald editorial published in the same edition called for vigilantism, as law and order had supposedly failed.

AOH political activity preceded the Herald's report. The day before Bennett published the “Molly” hoax, a Democratic nominating convention had taken place in Pottsville, county seat for Schuylkill County. Christopher Donnelly, a future school director later charged as a “Molly,” was elected that month as AOH county treasurer. At the Pottsville convention, Donnelly delivered 39 votes to the nomination of James Reilly, a young Irish Catholic from Schuylkill County running for U.S. Congress. With Donnelly's action, Schuylkill's AOH entered the national political arena.

“The Democratic primaries this year were captured, swept from their moorings by a tidal wave of Irish national feeling and bias, created by the candidacy of Mr. Reilly,” a Shenandoah paper declared. “The young Irish American element of the Democratic party, who, for the past few years, has been coquetting with the Labor Reform movement ... adopted him as their protege ... Mr. Reilly's friends were in the majority and controlled the convention.”

As AOH influence grew, so did newspaper accounts tying the Irishmen to supposed “Molly” activity. “The criminal classes,” Bennett's Herald said the day after after Reilly's nomination, “have the power to control all elections in the coal country.” Schuylkill County housed the coal region's most influential AOH lodge. The Hibernians who elected Donnelly as their treasurer in 1874 also elected John Kehoe as county delegate. Kehoe, later hanged as a “Molly,” served at the time as high constable for Girardville. In 1872, he had placed his name in consideration for state assembly.

In early November, Reilly won the federal congressional seat. A few days later, on the same day the Herald published the zoo hoax, Bennett ran a second column on Pennsylvania's “Mollies.” This headline ran: “THE MOLLY MAGUIRES. The Lawlessness in Pennsylvania--Brigands Infesting City and Country--Cruel Murders and Robberies--Ku-Klux Outrages.”

By November 1874, undercover Pinkerton operative James McParlan had been in the coal region for a little over a year. This time, the Herald embedded two recent murders--actual murders--in its report of fictional “Molly” atrocities: those of John Reilly at Wilkes-Barre and George Major at Mahanoy City.

With coal region violence on the rise, AOH electoral gains, including the celebration of James Reilly's congressional seat, were lost in the upcoming press clamor against “Molly Maguire” terrorism. Within the next four years, the same town that hosted Reilly's nominating convention would witness seven more regional murders, all ascribed to the shadowy “Molly Maguires.” Pottsville would hold nine “Molly Maguire” hangings of AOH men. Testimony from Pinkerton operative McParlan, accused by defense counsel as a murderer, would help hang all of these Irish Catholic men.

The Herald published yet another column in November 1874. Originating from Mahanoy City, its headline read: “CRIME IN THE COAL FIELDS. Horrible deeds of the Molly Maguires. Women Outraged in the Streets.” A local priest wrote back in protest. But “Molly Maguire” columns sold a lot of newspapers. The torrent of print rushed on undisturbed.

The New York Times, the New York Sun, diocesan newspapers in Boston, Erie, Philadelphia, and New York, and newspapers in Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and the coal region all labeled influential Irish American politicians, long before their arrests as “Mollies,” as banded terrorists. Though the Irishmen's goals included keeping seven-year-old boys in classrooms and out of slate-picking rooms, the reporters’ “Molly” coverage helped sway coal region juries.

The year of Pottsville's mass executions, Bennett moved to Paris. In the 1890s, still in control of the Herald, the publisher moved his paper from lower Manhattan to Midtown. Stanford White designed the new building. It  became the heart of Herald Square. When asked why he secured only a thirty-year lease, Bennett replied: “‘Thirty years from now the Herald will be in Harlem, and I’ll be in hell!’”

A former version of this post appeared under the title "The Herald Seduces the Public." The post was last revised on September 5, 2017.

The Enduring Power of Nativism

Nativist rhetoric in the United States, culled from a

vocabulary of hatred, fear, intimidation, and exclusion, reverberates in weird echoes across the centuries.

“We do not accept Jews, because they reject Christ!” the fictionalized character Clayton Townley ranted in Alan Parker’s 1988 film Mississippi Burning. “We do not accept Papists, because they bow to a Roman dictator! We do not accept Turks, Mongrels, Tartars, Orientals nor Negroes because we are here to protect Anglo-Saxon democracy and the American way!”

Parker’s film dramatized the deaths of the three Civil Rights workers killed in Neshoba County, Mississippi, on the night of June 21, 1964. The bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner remained undiscovered until early August 1964. Their efforts to register African Americans as voters during “Freedom Summer” led to their murders.

Eighty-seven years before to the day, on June 21, 1877, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania hanged the first eleven of an eventual twenty-one Irish Catholic men for alleged “Molly Maguire” crimes. Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) officer Patrick Hester died on the gallows in March 1878.

Before his arrest Hester, a grandfather and former school director, township supervisor, tax collector, and overseer of the poor, had worked for the naturalization and enfranchisement of Irish Catholic mineworkers. An editor, horrified at Hester’s efforts toward suffrage at the local courthouse, described Hester as “one of the acknowledged leaders of what is called the Democratic party in the Coal region, who with a number of his countrymen … just arrived from the temple of Justice, where they had been invested with the rights of citizenship …”

The editor warned: “Let native and Protestant American citizens ponder before they surrender their dearest rights to the rule of the Pope, or to the aggressions of the agents of foreign potentates.”

In Mississippi in 1964, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan drove the murders of Civil Rights workers. During the “Molly” trials in the mid-1870s, nativist lodges honeycombed Pennsylvania’s hard coal region. They went under cover of patriotic-sounding names.

A few weeks after the June 21 executions, a correspondent from Mahanoy City, a heavily Irish area, wrote to the Boston Pilot: “… we have got the ‘Junior Sons of America,’ ‘Mechanics,’ and many other secret societies, calling themselves Young Americans. The ‘Junior’ boys tell their fathers that they have not the same right here as [their sons] have, because they were not born in this country.”

Two Pinkerton agents who drove the “Molly” caseload, James McParlan and Robert Linden, took up residence in towns that housed prominent nativist factions. McParlan lodged in Shenandoah, home to Washington Camp No. 112 of the Patriotic Order Sons of America. The year after McParlan entered the region, Shenandoah formed a secret society under this disturbing name: “Sons of America, Shenandoah Commandery No. 14, Master Americans.”

Linden, McParlan’s supervisor, lodged in Ashland, home to Ashland Camp No. 84 of the Patriotic Order Sons of America. The Ashland division housed a subdivision with another troubling name: the “White Degree council.” The possible influence of McParlan and Linden with these groups has never been investigated.

At the issuance of the “Molly” death warrants in May 1877, the Shenandoah Herald published a column under the jocular heading “Girardville Giblets.” It carried a bald nativist taunt: “All our peace and order loving citizens were made happy this evening on the appearance of the Herald, containing the information that a beginning was to be made at disposing of the ‘Mollie’ murderers. All were happy to know that Governor Hartranft had determined to enforce the law, and that in the future, as at the present, ‘Mollieism’ has got to take a back seat, while white men say what shall be done.”

A half-decade before, the editor who so feared the enfranchisement of regional Irish Catholics had urged: “Every opponent of the Irish supremacy in this county should make it a point to examine the list and see if he is registered. … If the full vote is brought out the result will be a complete overthrow of that faction which is attempting to bind our county hand and foot to the Irish power.”

Within eight years of that publication, nativist rhetoric had helped destroy the power of “that faction.” The AOH in Pennsylvania’s hard coal region was broken. Its leaders had died on gallows in five counties, sat serving long prison sentences, or had long since fled the region.

To further explore the history of Pennsylvania’s Hibernians prosecuted as “Molly Maguires,” visit www.kehoefoundation.org.

Pennsylvania's Hibernians and the Clergy

Roman Catholic clergy figured prominently in Pennsylvania’s

“Molly Maguire” prosecutions. During the 1870s, Archbishop James Frederick Wood of Philadelphia, Bishop Jeremiah Shanahan of Harrisburg, Bishop Tobias Mullen of Erie, Father Daniel McDermott of New Philadelphia, Father Joseph Koch of Shamokin, Father Daniel O’Connor of Mahanoy Plane, Father Joseph Bridgeman of Girardville, and many more, massed together to declare Ancient Order of Hibernian (AOH) men and alleged “Molly Maguire” terrorists one and the same. Archbishop John Williams of Boston, Cardinal John McCloskey of New York, and Archbishop Patrick Ryan of St. Louis joined with Pennsylvania’s clergy in condemning the AOH men.

The clerics published their views in diocesan newspapers from Boston to New York to Philadelphia to Erie. Press coverage in the eastern cities echoed the clerics’ views and prepared the ground for the trials to come.

John Kehoe, AOH delegate for Schuylkill County executed in 1878 and posthumously pardoned in 1979, tried to cut through the resulting clamor. In fall 1875, from his seat as Girardville's high constable, Kehoe wrote to a local editor to protest the press’s conflation of the AOH with the “Molly Maguire” label.

Kehoe said: “… the Ancient Order of Hibernians … is a chartered organization, recognized by the commonwealth, and composed of men who are law-abiding and seek the elevation of their members. … Now, nothing can be more unjust than to charge the order with any acts of lawlessness, and nothing can be more inconsistent with the wishes of the people than the agitation of this matter by the leading papers of this country. The articles which have appeared on this matter have done an incalculable amount of harm, and, as a friend to law and order, I would advise their cessation.”

A few hardy clerics supported the AOH and the mineworkers’ cause. Just months before Kehoe wrote his letter from Girardville, Father James Brehony of St. Joseph’s Church in Summit Hill joined forces on behalf of the mineworkers with Thomas Fisher, AOH Carbon County delegate subsequently hanged as a “Molly.” The priest and the AOH delegate sat down together with Charles Parrish, director of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company, to negotiate the wage issue.

Their meeting proved unsuccessful. The following year, Fisher sat in Mauch Chunk Jail, charged with an alleged “Molly Maguire” crime. 

By January 1877 numerous AOH leaders, including Fisher and Kehoe, had been imprisoned, tried, and convicted. Within months, they would be sentenced to death. 

By February 1877, mineworkers’ wages had fallen to such a point fathers were unable to feed their families. Father Brehony organized a “Catholic colony” movement, in his words, “to enable Catholics who wish to leave the coal regions, to form a colony and thus avoid the disadvantages of separate removal to a distant part of the county.”

A reporter for Archbishop Wood’s diocesan newspaper described the mineworkers’ plight: “Removal or starvation are the alternatives that now stare thousands of the coal region broadly in the face. The expectation of bettering their condition there, of even obtaining a decent livelihood for themselves and their families is plainly hopeless.” The wages now being paid the men “simply place them in a condition of slow starvation …”

At the height of the “Molly” trials, an unnamed priest from Ohio addressed a group of Hibernians in Philadelphia. This priest shared Father Brehony’s passion and his willingness to confront those in authority. The unnamed priest gave a scathing assessment of Archbishop Wood’s actions against the AOH. Newspapers in Philadelphia and Shenandoah refused to give this priest’s name, his parish, or the name of his bishop. They identified him only as “connected with a prominent church in Ohio.”

The unidentified priest “denounced the action of Archbishop Wood in anathematizing the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and held that the members are the most fervent supporters of the Catholic faith.” Of Archbishop Wood's order of excommunication against AOH men in the Philadelphia diocese, the Ohio priest told Hibernians assembled in Philadelphia: “My bishop, through the official organ of his diocese, pronounced the action of the Philadelphia hierarchy as an injustice that was only worthy of the despot of Russia.”

Of the wholesale identification of the AOH with alleged “Molly Maguire” violence, the unnamed priest from Ohio concluded: “The movement against you is a Know Nothing strike at every Irish organization, and every man concerned in it deserves to be loaded with execration.”

To further explore this history, visit www.kehoefoundation.org.

From Hamden to Litchfield: A Trail of History

As its name suggests, Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University, dedicated on September 28, 2012, seeks to inform the public of the causes and consequences of Ireland’s Great Hunger. A potato fungus, bad weather and an inhumane British government policy combined from 1845 through 1852 to cause more than one million deaths from starvation and related diseases, and the emigration of more than two million Irish people from their native land.

A recent trip to the museum revealed it has chosen a compelling medium to render this history: art, executed by Irish artists.

The full power of the museum shows itself on the second floor. Formed in the shape of a ship, it holds 20^th-century artworks, along with an exhibit of 19th-century news publications.

In John Behan’s bronze “Famine Cart,” an emaciated horse hauls skeletons. A small-scale replica of Behan’s “Famine Ship” shows three masts depicting the crosses of Calvary, with skeletons as ship’s sails. Robert Ballagh’s beautiful stained-glass triptych “An Gorta Mor” gives weight to the full cycle of events, from bucolic farm scene to blight to eviction.

Margaret Lyster Chamberlain’s “The Leave-Taking,” also in bronze, depicts 17 Irish people moving toward starvation or the perils of the Atlantic crossing. For her depiction, Chamberlain relied on photographs from Auschwitz.

With the technology of photography in its infancy in the mid-1800s, no known photos have surfaced of Irish famine victims. But illustrated newspapers depicted the horrors. The illustration of Brigid O’Donnel with her two starving children, rendered in bronze by Behan and on display at the museum, came to symbolize the national plight.

In Micheal Farrell’s “Black ’47,” skeletons serve as prosecution witnesses against Charles Trevelyan and British policy. Farrell’s work shows the legal nature of man’s inhumanity to man. Kieran Tuohy’s “The Lonely Widow,” carved from 5,000-year-old bog oak, hints at its antiquity.

The sultan of Turkey, depicted in Farrell’s large painting, offered Ireland £10,000 in famine relief. Britain persuaded him to reduce his offering to £1,000 in deference to Queen Victoria, who offered the Irish £2,000. The sultan complied with Britain’s request. He then secretly sent three ships loaded with food to the beleaguered country.

My sojourn to Quinnipiac was followed by a trip to Litchfield, Connecticut, where the Litchfield Historical Society hosted the daylong program “The New America: Discovering and Documenting the Immigrant Experience.” Grace Brady, executive director of Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum, closed the program’s events. Brady’s presentation included slides of the museum’s collection.

The slides included Lilian Davidson’s “Burying the Child,” its blues reminiscent of Picasso. In Davidson’s painting, a father whose skill in digging potatoes helped his family to thrive now uses that skill to bury his child. The mother stands holding the baby, a study in despair. The adults in this painting who witnessed the burial will soon find their own graves.

Pádraic Reaney’s “Departure,” a haunting work in red and blue, shows skeletal figures aboveground stalking toward death from starvation or emigration. Figures buried below suggest Oscar Wilde’s quote: “Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.” Brady spoke of succeeding Irish generations telling children to take note of where they trod, and of what lay buried beneath them.

Brady spoke of the Choctaw Indians, a decade and a half after their forced march along the “Trail of Tears,” identifying with the oppression of the Irish by the British government. At the height of the Great Hunger in 1847 the Choctaw, in the midst of their own privations, sent $170 to Ireland for relief efforts.

Brady also spoke of “callous neglect” on the part of the British government. She described the use of battering rams by British soldiers to empty cottages of families, and the “unroofing” of cottages in the midst of winter. She spoke of the desire on the part of some in the British government to deal with “the surplus” of Irish people, with policies that proved an effective strategy.

Civilized societies honor their history. The girds of civilization help mitigate even the most unimaginable horrors. In Litchfield, the historical society that offered the venue to explore this dark history offered a boxed lunch. Curried chicken salad came alongside a small plate of brie, with sliced green apple and a few pansy blossoms.

The society’s tour included a visit to St. Michael’s Episcopal Church on South Street. There, visitors viewed the church’s stone and wood carvings chiseled by Italian immigrants. In the warm light, the anonymous wooden faces glinted with humor and intelligence.

The transformative power of art remains one of the most enduring tools in our collective march toward civilization. Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum owes its existence to the vision of John Lahey, president of Quinnipiac University, and to the generosity of Murray Lender. Without their efforts, this compelling body of work would not be securely housed under one roof.

Lahey helped secure Rowan Gillespie’s “The Victim” as the collection’s first work of art. In Gillespie’s bronze, a sitting boy wrapped only in a cloak lifts his face toward the future. The work captures both the horror and the endurance of humanity during that time. It serves as a touchstone for all who wish to honor, preserve and value our collective history.

Justice Lies Bleeding

The Wednesday evening of April 15, 2015, at Penn State’s Hazleton campus arrived a little warmer than predicted. Those climbing the concrete steps from the parking lot to the Evelyn Green Academic Building didn’t need their winter coats. An arrow on a sign reading “Irish History” directed visitors to the Greater Hazleton Historical Society presentation of “The Irish Experience in Northeastern Pennsylvania.”

Breándan Mac Suibhne, associate professor of history from Centenary College in Hackettstown, New Jersey, opened the presentation attended by almost one hundred people. Mac Suibhne examined the emergence of Ireland’s so-called “Molly Maguires,” men banded together to fight the privations of Ireland’s Great Hunger. He discussed an Irish schoolmaster’s claim, in 1856, of a list of alleged “Mollies”—a list the schoolteacher shared with the local magistrate, and then received passage for himself and his family to Australia. Mac Suibhne shared his family’s history and their integration of the painful legacies of privation and emigration.

Then Mark Bulik, author of The Sons of Molly Maguire, used the venue to discuss his understanding of Pennsylvania’s “Molly Maguire” history. Bulik's account traces vestiges of mummery in Ireland, a traditional British theatrical form sometimes characterized by male actors dressed in women’s clothing, to alleged “Molly Maguire” violence in Ireland to a transplantation of that violence to the Pennsylvania coalfields.

Both Bulik’s presentation and his book rely on a skeleton of previous histories that casually accept the guilt of Pennsylvania’s Ancient Order of Hibernian (AOH) men prosecuted as “Mollies.” Almost all of these previous histories accept the account of events promulgated by Pinkerton agents, in reports and trial testimony, and in Allan Pinkerton’s fiction, a dime novel version of this complex conflict.

The Pinkerton rendition of events from this period has controlled the entire documentation of this history, including Martin Ritt’s film, vetted by Pinkerton agency attorneys before its release in 1970. The Pinkerton version of events focuses attention on trials in four anthracite region counties. Trials actually took place in eight counties, in both the anthracite and bituminous regions. The Pinkerton version of events portrays the Hibernians as banded assassins. Exhaustive research into their biographies suggests Irish Catholic men who combined compassion with an urge for political reform.

In the late 1870s, a defense attorney asked one of the few Irish defense witnesses with the courage to take the stand his opinion of the alleged terrorist group called the “Molly Maguires.” The witness declared them a fairy story, a tale generated to entertain and scare listeners. The discussion at Penn State Hazleton added a new wrinkle to an old story. This time, per Bulik, Ireland’s alleged “Molly” terrorists wore dresses.

Bulik’s theory provides the latest red herring in the long, distorted, telling of Pennsylvania’s “Molly Maguire” prosecutions, a telling often used to titillate and entertain. This latest theory, as described in Bulik’s new book, derives in part from a survey of a hundred mummers' scripts archived at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum.

The history of the “Molly Maguire” trials in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny, Carbon, Columbia, Fayette, Luzerne, Northumberland, Schuylkill, and Westmoreland counties has its roots both in Ireland and in the powerful hybrid of Irish Republicanism and American democracy. This hybrid proved so potent it required twenty-one executions in five counties to halt its forward movement.

Bulik’s theories provoke in other ways. He informed the audience that Pennsylvania’s alleged “Molly Maguire” violence arose after an influx of famine refugees diluted the old “middle class leadership” of Pottsville’s AOH. Bulik’s references to alleged “Molly Maguire” crimes as “the ultimate trick or treat gone bad” and to alleged “Mollies” as the “evil twins of the Mummers” brought expected laughs from the audience.

Many, if not all, of Pennsylvania’s AOH men charged as “Mollies” were naturalized U.S. citizens. The youngest among them decorated the walls of their cells with American flags. They believed in the power of the American system of justice. Up to the time of their executions, they refused to believe their executions could be secured through evidence supplied by self-confessed murderers, corroborated by testimony scripted and delivered by paid Pinkerton operatives. The juries that weighed this evidence included German farmers. Some of them spoke little English.

Bulik gave a glancing reference to John Kehoe, Schuylkill County’s AOH delegate hanged as the “King of the Mollies.” Had Bulik stretched his research a bit, he may have discovered Kehoe’s letter to a Pottsville editor in 1875—a letter that Kehoe wrote from his position as Girardville's high constable. In it, Kehoe urged area residents “to encourage brotherly love instead of sowing seeds of antagonism which sooner or later may lead to bloodshed.”

A quote from Macbeth, included in the program’s handouts, summed up the proceedings for this observer: “… this sore night / Hath trifled former knowledge.”

Bulik’s treatment of this tragically complex social justice history—including prosecutions that ridiculed the protection the U.S. Constitution affords its citizens—further clouds the discussion of the social, religious, ethnic, political, financial, and industrial issues that defined it. These issues still beg for explication.

A dimly remembered quote from the 1870s sums up the ongoing need in the telling of this history: “Justice lies bleeding. / Come fly to her aid.”