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Kehoe Foundation

Since its inception in June 2011, this blog has received more than 14,000 hits worldwide. Interest has come from the United States and Europe, and from countries throughout the world struggling with religious and ethnic conflict.

Irish Catholics in the United States during Pennsylvania’s “Molly Maguire” conflict navigated a river of ethnic hatred. In 1871, a bemused correspondent for the Irish Times noted that “native” Americans, those born on U.S. soil, wanted Irish immigrants only as “hewers of wood and drawers of water.”

In 1871 the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), an Irish Catholic benevolent society working under newly revised charters in New York and Pennsylvania, sought to enhance the standing of Irish Catholic men. In the words of John Kehoe, AOH delegate for Pennsylvania’s Schuylkill County hanged as the “King of the Mollies,” the order’s members comprised Irishmen “who are law-abiding and seek the elevation of their members.”

Exhaustive research shows that AOH officers charged with “Molly Maguire” crimes in the Pennsylvania coalfields embraced an agenda of wide-ranging reform that included political, labor, social, and even financial initiatives. The combined efforts of these AOH men generated a powerful hybrid—one that combined American individualism with the AOH creed of friendship, unity, and support to those less fortunate. In Pennsylvania’s coal region, a region gripped by cruel Gilded Age practices, AOH advocacy included labor reform to benefit mineworkers of all ethnicities.

This extraordinary movement, born of American political optimism and colored with Irish Catholic principles of equity and compassion, never came to flower. Twenty-one AOH men charged as “Molly Maguire” terrorists died on gallows in five counties. At least sixteen of them left behind statements of innocence.

I have spent more than a decade researching and documenting this conflict. In October 2013, I formed the Kehoe Foundation to help support this work. The foundation’s website is currently under construction. I’ll post its web address here as soon as it becomes available.

In a world torn with ethnic strife, the nonviolent advocacy embraced by many of Pennsylvania’s nineteenth-century Irishmen condemned as “Molly Maguires” deserves a fair hearing.

Anne Flaherty


Visit the Kehoe Foundation at www.kehoefoundation.org

In 1875, a Historic St. Patrick's

John Kehoe’s Hibernians “stand up to the mark like men”

By A. Flaherty

In 1875, St. Patrick’s Day in Pennsylvania’s Mahanoy City broke cold and clear. But conflict gripped the hard coal region. Festivities that honored Ireland’s patron saint would highlight a longstanding war between Irish priests under the authority of Archbishop James Frederick Wood and Irish Catholic men who marched under society banners.

Long-buried accounts of those festivities help reveal this historic truth: John Kehoe, jeered countrywide three years later as “King of the Molly Maguires,” had a history of nonviolent leadership.

In early 1875, three unsolved murders from the previous year had left the press trumpeting tales of the dreaded “Molly Maguires.” The murders had exacerbated tensions between Schuylkill County’s Irish and Welsh residents. By March, the third month of the mineworkers’ “Long Strike,” newspapers were also giving out lurid reports of outrages by striking mineworkers.

But Schuylkill County’s mineworkers had just returned triumphantly from their Anti-Monopoly Convention, held in Harrisburg early that month. Their effort against Franklin Gowen’s Philadelphia and Reading Railroad had succeeded. Gowen, accused of gross monopoly by even conservative newsmen, wielded monolithic power as head of the region’s “Coal Combination.” Schuylkill’s mineworkers had successfully contested that power. They’d helped mount a legislative challenge to Gowen’s railroad charter.

Irish names studded the Anti-Monopoly roster. At least one member of the county’s Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), Michael Lawler, had joined in the Harrisburg battle. Schuylkill’s Hibernians had something to celebrate.

By this time, 450 men swelled the ranks of Schuylkill’s AOH divisions. Pennsylvania’s AOH constitution, filed in 1871 with the state legislature, named March 17 “a National Holiday of this Order, to be celebrated by a public procession of its members.” But a hostile press continually labeled these Irish Catholic men as “Molly Maguires.” Tensions threatened even their St. Patrick’s Day parade.

Schuylkill’s AOH parade would take place in Mahanoy City. It would form on Main Street, led by the St. Clair Union Cornet Band. Kehoe would march at its head. The Girardville Flute Band, from Kehoe’s home town, would lead one division.

Reports filed by undercover Pinkerton detective James McParlan detail tensions between the AOH and the clergy at this time. Like the hostile press, McParlan routinely used the “Molly Maguire” smear to identify AOH men. McParlan’s report, written before the 1875 parade, tells of Shenandoah pastor Father O’Reilly calling down “God’s curse, and his curse … on all the Molly Maguires, and their families, and on every one who [goes] to Mahanoy to see the parade.”

McParlan’s reports also document the planning behind this proud display of solidarity. One tells of AOH treasurer Christopher Donnelly, a miner who served on New Castle’s school board, purchasing “green ribbons & fringe for Regalia & flags” for the 1874 parade. It tells of Donnelly’s hope “to have a grand turnout.”

In 1875, despite Father O’Reilly’s curse, Schuylkill’s Hibernians marched under the AOH banner. On that cold morning in March, members from divisions throughout the county traveled by train to Mahanoy City. Escorts met them and took them to Metz Hall. McParlan reported: “nearly all the Body’s [sic] of Molly Maguires were represented.”

McParlan’s report documented the meeting:

“County Delegate Kehoe made a speech and said that the parade was looked upon by the Citizens of Mahanoy, as a foreboding of bloodshed, and murder, and that he (Kehoe) wanted to inform them (the MM’s) that if any of them got drunk, or misbehaved, he (Kehoe) would strip them of their regalia, that he wanted to show to the Clergy and the public, that although they bore a bad name, they were by no means deserving of it.”

Kehoe urged the AOH marchers: “when they were opposed to, by any other party … they must all stand up to the mark like men, and not act like boys.”

Kehoe’s words took hold. Area newspapers described their effect: “The much-talked of parade of the Ancient Order of Hibernians was carried out with great éclat … The conduct of the large crowd was good throughout, and the appearance of those who took part in the demonstrations, was strikingly dignified and manly.”

Subsequent events blasted Kehoe’s hopes of taming clerical hostility. In a diocesan newspaper, a correspondent who signed himself “Obedience” revealed the day’s unlikely denouement: a conflict with yet another Irish priest.

“Obedience” told of a flag that belonged to St. Kieran’s parish in Heckscherville, a flag “borrowed from Father O’Brien for the St. Patrick’s Day parade.” The AOH men had “paraded with it in Mahanoy City and refused to return it.”

“Obedience” told the fate of the flag from St. Kieran’s, carried through Mahanoy City by Kehoe’s men on St. Patrick’s Day: “Father [O’Brien] … succeeded in recovering the flag on the 7^th of May … he burned it on Sunday, May 9^th, in presence of the congregation.”

Note: This would be the last AOH parade for some time in Schuylkill County. Arrests of AOH men for alleged “Molly Maguire” crimes started six months later. Of the Hibernians mentioned above, Lawler was arrested and gained immunity by testifying against fellow Hibernians, Donnelly served many years’ imprisonment, and Kehoe was hanged.

What Nerved Brutus to Slay Caesar

Beau Riffenburgh’s recent biography of James McParlan, titled “Pinkerton’s Great Detective: The Amazing Life and Times of James McParland” [sic], documents the life of a detective so slippery, observers cannot even agree on the spelling of his name.

Young James McParlan was noted as “J. McF” in early Pinkerton reports, known undercover in Pennsylvania as “James McKenna,” and in later years spelled his name “James McParland.”

Riffenburgh visited an impressive list of archives in support of this work. But of McParlan’s long career, Riffenburgh concludes: “… there are more questions than answers. It is just this elusiveness that is the essence of the Great Detective, who was, is, and will forever more remain, an enigma.”

Was McParlan “an enigma,” or was he simply a con man? Observers can agree on this: the truth of McParlan’s career—and of his character—live on in the buried details of his caseload. As that truth lived in the hearts and minds of men, long buried, who purchased his services.

In Pennsylvania during the 1870s, a triumvirate of disappointed gubernatorial candidates helped mount the cornerstone of McParlan’s career: the “Molly Maguire” caseload. Three successive defeats in six years of Democratic Party candidates with close ties to anthracite coal and railroad interests had left that party’s conservative leaders scrambling for purchase. The politicians who suffered these losses played both direct and indirect roles in the subsequent “Molly Maguire” trials. Simply put, these men hanged their political enemies.

In 1869 Asa Packer, president of the Lehigh Valley Railroad, suffered the first of these stinging defeats. A half decade later, Packer sent his attorney, Allen Craig, to help prosecute the “Molly Maguire” caseload.

In 1872 Charles Buckalew, special prosecutor during the 1877 “Molly Maguire” Rea trial, lost a bitter campaign for the governor’s chair. One coal region editor described Buckalew’s allegiance: “Charles R. Buckalew is acknowledged to be the attorney of the Reading railroad Company. He was their agent while in the Senate, and Frank Gowen’s right-hand man generally.”

Gowen, Buckalew’s promoter, served as president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and chief special prosecutor during the “Molly Maguire” trials. Gowen’s company purchased the services of both McParlan and of a score of Pinkerton operatives who infiltrated the coalfields and the state capital at Harrisburg during this volatile time.

In 1875 Pennsylvania’s voters crushed the gubernatorial bid of Cyrus Pershing, the third candidate with close ties to Gowen. The following year, Pershing served as Schuylkill County’s president judge during the “Molly” trials. According to the New York Times, Democratic Party elder Francis Hughes “engineered” Pershing’s nomination. The year after Pershing’s defeat, Hughes served as yet another special prosecutor in the “Molly Maguire” trials.

In 1871, smack in the midst of the struggling candidacies of these coal region politicians, tens of thousands of Pennsylvania’s Irish Catholic men organized under a new official state charter of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH). Most were also Democrats. But the political views of these AOH men, champions of the workingmen, directly challenged those of the Gilded Age politicians—Packer, Buckalew, Pershing and Hughes—who carried out the “Molly Maguire” trials under Gowen’s hand.

This conflict in Pennsylvania left behind more than 15 alleged "Molly Maguire" murder victims. It devastated families on all sides of the conflict. It destroyed a nascent labor union and left a political reform movement in tatters. It shattered the political influence of Pennsylvania’s AOH and tainted AOH influence countrywide. That influence threatened to grow exponentially after Pennsylvania’s 1871 official state chartering.

Men caustically—and continually—disappointed in their political ambitions mounted the “Molly Maguire” trials. Those trials pivoted around the purchased testimony of Pinkerton detective McParlan. McParlan’s testimony declared the AOH and a shadowy group called the “Molly Maguires” one and the same.

Riffenburgh says of McParlan: “… most of those who have evaluated his character based on what he did in relation to the Molly Maguires have not truly produced assessments that withstand impartial analysis of the full facts.”

And yet after almost a century and a half, historians have not yet brought forward the facts of these frustrated politicians who helped Gowen mount his “Molly Maguire” campaign.

More than 135 years have passed since McParlan gave his “Molly Maguire” testimony. That testimony sent dozens of influential Irish Catholic men to prison and more than a score—including four AOH county delegates—to the gallows. Yet McParlan’s most recent biographer, Riffenburgh, can declare this detective only “an enigma.”

If McParlan lied in his “Molly Maguire” testimony, his long career as “Pinkerton’s Great Detective” marks one of the most effective and murderous cons in history.

“‘What nerved Brutus to slay Ceasar [sic]?’” defense attorney Daniel Kalbfus asked a jury of McParlan in 1876. “‘Why did Booth kill Lincoln? … ambition, that which threw Satan over the walls of heaven.’”

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For the Grace of a Happy Death

December 18, 2013, marked the 135^th anniversary of the execution of John Kehoe at Pottsville, Pennsylvania. On that day in 1878, newspapers country-wide reported the scheduled death of the “King of the Molly Maguires.”

On that morning in 1878, an unnamed reporter for the Philadelphia Times sent to cover Kehoe’s execution also described the transformation by six nuns of the cell at Pottsville Prison used to host two final Masses said on behalf of the dying man:

“Shortly after 7 o’clock this morning Father Gallagher entered Kehoe’s cell and a few minutes later began the celebration of the Mass. In one corner of the corridor, in a large, double cell used as a sort of storehouse for the shoes made by the convict laborers, the Sisters had erected a small altar. As I entered this in the dark hours of the morning, the chill look of the prison was left behind and there in a convict cell was a perfect fac-simile of a convent chapel.”

The reporter described in detail the “MASS IN A PRISON CELL.” The six nuns, four from St. Patrick’s Church in Pottsville and two from the neighboring town of St. Clair, had draped every wall of the dingy storeroom with white muslin draperies. They had brought in branches of evergreen to mount against the white backdrop. They had brought in ornamental white plaster candleholders to place on the small altar. They had lighted the altar with candles.

Those assembled for the two Masses that morning knelt on the room’s cold floor. Father Gallagher, dressed in vestments of gold and white, performed the first service. Two acolytes attended the priest. All prayed “for the grace of a happy death for Kehoe,” and all received Holy Communion. Father Brennan conducted the second service.

“After the last service had been concluded,” the reporter said, “Kehoe expressed his satisfaction that the day was one of the Virgin Mary’s feast days, for, he said, he had great confidence in her intercessory power.”

The account in the Philadelphia Times also included the details of Kehoe’s execution, a grim affair that involved a slipped knot in the ropes and a prolonged strangulation in a snowstorm. While Kehoe struggled for breath on the gallows, Father Gallagher, stationed below him, spoke the words of the plenary indulgence. The Times reporter gave details, too, of that ritual: “for the indulgence to have its full effect perfect charity must exist, and there must be in the heart and mind of the man a destruction of all affection, not only to grievous sins but also to venial or lighter ones.”

Kehoe, Schuylkill County delegate to the Ancient Order of Hibernians, had been twice elected high constable of Girardville and was named, in 1872, as a nominee to Pennsylvania’s State Assembly. He left behind a wife and five children. At the time of his death, Kehoe was 41 years old.

The Philadelphia Times account from the day of the execution contained no byline. A year and a half previously, a Philadelphia Times reporter who signed himself simply “C. CATH.” had interviewed Kehoe at length in his cell at Pottsville Prison.

Fifteen months after the unnamed Philadelphia reporter witnessed Kehoe’s execution in the snowstorm at Pottsville, C. Cathcart Taylor, city editor for the Philadelphia Times, committed suicide at his home in Philadelphia. At the time of his death, Taylor was 34 years old. Whether Taylor had witnessed the two Masses said in the prison cell and Kehoe’s subsequent death on the gallows is not known.

Kehoe’s body was transported by train to his home in Girardville. His burial took place at St. Jerome’s cemetery in Tamaqua, Schuylkill County. Two of Kehoe’s in-laws, victims of an 1875 vigilante attack, also lay buried in the cemetery there that overlooked the town.

A carved hand grasping a cross and a bloom of spring flowers decorates Kehoe’s gravestone. Its inscription reads:

“Sacred to the memory of John Kehoe

A native of the County Wicklow

Ireland.

Died Dec. 18, 1878,

Aged 41 Years, 5 Mos. & 15 Ds.

May his soul rest in peace.

Whilst in this silent grave I sleep,

My soul to God I give to keep.”

Promise Denied and Promise Renewed

“Well, the sun is surely sinking down,” James Taylor sang from the glass pavilion of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum on November 22, 2013. Visitors gathered in Stephen Smith Hall heard Taylor’s tribute via live broadcast. “But the moon is slowly rising.”

The Library’s commemorative events that day also included a new exhibit called “A Nation Remembers.” This video tribute opened with a 50-year-old broadcast from radio station WGBH, captured during the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s performance of a Rimsky-Korsakov opera score.

Thirty minutes into that afternoon’s program in 1963, music director Erich Leinsdorf interrupted. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Leinsdorf told the matinee audience, “we have a press report over the wires. We hope that it is unconfirmed, but we have to doubt it. The president of the United States has been the victim of an assassination.”

Gasps of disbelief filled Symphony Hall. Leinsdorf continued: “We will play the funeral march from Beethoven’s Third Symphony.”

The country, as so many later observed, had changed forever.

Veteran newsman Robert MacNeil, in Dallas that day to cover Kennedy’s speech and parade through the city, recalled the vivid sense of promise that colored the parade’s beginning: in MacNeil’s recollection, the “resplendent” presidential couple descending to the tarmac at Love Field, the strawberry-pink suit the first lady wore, the sheaf of blood-red roses she carried, the hand reaching through the fence to break off a souvenir bloom from the bouquet.

That morning in Fort Worth, the President had cheered “no faint hearts in Fort Worth.” He had spoken of the need for all U.S. citizens to “assume the burdens of leadership.” Kennedy’s speech given five months before at American University had called for a “genuine peace … the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living …”

The presidential party left Love Field on November 22 at 11:40 a.m. The motorcade reached Dealey Plaza just minutes before its planned destination. The three shots sounded as it turned onto Elm Street, past the Texas School Book Depository.

The rest lives in collective memory: the Secret Service agent spread-eagled over the back of the convertible, the message sent to Parkland Hospital to stand by for “a severe shotgun wound.” And then Walter Cronkite’s announcement.

It was for many Americans, said a BBC commentator on the 50th anniversary, “as though hope itself had died.”

But in Dallas for the 50^th anniversary memorial, where shots had reverberated through Dealey Plaza, young naval officers resplendent in dress uniform sang “America the Beautiful.” The early afternoon light glinted off their white caps. The tenor line of the song rose and fell, floating over the heads of the assembled crowd.

On the grassy knoll, Mayor Michael Rawlings unveiled a new monument inscribed with words from a speech Kennedy had prepared for the Dallas Trade Mart, a speech that was never delivered. In it, Kennedy spoke of the essential need for righteousness to underlie strength: “‘except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.’”

In Kennedy’s 1963 Civil Rights Address to the country, he spoke of “a moral issue,” one “as old as the scriptures and … as clear as the American Constitution …” Kennedy’s brand of Hibernian optimism and inclusion continues to animate today. A young student vibrant with energy told a BBC newsman on the anniversary date of the assassination that Kennedy’s call to action is “as relevant today as it was in the sixties.”

“So close your eyes,” Taylor sang for those who heard the Kennedy Library tribute. “You can close your eyes, it’s all right. … I can sing this song. And you can sing this song when I’m gone.”

In February 2014, Anne Flaherty will present a three-lecture course titled “Pennsylvania’s ‘Molly Maguires’: Prosecution or Witch Hunt?” through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) program at American University.