The Murder of the Molly Maguire’s
By
John William Tuohy
In the late 1870's
the worst outbreak of Anti-Irish hysteria flared up in the coal mines of
central Pennsylvania and resulted in the murder of the so-called Molly Maguire’s.
The Irish worked under the most deplorable conditions in the mills and factory
in New England and other parts of the East Coast, where flash fires and
explosions were an accepted work hazard, where no Government agencies or Unions
protected them, where companies owners primary interest was in the bottom line
and not a few more dead or mangled workers, men, Women or Children.
The economy was, for
all given purpose ruled over and run by a powerful Elite. Only 160 families
controlled the nation’s textile, Railroad, Banks, insurance and shipping
business, at a time when neither income nor inheritance was taxed.
For a brief
period the civil war had driven the Irish in some parts of the country off of
the railroads, and after the war ended large numbers of Irish men took work in
the Anthracite coal fields of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Anthracite is a hard
coal that burns longer and cleaner than the more plentiful soft coal called
bituminous coal but is extremely difficult to remove from the ground.
"To get to the
coal" Labor Standard "Miners entered a series of deep and complex
tunnels in a small steel cage and then descended hundreds of feet under the
ground. Once in the mines the miners crawled on their bellies through the coal
dust water and smoke. They work here in this little black hole, all day and
every day, trying to keep cool in the summer, trying to keep warm in the
winter, picking away among the black coals, bending over until their spins are
curved, never saying a word all their live long day,... the smallest boys do
not get more than a dollar a day"
The crew bosses, of whom no manual work
was required, exerted graft for privileges in the mines and sometimes took
outward bribes so miner could keep his job. Between shake downs they also acted
as spies for the owners who were reaping enormous profits from the terror that
was their employee’s lives.
Mining, for all that
was wrong with it offered two special attractions for the Irishman, it paid on
time and in full and it better than any other type they could hope to find.
Even then the wages were miserable.
In 1839 the miners were paid a dollar a
day, ten years later the wage had increased to only $1.50 a day and remarkably,
that dropped by eight cents in 1850.
Sometimes the miners
were not paid at all when the corporations simply dissolved the company the
miners had been worker for and reorganized under another name. This was such a
frequent occurrence that finally a bill was passed in 1876, requiring the coal companies
to pay its miner in cash once a month.
The mining camps were miles from the
nearest town and the miners were forced to use the company stores for supplies
and where everything was priced 15%
higher than any other store in the state.
Sometimes the mine owners didn't
bother with the formality of selling products from their stores they simply
deducted the difference from its employees paychecks, and they deducted for
everything, food from company stores, rent in company houses, and a rent charge
for the tools used by the miners to dig the coal. Boys as young as eight were
employed in the coal mines to join the adults who worked ten hours a day six
days a week, most of the time with Sundays off.
However no child was too
young to work in the mines, of the 22,000 miners working in Schuylkill County
in 1870, 5,500 were children between the ages of seven and sixteen. The work
was as brutal as it was dangerous and no miner could be sure that once he
entered the mine that he would ever come out alive.
There were no provisions
for safety or ventilation and Mine inspectors were a thing of the future. Mine
owners easily crushed or bribed away any sort of protective legislation and it
was not until 1870 that the mines were to have two exits in the event of a
collapse, but the second exit was more theory then fact, and even that took the
deaths by fire of 179 miners in the great Avondale fire of 1869.
Nowhere were
such laws needed more than in Schuylkill County. In one seven year period 566
miners were killed and another 1,665 injured in work related accidents and in
one year, 1871, 112 miners were killed and another 339 injured.
There was union
activity in the coal mines to protest and change the working and living
conditions. In 1868, 20,000 miners went on strike for four months to gain the
right of an eight hour day. But the strike failed, the Mine owners held out
with scab labor, and the miners went back to a 60 hour week.
In 1876, a coal miner
strike almost drove the entire industry bankrupt, the miners couldn't hold out
and this strike to, was broken. Other labor flare ups, and there were many,
included sometimes violent demonstrations and often bloody clashes with the
local police of State militia. In the labor battles that did break out the
Miners used guerrilla warfare tactics. To counter those actions the Mining
companies hired thugs who could operate without fear of legal retribution, to
roam the coal mining towns and terrorize the miners in to submission and out of
the labor movement.
As an example, in
1875, in the village of Wiggans patch a squad of company thugs kicked in the
front door of minor named Charles O'Donnell who was suspected of union
activities. Waiting until one in the morning, the goons blasted their way in to
the house, first killing O'Donnell with 14 bullets to the head and then fired
several more shots into one of O'Donnell's boarders, a Mrs. Charles McAllister.
When a group of
miners wives gathered outside a company store in Tuscarora to protest prices,
company official showed up and fired randomly in to the crowd, killing one and wounding
several more. A few days later a mine boss named Patrick Varry fired point
blank into a crowd of 300 protesting miners, killing two and injuring one. In
both cases, the local law enforcement arrested both killers but released them
on the grounds that the miners had threatened their lives.
A few days later
Edward Coyle, a leading member of the local Hibernians, was found shot to death
in side a company storage bin. By the end of 1874 the violence against the
miners had grown so serve that even the ultra-conservative Miners National Association
suggested that its membership in the area arm themselves.
The Irishmen were a
favorite target for company officials since they had already gained a
reputation for themselves as rabble rouser more apt to speak their minds, and
in many cases in the Coal mines they wrongly accused the Irish of Union activities,
(which at that time, was outlawed) even through it was commonly known in
Pennsylvania that it was German miners who were behind the labor union forces,
a tradition they had carried over from Europe with them.
The anti-Irish
anti-Labor forces argued that the Irish were behind the Union activities and
got around the law by using the cloak of the Ancient order of Hibernians to
conduct Union business, what's more, they said, the A.O.H Irishmen didn't
really care about the plight of the working man, they were simply building
unions to be used later as political strong base.
However the National
Organization of the A.O.H had a strict hands off policy in the matter of Labor
unions (in fact the National A.O.H went out of its way at its national convention
in April of 1877 to denounce the Molly Maguire’s and threatened to throw out
any of its membership that was operating within the organization. Unfortunately
all this did was to encourage the public’s belief that such an organization
existed.
The Irish were in
fact, making great strides in the political make up of most county and other
local organizations, across the East Coast and especially in Pennsylvania.
And this was the real
threat. In order for corrupt big business to operate effectively, it needed
political machines that would cooperate with them, and at that point, all that
had proven by the Irish political machines is that they would use politics to
help themselves and their own kind.
If the Coal companies
were abusing their Irish and other ethnic work forces, it would only be a
matter of time before, the Celts would use that political power to correct
those abuses.
Reading Railroad
President Franklin Gowen, hired the world famous Pinkerton detective agency to
uncover all and any labor Union leaders active in his coal mines and to have
their activities stopped.
Allen Pinkerton, the
legendary founder of the Pinkerton agency was a renowned publicity hound and self-promoter,
who made it a quick public fact that he had received almost $250,0¬00.00 by the
Mining company (about 2.5 million by today's standards) to uncover Union
activity in the coal mines.
It was an outrageous
sum of money.
The press reported
every single detail of the investigation to explain to itself and the nation
why Pinkerton had been paid such an outrageous sum of money and whether or not
the famed sleuth and his army of undercover men even deserved such a fee.
Within two weeks of
his press conference Pinkerton sent his undercover men in to the Mines. It can
only be assumed that Pinkerton figured that the Irish didn't or couldn't read
the newspaper that splashed the story of Pinkerton's planned undercover
invasion of the Irish camps, and within days of their arrival almost all of
Pinkerton's operatives were uncovered and tossed out of the camp.
All except one, a man
named James McParlan. McParlan not only breached the camps security he also
claimed to have reached the inner most circles of the Mine workers Union, which
he said was operated out of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, in a an organization
called the Molly Maguire’s.
At best, McParlan was
a suspect character. It was reported in the press that he had killed a man in
Ireland and that he had once shot and killed a Policeman in upper state New
York and that he was already mired in several suspicious investigations for the
Pinkerton's in other parts of the country.
It will never be
completely clear as to whether or not McParlan uncovered even a shred of real
evidence in the coal mines, or whether the he simply fabricated what he later
told the courts.
Even the extremely
biased Judge at the kangaroo court that tried the Irish miners, found it
amazing that, according to McParlan's testimony that he was taken in to the
confidence of the Molly Maguire organization after living in the mining camp
for less than two weeks.
The fact was, that
the Pinkertons had been paid a tremendous amount of money to uncover something
and to date they had come up with nothing. What was at stake was the very
existence of the Pinkerton Company. What is also a fact, is that once the
Pinkerton's entered the coal mining camps the number of assault on companies
official doubled as did acts of sabotage against company owned property.
Several weeks after
entering the coal mines under the name McKenna, Pinkerton agent McParlan arose
from the mines and reported in to his handlers back in Chicago.
Within days a series
of arrests were made across the entire coal region. The first tried were miner
Michael J. Doyle, Edward J. Kelly and John Kerrigan, all three were accused of
the shot gun slaying of mine supervisor John P. Jones.
Shortly after the
trail started McParlan assisted in the fourth arrest in the case, that of
Alexander Campbell an important member of the local Hibernians. During almost each of
the trials McParlan took the stand to say that he had not only uncovered the
existence of a secret organization called the Molly Maguire’s, but that he had
been allowed in to its membership and knew first hand of each of the planned
murders that the Molly's had plotted out.
There may have been a
secretive organization called the Molly Maguire’s back in Ireland made up of
Irish peasants who rose up by night against their English landlords.
Another story has it
that in order to protect their identity, the group dressed as women when it
made its midnight attacks against the gentry, and some say the group was led by
a women named Molly Maguire, which would seem odd that she would let her name
be known after being involved with activities punishable by death.
By 1876, newspaper
around the country claimed that any labor strike or violence was led by a local
chapter of the Molly's. The first trail was
nothing less than a mockery of justice. The court house was surrounded by
heavily armed Coal and Iron police who were employed by the Mining company and
the States Prosecutor who was later revealed to be on the Mining companies
payroll, wore his retired US Army Generals uniform during the length of the
trail.
More than 120 witnesses
were brought before the court, most of them saying little more then what
amounted to the fact that the three miners, Doyle, Kelly and Kerrigan, had been
in the region for a while and had been looking for work.
One witness testified
that there was nothing unusual about young men roaming the mining towns looking
for work since so many of them had been blacklisted by the Mine company for
their memberships in the Hibernians.
Aside from Pinkerton
Agent McParlan, the prosecution’s chief witness to the shooting swore that he
had seen one of the miners hiding behind a row of bushes near the murder scene,
yet the killing took place in an open field.
The case was going so
well for the miners that their lawyers told the court that they would not
present any of their own witnesses since the State seemed to be winning their
case for them.
The jury however,
returned a guilty verdict against all four men who were sentenced to death by
hanging.
Next came the trail
of miner James Carroll, also a high ranking Hibernian. Carroll was accused of
the shooting murder of Policeman James Yost. Other indicted and tried for the
same murder were miners Thomas Duffey, known labor militant who was supposed to
have put up the $10.00 bounty for the Policeman shooting.
James Roarity was
arrested on the grounds that he provided the weapon used in the shooting and
finally Hugh McGeehan and James Boyle both black listed Hibernians who were
said to have fired the actual shots that killed the Policeman.
Again the state
seemed to have to no actual case against the accused accept that they were
known members of Hibernians, however the state did have a star witness (aside
from Pinkertons agent McParlan) in the form of John Kerrigan who had already
been sentenced to death for the shooting of the Mining supervisor.
It was clear, and
almost understandable, that Kerrigan had decided to turn states witness when
faced with the grim reality that he was otherwise going to hang for a murder he
didn't commit.
An alcoholic,
Kerrigan's entire body shook as he testified at the trail of the accused
killers of the Policeman. Kerrigan said that he
was present when the Hibernians (the accused) planned the Mining Supervisors
and the Policeman's killing. It was all the jury needed to hear. A few days
later miners James Boyle, Alexander Campbell, James Carroll, Thomas Duffy, Hugh
McGeehan, Michael Doyle and Edward Kelly were hung by the neck. In the case of
Alexander Campbell, his crime consisted chiefly of owning the boarding house
where the murders were supposedly planned out.
Now spurred on by
their success in the last two trails the mining companies threw out their net
for more suspected labor agitators. Over the next two years, with all
opposition to them on the run, the companies cut wages, (from $18.20 in 1869 to
$9.80 by 1877) increased hours and laid off hundreds of workers from the mines.
Next came the trials
of known labor leaders Thomas Munley, and Charles McAllister for the murder of
mine foreman Thomas Sanger and a friend, Robert Urn. Then came the trial of
Hibernian Joe Kehoe (again with McParlan as the chief witness) for the murder
of a company man named William Thomas. Then came the trial of Patrick Hester,
Peter McHugh and Patrick Tully for murder and they went on and on until 1877.
The official record
shows that 19 miners were hung by the neck, they were Irishmen one in all,
Thomas Munley, James Carroll, James Roarity, Hugh McGeehan, James Boyle, Thomas
Duffy, Michael J. Doyle, Edward J. Kelly, Alexander Campbell, John Donahue,
Thomas P. Fisher, John Kehoe, Patrick Hester, Patrick Tully, Peter McHugh,
Peter McManus, Andrew Lanahan. In the case of two others, Charles Sharpe and
James McDonald, both men were hanged right after the State’s Governor had
officially pardoned them.
The pardon was
thought to be a comprise against the rising tide of public disgust over the
butchery and the mine owners desire for complete silence of all its trouble
makers. To this day, not a single authentic document exists which proves that
an organization called the Molly Maguire’s existed in the coal mines of
Schuylkill County, the fact remains that the Molly Maguire’s had to be invented
by the Mine owners if for no other reason than to frighten the country and draw
its attention to the side of the mine owners.
There were Irishmen in the coal
mines who were actively organizing labor unions, most of the Irishmen were also
members of, and in some cases, officer in, the Ancient Order of Hibernians
To keep itself out of
trouble the Catholic Church in America openly aligned itself with the Mine
owners, which even further widen the belief that the Molly’s existed. In 1889,
Franklin Gowen, the President of Reading Railroad committed suicide. In 1907
McParlan was accused of manufacturing evidence in a trail and dismissed from
the Pinkerton service.
Despite that he did achieve a sort of celebrity status.
Several dime novel books were written about him and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a renowned
Irish hater, used McParland character in several of his books. However McParlan
fame was fleeting. He disappeared completely after 1910 and is thought to have
been killed by Irish nationalist in the forests of Washington state. In 1970
the Governor of the State of Pennsylvania reopened the case of the Molly Maguire’s
and granted all of the condemned men full pardons on the ground that they were
innocent in the first place.
