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The institution of a republic embodied an attempt to fix the
supremacy of the plantation slavemaster class, through a Federal
state that was designed to give these magnates the independence
of virtual principalities. This is how American corporate law
came into being as the vehicle for "private ownership"
of resources that otherwise would belong to a people, a nation.
In the following article on the ephemeral Molly Maguires, the
influence of privatized power is illustrated in its crusade to
destroy the independence of the laboring class. Modern Americans
are accustomed to the media's portrayal of the republic as a benefactor
to Americans, but the reality that republican institutions have
always embodied the agendas of the ruling class is poignantly
portrayed in this story about the struggles early laborers endured
in trying to get some fairness from the corporations of the republic
that have been the principal employers of the national economy.
To this day, no one knows if there really was a group called
the Molly Maguires, because the group's members were sworn to
secrecy; but 20 men were hanged. One of the reasons this episode
is largely forgotten is not only because the trials were carried
out by interests that guaranteed that the results would not be
just, but underlying it all was a series of acts of sabotage by
workers against the ruling class, that the ruling class accurately
perceived as a direct threat to its hegemony over society. Police
states are terror-driven societies, and the only way to forestall
mass resistance is to make an example of any individual resistors,
so that potential resistance will be terrified into inactivity.
This also happened to the Haymarket anarchists, who were handed
death sentences on account of their ideologies, who were pardoned
a century after the great injustice was carried out of depriving
them of their lives. The principle of rule-by-terror is very
old, and the Chinese phrased it this way: "Kill one, frighten
ten thousand." MAKING SENSE OF THE MOLLY MAGUIRES By Kevin Kenny
(Oxford University Press, 368 pp)
(Review by Thomas Flanagan, author of numerous books, including
"The Year of the French," and "The End of the Hunt."
He is currently writing a novel set in Ireland in the 1940s)
On June 21, 1877, in the anthracite-mining county of Schuylkill,
Pa., 10 men, all of them Irish and, so the state charged, members
of a secret, oath-bound conspiracy to murder known as the Molly
Maguires, were hanged in two batches. Four in Mauch Chunk, a
town as gaunt as its name, were hanged together on a special gallows
built for the occasion. In neighboring Pottsville, it had at
first been intended that the condemned be hanged on a scaffold
capable of accommodating all six, but it was later decided to
hang them in pairs. All 10 were accompanied by priests, and most
of them made well-rehearsed expressions of guilt and contrition.
All were buried in consecrated ground in Catholic cemeteries.
Twenty men in all would be executed, but it was the mass hangings
on Black Thursday that lingered in the American imagination, like
the exorcism of an immense, depraved and unfathomable evil. Great
crowds had assembled in the streets of the towns and were kept
in order by the heavily armed Coal and Iron Police. History,
wrote the Chicago Tribune, "affords no more
striking illustration of the terrible power for evil of a secret,
oath-bound organization controlled by murderers and assassins
than the awful record of crime committed by the Molly Maguires
in the anthracite-coal region of Pennsylvania." (Interestingly
enough, the Hawaiian "Committee of Public Safety,"
that launched the overthrow of the legitimate Hawaiian government,
as well as the Sons of Liberty, were both secret, oath-bound organizations.
WFI Editor) And the Philadelphia Public
Ledger, published in a city not too distant in miles from
Schuylkill but dwelling, it was hoped, in a different moral universe,
spoke of a "day of deliverance from as awful a despotism
of banded murderers as the world has ever seen in any age."
The Mollies had acquired and were to retain a powerful, baleful
and complex symbolic meaning. Oaths, even wicked ones, were taken
seriously, and the wicked ones conjured up the amorphous terrors
of dark and lethal conspiracies. Ironically, and with tragic
consequences, two organizations that fiercely opposed the Molly
Maguires were deliberately branded as their secret puppet masters
and made to share their infamy. One was the miners' legitimate
labor union, the Workingmen's Benevolent Assn., which had inherited
the traditions of British trade unionism, which rejected violence.
In particular, it shunned Mollyism, which had acquired a national
reputation for the use of murder and intimidation as weapons in
industrial conflict. The other target was, to all intents, the
Roman Catholic Church.
There had indeed been violence and disorder in the mining district
ever since the Civil War, and it included the murders - Kevin
Kenny prefers to call them assassinations - of some 24 mine foremen
and superintendents. The killers formed a loose group that may
as well be called Molly Maguires as anything else, but only if
the name is used in the subtle and precise manner of Kenny in
this remarkably fine work of historical research and analysis:
"The Molly Maguires always existed on two related levels:
as a sporadic pattern of violence engaged in by a specific type
of Irishman, and as a ubiquitous concept in a system of ideological
representation that sought to explain the variety of social problems
besetting the anthracite region in the mid-19th century.
In other words, the violence in which the Molly Maguires undoubtedly
engaged was put to all sorts of uses by contemporaries, most effectively
by those who were opposed to Irish immigrants and organized labor.
Any reinterpretation of the Molly Maguires today needs to inquire
simultaneously into how the Molly Maguires were represented and
what they may have been in fact."
Attitudes toward the Irish had been shaped almost from the hour
of their arrival in Schuylkill in the wake of the great famine
of the 1840s. Throughout the decades and the turmoil that followed,
they were given expression and shape in the nativist pages of
Benjamin Bannan's Miners' Journal. Bannan, of Welsh descent,
held a political vision that was not ignoble: a sober God-fearing
industrious republic of free workmen and their employers. His
austere Protestant soul, however, was revolted by the spectacle
of a "race" that seemed not to respect this vision,
as the Irish, to his eyes, did not.
For one thing, they were not Welsh. Work in the mines was divided
between the skilled labor and the outside tasks, such as sorting
out slate. The skilled and experienced miners were from Wales,
trained in mining through generations and with a strong sense
of guild solidarity. The unskilled laborers were Irish and came,
most of them, from West Donegal, where there were no mines nor
much of anything else. The nativists - the racists of that day
- of course regarded the difference as evidence of the laziness
and ignorance that were part of the Irish essence. The Welsh
were inclined to agree. (Much of this points up the reality that
racism not only exists between white and non-white ethnic groups,
but within the white ethnic group itself. This can also be found
among the black Americans, the lighter skinned blacks constituting
an upper class among blacks. Ultimately, racism is the exaggeration
of distinctions among people for vile purposes, and it is more
driven by hatred than real differences. WFI Editor)
Muff Lawlor's shebeen in Shenandoah and Jack Kehoe's Hibernia
House in Girardsville were not places to which Bannan might be
tempted to repair for a thoughtful glass of claret. But of course
he was never tempted. He had concluded, as had his readers, that
the Irish constituted a distinct and abominable branch of the
human family. To their laziness were joined other vices: drunkenness,
a readiness to fight, blasphemy, primitive superstition and a
slavish idolatry of the pope. A fear of the pope and his designs
upon American democracy was general, but the Irish peasantry were
believed to have brought over the plague in a particularly virulent
form.
Elsewhere in the same county, the poverty of West Donegal was
spoken of with pity, and British gazettes could scarcely describe
it without a shudder: "The coast, over the greater part
of the distance, is singularly broken and intersected … The
seaboard is almost a chaos - a dismal wilderness of bog and pond,
of barren sand and naked rock - a tract of desolation in which
moors, ponds, shivering torrents, drifting sands and denuded granite
are mingled in utter melee, and severally striving for the mastery."
The largest landlord, the marquis of Conyngham, governed from
the distant pasturelands of County Meath. He was represented
on the scene by agents and overseers, who prefigured the mine
foremen and superintendents of Schuylkill, first as perceived
oppressors and then as targets.
In Donegal, as well as in many other regions of Ireland, a tradition
of violence against agents and middlemen had been developing for
a century under a variety of picturesque names - Rockites, Whiteboys,
Terry Alts, Ribbonmen. And Molly Maguires. The West Donegals
had taken little part in these episodes, but they knew all about
them; violence was part of the texture of their lives. Violence
in Schuylkill, a product of the same culture, with its tradition
of retributive justice, began during the Civil War, as a savage
reaction against conscription into what was seen as "a
rich man's war." But it grew during the 1870s, as
Kenny shows, as a response to worsening industrial conditions
created by the expansion of capitalism.
It is an irony of the Molly Maguire's history, as distinguished
from its historical moment, that the more capable the historian
the more likely he is to conclude that we will never learn much
about the actual Mollies, beyond their names and the dates of
the particular murders for which they were hanged. And we may
not even know that, for several of the men hanged were innocent
of those crimes. We know so little partly because until recent
years, we knew so little about the laboring classes and partly
because we have accepted the vivid and melodramatic near-fictions
of their enemies.
In October 1873, a superintendent of Allan Pinkerton's National
Detective Agency reported to Franklin Gowen, president of the
Reading Railroad - which under his vigorous leadership controlled
mining as well as transportation - "the rumored existence
at Glen Carbon of an organization known as the 'Molly Maguires,'
a band of roughs joined together for the purposes of instituting
revenge against anyone against whom they may have taken a dislike."
Within the month, Gowen was meeting with Pinkerton.
Molly Maguire, so Gowen revealed to a supposedly horrified Pinkerton,
was a "noxious weed" transplanted from Ireland. The
"band of roughs" in Glen Carbon had within days expanded
to stretch across the continent. "Wherever in the United
States iron is wrought, from Maine to Georgia, from ocean to ocean
- wherever coal is used for fuel, there the Molly Maguire leaves
his slimy trail and wields with deadly effect his two powerful
levers - secrecy and combination." Galvanized by this threat
to an industrialized nation's very existence, which seems to have
escaped the attention of the head of a national detective agency,
the two men vowed to join their efforts.
Pinkerton seems not to have noticed Gowen's eccentric manner of
conveying information by rodomontade, possibly because he himself,
we discover, spoke in an identical way. They determined that
they must send an undercover detective into the field, and as
Pinkerton - or, rather, his ghostwriter, says: "It is no
ordinary man that I need in this matter. He must be an Irishman,
and a Catholic, as only this class of people can find admission
to the Molly Maguires." And he insisted that none of his
agents "shall ever be required to appear and give evidence
on the witness stand." Hamlet himself faltered before the
conditions his father's oath laid upon him, but Gowen, in a species
of pentameter, accepted the stipulation.
The man Pinkerton chose, James McParlan, a young native of County
Armagh in Ulster, entered the Schuylkill region in 1873 under
the name of James McKenna and, at the same moment, entered American
folklore. For 2 ½ year, he lived in the constant company
of men who cheerfully murdered informers and left that company
only to testify at their trials. Of his courage and his quick-wittedness,
there can be no question, but the narrative shaped from his thrilling
experiences is a different matter. Even before the final executions,
Pinkerton had produced his long exposition, copiously illustrated
- with crude woodcuts - "The Molly Maguires and the Detectives."
To the present day and until Kenny's study, nearly all subsequent
accounts have derived from this work and from its numerous imitators.
The only real attempt to break what Kenny calls Pinkerton's narrative
mold was James Coleman's Marxist study in 1936.
Kenny, like most historians these days, has an austere distrust
of narrative, which is regarded as inherently simplistic and,
in the case of the Molly Maguires, with good reason. "McParlan's
activities in the anthracite region need only be briefly summarized
here," he says with a touch of donnish hateur, "as the
job of reconstructing his movements has already been done well
and often." A chapter giving some consideration to the conventions
and purposes of the narrative tradition, of which Pinkerton's
book is an instance, might have taken Kenny off his path, but
it might have been worth the diversion. It is a bizarre but far
from unique example of mid-19th century popular culture,
which finds room not only for its central narrative of murder
and detection but for accounts of how cocks are trained for fighting,
the nature (albeit bowdlerized) of an Irish wake, the furnishings
of a priest's parlor, choruses and verses of Irish music-hall
songs, reports of prize fights. But it is a narrative that moves
inward through layers of secrecy to the center of a conspiracy.
Small wonder that Arthur Conan Doyle drew upon McParlan's adventures
for one of the Sherlock romances, "The Valley of Fear."
Who were the Molly Maguires; what did they do and why? It is
the third of these questions that the Pinkerton narrative and
subsequent books fail entirely and mysteriously to answer. The
currently accepted theory, expressed for example in Wayne Broehl's
"The Molly Maguires," as Kenny says in summary, holds
that "on both sides of the Atlantic, the antagonists of the
Irish were the same - the English. In Ireland they were landlords
and agents; in Pennsylvania they were mine owners and mine bosses."
A romantic notion but one that lacks particularity; the Mollies
knew they were Irish all right, but they were not motivated by
primordial ethnic passions.
What then? In a scene in Pinkerton's book, one among many, a
Molly reveals to McParlan a plan to wreck one of the trains of
the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Co. on the general
ground that "the Company would be greatly injured,"
as though Schuylkill was a kind of Sherwood Forest and the company
a kind of Sheriff of Nottingham to be tormented on general principle.
Buried within "Making Sense of the Molly Maguires,"
there is a counter-narrative, and a most persuasive one. Its
central figure is not McParlan or Kehoe, the "King of the
Mollies," but Gowen, described by an admirer as "one
of the great architects of industrial capitalism," and a
figure straight out of Theodore Dreiser. By 1873, using the well-known
methods of the robber barons, he had driven out of Schuylkill
the independent mine owners and the middlemen. Two forces from
the emerging labor movement remained to be confronted: the Workingmen's
Benevolent Assn. and, distinct from it, the shaggily organized,
mute and murderous band of roughs known as Molly Maguires. They
left behind them only a few badly written notes of warning, a
few rough ballads and a curiously powerful legend.
Gowen shattered or at least thoroughly demoralized the workingmen's
trade union by a three-branched campaign: providing welfare benefits
by which it was undercut, defeating it in the long strike that
it attempted and insinuating its identity with the Mollies. By
1875, with the strike in ruins, the Mollies alone lay in the field
against Gowen. Their notions of retributive justice, as Kenny
rather primly calls it, looked to less dispassionate eyes like
terrorism and murder. Gowen's problem and Pinkerton's, and the
problem of nativists in America in general, was to explain how
these murderous roughnecks constituted parts of a conspiracy so
wide that it threatened the republic.
The answer lay at hand. The Molly Maguires had taken control
of the Schuylkill branches of the Ancient Order of Hibernians,
which served as their front. In the world beyond, membership
in the AOH was shared by hundreds of thousands of boisterous Irishmen
with an array of passwords, secret winks, arcane rituals, perfervid
Catholic piety, highflying mumbo jumbo - parts of that urge to
join societies that Alexis de Tocqueville had remarked upon as
peculiarly American and identical to such Protestant equivalents
as the Knights of Pythias and the Odd Fellows. And as innocent.
By preying upon nativist fears and paranoia, the enemies of the
Mollies were able to insinuate the notion - despite the fierce
and unequivocal denunciation of the Molly Maguires by the Catholic
hierarchy - that the Schuylkill branches of the order were merely
the entering wedge of a vast scheme. Indeed, as Kenny persuasively
suggests, the Black Thursday processions to the gallows of prisoners
and priests, the public admissions of guilt and prayers for forgiveness
may have served, beyond religious need, the ideological function
of establishing a distance between the church and these shamefully
errant sons.
By 1878, the Molly Maguires were gone from Schuylkill, never to
return there but continuing to linger in the American imagination.
History itself, as sometimes it does, wove that imaginative lingering.
The trials were a mockery of any of any judicial process. As
one historian put it: "A private corporation initiated
the investigation through a private detective agency, a private
police force arrested the supposed offenders, and coal company
attorneys prosecuted - the state provided only the courtroom and
the hangmen." Gowen was the preeminent prosecutor, and
his long closing speech is a marvel, with great swatches of verse
by Bulwer-Lytton and even more dreadful poets and playwrights.
In 1889, on a Friday the 13th, he took a hotel room
in Washington and blew his brains out. Legend created a belated
act of retributive justice by the Mollies.
McParlan became a Pinkerton superintendent and, 30 years later,
persuaded a man named Harry Orchard to implicate the Western labor
agitator Big Bill Haywood in a conspiracy that murdered a former
governor. Clarence Darrow, Haywood's lawyer, destroyed him in
cross-examination, using as material the methods he had employed
with the Molly Maguires. In "Big Trouble," the late
J. Anthony Lukas' book on the Haywood episode, Lukas speaks derisively
of McParlan as "the Great Detective."
In 1979, the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons recommended a posthumous
pardon for Jack Kehoe, "the king of the Mollies," and
the governor, Milton Shapp, denounced Gowen's "fervent desire
to wipe out any signs of resistance in the coal fields."
All Pennsylvanians, he said, paid tribute to "these martyred
men of labor." In the pages of Pinkerton's book, Jack Kehoe
displays from time to time a sardonic, indeed a mordant, wit.
These recent developments may have brought a smile to his hard-bitten
lips. Wherever he is.
SOURCE: Reprinted from the 5 April, 1998, issue of the Los Angeles Book Review. Reprinted in the public service of the national interest of the American people.(WFI EDITOR: Pinkerton became infamous as the provider of security for the railroads. When Lincoln was elected President, the environment was so charged by the imminence of a nationalist revolution in the South, death threats were made against the President-elect. Pinkerton was hired by the Federal Government to guard Lincoln when he entered the City of Washington, D.C. Afterwards, Pinkerton was hired to establish a security agency for the President, and to provide military intelligence on the Confederate armies during the Civil War. This agency was called the Secret Service, which still exists today, and they have only lost four presidents, starting with the very first one they were organized to protect, Abraham Lincoln.) |
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