The Molly Maguires

BRIAN: So today on the show, we’ll celebrate St. Patrick’s Day by exploring Irish culture in America. We’ll hear some Irish-American music made at the birth of the recording industry. We’ll revisit our story on the Irish Brigade, a legendary federal union in the Civil War known for its bravery. And we’ll talk about Irish-American identity and ask, why does everybody get to be Irish on St. Patrick’s Day?

JOANNE: Now of course, it’s hard to see, but trust us, we’re all dressed in green here at BackStory and looking forward to telling the story of the Irish in America.

NATHAN: At the same time that New York’s visionary archbishop was constructing a symbol of spiritual grace and Irish benevolence, 135 miles west of New York City, Irish mineworkers were up in arms in a manner and under a banner that reached back to the old country.

KEVIN KENNY: The Molly Maguires really, in one sense, were the last of their line, because that secret society tradition, rooted in very old culture in rural Ireland, is an unlikely fit for the American Industrial Revolution.

NATHAN: Kevin Kenny is a history professor at Boston College. This is a story of a secret society, and a mystery that’s still roils the blood in eastern Pennsylvania. By the mid-19th century, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing. It was like an unstoppable engine, and it ran on coal. Particularly hard coal known as anthracite, good for use in factories and in homes. And the world’s largest supply happens to be in eastern Pennsylvania.

KEVIN KENNY: It’s a very rapidly developing industrial region. Very wild, very rugged, and very violent.

NATHAN: In the 1860s, the anthracite region of Pennsylvania could be divided into two halves– the upper region around the town of Scranton, and the lower region around the town of Pottsville.

KEVIN KENNY: In the upper region, the railroads, the big corporations, already have a monopoly over the production and distribution of coal. In other words, they own the coal mines and they’re shipping the product out to New York City.

NATHAN: This monopoly is enviable to one Franklin B. Gowen, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad. It’s his dream to replicate this model in the southern region. But he has one major obstacle– a powerful labor union known as the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association.

KEVIN KENNY: What’s distinctive about the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association– known for short as the WBA– is that it’s open to mineworkers of all kinds. In other words, the most skilled and the least skilled Protestant and Catholic British and Irish.

NATHAN: The WBA wants fair wages and better working conditions. With their 35,000 members, they could bring coal production to a halt with a single strike. But striking wasn’t the only weapon used against mine owners, and the WBA wasn’t the only player in the game.

KEVIN KENNY: A smaller, shadowy, obscure form of labor organizing that has much the same goal, which is decent wages and working conditions, but goes about the task very differently. And that group we refer to as the Molly Maguires.

NATHAN: The Molly Maguires consisted of the most alienated of the Irish mineworkers.

KEVIN KENNY: They were the unskilled laborers. The ones who came from the most remote parts of Ireland. The ones who were most likely to speak the Irish language.

NATHAN: And as Kenny referred to earlier, they have their own ideas about how to obtain better working conditions.

KEVIN KENNY: If there was a problem in a particular mine, they would approach the mine owner and they might post a coffin notice. And a coffin notice was a crudely sketched image of a coffin on a piece of paper that would be nailed to somebody’s door with the words, “This will be yours.”

NATHAN: This form of rural secret society violence had a long history in the Irish countryside. In fact, the American Molly Maguires were inspired by an Irish group in the 1840s with the same name.

KEVIN KENNY: Molly Maguire, obviously, is a woman. And there are various stories told in Ireland that there was a real woman, Mistress Molly Maguire, who was to be evicted from her household and refused to leave, and that the house was leveled on top of her. And then a group of people got together to avenge her memory.

That’s folklore. We don’t know of any particular woman called Molly Maguire. What we do know is that groups of young men engaged in this pattern of secret society violence, and to protect their anonymity, they dressed as women. They took the image of Molly Maguire as the emblem of their struggle for social justice in the Irish countryside.

NATHAN: The American Molly Maguires didn’t dress as women, but they did carry out the assassinations of mine owners, foremen, and supervisors. And at the Reading Railroad headquarters in Philadelphia, Franklin B. Gowen saw an opportunity. He would use these assassinations to dismantle all forms of labor organization in the mines.

KEVIN KENNY: Although the WBA steadfastly opposes Molly Maguire-ism, Franklin B. Gowen argues consistently that the two are related. That the Molly Maguires, in effect, are the terrorist wing of the trade union. And it’s on that basis that he sets out to destroy both.

NATHAN: In October of 1873, Gowen holds a meeting with Allan Pinkerton, the founder of America’s first detective agency. He asked Pinkerton to help him get to the bottom of what he describes as the Molly Maguire conspiracy. Pinkerton dispatched an Irish born agent, James McParland, to go undercover in the mining community.

KEVIN KENNY: And he masquerades as a good fellow, having lots of escapades, and throwing his money around. Ingratiates himself with the local community.

NATHAN: For two and a half years, McParland sends frequent reports back to the agency with his findings. He tells Pinkerton the Molly Maguires have connections to yet another Irish organization.

KEVIN KENNY: McParland’s first move is to connect them to another organization, and that is the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the AOH. The AOH is a Catholic fraternal society, a working class fraternal society, that exists not only in Pennsylvania, but nationally and, indeed, internationally. On the one hand, it’s absurd to say that because some Molly Maguires belong to the AOH, Molly Maguire-ism was a national or international conspiracy.

That was said repeatedly in the 1870s, but it doesn’t wash. But at the same time, it seems quite clear on the basis of my research that local lodges of the Ancient Order of Hibernians were used for violent purposes. In other words, in a handful of lodges of the AOH, in the heart of the lower anthracite region, crimes were plotted, arranged, and put into execution.

NATHAN: Now that Gowen and the Pinkertons had their evidence, all they needed was the right moment to swoop in and crush the Molly Maguires. That moment came in 1875, in the middle of the most severe economic depression the United States had seen. The WBA was waging what would be their final labor struggle, known as the Long Strike.

KEVIN KENNY: It draws national attention in the newspapers. There are scenes of near starvation that are reported by the end of that strike. And by June or so of 1875, the union goes down to final and total defeat. So the labor movement is gone. Into the vacuum left by the labor movement step the Molly Maguires.

NATHAN: Six more assassinations occur that summer, but the Pinkerton agency now has several undercover detectives on the case, and soon the arrests begin.

KEVIN KENNY: About 50 people are put on trial accused of Molly Maguire crimes and activities. All of them are members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. The trials draw enormous attention nationally for a number of reasons, not least being the evidence of McParland himself, who is revealed as an undercover detective. He walks into the courtroom and there is their friend and confidant for the last two and a half years, now revealed as an undercover detective.

The evidence of informers who turned state’s evidence to save their necks. The wife of one of these informers denounced him from the witness stand as a dirty little rat. Catholics, we know, were excluded from the juries. But perhaps most extraordinarily of all is that the lead prosecutors in these showcase trials were railroad and coal mine attorneys, and the most spectacular and prominent of all of them was Franklin B. Gowen, who came up from Philadelphia to deliver the arguments for the prosecution at several of the trials in Pottsville.

NATHAN: And on June 21, 1877– known locally as Black Thursday, or the Day of the Rope– 10 men are executed. Over the next two years, 10 more men are hanged. But how many of them were innocent? How many were guilty? Kenny says we’ll never know for sure.

KEVIN KENNY: I would say some were guilty as charged. Some were not guilty as charged but may have been involved in other things. And I’d say one or two were very unlucky. Interestingly, the ringleader, the alleged ringleader of the Molly Maguire conspiracy, a man called John Kehoe, in 1979, he received a posthumous pardon from the governor of Pennsylvania.

NATHAN: Because of the miscarriage of justice, the Molly Maguires have been remembered as working class heroes, victims of capitalist and nativist oppression. But Kenny says he’s not satisfied with that interpretation.

KEVIN KENNY: And I suppose the reason why that’s not satisfactory is that in the end of the day, there are 16 dead bodies on the stage, and somebody killed them. Right? And so I remember giving a lecture out in the mining region in the prison where four of the men were hanged, and I was standing, giving a public lecture just outside their cells. And I said that the Molly Maguires killed people, and that the historians task is to explain why.

And I paused deliberately to hear that pin drop, because it was a very silent room, and most of my audience didn’t want to hear that. But I think that the explanation lies in Irish history. So what I see happening is under really desperate conditions, that a certain kind of Irish coworker, desperate and alienated, drew on Irish rural traditions to fight back in industrial America.

NATHAN: Kevin Kenny is a history professor at Boston College and the author of Making Sense of the Molly Maguires. Earlier in the show, we heard from John Loughery. He is the author of Dagger John– Archbishop Hughes and the Making of Irish America.