Molly Maguires
Years: 1873 - 1878
The Molly Maguires, if they indeed exist as an organized group and not a label assigned by their enemies, is a 19th century secret society of mainly Irish-American coal miners.
The Molly Maguires are accused of kidnapping and other crimes, largely because of the allegations of one powerful industrialist (Franklin B. Gowen), and the testimony of one Pinkerton detective (James McParland).
Fellow prisoners testify against the defendants, who are arrested by the Coal and Iron Police, who serve Gowen, who acts as prosecutor in some of the trials.
The trusts seem to have focused almost exclusively upon the Molly Maguires for criminal prosecution.
Molly Maguire history is sometimes presented as the prosecution of an underground movement that was motivated by personal vendettas, and sometimes as a struggle between organized labor and powerful industrial forces.
Whether membership in the Molly organization overlapped union membership to any appreciable extent remains open to conjecture.
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"Hard coal" mining had come to dominate northeastern Pennsylvania, a region already afforested twice over to feed America's insatiable appetite for energy, during the mid nineteenth century,
Powerful financial syndicates controlled the railroads and the coalfields by the 1870s.
Coal companies had begun to recruit immigrants from overseas willing to work for less than the prevailing local wages paid to American-born employees, luring them with "promises of fortune-making".
Herded into freight trains by the hundreds, these workers often replace English-speaking miners and are frequently unable to read safety instructions.
Twenty-two thousand coal miners work in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania.
Fifty-five hundred of these are children between the ages of seven and sixteen years, who earn between one and three dollars a week separating slate from the coal.
Injured miners, or those too old to work at the face, are assigned to picking slate at the "breakers" where the coal is crushed into a manageable size.
Thus, many of the elderly miners finish their mining days as they had begun in their youth.
Wages are low, working conditions ware atrocious, and deaths and serious injuries number in the hundreds each year.
On September 6, 1869, a fire at the Avondale Mine in Luzerne County, had taken the lives of one hundred and ten coal miners.
The families blame the coal company for failing to finance a secondary exit for the mine.
As the bodies of the miners are brought up from the Avondale Mine disaster, John Siney, head of the Workingmen's Benevolent Association (WBA), climbs onto a wagon to speak to the thousands of miners who had arrived from surrounding communities: “Men, if you must die with your boots on, die for your families, your homes, your country, but do not longer consent to die, like rats in a trap, for those who have no more interest in you than in the pick you dig with.“ (Labor's Untold Story: The Adventure Story of the Battles, Betrayals and Victories of American Working Men and Women, United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of Amer; 3rd edition (June 1979), pp. 45.)
He had asked the miners to join the union, and thousands of them had done so that day.
Some miners faced additional burdens of prejudice and persecution.
Some twenty thousand Irish workers have arrived in Schuylkill County over the past twety-five years.
It is a time of rampant beatings and murders in the mining district.
The President of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, and of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company and "the wealthiest anthracite coal mine owner in the world", Gowen has hired Allan Pinkerton's services to deal with the Molly Maguires.
Pinkerton has selected James McParland, a native of County Armagh, to go undercover against the Mollies.
Using the alias of James McKenna, he makes Shenandoah his headquarters and will claim to have became a trusted member of the organization.
McParland's assignment is to collect evidence of murder plots and intrigue, passing this information along to his Pinkerton manager.
He has also begun working secretly with a Pinkerton agent assigned to the Coal and Iron Police for the purpose of coordinating the eventual arrest and prosecution of members of the Molly Maguires.
Although there had been fifty "inexplicable murders" between 1863 and 1867 in Schuylkill County, progress in the investigations has been slow.
The union has grown powerful; thirty thousand members—eighty-five percent of Pennsylvania's anthracite miners—have joined, but Gowen has built a combination of his own, bringing all of the mine operators into an employers' association known as the Anthracite Board of Trade.
In addition to the railroad, Gowen owns two-thirds of the coal mines in southeastern Pennsylvania.
He is a risk-taker and an ambitious man.
In December, 1874, Franklin B. Gowen had led the other coal operators to announce a twenty percent pay cut.
Union leaders are "excoriated by the press", and are "denounced from altar and pulpit".
On May 12, John Siney, the union leader who had addressed miners at the Avondale disaster, and who had favored arbitration an opposed the strike, is arrested at a mass meeting called to protest the importation of strike breakers.
An organizer for the miners' national association by the name of "Xingo Parkes" is also arrested, along with twenty-six other union officials, all on conspiracy charges.
Gowen "deluges the newspapers with stories of murder and arson" committed by the Molly Maguires.
The press produce stories of strikes in Illinois, in Jersey City, and in the Ohio mine fields, all inspired by the Mollies.
The stories are widely believed.
In Schuylkill County, the striking miners and their families are starving to death.
On August 29, 1875, Allan Pinkerton writes a letter to George Bangs, Pinkerton's general superintendent, recommending vigilante actions against the Molly Maguires: "The M.M.'s are a species of Thugs... Let Linden get up a vigilance committee. It will not do to get many men, but let him get those who are prepared to take fearful revenge on the M.M.'s. I think it would open the eyes of all the people and then the M.M.'s would meet with their just deserts."
Anthony Lukas observes that the defeat was humiliating, and traces the roots of Molly violence in the aftermath of the failed strike:
Judges, lawyers, and policemen were overwhelmingly Welsh, German, or English ...
When the coalfield Irish sought to remedy their grievances through the courts, they often met delays, obfuscation, or doors slammed in their faces.
No longer looking to these institutions for justice, they turned instead to the Mollies ... Before the summer was over, six men—all Welsh or German—paid with their lives.
Anthony Lukas will write that the attack seemed "to reflect the strategy outlined in Pinkerton's memo". ((Lukas, J. Anthony. Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America, 1997, p. 182.)
The victims had been secretly identified by McParland as Mollies.
One of the men is killed in the house, and the other two supposed Mollies are wounded but able to escape.
A woman, the wife of one of the reputed Mollies, is shot dead.
McParland is outraged that the information he had been providing had found its way into the hands of indiscriminate killers.
When McParland hears details of the attack at the house, he protests in a letter to his Pinkerton supervisor.
He does not object that Mollies might be assassinated as a result of his labor spying—they "got their just deserving".
McParland resigns when it becomes apparent the vigilantes are willing to commit the "murder of women and children", whom he deems innocent victims. (Horan, James David. The Pinkerton Story, Putnam (1951) pp. 151-152)
Benjamin Franklin, McParland's Pinkerton supervisor, declares himself "anxious to satisfy [McParland] that [the Pinkerton Agency has] nothing to do with [the vigilante murders.]"
McParland is prevailed upon not to resign.
Frank Wenrich, a first lieutenant with the Pennsylvania National Guard, is arrested as the leader of the vigilante attackers, but released on bail.
Another miner, Hugh McGeehan, a twenty-one-year-old who had been secretly identified as a killer by McParland, is fired upon and wounded by unknown assailants.
Later, the McGeehan family's house is attacked by gunfire.