1877 - Molly Maguires
The Molly Maguires were the Bolshevists of their day. Unlike that later breed, however, they were more closely and compactly knit together and their organization was secret. Passwords, grips and all the paraphernalia of a fraternal society they had. How the organi zation began has never been satis factorily determined. The actual existence of the Molly Maguires as a coordinated secret society or terrorist organization is still debated by historians. No one has ever produced a primary source document proving that the Molly Maguires existed as such. What the court cases, sentences and subsequent hangings served to do was merely to implicate specific individuals in acts of violence.
The seat of this association, or rather of that branch of the Ancient Hibernians which gained the special name of Molly Maguires, was the anthracite coal district of Pennsylvania, comprising the counties of Schuylkill, Carbon, Luzerne, with part of Columbia and Northumberland. The number of people is now not far short of 500,000. The mines of the district yield a large quantity of coal, and the laboring population whom they attract to work them live in towns of various sizes, or in hamlets, patches as they are often called, near the several mining works.
Inferior towns contained large masses of immigrant laborers and traders of various nations, Irish, Welsh, Germans, Swedes and others. In some the population is preponderantly Irish. Most of these are Roman Catholics, who have brought with them to the New World the habits and manners, the brogue, the feelings and prejudices, the loves and hatreds of their native island; deadly foes of land-owners and capitalists.
The name Molly Maguires, by which the clandestine league of Irishmen was best known in Pennsylvania, was imported from Ireland. It was there adopted by a branch of the Ribbonmen, whose nightly outrages were perpetrated in female disguise. But the name which they gave themselves and under which they sought to veil their proceedings in Pennsylvania, was "The Ancient Order of Hibernians." This purported to be a benevolent Society.
The Molly Maguires originated in Ireland in the 1840s as a secret society dedicated to fighting the mounting agricultural oppressions in their country. The Molly Maguires back in Ireland were generally stout active young men, dressed up in women's clothes, with faces blackened or otherwise disguised; sometimes they wore crape over their countenances, sometimes smeared themselves in the most fantastic manner with burnt cork about their eyes, mouths and cheeks. In this state they used suddenly to surprise the unfortunate grippers, keepers or process-servers, and either duck them in bog-holes, or beat them in the most immerciful manner, so that the Molly Maguires became the terror of all officials. At last neither grippers. process-servers, nor keepers could be got for love or money to perform any duty, or to face the danger of these dreaded foes.
They were said to be men who held human life cheap, always prepared for any deed of bloodshed or violence, which their angry passions or interested motives prompt, and for any amount of perjury which may avail to save a confederate from the punishment of his guilt. Their religion is to them a very simple matter; to pay their priest his dues, to communicate now and then, confessing and getting absolved; after which they return refreshed to the commission of crimes planned in secret meetings which are opened with prayer. If their crimes are detected, and the gallows becomes their doom, they confess at last, not to the public they have outraged, but to their priest in private, whose absolution they regard as a passport to heaven, when they die with a lie in their mouths.
In the early 1860s with the outbreak of the Civil War, a loosely organized, mostly reactive version of the Irish Molly Maguires allegedly emerged in the coal region, but as historian Kevin Kenny has argued, it is difficult to "disentangle the strands that went into the violence, from rudimentary trade unionism, and from draft resistance to robbery, intimidation, and drunken brawling." Between 1862 and 1868, the Molly Maguires are said to have assassinated six mining officials and supervisors with whom they or their secret society fellows had employment-related grievances.
At the time it was notorious that such an Order existed in the coal district. But as its members were bound by an oath to conceal from the uninitiated their own membership, and all they knew of the Society and its affairs, while they were known to each other by secret signs and passwords, varied from time to time, and communicated from a central authority to the local officers and by them (under the slang term " goods") to the other members, no information could be obtained on any of these matters by people in authority. The secrecy of the Molly Maguires seemed for a long time secure and impenetrable.
In the summer of 1862 President Lincoln published an Ordinance for the general enlistment of troops in all States of the Union, which remained faithful to the Government established at Washington. The Molly Maguires, fearing probably that their Order would be broken up and its power weakened or overthrown by the effects of this Ordinance, used every effort to hinder its execution, and circulated anonymous threats of violence against all who should enforce it. Nor did they confine themselves to mere menace. In Carbon County government officers employed in the enlistment were murdered, others assaulted and abused, houses and properties were set on fire. The Miners' Journal of Pottsville, March 30, 1867, gives the names of fifty persons murdered in Schuylkill County from the 1st of January, 1863; of whom twenty-seven, or more than one half, had fallen by hands unknown; and may safely be set down to the score of the Molly Maguires.
By the late 1860s, the Workingmen's Benevolent Association (WBA) had united the mineworkers in an organized labor movement, briefly tempering such actions. The union secured better wages for miners until Franklin B. Gowen, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, finally succeeded in monopolizing control of the local coal mining industry, thus undermining the WBA and crushing its "Long Strike" of 1875.
Gowen made up his mind that this terrorism in the anthracite regions should be stopped. The violence then resumed to fill the vacuum left by the decline of the labor union and the Molly Maguires were credited with eight more assassinations between 1874 and 1875. These alleged Molly Maguires were brought to trial in courts that allowed Gowen and other mine owning interests official prosecutorial status.
Gowen called upon the famous Pinkertons, then in the heyday of their achievements, and James McParlan was assigned. He was then a young man, in his twenties, and he had been a detective only a year. Assuming the name of James McKenna, McParlan stepped off the train at Port Clinton, PA., and looked about for his lodging. Nearby in a tavern he heard sounds of drunken revelry. He had come across a chapter of the Mollies. Like a brother they took him in an his ready Irish wit and song made him popular at once.
From that time on he was a member of the organization, learned its secrets and so won the confidence of these desperate men that they made him their secretary. He took notes of all he discovered, jotting them down sometimes with washing bluing or soot and water because he did not dare to buy a bottle of ink. He kept his employers informed of all that went on, and it was said that, only three men knew McParlan's mission.
For three years the detective made his investigations, working as a miner a part of the time and always sharing all the secrets of the Mollies. Then one day the news was spread and seventy persons were arrested. McParlan's work, howev er, was not ended, for he still had to testify against his late companions. In the period awaiting the court proceedings the detective's life was threatened many times. Attempts were made to throw him down a mine shaft, to poison him and to blow him up with dynamite. All this failed and McParlan had the satisfaction of sending twenty to the scaffold, ten of whom were hanged on the same day, known as Black Thursday, June 21, 1877.
This was 1877 and Molly Maguireism was wiped out.
The romance of real life is a greater romance than that of fiction. And, no sensational novels contain incidents more terribly mysterious than many of the facts occurring in the records of human crime and calamity.
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