This Day in Labor History (Molly Maguires Infiltrated)

October 27, 1873—Using the alias James McKenna, James McParlan, a minor Pinkerton National Detective Agency operative relegated to spotting crooked conductors on Chicago trolleys, boarded a Reading coach headed for the coal country of Pennsylvania. The assignment he eventually carried out, in stunning fashion: to infiltrate the Molly Maguires, an Irish-American group believed to be waging a campaign of violence against mine operators and policemen.

Whether the "Mollies" actually existed--and to what extent--remains a lively question. The high rate of violence in Schuykill County--142 unsolved murders from 1862 to 1877--might argue in its favor. But, as John A. Barnes notes in Irish-American Landmarks: A Traveler’s Guide, this was hardly out of the ordinary for mining regions, even in areas with a comparatively small Irish presence.

What is inarguable, however, is the two different forms of desperation that led management and labor to clash.

It’s easy to see how labor felt constrained. The 50,000 coal miners in eastern Pennsylvania as the 1870s began had to cope with the following:

* Hopelessly inadequate safety precautions;
* Flooded shafts and cave-ins;
* Less than a dollar a day in pay for 14-to-16-hour days;
* As many as eight children crammed into small huts;
* Early deaths from black lung;
* Lack of sympathy from a government that in those years was committed to laissez-faire.

But both McParlan and his company were, in their own way, desperate. Allan Pinkerton, facing looming bankruptcy because of the economic distress sweeping the U.S. that year, looked for a badly needed cash infusion in what was becoming a specialty of his: union-breaking. After six years in the U.S., tiring of small-time jobs, the slight, bespectacled McParlan hoped this assignment would lead to something more.

One hundred thirty-five years after his fateful journey, McParlan remains a particularly vivid example of one of the most persistent and troubling figures throughout Irish and Irish-American history: the informer. The 1970 film that centered on his dilemma, named, of course, The Molly Maguires, follows a line of Celtic self-questioning in cinema that has also included John Ford's The Informer (with Victor McLaglen's Oscar-winning performance as the title character) and David Lean's Ryan's Daughter (with Leo McCarey playing the guilty party).

I'm not sure why director Martin Ritt didn't do a better job with this film. He certainly had a fine pair of leads in Richard Harris and Sean Connery (playing, retrospectively, McParlan and the man he betrayed, Jack Kehoe). Ritt's own status as the victim of an informer, during Hollywood's blacklist period, certainly gave him sympathy with a wronged class. But, even aside from the nearly impenetrable accents involved, this film does not live. (The one point of interest might be the presence of future author Malachy McCourt as a bartender.)

I recommend the late J. Anthony Lukas' essay on the film in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (general editor: Mark Carnes). His essay nicely summarizes the historical revisionism that has sought to understand the roots of a bitter management-labor conflict seen at the time through the lens of dime-store novels and a Protestant-leaning populace that, then as now, is happy to rely on cheap labor but anxious that this has necessitated an influx of disenfranchised outsiders.

Over the last ten years, while visiting my friend Jimmy in the Schuylkill River area, I rode through land that had served as the flash point for the struggle over the "Mollies." The region exhibited signs everywhere of the human toll taken by the collapse of the Rust Belt in the late '70s and early '80s, but when I learned its prior history, it seemed haunted by something even more tragic.

Jimmy lived at the time in Orwigsburg, nearby Pottsville. At the Sheridan House in the latter town, McParlan/McKenna made the acquaintance of members of the group he would betray. Nearly three years later, McParlan's trial testimony in Pottsville would help send some of these men to the gallows.

Two paragraphs ago, I referred to the area being “haunted.” In one sense, an element of the supernatural has given rise to a local legend. County Donegal native Alec Campbell , convicted of being an accessory in the murder of a mine company official, protested his innocence so vigorously that he even left his imprint on the cell wall. His final words supposedly were: “That mark of mine will never be wiped out. There it will remain forever to shame the country that is hanging innocent men.” As of 1995, when Barnes wrote his historical travel guide, that imprint remained embedded in Carbon County Jail in Mauck Chunk (now called Jim Thorpe), Pa.

Pottsville would give rise, three decades later, to a self-described "Doctor's Son," John O'Hara—to my mind, the short-story writer unsurpassed in the 20th century for his understanding of men and women from all walks of life. It's been a long time since I saw the film—which, in any case, mangled his novel—but for me the greatest cry of the heart in BUtterfield 8 occurs when O'Hara's alter ego, James Malloy, lays bare the unease that he grew up with in town:

"America, being a non-Irish, anti-Catholic country, has its own idea of what a real gangster looks like, and along comes a young Mick [i.e., James Cagney] who looks like my brother, and he fills the bill. He is the typical gangster….At least it's you American Americans' idea of a perfect gangster type, and I suppose you're right. Yes, I guess you are. The first real gangsters in this country were Irish. The Molly Maguires. Anyway do you see what I mean by all this non-assimilable stuff?"

It was the tragedy of 19th-century Irish-Americans that they reenacted the anguish of their ancestral homeland with descendants of their tormenters.

In Boston, they encountered the scions of the Puritans, who, under Oliver Cromwell, had carried out a campaign of dispossession in Ireland so fierce, giving the inhabitants the Hobbesian choice, "To hell or Connaught."

Legend has it that the Molly Maguires began as an anti-landlord organization in Ireland of the Famine years. In eastern Pennsylvania, recent Famine immigrants or children of this group suffered at the hands of Franklin B. Gowen, the Protestant Irish president of the Philadelphia and Pinkerton Railroad, whose stranglehold on the manufacture and production of coal in the region must have reminded them more than a little of the landlords they fled.

At the time, it seemed that the three figures responsible for breaking this secret society had gotten what they wanted. Gowen linked the Workingman's Benevolent Association with the Mollies, a group now seen as murderous. Pinkerton would go on to become a detective agency with all the work it could handle in those anti-union times. McParlan became manager of the agency's Western Division in Denver, where 30 years later, he would gather evidence implicating the I.W.W.'s "Big Bill" Haywood in the conspiracy to murder the governor of Idaho.

Historians increasingly agree that the 20 men executed for their part in the Mollies were railroaded. (Not a single Irish-American was enpaneled on the juries.) Kehoe, executed for the murder of a mine foreman, would be pardoned more than a century later by Pennsylvania Governor Milton Shapp, who took note of the coal miners' desperate plight and Gowen's fear of one of their most popular champions.

And Gowen? He committed suicide, six years after losing his job with the railroad.