Making Sense of the Molly Maguires: Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition [Anniversary ed.] 0197673880, 9780197673881

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Making Sense of the Molly Maguires

Making Sense of the Molly Maguires Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition

KEVIN KENNY

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © 1998, 2023 by Kevin Kenny First published by Oxford University Press, 1998 Twenty-fifth anniversary edition published by Oxford University Press, 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Part of chapter 3 was published as “Nativism, Labor, and Slavery: The Political Odyssey of Benjamin Bannan, 1850–1860,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 118 (October 1994): 325–61. Some material on Catholicism in chapters 3, 6, 7, 8, and 9 was published as “The Molly Maguires and the Catholic Church,” Labor History, 36 (Summer 1995): 345–76. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kenny, Kevin, 1960– Making Sense of the Molly Maguires / Kevin Kenny. p. cm. Includes bibliographic references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-767388-1; EPUB 9780197673904; UPDF 9780197673898 1. Molly Maguires. 2. Coal Miners—Pennsylvania—History. 3. Irish Americans—Pennsylvania—Social conditions. I. Title. HV6452.P4M64 1998 364.Iˊ06ˊ09748—dc21 96—53599 Printed by Marquis Book Printing, Canada

For Rosanna, Michael, and Owen

Contents

Abbreviations Used in Footnotes xi



Preface to Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition



xiii

Introduction 3

1  Whiteboys, Ribbonmen, and Molly Maguires

13

2  The World of Anthracite

45

3  Enter the Molly Maguires

73

4  The Rise of a Labor Movement

103

The Reading Railroad Takes Control

131

6  The Return of the Molly Maguires

157

5 

7  Rough Justice 185 8  The Molly Maguires on Trial

213

9  Black Thursday 245

Epilogue 277



Conclusion 285



Appendices 289



Bibliography 315



Index 329



Photos follow page 164

Preface to the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition

T

he Molly Maguires have found a new historian in every generation. Allan Pinkerton, the founder of America’s first national detective agency, who sent James McParlan into Pennsylvania’s anthracite country as an undercover agent, published the first history in 1877. Celebrating McParlan’s exploits and casting the Irish as inherently depraved, Pinkerton’s ghost-written book, The Molly Maguires and the Detectives, laid down a foundational myth that endured for almost a century. In his secret reports back to Philadelphia, McParlan linked the Molly Maguires to a fraternal ethnic organization called the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH). Most of the convicted men were members of this organization, and it is clear from the evidence—even allowing for McParlan’s lies and distortions—that some of them used local lodges for violent purposes. Establishing this connection with a national and international organization equipped the Molly Maguires with an institutional structure well out of proportion to their numbers. This was grist for the mill of conspiracy theorists, at the time and later, allowing them to magnify the threat posed by a small, desperate, and often misguided group of immigrant workers. The myth of the Molly Maguires resurfaced in fictional form in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel, The Valley of Fear (1904). Conan Doyle met Allan Pinkerton’s son on a transatlantic crossing, learned about the Molly Maguires, and borrowed their story for his plot. Sherlock Holmes solves a murder case on an English country estate through an extended flashback to the United States,

xiv Preface to the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition telling the story of the Ancient Order of Freeman and their murderous inner circle, the Scowrers. “Black Jack” McGinty—based on John “Black Jack” Kehoe, the alleged ringleader of the Molly Maguires—presides over the Scowrers, and Detective John McMurdo brings them to justice.1 The interpretive tide shifted in the twentieth century, unevenly at first. In the 1930s, Anthony Bimba turned the myth of the Molly Maguires on its head, casting them as innocent victims of capitalist oppression. This approach, however, left open the question of who killed their victims. In the same decade, J. Walter Coleman offered a more nuanced interpretation, tracing the Molly Maguires’ distinctive brand of violent protest to the Irish countryside. Coleman also exposed Detective James McParlan as a liar whose evidence could no longer be used as the basis of a reliable historical narrative. Wayne G. Broehl’s The Molly Maguires (1964) tended to take McParlan’s reports at face value but provided important insights on the business strategy of Franklin B. Gowen, the president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, who hired the Pinkertons to infiltrate the labor movement as part of a campaign to control the production and transportation of coal.2 The film version of The Molly Maguires (1970), starring Sean Connery as John Kehoe and Richard Harris as James McParlan, demolished the myth of the undercover detective as hero. In the climactic scene, McParlan visits John Kehoe in his death-cell. “You came for absolution,” the Molly Maguire tells the detective. “You’d like to be free from what you’ve done. ... Punishment, that’s what you want. You think punishment’s all that can set you free.” Kehoe pounces on McParlan and is hauled off by the guards. “Are you free now?” Kehoe asks. “Have I set you free for a grand new life? You’ll never be free. There’s no punishment this side of hell can free you from what you did.” The film’s director, Martin Ritt, and producer, Walter Bernstein, had both been blacklisted in the McCarthy era. They saw the film, in part, as a response to director Elia Kazan, who cooperated with the investigations in the 1950s and whose hero in On the Waterfront, played by Marlon Brando, famously informs against corrupt union bosses. Their movie did not have the impact they hoped for, but along with Coleman’s book a generation earlier, it cleared a path for the new history I wrote in the 1990s.3 My interest in the Molly Maguires had modest beginnings. I was assigned to write some encyclopedia entries for Eric Foner’s and Jack Garraty’s The Reader’s Companion to American History, the kind of task that graduate students eagerly

1. Allan Pinkerton, The Molly Maguires and the Detectives (1877; New York: Dillingham, 1905); Arthur Conan Doyle, The Valley of Fear (1904; London: Penguin Books, 1981). 2. Anthony Bimba, The Molly Maguires (New York: International Publishers, 1932); J. Walter Coleman, The Molly Maguire Riots: Industrial Conflict in Pennsylvania (Richmond, VA.: Garrett & Massie, 1936); Wayne G. Broehl, The Molly Maguires (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). 3. Martin Ritt, dir., The Molly Maguires (1970).



Preface to the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition

take on to earn some money and to get their first publications. I found it easy to complete all of them—except the one on the Molly Maguires. In the secondary sources, there was no consensus on who they were, why they behaved as they did, or even whether they existed institutionally. I knew something about the Molly Maguires in Ireland, both as a specific group of rural agitators active during the great famine and as a generic term for popular protest. But the American episode remained baffling. I cobbled together a tentative entry for the encyclopedia and then devoted most of the remainder of my doctoral career to the subject.4 The intellectual origins of the project were obviously deeper. Through my training at Columbia University, I came to realize that American immigration and labor history were inseparable. As an undergraduate at the University of Edinburgh, I had read E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, and I belong to the tail end of the generation of historians shaped by that book. At Columbia, I learned from reading Herbert Gutman that there was no single “making” in the United States, where the working class was successively reshaped by waves of migration, both external and internal. Understanding American labor history, Gutman insisted, required close attention to workers’ pre-migration cultures and their adaptation to new settings. Unskilled Irish immigrant laborers, moreover, had little place in the then-dominant narrative of American labor history, which saw working-class consciousness as a form of “artisanal republicanism” practiced by native-born skilled workers.5 A second intellectual underpinning of the book had to do with historical method. I have always been drawn to “history from below”—the lives of ordinary, often nameless or voiceless people, especially when they made a mark by engaging in social protest. The Molly Maguires were an extreme case. Often preliterate and Irish-speaking, they left virtually no evidence expressing their point of view. Only two short letters, one of them a fragment, survived. Everything else that was known about them came in hostile descriptions left by others. How, then, could I write their history? I needed an explanation that broke free of the two existing poles of interpretation about them, as depraved killers or innocent victims of oppression. There were Molly Maguires in the anthracite region, and they killed people. I wanted to explain why. The phrase “Making Sense of the Molly Maguires”—a mantra as I did the research, and the eventual title of the book—captured my attempt to explain how contemporar-

4. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, eds., The Reader’s Companion to American History (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1991). 5. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Random House, 1963); Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (New York: Vintage Books, 1976); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Peter Way, Common Labour: Workers and the Digging of North American Canals, 1780-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

xv

xvi Preface to the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition ies understood the affair, as well as my own attempt to explain who the Molly Maguires were and why they acted as they did. To accomplish these two related goals, I analyzed everything that people said about the Molly Maguires in the nineteenth century, reading against the grain to uncover the ideology of nativism and searching for clues about the Mollys’ motivation. I also drew inferences from census records and government reports about the class structure of the mining community. In this way, I tried to disentangle fact from fantasy to make sense of the Molly Maguires. Though focused on a single region, the story opened out onto some of the main themes in North Atlantic history in the mid-nineteenth century. In the United States, these included mass immigration, industrialization, and class conflict in the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction. In Ireland, they included mass emigration, the land system, and agrarian violence, set against the period of the great famine. Making Sense of the Molly Maguires brought these themes together, examining the distinctive history of Pennsylvania’s anthracite region in a broad-ranging transatlantic setting.

When I first encountered the story of the Molly Maguires, I immediately noticed something strangely familiar. As someone trained in both Irish and American history, I could see that the violence in Pennsylvania conformed to a pattern in the history of the Irish countryside. The first reports of the Molly Maguires in Ireland date to the 1840s and 1850s. They were the last in a long line of secret societies and protest groups that included the “Whiteboys,” the “Oakboys,” the “Ribbonmen,” and the “Lady Clares.” The men who joined these organizations wore female clothing and used powder or burnt cork on their faces, both as a form of disguise and to signify their allegiance to a mythical woman who symbolized their struggle. This kind of popular violence had once been widespread in early modern Europe. It survived longest in rural Ireland, which had the most concerted pattern of agrarian violence in Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. Irish underground societies sought to enforce their moral code in response to violations of customary practices by landlords, agents, or tenants. They wreaked vengeance on those who enclosed common land with fences, who replaced tenants with animals, or who converted tillage land to grazing. Sometimes they maimed or killed animals as symbols of commercial farming. They also targeted tenants who took leases from other tenants who had been evicted. The insurgents often acted under cover of darkness. Officials in Dublin and London referred to them as “midnight legislators.” The American Molly Maguires were a transatlantic outgrowth of this distinctive Irish agrarian tradition. Sporadic traces of the tradition emerged on American canals and public works in the antebellum era, and then in railroad construction and in the coal mines. As Irish immigrants fought back against exploitation with violence, reports emerged that organizations of the Whiteboy and Ribbonmen type—complete with hand-grips, passwords, recognition



Preface to the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition xvii

signs, oaths of secrecy, and threatening notices—were active. Initially, factions from one part of Ireland did battle with those from another. Irish immigrants did not fight for the sake of it but for access to employment, with each side attempting to drive the others off the works. They also retaliated against bosses who were late in paying them, or who favored workers from other ethnic backgrounds, by destroying the work they had done, in much the same way as insurgents in rural Ireland destroyed fences and dug up pasture land to render it fit for potato cultivation by the poor.6 The nucleus of the Pennsylvania Molly Maguires came from the remote northwestern county of Donegal. Many of them were Irish speakers. None of them were known to have criminal backgrounds in Ireland, but they arrived in Pennsylvania with a cultural memory and established traditions of protest. Faced with appalling conditions in the coal mines, they responded by deploying a specifically Irish form of collective violence against their enemies. Breandán Mac Suibhne’s The End of Outrage: Post-Famine Adjustment in Rural Ireland (2017) reveals the extent of Molly Maguire activity in Donegal before and during the migrations triggered by the great famine. MacSuibhne also uncovers a significant degree of reverse migration and cultural influence from Pennsylvania to Ireland. His title, The End of Outrage, contains a triple pun. It refers to the goal of Irish agrarian protest, its termination by the famine, and the failure of subsequent generations to acknowledge what happened. As the most marginalized of the Irish, lacking marketable skills, and ostracized by the twin pillars of their ethnic community—the trade union movement and the Catholic Church—immigrants from Donegal were at the heart of the Molly Maguire story in Pennsylvania.7 The Molly Maguires embodied an archaic form of labor protest that fit poorly with conditions in industrializing America. The standard form of labor organizing in an industrial capitalist economy is not the secret society but the trade union, with its weapons of collective bargaining and strikes. As early as the 1840s, Irish canal workers in North America were substituting strikes for violence and labor unions for secret societies. By the 1850s, Irish workers dominated New York City’s largest unions, organized by unskilled laborers and longshoremen. They also led the textile spinners’ unions in Massachusetts at this time and played a prominent role in the foundation of the American Miners’ Union in 1861. Irish-born miner John Siney helped found and became the first leader of the largest union in the United States in the 1860s and 1870s, the

6. Way, Common Labour. 7. Breandán Mac Suibhne, The End of Outrage: Post-famine Adjustment in Rural Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). The only book on the subject other than MacSuibhne’s to appear since Making Sense of the Molly Maguires is Mark Bulik, The Sons of Molly Maguire: The Irish Roots of America’s First Labor War (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). Bulik focuses on traditions of mummery in rural Ireland and on the early stages of Molly Maguire violence in Pennsylvania in the 1860s.

xviii Preface to the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition Workingmen’s Benevolent Association (WBA). Organized in the anthracite region in 1868, the WBA mobilized 35,000 mineworkers, first under Siney’s leadership and then under another Irish-born miner, John Welsh. Siney and Welsh attempted, with considerable success, to unite all anthracite workers, regardless of national origin, religion, or skill into one big union. Some of the Molly Maguires belonged to the trade union. Others, including the most alienated, unskilled members of the workforce, along with the tavern keepers at the heart of the conspiracy (many of them former mine workers), kept their distance from the union and favored violent tactics. The labor movement in the anthracite region, then, took two distinct if overlapping forms. A large, powerful, and inclusive trade union opened its doors to all mineworkers who wished to join. Alongside the union, operating to some extent within the Ancient Order of Hibernians, was a small and exclusively Irish group, based in Schuylkill County and Carbon County in the lower anthracite region, that favored direct violent action and became known as the Molly Maguires. At the most basic level, both groups wanted the same thing: a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. But they went about the task in very different ways. The union men, as representatives of the working class, sat across the table from representatives of the employing class and tried to hammer out an agreement. If the employers proved recalcitrant, the union had a powerful weapon at its disposal: workers could go on strike and bring production to a standstill. The union leaders took a collective view of social and economic problems, and men like John Siney were active in regional and national third-party politics. The Molly Maguires, by contrast, had a more local and direct approach. If a mine operator treated Irishmen unfairly by reserving the best jobs for Welshmen or by paying the Welsh more than the Irish for the same work, they delivered a verbal warning, telling him to desist. If he did not listen, they nailed a sheet of paper to his door with a coffin sketched on it and the words “this will be yours.” This “coffin notice” might be followed by a beating. The ultimate sanction was assassination. The WBA never wavered from its condemnation of violence, particularly Molly Maguire violence. The union’s ability to unite all mine workers regardless of skill, religion, or ethnicity explains why the first wave of Molly Maguire violence subsided in 1868, when the WBA was founded, and why the second wave immediately followed its destruction in 1875. The actions of a militant few, the union leaders warned, might destroy the labor movement as a whole. This prediction proved all too correct. Franklin B. Gowen of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad set out with grim determination to bring the Schuylkill anthracite industry under the control of a single corporation. Standing in his path were two sets of adversaries: independent mine operators and the labor movement. Gowen eliminated the small operators by buying them out and targeted the labor movement by identifying the Molly Maguires as the terrorist arm of the WBA. By collapsing the distinction between these two organizations, he once again equipped the Molly Maguires with an institutional structure they never had and ensured the destruction of both. James McParlan arrived in the mining country in October 1873 to gather



Preface to the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition xix

the evidence Gowen needed. He stayed there until his cover was blown eighteenth months later. Clearly aware of some killings in advance, he probably participated in the planning of others. McParlan, in other words, was almost certainly an agent provocateur. Based on his reports, the private police force of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad arrested the suspects. More than fifty Molly Maguires were put on trial. Most of the prosecuting attorneys—led by Franklin B. Gowen—worked for railroads and mining companies. Several of them, including Gowen, rushed their courtroom speeches into print as popular pamphlets. The first ten Molly Maguires were hanged on a single day, June 21, 1877—four in Mauch Chunk (today’s Jim Thorpe) and six in Pottsville—known as “Black Thursday” or the “Day of the Rope.” Over the century that followed, memories of the Molly Maguires survived in the mining country within families and in the labor movement. It was not the kind of thing one talked about to outsiders, or across class and ethnic lines. The 1970s, however, saw a public reckoning. After a campaign led by his descendants, John Kehoe received a posthumous pardon in 1978 from Governor Milton Shapp of Pennsylvania, who paid tribute to all the executed men, describing them as “martyred men of labor.” The Molly Maguires were certainly martyrs to their cause. Some, however, were guilty of murder or conspiracy to murder. Others were probably innocent or were convicted of the wrong crime. Twenty of them died on the scaffold, but sixteen other men—mine owners, superintendents, bosses, workers, and public officials—died as well. Somebody killed them, and the violence cannot be explained away. The perpetrators, whether or not they used the term Molly Maguires to describe themselves, became known to history by that name. They operated under the cover of a few local lodges of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, adapting to local conditions a strategy of violent protest with deep roots in the Irish countryside. Such was the institutional reality corresponding to the nativist and anti-labor polemics of Franklin B. Gowen. To this extent, the Molly Maguires existed, even if they never existed as the organized conspiracy imagined by their enemies.8 Making Sense of the Molly Maguires was resolutely skeptical in its approach to historical evidence, given the nature of the sources. Twenty-five years later, I retain this skepticism concerning what the sources can tell us about the Molly Maguires, while confronting more directly the fact that they killed people. I have given many public lectures on the Molly Maguires over the years, including one inside the Old Jail Museum in Jim Thorpe, next to the cells where four condemned Mollys were held on the eve of their execution on “Black Thursday.” My message—that the Molly Maguires were real—is not always the one that my audiences have expected or wanted to hear. Yet, while we will never know if every man convicted was guilty as charged, the Molly Maguires clearly acted

8. Historical Society of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, Molly Maguire Collection, John Kehoe File, M 170.18, MI, letter of Governor Milton J. Shapp, September 6, 1978.

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Preface to the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition as a group to avenge themselves against their enemies, in ways that made sense to them.9 Historical inquiry requires empathy, an attempt to understand what made sense to others. Most of the empathy in Making Sense of the Molly Maguires is for the downtrodden Irish—the insulted and the injured of the American industrial revolution. Empathy, though, is not the same as sympathy: to explain a historical phenomenon is not to justify it. Historians do not sit as judge and jury on the past; they try, as much as possible, to make sense of the past on its own terms. In the case of the Molly Maguires, this involves an effort to understand the violence, not to condone or condemn it. In writing this book, I was not asking whether people’s actions were right or wrong. I was trying to determine what they did and why. In teaching the book over the last quarter-century, the only time this line between explanation and justification grew uncomfortably narrow was in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when I sometimes had to explain that I was seeking to understand the Molly Maguires, not to defend their actions. It was challenging at that time to teach other, similar topics, including the Haymarket Affair of 1877 and the Sacco and Vanzetti case of the 1920s. Since the book’s publication, industrial labor has become less prominent in American historical writing and the field of immigration history has moved in new directions. Nonetheless, labor history in some form will remain important as long as we remember that people worked in the past. And the main themes of the book—class, labor organizing, nativism, cultural adaptation, and history from below—remain central to immigration historiography today. Making Sense of the Molly Maguires made an impact in these two scholarly fields, but one of the most gratifying things about the book is the correspondence I receive from readers beyond the university. Some of these readers are descendants of the Molly Maguires or their victims. Others worked in the coal mines or belong to families who did. All of them, like me, are engrossed by this tragic episode in American history and how to make sense of why it happened.

9. Carbon County Jail, where several of the Molly Maguires were housed and executed, is now The Old Jail Museum, dedicated to their memory. The town of Mauch Chunk, where the jail stands, was renamed Jim Thorpe in 1954 after the Native American athlete and Olympic gold medalist.

Making Sense of the Molly Maguires

Map 1. Most of the American Molly Maguires emigrated from nine counties in north-central and northwestern Ireland: Monaghan, Cavan, Fermanagh, Longford, Leitrim, Roscommon, Sligo, Mayo, and Donegal.

Map 2. County Donegal, Ireland, in the mid nineteenth century. The nucleus of the Molly Maguire leadership in America came from the baronies of Boylagh and Kilmacrenan in the Irishspeaking western portion of the county. Samuel Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Map 3. The Pennsylvania anthracite region in the mid nineteenth century. The Molly Maguires were based in the area between Mauch Chunk and Tamaqua, at the eastern end of the Southern Coal Field; along the borders of Luzerne, Carbon, and Schuylkill counties, in the vicinity of Hazleton; and in the territory extending westward across the Western Middle Coal Field from Mahanoy City through Shenandoah and Ashland to Mount Carmel and Shamokin.

Figure 1.  “The Strike in the Coal Mines—Meeting of ‘Molly McGuire’ Men.” In this famous engraving from Harper’s Weekly, the Molly Maguires appear uncharacteristically respectable. The scene can be read as labor’s Sermon on the Mount, with the Molly Maguires assembled to hear their leader declaim on social justice. The seated figure behind the orator has sometimes been taken as James McParlan in the role of Judas; but this is anachronistic, as the detective’s identity was not known until 1876. The figure stands out because he wears no hat, has a peculiar facial expression, and is noticeably younger than the other men. But none of these characteristics necessarily signifies guilt or deception; together, they may instead suggest John the Beloved Disciple, seated next to his revered teacher. Paul Frenzeny and Jules Tavernier, Harper’s Weekly, January 31, 1874. Courtesy of the Perry-Castañeda Library, the University of Texas at Austin.

Figure 2.  “A Marked Man.” In the turbulent decades of the late nineteenth century, labor violence was frequently equated with savagery and untamed femininity. Molly Maguire is represented here in the figure of a virago, brandishing her fist at a mounted passerby and thereby marking him for death. Joseph Becker, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, April 10, 1875. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Figure 3.  “Riots Near Scranton.” Bosses often tried to keep their mines open during strikes. Here, two bosses trying to bring some coal out of a mine are greeted by striking workers armed with sticks and stones. Joseph Becker, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, April 29, 1871. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Figure 4.  “The Coal Riots.” Tensions between Welsh miners and Irish laborers were at the heart of the Molly Maguire story. Here, a group of “Welsh miners and their wives” disrupts a meeting of Irish laborers in the Scranton region. The laborers had organized a brief-lived union of their own in May 1871, demanding better pay from the miners who employed them and an end to the Welsh monopoly on skilled positions. Joseph Becker, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 27, 1871. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Figure 5.  “Miners’ Homes.” A typical mine patch in 1874. Joseph Becker, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, December 12, 1874. Courtesy of the Perry-Castañeda Library, the University of Texas at Austin.

Figure 6.  “Miners’ Homes Near Mine Hill Gap.” The large structure in the back- ground is probably company-built housing. Joseph Becker, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 6, 1875. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Figure 7.  “Blacklegs in Mahanoy City.” To keep their mines in operation during strikes, the bosses often imported replacement labor. Here, strikebreakers are confronted by supporters of the trade union. Joseph Becker, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 25, 1871. Courtesy of the New York Public Library

Figure 8. “Rioters Chalking up Threats and Warnings Against the ‘Blacklegs.’” Organized labor is represented here as turbulent and threatening, erasing any distinction between trade unionism and Molly Maguireism. Note the simian features of the figure standing at the top (left center), and next to him the man sketching the coffin, with the words “The Next thing You Will be all Shut in . . .” Joseph Becker, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 6, 1871. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Figure 9.  “Horrors of the Mine—After the Explosion.” American anthracite mining in the nineteenth century is believed to have been the most dangerous form of coal mining in the world. Paul Frenzeny and Jules Tavernier, Harper’s Weekly, May 31, 1873. Courtesy of the Perry-Castañeda Library, the University of Texas at Austin.

Figure 10.  “The Last Loaf.” In this hostile depiction of a scene from the Long Strike of 1875, women and children face starvation as their menfolk carouse irresponsibly in the background. Joseph Becker, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 13, 1875. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Figure 11.  “Pay-Day in the Mining Regions.” The arrest of a wild Irishman forms the obligatory centerpiece. Joseph Becker, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, September 4, 1875. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Figure 12.  Clockwise from top left: James Carroll (c.1837–77), hanged on Black Thursday for the murder of Benjamin Yost; Michael J. Doyle (c.1850–77), hanged on Black Thursday for the murder of John P. Jones; mine foreman Thomas Sanger (1842–75), assassinated on September 1, 1875; mine superintendent John P. Jones (1832–75), assassinated on September 3, 1875. Barclay & Co., The Lives and Crimes of the Mollie Maguires. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Figure 13.  Clockwise from top left: Four Molly Maguires hanged on Black Thursday: Thomas Duffy (c.1852–77), for the murder of Benjamin Yost; Thomas Munley (1845–77), for the murders of Thomas Sanger and William Uren; James Roarity (1845–77), for the murder of Benjamin Yost; and James Boyle (c.1852–77), for the murder of Benjamin Yost. Barclay & Co., The Lives and Crimes of the Mollie Maguires. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Figure 14. Clockwise from top left: Alexander Campbell (1833–77), hanged on Black Thursday for the murders of John P. Jones and Morgan Powell; Hugh McGehan (c.1852–77), hanged on Black Thursday for the murder of Benjamin Yost; policeman Benjamin Yost (1841–75), assassinated on July 5, 1875; and Edward Kelly (c.1855–77), hanged on Black Thursday for the murder of John P. Jones. Barclay & Co., The Lives and Crimes of the Mollie Maguires. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Figure 15.  Mine foreman Frank W. Langdon, assassinated on June 14, 1862; and Jack Kehoe (1837–78), the alleged mastermind of the Molly Maguire conspiracy, executed on December 18, 1878, for Langdon’s murder. Barclay & Co., The Lives and Crimes of the Mollie Maguires. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Figure 16.  Franklin B. Gowen (1836–89), President of the Reading Railroad; and the informer, Jimmy “Powder Keg” Kerrigan (c.1845–98). Scribner’s, 18 ( July 1895): 82. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Reprinted with permission.

Figure 17.­  Allan Pinkerton (1819–84). Harper’s Weely, July 12, 1884. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Reprinted with permission.

Figure 18.  James McParlan (1844–1919). Scribner’s, 18 July 1895): 82. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Reprinted with permission.

Figure 19.  “Executions of the ‘Mollie Maguires’ at Mauch Chunk,” June 21, 1877. Barclay & Co., The Lives and Crimes of the Mollie Maguires. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Figure 20.  “The March to Death,” Pottsville, June 21, 1877. Nine Molly Maguires were executed in the yard of Pottsville Prison between 1877 and 1879. Joseph Becker, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, July 7, 1877. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.