This is the fifth excerpt from Labor’s Untold Story printed here by permission of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE). The book can be purchased for $6.95, plus $2 postage for single orders from the UE by writing to their headquarters at 2400 Oliver Building, 535 Smithfield Street, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15222.

With the arrival of the depression of 1873 Gowen’s plight became serious. He needed some great event in which to play the part of hero to recoup his sagging prestige. Before his career was over, his biographer Schlegel reports, "Gowen was to borrow millions upon millions to make the Reading Railroad one of the largest corporations the world had ever known," and he was already overextended. "Hard times and investments of a questionable nature on the part of the Philadelphia and Reading had placed Gowen at a disadvantage in the eyes of the stockholders, but if he could deal a death blow to organized labor ... he would amply redeem himself in the public eye." ⁶ In addition an anti-monopoly league was being formed in which dealers were charging him with selling coal short-weight, withholding freight cars from rivals, delaying their shipments, and conspiring to control production.

As he brooded over his troubles, still confident that he was a genius destined to conquer all, it seemed to him that the primary source of his difficulties was the miners’ union. Only by greatly reducing wages could he buttress his shaky financial position. But more than the miners’ union, it was that group of young Irish miners in the Ancient Order of Hibernians who were standing in his way. It was they who opposed Siney when he talked of a reasonable attitude and arbitration instead of strikes and it was they who advocated strike rather than suffer a cut below the contract’s minimum wage. If Gowen could get rid of Munley, Doyle, McGeehan, Kelly, Carroll, Kehoe, Duffy, and the progressives they led in the miners’ union, he could have clear sailing. At first he thought he would charge them with being Communists and, in fact, as late as 1875 he testified before a committee of the Pennsylvania legislature that the group was composed of foreign agents, "advocates of the Commune and emissaries of the International."

This charge was a queer slip on Gowen’s part because two years before he had called in Allan Pinkerton of the detective agency and, in employing him and his agency to break the union and its progressive caucus in the Ancient Order of Hibernians, he had told another story. Then, to Pinkerton, and usually later, although he occasionally reverted to his charge that the progressive miners were Communists, he said that the Irish miners were members of a secret Irish terroristic organization whose end was the destruction of society.

The progressive miners, he told Pinkerton, were members of a band, formed in Ireland and brought to the United States, known as the Molly Maguires. Their goal was the seizure of power, their method was murder. They were using both the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the miners’ union to conceal and further their conspiracy.

A good number of historians now concede that there was never any organization in Pennsylvania known as the Molly Maguires--although any militant miner might have been called a Molly Maquire after the newspapers had spread Gowen’s charge far and wide. But the Molly Maguires in fact were nothing but a fabrication of the Reading Valley’s leading and most eccentric citizen. There was only the Ancient Order of Hibernians, usually called the AOH, its oaths and rituals demanding brotherhood and patriotism.

But as Gowen spoke of his creation to Pinkerton in 1873, his eloquence overcame him and, pacing up and down his office before the detective, he said, according to Pinkerton, that the Irish terroristic society not only dominated southern Pennsylvania but most of labor the country over. "Wherever in the United States iron is wrought," he said, according to the detective, "from Maine to Georgia, from ocean to ocean--wherever hard coal is used as fuel, there the Molly Maquire leaves his slimy trail and wields with deadly effect his two powerful levers, secrecy and combination."

Pinkerton, duly convinced, declared that he could not begin to consider the case without a retainer of $100,000.⁷ His mind just could not function until stimulated by such a fee. After obtaining the necessary stimulation he told Gowen that the operative whom he would send into the coal fields must be a man who would have no more doubts than Gowen. For, as Pinkerton stated in his book about the Molly Maguires, an ordinary operative might think that Gowen was engaged in "persecution for opinion’s sake" or that his plan of breaking the miners’ union was only "a conflict between capital on one side and labor on the other."

After considerable thought Pinkerton selected as his leading spy for the coal fields one James McParlan, a twenty-nine-year-old native of Ireland who Pinkerton felt sure would not be bothered by any feelings that his victims were being persecuted for their belief in trade unionism. McParlan seemed a merry fellow, every ready for a fight or a frolic, until one looked into his eyes. They were as cold as a cobra’s. He had red hair, a sweet tenor voice, a large capacity for whiskey, and a past said to include a murder in Buffalo. His assignment was to join the Ancient Order of Hibernians and get or manufacture evidence upon which such militant union members as Duffy, Carroll, McGeehan, Kehoe, Kelly, Munley, and their friends could be hanged. Since Gowen believed that the union miners were criminal conspirators, that trade unions themselves were criminal conspiracies, the Pinkerton operative was not particular as how he was to settle with men believed to be beyond the law.

For two years McParlan, using the name of McKenna and receiving $12 a week and expenses, traveled the coal fields but was unable to obtain any evidence of crime committed by the miners. He was successful, however, in joining the AOH. He spend most of his time in saloons, occasionally joining in a brawl, always suggesting violence as the only course against the operators, and now and again raising his voice in song.

But fine as McParlan was as a singer, he was discovering no murders. His expected frame-ups were slow in coming and in 1874 the union still stood firm against a paycut despite the falling price of coal. Gowen decided to force a strike and showdown. A contemporary writer and confidant of Gowen, one F. P. Dewees, later wrote that by 1873 "Mr. Gowen was fully impressed with the necessity of lessening the overgrown power of the ‘Labor Union’ and exterminating if possible the Molly Maguires." He could wait no longer on McParlan and in December, 1874, the operators, under Gowen’s leadership, announced a twenty percent cut. The miners went out on strike Jan. 1, 1875.

⁶ J. Walter Coleman, The Molly Maquire Riots. Industrial Conflict in the Pennsylvania Coal Region, pp. 70-71

⁷ Pinkerton, born in Scotland and once a radical himself, was the founder of modern industrial spying. His first clients were Gowen, Tom Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and other railroad managements. His agency, inherited by his sons and still in existence, became larger and larger as strikes in the seventies and eighties made the hiring of labor spies big business. In the 1930s the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee revealed that the agency was still receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly for supplying leading corporations with labor spies. According to the committee, the Pinkertons had a gross annual income of over two million dollars in 1934 and 1935 and Robert A. Pinkerton, the head of the agency, received from it in dividends alone $129,500 in 1935, a sum much in excess of the salary of the President of the United States. The author of some twenty books about his exploits, Allan Pinkerton wrote in 1878 of his literary work, "My extensive and perfected detective system has made this work easy for me where it would have been hardly possible for other writers; for since the strikes of ‘77, my agencies have been busily employed by great railway, manufacturing and other corporations, for the purpose of bringing the leaders and instigators [of strikes] to the punishment they so richly deserve. Hundreds have been punished. Hundreds more will be punished."