Books: The Original Irish Mafia

LAMENT FOR THE MOLLY MAGUIRES by Arthur H. Lewis. 308 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $5.75.

A century ago, terror stalked the coal fields of eastern Pennsylvania. Men were gunned down on the open road and even in their own parlors. Informers had their ears cut off and their tongues torn out by the roots. Dynamite destroyed mine tipples and derailed freight trains. In one coal-mining county alone, there were 142 unsolved murders in 13 years.

This savage undeclared war was fought for nearly three decades, between unequal antagonists. On one side were a few thousand Irish immigrants who lived in shantytowns beside the collieries and worked in the mines for wages as low as 50½ a day. On the other were the absentee mine owners in Manhattan and London, who fought the battle through their mine superintendents—usually of English or Welsh origin—and their own private army, the Coal and Iron Police.

The fighting arm of the immigrant Irish miners was known as the Molly Maguires, after a legendary heroine of Irish insurrections against the British during Ireland’s great famine. In the U.S., the Mollies concealed themselves within the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a legitimate benevolent association of Irish-Americans. They were led by Jack Kehoe, a tall, tough ex-miner turned saloonkeeper; each branch of the society was headed by a “body-master,” who could produce a dozen gunmen when needed.

Agent Provocateur. The man who broke the Molly Maguires was Franklin Benjamin Gowen, president of the Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Co., whose ancestors had come from Ireland’s Protestant north; and he used another Irishman to penetrate the Mollies. His choice for the job was James McParlan, a gifted, gabby little Pinkerton detective who was as ready with his fists as with his wits.

Violence in the coal fields was actually diminishing at the time when Pinkerton Agent McParlan, posing as a murderer on the run from Buffalo police, wormed his way into the high councils of the Molly Maguires. It was later charged that McParlan acted as an agent provocateur and deliberately whipped up bloodshed. The attacks also changed character: from reprisals against brutal or dishonest mine bosses, the Mollies turned to capricious, Mafialike assaults on anyone who offended one of their band.

Docile Wave. When McParlan threw off his disguise in 1876, after three years as a Molly Maguire, he had enough evidence to send 20 men to the gallows. By this time, the Mollies were in a bad way, denounced by their Roman Catholic priests, shunned by decent citizens, swamped in a new wave of supposedly more docile immigrants from eastern Europe. The trials were swift and of doubtful legality. No Roman Catholic was allowed on a jury, and the prosecution was headed by Mine Owner Franklin Gowen himself. Several of the condemned men were almost certainly innocent; one was hanged while the courier bearing a reprieve from the Governor hammered on the prison door.

For Author Arthur Lewis, a onetime newsman who wrote a lively 1963 biography of Millionairess Hetty Green, The Day They Shook the Plum Tree, the story of the Molly Maguires was clearly a labor of love. Lewis comes from Mahanoy City in the heart of the coal fields, where the old wounds are still raw. He notes approvingly that all condemned Molly Maguires died gamely and with style. Two carried red roses to the scaffold. Another joked cheerfully as his hair was cut just before his execution: “Make it good, Al,” he told the barber, “or you’re liable to lose a customer.”