Remember back when you were an Irish union activist in a Pennsylvania coal mine and the mine owner decided Irish union organizers were terrorists, so he hired a private security company to find or make up evidence so you could be convicted and hanged?
Yeah, those were the days.
More below the fold....
Those Were the Days, Part I - The Molly Maguires
This week Morning Feature looks back at the pace and cost of progressive change. Today we revisit the executions of ten Irish union activists in 1877. Tomorrow we'll remember the murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964. Saturday we'll weigh our progress and backsliding on wealth and race privilege.
It's worth looking back, if only to counter the meme that never before in history have progressives faced such daunting challenges. I don't minimize today's tasks. Some, like climate change, are dangers our species has not faced in centuries or millenia, and the strategies that helped us to survive then would be morally repugnant now. Others are problems progressives thought we had mostly resolved, only to see some gains slip away over the past 40 years of Conservative Winter.
Some gains, but not all. We don't let corporations investigate, arrest, prosecute, and execute union activists anymore, and the most important facts about the Molly Maguire case are the identities of the key actors. As Pennsylvania judge John Lavelle later wrote:
The Molly Maguire trials were a surrender of state sovereignty. A private corporation initiated the investigation through a private detective agency. A private police force arrested the alleged defenders, and private attorneys for the coal companies prosecuted them. The state provided only the courtroom and the gallows.
The "special" in special prosecutor:
The special prosecutor appointed for the Molly Maguire trials was the owner of the mines where the union organizers worked: Franklin B. Gowen. Gowen had been a local district attorney before leaving the post to represent the Reading Railroad. (Yes, the one on the Monopoly board.) Gowen soon became its president, and used his political contacts to fashion a loophole in a Pennsylvania law that barred railroad companies from owning coal mines. He continued to seek and receive appointments as a special prosecutor, often in cases against challengers to his business interests.
Labor unrest was widespread in the 1870s, but unions were a novel idea with little or no legal protection. When workers on the Pennsylvania Railroad declared a strike, its owner Thomas Scott said they should put on "a rifle diet for a few days and see how they like that kind of bread." On July 21, 1877, a local militia opened fire on strikers, killing 20 and wounding 28 more. Two days later, Gowen copied those tactics when a militia killed 16 in what became known as the Reading Railroad Massacre. In both events the militia were mustered and sent out not by local government, but by the railroad companies.
So Gowen was used to being a law unto himself, and when Irish miners began trying to form a union he declared them a terrorist society: the "Molly Maguires." Although such groups existed and fought against English rule in Ireland, the only evidence of the Molly Maguires' existence in the U.S. was that found by Gowen in trying to crush Irish union activists. To get that evidence, Gowen hired his own police force.
The "private" in private security companies:
Gowen turned to the Blackwater-cum-Xe of his day, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Founded in 1850, the agency struck gold during the Civil War with contracts to provide security for President Lincoln, intelligence for Union generals, and other war-related tasks. After the war it grew larger than the U.S. Army, a corporate army whose agents were hired out to protect corporate interests.
Among those agents was James McParland. Like the workers imported to labor in Gowen's mine, McParland was an Irish immigrant. Unlike them, McParland had been educated in a protestant school in what would later become Northern Ireland. He was assigned to infiltrate the Irish union groups and find evidence to prove the existence and crimes of the Molly Maguires.
In December of 1876, McParland was outraged to learn that information he gathered had been passed to vigilantes who attacked and murdered the wife of a union activist. He wrote and then retracted a letter of resignation and continued his undercover work. McParland's testimony, and that of informants promised immunity on other crimes, was used to convict the ten union activists in two highly-publicized trials. All ten were hanged on June 21st, 1877.
History's verdict:
It's often said that history's first draft is written by the winners, and that was the case here. Late 19th and early 20th century historians, sympathetic to corporate views, demonized the Molly Maguires as terrorists and lionized Gowen and McParland as having ended their reign of terror. McParland became known as The Great Detective and his investigation of the Molly Maguires inspired the last Sherlock Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear.
But over time the investigation, trial, and verdict have been widely challenged. Did violence occur during the labor unrest of the 1870s? Certainly, and much of it was committed by hired thugs acting on corporate orders. But union activists committed some as well, and it's possible that some or all of the men convicted and hanged in the Molly Maguire trial were guilty.
It's impossible to be sure, because the men were investigated by a private security agency and prosecuted by the mine owner against whom they were organizing. The blatant conflict of interest makes the Molly Maguire case a miscarriage of justice, no matter their guilt or innocence.
But if you were a rich industrialist, those were the days.
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Happy Thursday!
Crossposted from Blogistan Polytechnic Institute (BPICampus.com)