Ned McAdoo and the Molly Maguires: Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO (1987)

"Is Violence Ever Justified?"

by Maggie Mulhearn [2]

The African American activist H Rap Brown has called violence "as American as cherry pie." Nowhere has this claim enjoyed greater cachet then in labor-management relations. The Pullman Strike, the Haymarket Riot, the Homestead Strike, the bombing of the Los Angeles Times Building... these murderous confrontations characterized the war between labor and capital around the close of the 19th and the start of the 20th centuries.

Predating --- and prefiguring --- these well-known incidents in America's labor history are the enigmatic events that occurred in the hard coal region of central-eastern Pennsylvania from 1865 through 1876. Sometimes archaically called "the Molly Maguire Riots"(there were no riots as we understand that word today), this protracted conflict accounted for 16 murders, followed by 20 hangings... or what one might call state-sanctioned homicides.

Since the days when 20 so-called Molly Maguires were marched to the gallows in Pottsville, Hazleton and Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania between 1876 and 1878, historians and writers have quarreled vehemently over whether these men were organized terrorists or innocent victims ala Sacco and Vanzetti. Detractors point to a long tradition in the west of Ireland of Whiteboys, Ribbonmen and other vigilante groups, which tradition is said to have spawned the killings, beatings and arsons in the anthracite coal fields after these self-same nightriders, or their progeny, immigrated to the U.S. Conversely, left-leaning commentators have contended that the hanged Irishmen were labor leaders and politicians targeted by the mining interests for liquidation.

Let us assume for the sake of argument that the Molly Maguires really were what the Pinkerton detectives and the county prosecutors claimed they were: a secret society, founded in County Donegal to terrorize landlords and their agents, and transplanted to the Pennsylvania coal fields, where they launched a reign of terror --- murders, assaults, and arsons --- in the 1860s and 1870s. If all of that were true, would it not also have been justified?

No American ever raises doubts about the justice of the Boston Tea Party. If those Boston patriots were morally entitled to dump the private property of English merchants into the ocean, then the equally-aggrieved Irish coal miners of a century later surely were entitled to rip up railroad tracks and burn down an occasional colliery.

Though the 19th century Catholic Church condemned the Molly Maguires, no Christian ever doubted Jesus Christ's justification in throwing the money lenders out of the Temple in Jerusalem. Arguably the early Christian church was a band of conspirators striving to displace the state religion and the official gods of the Roman Empire, as well as the Jewish faith from which their cabalistic schism had sprung. So was the Church not hypocritical in condemning the Mollies?

And is not even homicide sometimes justifiable? The law has always recognized my right to defend my home against intruders, even to the point of using deadly force. And if a man may fire his gun to protect his family from another who is intent on entering his home and wreaking deadly harm, he ought to be able to fire that same gun at the man who is intent on slowly murdering his family by means of starvation wages.

No less a legal mind than the great Clarence Darrow made similar arguments in defense of violent union behavior a little later in the last century.