James McParland
was born in Ireland
in 1843. He worked as a stock clerk, agricultural labourer and circus
barker before taking a ship from Liverpool
to New York in 1867.
McParland settled in Chicago where he
opened a store selling alcohol. After a fire destroyed his business
in 1871 he joined the Pinkerton Detective
Agency.
In 1873 Franklin B. Gowen, president of
the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, had a meeting with Allan
Pinkerton of the Pinkerton Detective
Agency. Gowen had considerable investments in the coal-mines of
Schuylkill County and feared that the trade union activities of John
Siney and the Workingmen's Benevolent Association would result
in lower profits.
Allan Pinkerton decided to send McParland
to Schuylkill County. Assuming the alias of James McKenna, he found
work as a labourer in Shenandoah. Soon afterwards he joined the Workingmen's
Benevolent Association and the Shenandoah branch of the Ancient Order
of Hibernians (AOH), an organisation for Irish immigrants run by the
Roman Catholic clergy.
After a few months of investigations McParland reported back to Allan
Pinkerton that some members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians
were also active in the secret organization, the Molly
Maguires. McParland estimated that the group had about 3,000 members.
Each county was governed by a bodymaster who recruited members and
gave out orders to commit crimes. These bodymasters were usually ex-miners
who now worked as saloon keepers.
Over a two year period McParland collected evidence about the criminal
activities of the Molly Maguires. This
included the murder of around fifty men in Schuylkill County. Many
of these men were the managers of coal mines in the region.
John Kehoe, one of the leaders of the Molly
Maguires became suspicious of McParland and began to investigate
his past. McParland was tipped off that Kehoe was planning to murder
him so he fled from the area.
In 1876 and 1877 McParland was the star witness for the prosecution
of John Kehoe and the Molly Maguires. Twenty
members were found guilty of murder and were executed. This included
Kehoe, a former union leader who was convicted of a murder that had
taken place fourteen years previously.
There was a great deal of controversy about about the way the trial
was conducted. Irish Catholics were excluded
from the juries while Protestant immigrants from Germany
who could not speak English were accepted. Welsh
immigrants, who had for a long-time been in conflict with the Irish
in Schuylkill County were also well represented on these juries.
Most of the witnesses who provided evidence in these cases were like
McParland on the payroll of the railroad and mining companies who
were attempting to destroy the trade union
movement. In other cases, defendants were persuaded to turn state's
evidence to help convict their alleged collaborators.
It was also pointed out that most of the murder victims were employees
of small coal companies that were later taken over by the Philadelphia
and Reading company. Some historians have suggested that it was the
company run by Franklin B. Gowen, and
the man who initiated the original investigation, that had the most
to gain from these murders and the destruction of the emerging trade
union movement.
After the Molly Maguires McParland became
the manager of the Pinkerton Agency's Western Division, based in Denver.
In 1906 McParland was called in to investigate the murder of Frank
Steunenberg, the governor of Idaho. McParland was convinced from
the beginning that the leaders of the Western
Federation of Miners had arranged the killing of Steunenberg.
McParland arrested Harry Orchard, a stranger
who had been staying at a local hotel. In his room they found dynamite
and some wire.
McParland helped Orchard to write a confession that he had been a
contract killer for the WFM, assuring him this would help him get
a reduced sentence for the crime. In his statement, Orchard named
William Hayward (general secretary of
WFM) and Charles Moyer (president of WFM). He also claimed that a
union member from Caldwell, George Pettibone, had also been involved
in the plot. These three men were arrested and were charged with the
murder of Steunenberg.
Charles Darrow, a man who specialized
in defending trade union leaders, was employed
to defend Hayward, Moyer and Pettibone. The trial took place in Boise,
the state capital. It emerged that Orchard already had a motive for
killing Steunenberg, blaming the governor of Idaho, for destroying
his chances of making a fortune from a business he had started in
the mining industry.
During the three month trial, the prosecutor was unable to present
any information against Hayward, Moyer and Pettibone except for the
testimony of Orchard. William Hayward,
Charles Moyer and George Pettibone were all acquitted. Orchard, because
he had provided evidence against the other men, received life imprisonment
rather than the death penalty.
(1)
Franklin B. Gowen, speech during the trial
of the Molly Maguires (1876)
Is there a man in this audience, looking at me now, and hearing me
denounce this association, who longs to point his pistol at me ? I
tell him that he has as good chance here as he will ever have again.
I tell him that if there is another murder in this county, committed
by this organization, every one of the five hundred members of the
order in this county or out of it. who connives at it, will be guilty
of murder in the first degree, and can be hanged by the neck until
he is dead. I tell him that if there is another murder in this county
by this society, there will be an inquisition for blood with which
nothing that has been known in the annals of criminal jurist prudence
can compare.
And to whom are we indebted for this security, of which I now boast?
To whom do we owe all this? Under the divine providence of God, to
whom be all the honor and all the glory, we owe this safety to James
McParland; and if there ever was a man to whom the people of this
county should erect a monument, it is James McParland the detective.
It is simply a question between the Molly Maguires on the one side,
and Pinkerton's Detective Agency on the other; and I know too well
that Pinkerton's Detective Agency will win. There is not a place on
the habitable globe where these men can find refuge and in which they
will not be tracked down.
(2)
Cleveland Moffett, McClure's Magazine (1894)
The origin and development of the
Molly Maguires will always present a hard problem to the social philosopher,
who will, perhaps, find some subtle relation between crime and coal.
One understands the act of an ordinary murderer who kills from greed,
or fear, or hatred; but the Molly Maguires killed men and women with
whom they had had no dealings, against whom they had no personal grievances,
and from whose death they had nothing to gain, except, perhaps, the
price of a few rounds of whiskey. They committed murders by the score,
stupidly, brutally, as a driven ox turns to left or right at the word
of command, without knowing why, and without caring. The men who decreed
these monstrous crimes did so for the most trivial reasons—a
reduction in wages, a personal dislike, some imagined grievance of
a friend. These were sufficient to call forth an order to burn a house
where women and children were sleeping, to shoot down in cold blood
an employer or fellow workman, to lie in wait for an officer of the
law and club him to death. In the trial of one of them, Mr. Franklin
B. Gowen described the reign of these ready murderers as a time "when
men retired to their homes at eight or nine o'clock in the evening
and no one ventured beyond the precincts of his own door; when every
man engaged in any enterprise of magnitude, or connected with industrial
pursuits' left his home in the morning with his hand upon his pistol,
unknowing whether he would again return alive; when the very foundations
of society were being overturned."
(3)
Charles Darrow, comments on Harry
Orchard and James McParland during the Steunenberg
murder trial (1907)
Gentlemen, I sometimes think I am dreaming in this case. I sometimes
wonder whether this is a case, whether here in Idaho or anywhere in
the country, broad and free, a man can be placed on trial and lawyers
seriously ask to take away the life of a human being upon the testimony
of Harry Orchard. We have the lawyers come here and ask you upon the
word of that sort of a man to send this man to the gallows, to make
his wife a widow, and his children orphans--on his word. For God's
sake, what sort of an honesty exists up here in the state of Idaho
that sane men should ask it? Need I come here from Chicago to defend
the honor of your state? A juror who would take away the life of a
human being upon testimony like that would place a stain upon the
state of his nativity--a stain that all the waters of the great seas
could never wash away. And yet they ask it. You had better let a thousand
men go unwhipped of justice, you had better let all the criminals
that come to Idaho escape scot free than to have it said that twelve
men of Idaho would take away the life of a human being upon testimony
like that.
Why, gentlemen, if Harry Orchard were George Washington who had come
into a court of justice with his great name behind him, and if he
was impeached and contradicted by as many as Harry Orchard has been,
George Washington would go out of it disgraced and counted the Ananias
of the age.
I am sorry to say it, but it is true, because religious men have killed
now and then, they have lied now and then. Of all the miserable claptrap
that has been thrown into a jury for the sake of getting it to give
some excuse for taking the life of a man, this is the worst. Orchard
saves his soul by throwing the burden on Jesus, and he saves his life
by dumping it onto Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone. And you twelve men
are asked to set your seal of approval on it.
I don't believe that this man Orchard was ever really in the employ
of anybody. I don't believe he ever had any allegiance to the Mine
Owners Association, to the Pinkertons, to the Western Federation of
Miners, to his family, to his kindred, to his God, or to anything
human or divine. I don't believe he bears any relation to anything
that a mysterious and inscrutable Providence has ever created. He
was a soldier of fortune, ready to pick up a penny or a dollar or
any other sum in any way that was easy to serve the mine owners, to
serve the Western Federation, to serve the devil if he got his price,
and his price was cheap.
If Harry Orchard has religion now, that I hope I never get it. I want
to say to this jury that before Harry Orchard got religion he was
bad enough, but it remained to religion to make him totally depraved.
Hawley will picture him as a cherubim with wings growing out from
his shoulders and with a halo just above his head, and singing songs
with a detective on one side of him and McParland on the other. I
don't know yet how Borah will picture him, but everybody will picture
him according to how they see him. My picture is not these, none of
these. I see what to me is the crowning act of infamy in Harry Orchard's
life, an act which throws into darkness every other deed that he ever
committed as long as he has lived. And he didn't do this until he
had got Christianity or McParlandism, whatever that is. Until he had
confessed and been forgiven by Father McParland, he had some spark
of manhood still in his breast.
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