Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Valley of Fear was influenced by the conflict between the Molly Maguires and the Pinkerton Detective Agency, so it behooves us to take a deeper look at this Irish secret society and their clashes with the law.
The Molly Maguires were putatively (all accounts actually come from outside sources) an Irish secret society that used terrorist tactics and murder to amass and maintain power in Pennsylvania’s coalfields during the late 1800s. The coalfields had experienced fits of violence for several decades prior, but conflicts grew during the 1870s. Irish miners began to organize, especially in response to Frank Gowen, a ruthless robber who dominated the coalmines in the region (officially under the Reading Railroad), and his cruel treatment of the miners.
In the wake of the disastrous Panic of 1873, Gowan cut wages and organized an industry cartel. He feared the organization of the miners and thus hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency, a notorious private organization often utilized by businesses to spy on and break up workers’ strikes. The Agency began to spread rumors of the Molly Maguires, a secret society named after one in Ireland that punished British landowners who charged high rents to Irish farmers. It sent James McParlan, an Irish Catholic immigrant, to work undercover for almost three years, gathering information that would later allow him to testify against twenty men. A failed strike in 1874 led to more support for the Mollies. Anti-union people began to turn up dead, and sabotage was carried out against company property. The Iron and Coal Police were targeted as well; they were the scourge of the miners.
The trial lacked almost all due process. Coal company attorneys prosecuted the case. A local judge complained, “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." In the end, twenty Irish immigrants were hanged for terrorism and murder. They swore their loyalty to the Catholic Church before they were executed.
The alarm over the Molly Maguires also manifested in the crushing of the miners’ union, the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association, and disallowed the organization in the coalfields for many years to follow. Some Catholic bishops also excommunicated any member of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which was a fraternal order in which some more violent Irish miners belonged. As scholar Kevin Kenny wrote, “though there were some dissenting voices among labor organizations, the Molly Maguires were represented in most contemporary accounts as the embodiment of evil. One specific narrative quickly became dominant: the Molly Maguires as a band of Irish cutthroats, engaging in violence for its own sake, for money, or for revenge, who terrorized the anthracite region for more than a decade before they were finally brought to justice by a heroic Pinkerton detective and his employer, the Reading Railroad.”
In 1978 the governor of Pennsylvania, Milton Shapp, proclaimed that the trial was unfair, there was no evidence to convict any of the men, and granted John “Black Jack” Kehoe a posthumous pardon. He stated, “We can be proud of the men known as the Molly Maguires because they defiantly faced allegations which attempted to make trade unionism a criminal conspiracy."
