Ned McAdoo and the Molly Maguires:Chapter Five July 18, 2010
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CHAPTER FIVE (Now)
That book that lay cradled in my Father’s ample lap on that frosty morning a decade ago lay now on the nightstand next to my side of our queen-sized bed. It was I who had fallen asleep last night with the yellowed and dog-eared volume in my lap. Apparently Judy had taken it gently from my fingers, as she has done with books so many times, careful not to wake me, and placed it on the night table.
I looked at the cover, black as the coal the Irishmen had mined. “The Molly Maguires” by Wayne G. Broehl, Jr. I was reading it for the third time. I’d read it once after Pop’s first reading, and again during law school, when I did a paper on labor law and labor unions. And now I was reading it because the case I’d become involved — no, make that embroiled — in had made me think of Black Jack Kehoe and his hanged comrades. And of course reading it was what had brought on the dream… the nightmare from which Judy had just shaken me awake.
Determined to snap out of the anxious funk the vision of Black Jack had left hanging in the very air around me, I plopped out of bed, my feet thumping down onto the forest green wall-to-wall carpet. My toes felt blindly, unconsciously around, found my battered brown leather slippers and crawled into them. I padded across the carpet and into the bathroom, still unfocused. In the bathroom I jammed my personal attachment onto the electric toothbrush, then loaded up the bristles with toothpaste. I turned on the cold water and wet the blob of Crest. Bringing the dripping, blue blob toward my open mouth, I pressed the electric brush’s ‘on’ button. The little, bristly end began to vibrate. The lump of well-soaked Crest flipped off the bristles and landed in my left eye.
“Oh, shit,” I shouted, dropping the humming appliance on my right foot as I grabbed for the hand towel hanging on a hook beside the sink.
“I hord dat,” said a penetrating little voice about three feet behind me. Startled, I turned reflexively to the left, stepping on the still buzzing electric brush, which made a sharp, snapping sound and abruptly stopped humming.
“I’m goin’ tell Mommy,” said that high-pitched little voice. Little Judy, as she was known in our family circle, ran out of the bathroom, shouting, “Mommy, Mommy, Daddy said the s-word. Daddy said the s-word.”
I turned back to the sink, muttering softly to myself. I plucked the towel from the hook and wiped the Crest from my eye. I picked up the electric brush, now silent and bearing a long, thin crack down its side. I tried the ‘on’ button. Nothing. I put the poor, dead (or was it just badly wounded?) machine on the shelf over the sink and contented myself with a good long gargle of mouthwash.
After a quick shower I felt awake. The residual tension from the nightmare seemed to have washed down the drain with the soap suds and shampoo. With a hairbrush and the electric hairdryer, I teased and cajoled my thinning mop of rusty-colored hair into a posture where it looked thicker than it really was any longer.
“Grass doesn’t grow on a busy street,” Mom was always telling me. Archie, whose silver gray locks now formed a curly fringe beneath a shiny dome, always smiled appreciatively, although the remark was never addressed to him. Recalling her cliché this morning, as I gazed at myself in the mirror, gave me very little comfort. “I’m not even 40,” I muttered. Picturing myself with the same pale Easter egg nestled in a nest of cellophane straw — which is how I pictured the top of Pop’s head — made my heart even heavier than it had been when I climbed out of bed.
I reached into Judy’s side of the medicine chest, intending to add a little hairspray to what seemed on this Monday in mid-March to be my woefully understaffed scalp. Awake now, but inattentive, I spritzed the aerosol mist into my right eye.
“Jesus H Christ,” I growled, again making a desperate grab for the hand towel. The day being what it was, I stuffed into my stinging, hairs-prayed eyeball the corner of the towel containing the blob of Crest I had earlier extracted from the corner of my left eye. “Shit!” I shouted again.
“Mommy, Daddy doin’ it ‘gen,” came the siren-like voice of my two-year old daughter from somewhere near the bathroom door.
Having thrice verbally transgressed — all profanity and vulgarity having been forbidden to me by Big Judy, when God gave us Little Judy two years ago — and my transgressions having dutifully been reported by Little Judy to Big Judy, I left the house without the protection of my ladies’ good luck kisses. With thinning pate and lacking my ladies’ charms against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, I pointed my yellow Dodge neon toward the office, while idly flipping on WHYY, the local Public Broadcasting news channel.
“Mother, mother ocean, I have heard your call…”, I muttered in a Monday morning monotone of one of my favorite Jimmy Buffett tunes, as I navigated the few blocks to the offices Archie and I share at the corner of Manoa and Eagle Roads. It’s the same place he had his office back in 1987, except now the firm of McAdoo & McAdoo, L.L.C. occupies the largest suite.
“Police say Larkin, who is awaiting trial as the alleged “Elephant Man,” was arrested again, this time as he sprayed dayglo paint on the steps of the Montgomery County Courthouse, where his trial is scheduled to begin early next month.”
The newscaster’s voice reached my ears like a slap aside the head. As my aural sense suddenly concentrated totally upon the broadcast, my visual acuity must have diminished proportionately. Suddenly the predominating sounds were horns blasting on both sides of my little yellow chariot. I reflexively slammed on my brakes. Looking around I realized to my horror that I was half a car length into the intersection of Manoa and Darby Roads. The light was against me and properly angry commuters were snarling at me through their windshields from both sides.
There was little I could do, and little they could do but let me proceed across Darby and continue down Manoa toward the office. This I did at a goodly clip, risking a ticket for speeding through the school zone at the Manoa Elementary School, just half a block before careening into the driveway in front of the white stucco building which was once a branch library but now housed our two-lawyer firm.
I bounded up the steps and threw open the front door, startling Ruthy, who appeared to be in the process of booting up her computer.
“Where’s Archie?” I asked a bit breathlessly and utterly insensitive to having just frightened the wits out of our crackerjack little Italian secretary.
“Oh, God, Ned,” she gushed uncharacteristically (Ruth DiPetro is usually all business), “You scared the life out of me! Archie? Well, ah… jeeze, Ned, you know your Father is never here too early.”
“Yeh, right,” I nodded, my mind now a mix of panic and frustration. Echoing that movie action hero-cum-governor I secretly idolized in a vestigial, post-adolescent way, I muttered, “I’ll be back,” turned and bounded back down the front steps.
I ran across the parking area and the narrow flower bed, now merely mud, that bordered the sidewalk, and on down Eagle Road. I crossed so quickly and recklessly that I again elicited the well-deserved blasts of a startled commuter’s horn, and continued at an almost Arnold Schwarzeneger pace down Stanley Avenue to the house where I had grown up.
Running up the walk, I grabbed the door handle, and came to an abrupt halt. The door was locked. I pounded on it, then rang the bell. Nothing. The absurd thought coursed through my mind, “Not a creature was stirring, not even a…,” when the door swung back from my face and there stood my Old Man. He looked surprised to see me.
“Ned!” he exclaimed. He was wearing trousers and a white shirt, and his face was half shaved, the other half still lathered and awaiting his razor.
I practically pushed his bulky body backwards into the foyer as I burst into the house.
Huffing and puffing, I managed to say, “I presume you haven’t heard the news. You wouldn’t look so calm if you had.”
“What news?” Archie squinted his eyes like some great groundhog who had been disturbed down in his den and had emerged into the morning light still unprepared to face the day.
“John’s been arrested,” I heaved. “Larkin… he’s been arrested.”
Archie sat down on the stairs, oblivious to the shaving soap that coated his left cheek. “My God, Ned. He hasn’t blown somebody up?” Archie’s eyes looked at me pleadingly. Like any attorney who has done his duty and won bail for his criminal client, Archie lived in fear that the accused felon he’s gotten freed will use his freedom to commit more crimes.
Since most accused felons are guilty as sin, this is not an unfounded fear.
“No, no,” I hastily, if somewhat breathlessly, reassured him. “The radio made it sound like it was just vandalism.”
“What?” The Old Man continued to blink in confused disbelief. “Larkin’s become a vandal?”
“That seems to be it,” I shrugged, wiping my forehead with my pocket handkerchief. “If I heard it right, he spray painted the courthouse steps.”
“The courthouse steps!” Pop lumbered back to his bare feet. (I have never been able to comprehend how Archie can stand to pad around the house, which is mainly hardwood floors, without slippers or socks, even in the dead of winter.) His hairy toes, peaking from beneath trouser legs that dragged along the floor, looked like they belonged to Bilbo Baggins. “In Norristown?”
“That seems to be it,” I confirmed with a second shrug. I balled up the damp hanky and stuffed it back into my trouser pocket. “What do you want to do?”
“What time is it, anyhow?” he inquired.
I checked my wristwatch, a Rolex to which I had treated myself on the settlement — very favorable to my client — of my first fairly large auto accident case half a dozen years ago. “A couple minutes past nine.”
“Well,” opined the Old Man, “I guess we need to get on up there and sort this thing out. If Larkin did it, Judge Daedelus is going to revoke his bail for sure.”
Ned McAdoo and the Molly Maguires: Chapter Four July 1, 2010
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CHAPTER FOUR (1973)
“Curse of Convicted Mollie Still Lives”
by Jim Castagnera
On June 21, 1877 four men were hanged in the Central Pennsylvania coaltown of Mauch Chunk. The four — Michael Doyle, Edward Kelly, Alexander Campbell, and “Yellow Jack” Donohue — were members of a secret society of Irish coal miners, known as the Mollie Maguires. They had been convicted of murder in the most sensational trial to ever take place in the Carbon County courthouse, located in Mauch Chunk.
The Molly Maguires used terror and violence to combat the oppression of their English and Welsh foremen at a time when wages for a danger-filled day “in the hole” amounted to about fifty cents. The name was derived from a similar secret society, formed in mid-19th century Ireland, whose members frequently dressed in women’s clothing to better ambush the rent collectors. The power of the American Mollies peaked during the 1870s. They are credited with about 150 murders, and incited the mining communities to sporadic mob violence. They even organized strikes in unsuccessful attempts to bring the great mining and railroad companies to their knees.
Finally, the Pinkerton Detective Agency, hired by the mine owners, sent an undercover agent named James McParlen into the anthracite coal fields. He successfully infiltrated the Mollie organization, and lived to testify at trials in Carbon and Schuylkill Counties which sent some dozen Mollies to the gallows.
“Yellow Jack” Donohue had been convicted of the 1871 murder of Morgan Powell, a foreman for the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company in Summit Hill, a tiny Carbon County community.
His three companions on the gallows had been found guilty of killing a mine foreman named John P. Jones.
Newspaper accounts of the executions record that “Yellow Jack,” Doyle and Kelly displayed no remorse as they faced the hangman’s noose. Only Campbell protested his innocence.
As they dragged him from his cell on the first floor of the county jail, Campbell flattened the palm of his left hand against the damp plaster wall.
“This hand print,” he vowed, “will remain here as proof of my innocence. He shouted this vow over and over as the sheriff’s deputies dragged him to the gibbet in the jail yard.
Campbell dropped two feet, six inches through the trap door. He took fourteen minutes to die. When the county coroner pronounced him dead at last, his body was cut down and taken home for burial.
The years passed. The Mollie Maguires gave way to the United Mine Workers of America with its less violent tactics and more successful strikes. Alexander Campbell’s hand print remained.
After the turn of the century the palm print on the jail wall became something of a legend in the anthracite coal regions. Tourists from the Pennsylvania Pocono Mountains made the pilgrimage to Mauch Chunk to see for themselves the curious legacy left by Alexander Campbell.
The response of local law officers to this notoriety was less than enthusiastic. The open sore of Molly-Maguireism was slow to heal.
Anti-Irish sentiment persisted into the twentieth century.
In 1930 a Pennsylvania Dutchman named Biegler was elected sheriff in Carbon County. Biegler was known to be anti-Irish and anti-Catholic. He was determined to put an end to the legend which had grown up around the so-called ‘miracle’ in the first floor cell.
One night he brought the county road gang into the jail and had them tear out the wall that bore the bizarre shadow of a human hand. When the rubble was cleared, the road gang put in a new wall and covered it with fresh plaster. Sheriff Biegler retired early the next morning, confident that he had obliterated the noxious Irish ‘miracle.’
When he awoke and visited the cell later that day, he was appalled to find that the fresh plaster was marred by the vague outline of a hand. By evening a black palm was clearly visible on the cell wall. Or so the story goes. Witnesses who will corroborate the strange incident are hard to find.
But a more recent attempt to obliterate the hand from the wall can be corroborated. In 1960 Sheriff Charles Neast took up residence in the jailhouse in Jim Thorpe. (The name Mauch Chunk was changed to Jim Thorpe in 1954 to honor the great Indian athlete.) To test the authenticity of the 83-year-old print, he covered it with a green latex paint.
As Ferdinand “Bull” Herman, the current jail turn-key, is pleased to point out
to visitors, the shadow hand has once again reemerged and is clearly visible.
The Carbon County Jail, built in 1869, looks the same today as when it housed four condemned Irish terrorists nearly a century ago. In fact it was used by Paramount Pictures in 1968 for several scenes (including the inevitable gallows scene) in the movie titled “The Molly Maguires.”
The jail still has a few prisoners — a duo of dope addicts and a local gent who wrote some bad checks — but no prisoner has agreed to sleep in the cell containing the hand print. No cot is kept in the cell. The ponderous steel-grating door is opened only to accommodate tourists. According to “Bull” Herman the number of visitors to the cell grows each year.
“People come from all over to see the hand,” he says, “Had some folks in from Georgia not long ago. It seems people around here have begun to forget about it. But people from out of state hear about it somehow.”
No doubt the Paramount movie contributed to renewed interest in the Mollie Maguires. Sadly, the film overlooked the hand print. But the legend of this eerie, black silhouette survives by word of mouth. “Bull” Herman is summoned to the massive, black and gold front doors of the jail by curious tourists more frequently every year.
It’s almost as if some power we know little about has decreed that the legacy of Alexander Campbell — the hanged Mollie who swore his innocence — will remain to be seen by succeeding generations of Americans. And will remain to thrill and haunt the sons and daughters of the miners who used to dig the Black Gold.
************
Excerpt from the diary of Maggie Mulhearn, dated June 13, 1973:
My silly parents wouldn’t take me to see the hand print. They said it wasn’t the sort of thing a teenaged girl should be interested in. I swear! They’d still have me playing with dolls if they could !! And I’m 13 !!!
Thank God I can always get Gram and Pop Pop to do whatever I want them to. After Sunday dinner, I helped Gram with the dishes. Then we all got into Pop Pop’s new Impala and drove to Jim Thorpe. It’ll be our little secret, Pop Pop said and winked at me as he turned round to back the car out of his driveway.
What a creepy place the jail is ! And that old guy, the Bull !! Well, he’s really just a skinny old man. Really, I guess it’s the place that makes him seem like such a creep. I kept wanting to call him Egor ! Probably he’s somebody’s Pop Pop. But how can he hang around that place all the time ?? I mean, I know it’s his job. But REALLY !!!
The door actually creaked when he opened it. Boris Karloff ! And the smell! It made me think of Pop Pop’s socks when he comes into the kitchen in the summertime after working in his garden all morning and pulls off his old work-boots and then yanks off those white socks that he owns a thousand pairs of. Anyway, that’s how it smelled.
Then “the Bull” (ha, ha) took us to the cell. The bars must weigh a ton, they’re so thick. They creaked a little, too, when he opened them. Besides the regular bars there was some kind of steel mesh attached to them. I asked Mr. Bull and he said that had been added on to all the cell bars much later than when
the Molly Maguires were here.
The hand print was pretty high up on the wall and I asked him if he’d mind reaching up and putting his hand on the hand print. Then I took his picture. I think he was flattered. I think this makes him feel important, like some kind of celebrity or something.
I thought the whole thing was a lot of fun. But Pop Pop and Gram seemed a little upset when we left the jail. When we got back to their house I asked them about it. And then they told me about my Great Great Grandfather.
[If you like this story, consider buying this and its prequel, Why My Dad Hates Ice Cream, at my storefront: http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=1257238%5D
Vintage Archie McAdoo, Attorney at Large June 14, 2010
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For those of you following the unfolding novel, Ned McAdoo and the Molly Maguires, herewith some vintage cartoons about his old man, Archie.
Ned McAdoo and the Molly Maguires, Chapter Three June 5, 2010
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CHAPTER THREE (1987)
On the evening of the day that he met Maggie Mulhearn, Archie told us during dinner of the unusual engagement.
“Who are the Molly Maguires?” Katy asked the question that was also in my mind. Given that Pop later confessed to me how he had indulged that afternoon in a celebratory pig out and snooze, in retrospect I’m surprised at how much he knew about John Kehoe and the so-called Molly Maguires when he responded to our collective curiosity.
“There are two kinds of coal in Pennsylvania,” he began, swallowing a bit noisily the piece of pork chop he had been chewing. “There’s soft coal. Bituminous. That’s the most common and it’s mined out around Pittsburgh. The second kind is anthracite, or… Ned?” He looked my way. The mashed potatoes on their way to my mouth stopped in mid air. The gravy dribbled from them back down onto my plate. This had always been one of Pop’s favorite pedagogic ploys, as far back as I can recall.
“Uh… hard coal?” I ventured, hoping that logic ruled in the realm of coal mining.
“Very good, Ned,” said my Father, showing no apparent pride that I had managed to guess the obvious. “Hard coal. Yes. Not so common, and today not very significant. But in the second half of the 19th century big money was being made in hard coal. By railroads such as the Reading, and by the people who owned and ran them. Naturally,” he continued, “like almost everyone else on the planet at that time, the hard coal miners were exploited.”
“What does that mean… exploited?” Katy questioned him.
“It means used… taken advantage of,” Mom chimed in, this brief interruption in his disquisition affording the Old Man opportunity enough to shovel in a big fork-full of mashed spuds and wash them down with a big gulp of the white wine he was having with his dinner.
“Right,” resumed Archie, delicately wiping some gravy from his fleshy, pink lower lip. “The miners in eastern Pennsylvania, where the hard coal was mined — they were mostly Irish, by the way — were required to work very long hours for very little pay. The work was exceptionally dangerous, even for a time when thousands of railroad and industrial workers were killed and injured every year.”
“So who are the Molly Maguires?” Katy impatiently persisted, as she always did when Dad got into his professorial posture.
“The Molly Maguires,” he went on, betraying only a very tiny bit of annoyance at this second, and apparently unwanted, interruption (his plate was clean, his wine glass empty now), “were Irish miners who rebelled against mine and railroad companies and took matters into their own hands.
“It was a secret society, the Molly Maguires, and its members shot mine owners and operators, blew up railroads and mines, and generally tried to make life as miserable for the capitalists as they made it for the miners and their families. But it was a no win situation.”
“What do you mean?” asked Katy.
“I know,” I said, stealing Archie’s thunder. “They were all caught and hanged.”
“How do you know that?” Archie inquired, a little disappointed that I had gotten to reveal the climax to his story.
“Because,” I said with some satisfaction, “I just remembered that I saw the movie on the late show one night.”
“Oh, yeah,” the Old Man reflected, caressing the right side of his bulbous nose with a pensive forefinger. “I remember the film. Do you recall it, Karen?”
Mom had gotten up and begun clearing the dinner dishes as a prelude to dessert. “Not really,” she replied. “I know we saw it years ago. But I can’t say it left too much of an impression.”
Mom was a Philly girl. The rest of Pennsylvania was an unknown wilderness to her, except for a couple of favorite Pocono resorts, which were the “known wilderness” in her mind. The history of the hard coal region was of no moment to her.
“Sean Connery and Richard Harris, wasn’t it, Ned?” Pop turned back to me, Mom in his view having nothing useful to contribute.
“Sean Connery for sure,” I responded. Connery was still a big star in the 1980s and on into the nineties. “I’m not sure who any of the other guys in it were.”
“Well, we ought to rent it,” Archie reasoned. In the next instant he was pushing himself ponderously back from the table.
“Don’t you want dessert?” Mom sounded a bit startled, and where Archie and dessert were concerned, rightly so.
“I’m going over to Movies Unlimited to see if I can get that flick,” he declared. “I’ll have my dessert with the movie.”
And so, a half hour later our family of four was gathered round the electronic hearth in the basement family room, watching a film released in 1970 by Paramount Pictures. The movie is called “The Molly Maguires,” staring, yes, Sean Connery, Richard Harris, and a soap opera rage of that era named Samantha Eggar. Directed by Martin Ritt, a film maker with a reputation for making “message films,” the movie captures the legend well enough:
The action opens with Richard Harris, playing the Pinkerton detective James McParlan, arriving at Shenandoah in central-eastern Pennsylvania, where he’s been dispatched by Alan Pinkerton, who’s been put on the payroll of the Reading Railroad to infiltrate and expose the Mollies. Under the alias of Jamie McKenna, McParlan takes a job down in the mines, meanwhile spreading around the local pub crowd the largess he attributes to “passing the queer” (fencing counterfeit money). The upshot is that Connery a/k/a Black Jack Kehoe, a fellow miner, initiates McParlan into his little band of desperadoes, a tight-knit band of terrorists within the ranks of the benevolent Irish social club, the Ancient Order of Hibernians.
Katy wasn’t much interested in this hoary yarn of labor exploitation and unrest. After gobbling a slab of Mom’s chocolate cake with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, she went to her room upstairs in search of more rewarding pursuits. The movie offered enough action to keep me interested, as the little band of Irish terrorists tore up the Reading’s tracks with their black powder charges and ambushed offensive mine bosses in their victims’ stables and outhouses. Mom stayed on to the end, too, though she insisted that one light stay lit — Archie likes the room dark as a theater when he watches a video — and she read some company documents she’d brought home in her briefcase, only occasionally casting a fleeting glance at the action on the screen.
But the Old Man was entranced. As the legendary tale lumbered inexorably to its tragic conclusion — McParlan’s betrayal of his comrades and his secret oath, their trial and execution, his rejection by Samantha Eggar (whose loyalty lay with her mine patch community), McParlan’s departure from the coal fields with his pockets filled with money but his heart just as heavy with unrequited love — Pop pumped down three big slabs of Mom’s extra-moist devil’s food cake (but no ice cream), sluiced down with about half a dozen cups of coffee. In fairness to my Dad, I note here that his concession to a healthier lifestyle that evening, as almost always, was decaf coffee sweetened artificially. This concession, pushed and policed by my mother, assuaged any twinge of guilt he might otherwise have felt about the three desserts.
Then, with Sean Connery and his comrades duly hanged by the neck until dead, and the chocolate cake (or what was left of it) duly sealed in saran wrap, Mom and I headed upstairs to our respective bedrooms and, gratefully, to our beds.
But not Pop. He adjourned to the sunroom at the back of the house, where he gobbled up the book he had begun before dozing off in his office that afternoon. One thing I always had to admit about the Old Man: if he could gorge himself on cake, he likewise could gorge himself on knowledge. He told me once that, when he started into law school, an attorney-friend of his father had given him a foam rubber cushion as a gift. “You’ll need this more than you’ll need your brains,” he had told Archie, who added that he used that cushion hard during his three years of legal education. And when I started into law school five years ago, Archie wrapped that beat-up cushion, with its foam rubber showing through the torn material at the corners, and gave it to me.
I did all right in law school but I never developed Pop’s power of uninterrupted concentration. Though I was upstairs asleep, still only a high school student, in my mind’s eye I can see him pawing over the battered paperback book, that in the months ahead became his constant companion, sometimes in his briefcase, often in his suit coat pocket. I can see the dim lamplight illuminating the side of his jowly face, and his ever-sweaty hands clutching the book.
Archie had read nearly the whole book by the time morning rolled around and Mom gave him a gentle kiss on the forehead — something I did see first hand — before tiptoeing out to the garage and heading for her job at REF Group.
Intelligence is Advertising turned inside out June 3, 2010
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So says William Gibson in Spook Country.
What we see on the outside is the ad. Turn it inside out and you’ll find the intelligence… the confidential research… inside it.
Life reduced to risk management? June 2, 2010
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“We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management.” — William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Miranda or Stasi… You Be the Judge June 1, 2010
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Today a majority of the US Supreme Court decided that if a detainee maintains silence for hours on end, this alone does not establish that he wishes to exercise his Miranda rights. Unless and until he expressly says so, he has not exercised them, and any time he opens his mouth, he has waived them.
Interrogate anyone continuously and eventually s/he will break down and start talking. This is beautifully illustrated in the opening sequence of the 2007 German film about the Stasi of the late, great East Germany, entitled “The Lives of Others.” Check it out on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iu-NJA4Y1RI
Alice through the Looking Glass May 31, 2010
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“With the grid, we’re here. This is the other side of the screen. Right here.” William Gibson, Spook Country, page 64
Cyberspace overlays Real Space. We move through one and we move through the other, simultaneously. If we have the right equipment, we are aware of this. I drive my car with the GPS operating, and I see myself moving simultaneously through both spaces.
New McAdoo and the Molly Maguires, Chapter Two May 30, 2010
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CHAPTER TWO (1987)
“Is Violence Ever Justified?”
by Maggie Mulhearn
The Black 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 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.
Two terrific writers, three terrific heroines May 26, 2010
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My two favorite writers at the moment are Stieg Larsson and William Gibson. For this old man’s money, both old boys write great female protagonists.
Larsson’s Girl (with the Dragon Tattoo; Who Played with Fire) is one of the brightest, ballsiest, and, yes, freakiest femmes in all lit. She is unforgettable, especially if, like me, you also saw her come to life in the Swedish cinematic rendering of Tattoo.
As for Gibson — he of Neuromancer (a classic of sci fi if ever there was) and Johnny Nemonic — he gives us two great women leads: Cayce Pollard of Pattern Recognition (2003) and Hollis Henry of Spook Country (2007).
For fans like me, an exciting summer lies ahead. Number three of Larsson’s trilogy is due out in July, the wrap up of Gibson’s latest trilogy — giving him then a trilogy of trilogies, written across three decades, of course — following in late summer or early fall.
I don’t usually do endorsements, but I am happy to help these guys (ah, well, Stieg is dead) sell their books.
Castagnera on Legal Rights 