This is the sixth excerpt from Labor’s Untold Story printed here by permission of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE). The book can be purchased for $6.95, plus $2 postage for single orders from the UE by writing to their headquarters at 2400 Oliver Building, 535 Smithfield Street, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15222.

From the first it was war, Gowen trying for the absolute extermination upon which Dewees wrote he was determined. Led by the president of the Philadelphia and Reading, the operators unleashed a reign of terror, hiring and arming a band of vigilantes who took the name of the "Modocs" and who joined the corporation-owned Coal and Iron Police in waylaying, ambushing, and killing militant miners.

Edward Coyle, a leader of the union and of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, was murdered in March. Another member of the AOH was shot and killed by the Modocs led by one Bradley, a mine superintendent. Patrick Vary, a mine boss, fired into a group of miners and, according to the later boast of Gowen, as the miners "fled they left a long trail of blood behind them." At Tuscarora a meeting of miners was attacked by vigilantes who shot and killed one miner and wounded several others. Later terrorists attacked the home of Charles O’Donnell in Wiggins Patch, killing this militant mine worker and murdering Mrs. Charles McAllister.

The miners, under the leadership of the AOH, began to fight back. Soon the state militia patrolled the coal patches, augmenting the Coal and Iron Police, who were responsible to none but the corporations which paid them. Not long later the courts were used to jail mine leaders who were daily being excoriated by the press, each Sunday from altar and pulpit. On May 12 John Siney, who had favored arbitration and had been against calling the strike, was arrested at a mass meeting of strikers in Clearfield County called to protest the importation of strikebreakers.

Xeno Parkes, field organizer for the Miners’ National Association with which the Schuylkill union was affiliated, was also arrested along with twenty-six other union officials. They were charged with conspiracy. In his charge to the jury Judge John Holden Owes, in the Siney-Parkes case, declared that "any agreement, combination or confederation to increase or depress the price of any vendible commodity, whether labor, merchandise, or anything else, is indictable as a conspiracy under the laws of Pennsylvania." In sentencing two officials of a local miners’ union Judge Owes said, AI find you, Joyce, to be president of the Union, and you, Maloney, to be secretary, and therefore I sentence you to one year’s imprisonment."

Although the union was nearly broken by the imprisonment of much of its leadership and the cold-blooded terror and murder of operator-inspired vigilantes, the fight went on, led almost exclusively now by the rank-and-file miners of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Gowen, in his effort to smash them, deluged the newspapers with stories of murder and arson on the part of the Molly Maguires. The reporters were charmed by the great man who talked to them so freely and soon there was scarcely a strike in the country that was not being attributed to Irish terrorists. As the press inveighed against the alleged Irish secret society, carrying each one of Gowen’s fabrications as if it were uncontested fact, it published stories of Molly Maguires inspiring strikes in Jersey City, the Ohio mine fields, and Illinois. The great men who were out to overthrow society, and the average reader accepted the fabrication as he accepted the fact that the earth was round.

But in Schuylkill County hunger was defeating the miners. "Since I last saw you," wrote one striking miner to a friend, "I have buried my youngest child, and on the day before its death there was not one bit of victuals in the house with six children." And Andrew Roy, in his history of the American coal miner, wrote:

"The miners made heroic sacrifices such as they had never made before to win the strike. In the closing weeks of the contest there were exhibited scenes of woe and want and uncomplaining suffering seldom surpassed. Hundreds of families rose in the morning to breakfast on a crust of bread and a glass of water, who did not know where a bite of dinner was to come from. Day after day, men, women and children went to the adjoining woods to dig roots and pick up herbs to keep body and soul together ..."

Defeated after six long months of hunger and bloodshed, the miners went back to work. They were forced to accept the twenty percent cut. The union was destroyed. Those who had led the strike were blacklisted and many were driven from the anthracite fields.

"We are beaten," admitted John Walsh, Civil War veteran and one of the union leaders who was exiled from the coal country, "forced by the unremitting necessity of wives and little ones to accept terms which we have already told the Coal Exchange and the public, we would never under any other circumstances have been forced to accept." And Joseph F. Patterson, another strike leader, later said, "The organization was broken. The heart was knocked out of the brave fellows who built it up and sustained it."

But the heart was not knocked out of McGeehan, Carroll, and Duffy, nor of Munley, Kehoe, and Doyle and the men they led in the AOH. They fought on, determined to restore miners’ wages and rebuild their union. It was then that Gowen apparently decided that any measure was justified in dealing with those whom the courts had found were criminal conspirators in that they were trade unionists. "Many operators," writes Peter Roberts in his Anthracite Coal Communities, "then furnished arms to their foremen ... When labor in many instances sought relief, it was answered with an oath supplemented with the pointing of a revolver." Militant miners often disappeared, their bodies sometimes being found later in deserted mine shafts.

When the miners fought back, under the leadership of those in the AOH, Gowen in 1876 summoned McParlan to him. The spy in three years of effort had gathered in nothing but a certain amount of booze and pay. He had obtained no evidence. But Gowen felt, and frankly said, that his own campaign had borne fruit, that public sentiment was such that, "It was sufficient to hang a man to declare him a Molly Maguire."

McParlan agreed to testify, and did testify, that all those whom Gowen wanted removed had freely and voluntarily confessed to him that they had committed various murders. His word was to be corroborated by various prisoners at various of the county’s jails, freedom the reward for corroboration. Among those who buttressed McParlan’s testimony at the ensuing trials was a prisoner known as Kelly the Bum, who admitted that he had committed every crime in the calendar. Another prisoner was one Jimmy Kerrigan whose wife testified that he himself had committed the murder with which he was charging the miners of the AOH.