EXCERPT:
James Roarty, bodymaster of the AOH in Coaldale, was convicted of furnishing two gunmen --James Boyle and Hugh McGehan -- to kill Tamaqua police officer Edward Yost. Yost was shot while adjusting a gas streetlight on July 6, 1875, by two men who hid behind a Civil War monument.
"After the hanging, my great-grandmother brought the body back to Allentown and buried him in the Immaculate Conception cemetery," Roarty said. "She was totally disgraced and lived her life out quietly in Allentown."
Roarty had worked in the "furnaces" under the Tilghman Street bridge in 1869 before getting a job in the Lehigh & Wilkes-Barre mines at Coaldale. Like Campbell, he saved his money and opened a tavern in Coaldale.
FULL ARTICLE:
James McParland, the Pinkerton detective who infiltrated the so-called Molly Maguires, had just fingered Alexander Campbell as the mastermind behind the murder of mine boss John P. Jones in Lansford.
Hired by coal barons who suspected the murders of 14 Welsh mine bosses in 12 years were the work of a clandestine group of Irish miners, McParland testified in Carbon County Court that Campbell ran a division of the Molly Maguires out of his tavern in Storm Hill, a section of Lansford.
Campbell planned the murder, imported two Mollies from Schuylkill County as hit men and supplied the Colt .45-caliber revolvers used to gun down the Welsh mining superintendent on his way to work at the Lehigh and Wilkes-Barre colliery, the Pinkerton agent testified.
Using the name of James McKenna, McParland had won the respect of the region's immigrant miners. A hard-drinking, tough-fisted son of the sod who would marry a Schuylkill County woman, McKenna was a leader among miners.
Now, wearing the Pinkerton star on his breast and with King Coal's money in his pockets, he was viewed as a turncoat.
A hush came over the crowded courtroom as McParland, dressed in black and peering through tiny spectacles, left the witness stand and made his way out of the courtroom.
"May you burn in hell," mumbled a Molly sympathizer.
This wasn't Aug. 28, 1876, when America was 100 years old and Judge Samuel S. Dreher sentenced Campbell to be hanged.
The remark damning McParland was made four days ago, when Carbon County's most sensational case was retried as part of the court's 150th anniversary celebration.
The jury in the mock trial, using modern standards of jurisprudence, reversed the conspiracy conviction that sent Campbell to the gallows on Black Thursday, June 21, 1877. Ten Mollies were hanged that day in Carbon and Schuylkill counties.
But the curse, made with a bit o' blarney, underscored the lasting legacy of the Molly Maguires, 116 years after they succumbed to the hangman's noose. To this day, the ghosts of the Molly Maguires haunt the mining patches of Schuylkill and Carbon counties.
"Where I come from," said Jim "Flash" McDonald of Schuylkill County, "we spit when we say the name McParland."
McDonald, who plays Irish music Sunday mornings on a Pottsville radio station, is from Cass Township. The Catholic church there is named for an Irish saint, and the Shamrock Fire Company paints its trucks green.
Many of the 350 people who packed the Victorian courtroom for the mock trail were direct descendants of the Mollies or the Coal & Iron police they battled.
Robert J. Linden of Lansdale, namesake of a captain in the Reading Co.'s private police force, showed up to defend his grandfather's reputation against the largely Irish crowd. The elder Linden, instrumental in convicting Campbell and other alleged Mollies, was McParland's contact during the year he spend under cover.
Linden has the 1873 Winchester rifle his grandfather used in his battles with striking Irish miners.
"He carried the Winchester during the insurrections up there," said Linden, who like his father and grandfather spent his working days at the Reading Railroad. "The mobs actually attacked the collieries and wanted to burn them down."
After battling the Mollies, Linden went to Philadelphia and opened a detective agency. A 33rd Degree Mason, he would become Philadelphia's superintendent of police. He died in 1904 of pneumonia.
Patrick Campbell, who wrote a book declaring his grand-uncle's innocence, was thankful that Alexander Campbell got to tell his side of the story. Campbell did not testify in the original trial. The book, "A Molly Maguire Story," was instrumental in developing the mock trial.
The make-believe Alexander Campbell, played by his great-grand-nephew J. Brian Campbell, denied any role in the Jones murder. He called the prosecution's assertion that he ordered Jones' murder in retaliation for the firing of two Mollies from Lansford as "total nonsense." Campbell noted that Jones didn't fire them -- a superior did.
Not only did Campbell deny being a Molly, he denied the organization existed.
"There is no such thing as a Molly Maguire," Campbell asserted. "The Mollies are purely a creation of Franklin Gowen, who concocted the story to malign the Irish worker." Gowen was head of the Pennsylvania & Reading Coal & Iron Co. and the Reading Railroad.
While not all agree, a few historians contend the Mollies were an illusion created by coal companies to bring public pressure against Irish miners who were organizing labor unions. By linking the murders to one small group of terrorists, the argument goes, the coal companies could create mass fear and hysteria.
Newspapers of the day, controlled by the coal companies, were filled with sensational accounts that pinned murder after murder on the Mollies -- before anyone was arrested.
But historians point out that little evidence -- except that provided by paid informants or defendants who cut a deal with prosecutors -- exists to link the murders to one group.
Prosecutors -- top coal company lawyers, not the districtattorney -- contended the Mollies used the Ancient Order of Hibernians as a front. While not all AOH members were Mollies, they said, all Mollies were AOH members.
The defense argued that the AOH was an Irish Catholic fraternal group that helped unemployed and injured miners who received no benefits from their employers. It was no more secret, they said, than the Masons or the Knights of Columbus.
Actors from Allentown's Theatre Outlet, dressed in period costume, portrayed witnesses in the mock trial. Speaking in heavy Irish brogue, they improvised testimony from their knowledge of the character's history.
So realistic were the proceedings that some observers and actors cried when the not-guilty verdict was read.
"I was crying, I really was," said Lee Burkett of Quakertown, who played Irish miner Hugh Dugan. "You get involved and draw your own conclusions, and the only conclusion I can come to is that Alexander Campbell was railroaded."
Judge John P. Lavelle, the mock trial's organizer, said it takes more than the trial to understand the Molly Maguires.
"What we cannot do here is re-create the tenor of the times," the judge said in his introduction. "In 1876, there was hysteria in Carbon and Schuylkill over the Molly Maguires and the Irish in the coal mines."
Coal companies, supplying the fuel for the Industrial Revolution, controlled the miners' lives from cradle to grave. The company owned the doctors who delivered their babies, the houses in which they lived and the stores where they bought their groceries.
So low were their wages, often paid in scrip, that miners sometimes owed the company money after working an 80-hour week.
"The coal companies took advantage of the miners, paying low wages and perpetuating inhumane conditions in the mines," Lavelle said. "Every day was a torture to these men."
Kevin Kenny, a Columbia University history professor who has written a book called "Making Sense of the Molly Maguires," said some Irish miners may have resorted to violence as a rudimentary form of justice.
Kenny, who did research in the coal regions and Ireland, said it would be naive to think of the Irish as innocent bystanders. Yet he's certain they were not as organized as the coal companies contended.
"The Molly Maguires clearly did not exist as the giant conspiracy of which we hear so much," said Kenny, who attended the mock trial.
Organizers condensed the original 14-day trial into five hours for the mock version. Left out of the testimony by agreement was any reference to union organizing in the 1870s.
The courtroom erupted into applause when, during an intermission discussion, retired labor leader John Brennan of Bethlehem called attention to an "eclipsing of the union role, 100 years ago and today."
Brennan, a founder of the Pennsylvania Labor History Society, maintained the violence was in reaction to the coal companies' stranglehold on politics, the judicial system and even religion of the times.
For James Roarty of Bethlehem, the mock trial was not simply an academic exercise. His great-grandfather and namesake was among the six hanged on Black Thursday in Schuylkill County Prison. Four people, including Campbell, were hanged the same day in Carbon County Prison.
A total of 20 men of Irish descent were hanged for murders, some of them dating back a decade or more, between 1877 and 1879.
James Roarty, bodymaster of the AOH in Coaldale, was convicted of furnishing two gunmen --James Boyle and Hugh McGehan -- to kill Tamaqua police officer Edward Yost. Yost was shot while adjusting a gas streetlight on July 6, 1875, by two men who hid behind a Civil War monument.
"After the hanging, my great-grandmother brought the body back to Allentown and buried him in the Immaculate Conception cemetery," Roarty said. "She was totally disgraced and lived her life out quietly in Allentown."
Roarty had worked in the "furnaces" under the Tilghman Street bridge in 1869 before getting a job in the Lehigh & Wilkes-Barre mines at Coaldale. Like Campbell, he saved his money and opened a tavern in Coaldale.
A retired director of the Pennsylvania Association of Building Contractors, Roarty said his parents were ashamed of their link to the Mollies. It was never discussed at home, and he discovered it only as a law student at Georgetown University in 1954.
Since then, he has researched the connection extensively and is writing a book.
All of the Mollies, he said, wore red roses on their lapels when they were hanged. Black Thursday was also known as "the day of the red rose" for many years.
When the Campbell verdict was read at 5 p.m. last Wednesday, Roarty said, he felt a sense of relief.
He thought of his great-grandfather, dangling at the end of a rope for eight minutes before dying. In a small way, the unofficial exoneration of Campbell vindicated his great-grandfather as well.
"There were others, including my great-grandfather," he said, "that without a doubt would be exonerated if their trials were held today."
Source: http://articles.mcall.com/1993-12-19/news/2941977_1_alexander-campbell-mock-trial-mining
