Today in Labor History June 24, 1904: Troops arrested 22 workers in Telluride, Colorado. They accused them of being strike leaders and deported them out of the Telluride district. This was a repeat of events in March, in which they deported 60 union miners. And all of it was part of the Colorado Labor Wars of 1903-1904. The strikes were led by the Western Federation of Labor (WFM) and heavily suppressed by Pinkerton and Baldwin-Felts detectives, local cops and militias. Some scholars have claimed said that "There is no episode in American labor history in which violence was as systematically used by employers as in the Colorado labor war of 1903 and 1904."
One of the strike leaders was Big Bill Haywood, who would go on to cofound the even more radical IWW in 1905. Pinkerton agent James McParland tried (and failed) to frame Haywood for the murder of former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg in 1905. The Pinkerton agency in Colorado at this time was run by James McParland, who had served as an agent provocateur and the sole witness against the 20 innocent Irish coalminers who were executed as Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania in the 1870s. (That story is depicted in my novel, “Anywhere But Schuylkill.”) McParlan placed numerous spies and agents provocateur within the WFM to sabotage and undermine their organizing.
Today in Labor History June 16, 1836: The London Working Men's Association was formed, launching the Chartist movement. The Chartists took their name from the People's Charter, which demanded universal suffrage for men, regardless of social class. The movement appealed to skilled workers, not the masses of unskilled laborers. They followed the utopian socialism of Robert Owen. The movement lasted from 1838 to 1857. America’s first cop, Allan Pinkerton, creator of the Secret Service & persecutor of the Molly Maguires, was a radical participant in the Chartist movement before becoming the bulldog of capitalists. While the Chartism was primarily a constitutional movement, there was a radical, insurrectionary wing. Pinkerton was a part of this wing. He fought cops, destroyed property, set fires and had to flee the UK in order to avoid imprisonment. You can read my satirical biography of him here: https://marshalllawwriter.com/the-eye-that-never-sleeps/
Today in Labor History May 9, 1907: Big Bill Haywood went on trial for murder in the bombing death of former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg. Clarence Darrow defended Haywood and got him acquitted. Steunenberg had brutally suppressed the state’s miners. Haywood had been framed by a Pinkerton agent provocateur named James McParland, the same man who infiltrated the Pennsylvania miners’ union in the 1870s and got 20 innocent men executed as Molly Maguires. You can read about that in my novel, “Anywhere But Schuylkill.”
On June 21, 1877, the authorities hanged ten Irish miners in a single day in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. Known as Black Thursday, or Day of the Rope, it was the second largest mass execution in U.S. history. (The largest was in 1862, when the U.S. government executed 38 Dakota warriors). They convicted the Irishmen of murder, and accused them of being terrorists from a secret organization called the Molly Maguires. They executed ten more over the next two years, and imprisoned another twenty suspected Molly Maguires. Most of the convicted men were union activists. Some even held public office, as sheriffs and school board members.
However, there is no evidence that an organization called the Molly Maguires ever existed in the U.S. The only serious evidence against the men was presented by a spy, James McParland, working for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, who provided the plans and weapons the men purportedly used in their crimes. The entire legal process was a travesty: a private corporation (the Reading Railroad) set up the investigation through a private police force (the Pinkerton Detective Agency) and prosecuted them with their own company attorneys. No jurors were Irish, though several were recent German immigrants who had trouble understanding the proceedings.
Nearly everything people “know” today about the Molly Maguires comes from Allan Pinkerton’s own work of fiction, The Molly Maguires and the Detectives (1877), which he marketed as nonfiction. His heavily biased book was the primary source for dozens of academic works, and for several pieces of fiction, including Arthur Conan Doyle’s final Sherlock Holmes novel, Valley of Fear (1915), and the 1970 Sean Connery film, Molly Maguires.
My novel, Anywhere But Schuylkill, tells a truer story of these union miners and their persecution by the Pinkertons.
Allan Pinkerton, creator of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, the private cops that murdered dozens of labor organizers and activists, that tried to frame Big Bill Haywood for murder, that provided the perjured testimony and bogus evidence that got 20 innocent Irish American miners executed as Molly Maguires only immigrated to the U.S. to avoid a stiff prison term in Britain, where he was wanted for armed insurrection. Yes, America’s first celebrity cop had been an arsonist, vandal and violent soldier in the radical Chartist movement, before fleeing to the U.S. with his 15-year-old wife.
If you think the were just a nightmare from America’s labor and activist history, think again. They are still at it today, undermining labor organizing at Amazon, Apple and Google, among other.