OPINION: How 2025 Stacks Up Against the Molly Maguires Era

The golden age that GOP politicians keep promising is looking a lot like the post-Civil War Gilded Age, which is why it’s worth examining our area during that period of unchecked corporate power and corruption.

When local history buffs think of the 1870s, the Molly Maguires probably come to mind. My first impression of them came from the 1970 film of that name, which portrayed them as exploited Irish-Catholic coal miners who fought back with violence and sabotage. 

Sean Connery got top billing as John “Black Jack” Kehoe, who was known as “the king of the Mollies.”  In the movie, he was a miner, but in real life, he’d worked his way out of that job to become a tavern/hotel owner and Girardville’s high constable.

He was hanged in 1878 for the 1862 murder of his neighbor, a mine supervisor who died two days after a brutal beating but apparently didn’t identify his assailants. 

There’s considerable doubt that the Mollies, an alleged terrorist group in Ireland, were even here, but 19th-century newspapers and “dime novels” claimed they were, under the guise of an Irish-Catholic benevolent society called the Ancient Order of Hibernians.

Anne Flaherty, Kehoe’s great-great-granddaughter, spent more than 20 years researching the 21 AOH members who were executed in the late 1870s.

According to her 512-page book, The Passion of John Kehoe and the Myth of the “Molly Maguires”, these deaths were due to political animosity, corporate greed and anti-immigrant rhetoric. (Irish Catholics were denounced as an inferior, even ape-like race.) 

“Railroad and coal interests in Pennsylvania’s anthracite region successfully weaponized ethnic hatred to seize the courts and the press to prosecute their political enemies,” Flaherty said.

Kehoe was a county delegate for the state-chartered AOH, whose constitution listed guiding principles of “unity, friendship and true Christian charity … by doing to each other, and to all the world, as we would wish they should do unto us.”

Some AOH members gained political influence as they advocated for social justice and workers’ rights. But they also made powerful enemies.

To use one of Donald Trump’s favorite words, Kehoe’s trial was rigged. The special prosecutor was Franklin Gowen, president of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad and its Coal & Iron subsidiary. Overseeing the proceedings was Cyrus Pershing, whom Gowan had installed as Schuylkill County’s president judge and who’d lost a gubernatorial election partly because of opposition from Kehoe and other AOH members. At least two jury members didn’t speak English, and Kehoe couldn’t testify in his own defense.

He was pardoned 100 years after his death due to efforts by his great-grandson Joe Wayne of Girardville and an investigation by former state parole agent Dave Mohr.

After reading the trial transcript, Mohr concluded that Kehoe wouldn’t have been convicted because there was no real evidence, he said during a recent presentation by Flaherty at the Schuylkill County Historical Society.

Then and now

Mohr also raised the question of whether such a miscarriage of justice could happen again but left that to each of us to decide for ourselves.

Later, however, he described the 1870s to me: “The company owners and politically powerful were in complete control; the press/media was used as a printed weapon to guide peoples’ thinking … Legal, judicial and law enforcement systems were subverted and run by the oligarchs.”

Well, look how Elon Musk, the world’s richest oligarch, took over government agencies while the Musk-Trump administration tests any constitutional and legal barrier to achieving its ends.  

Trump has made lying mainstream, and he’s chipping away at independent journalism.

Mohr also pointed out that 1870s businesses resorted to violence against workers fighting for better pay and working conditions.

Companies may not do that now, but they and their political allies do all they can to weaken unions. Utah recently banned collective bargaining for teachers, police, firefighters and other public employees.

Meanwhile, deregulation is making workers and the rest of us less safe.

Anti-immigrant hysteria is rampant. Deportations in Florida have left so few workers in low-paying, undesirable jobs that Gov./former GOP darkling Ron DeSantis wants to lift work restrictions for kids as young as 14.

Voting rights, free speech and liberal education are under attack.

Noncitizens who are here legally are being detained for expressing their political beliefs. And as “On Tyranny” author Timothy Snyder noted: “If you accept that noncitizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary.”

Do Americans really want this Gilded Age 2.0? If not, will enough of us try to stop it? 

Lisa Von Ahn is an experienced columnist previously published in the Pottsville Republican Herald newspaper.

Canary note: Opinions expressed in any Op-Ed column appearing on this site are the views of the writer and are not necessarily the opinions of Coal Region Canary.

Want to be a columnist with Coal Region Canary? Contact us at newscanary@gmail.com.

^{Image: “The Strike in the Coal Mines”/Public Domain}

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