Ned McAdoo and the Molly Maguires (Historical Fiction) by Claire and Jim Castagnera

The man was tall... six feet, at least... maybe seven. Or was he floating a foot or two above our hunter green carpet? Most of his face was hidden by a shaggy black beard and handlebar mustache. But his... oh, Christ almighty, those eyes. They were two glowing coals, each one orange, shimmering and radiating from a deep black socket, almost like the craters of two recently-active volcanoes. Or --- it occurred to me later --- two glowing embers of anthracite coal in some 19th century fireplace. And the mouth. It was open about half way and what I could see of the inside was bright and bloody red.

The body, which walked or floated slowly toward the foot of the bed, was dressed in a black, funereal suit of rough wool. The sleeves of the coat were too short and the long, powerful-looking arms hung down at the man's side, the ghostly white fingers fully extended but relaxed. Except for the eyes and mouth, the face, which had an exceptionally high forehead crowned by a thinning crop of ill-cut black hair, was so white that I could have believed it had been dusted with flour.

The specter did not so much speak as moan its message, which sounded to me like "Juice dish." The words meant nothing, yet the voice frightened me even more than the messenger's appearance. I tried to kick off the covers, intending to leap out of the bed and run for it. In my panic, as I was a little ashamed to recall later, I gave no thought to Judy, asleep beside me in our queen-sized bed.

I found that, despite kicking and flailing my arms and legs like the panic-stricken coward I was, I couldn't get the bed clothes off my body nor extricate myself from the bed. The apparition was hovering directly above me, still moaning "Juice dish, Juice dish," while I too moaned and wailed like some Irish banshee in a fairy tale, when I heard a third voice in my right ear. It was a soft and gentle female voice amidst all the male caterwauling that seemed to fill up the small dark space of the bedroom. At first I hardly heard it. But, accompanied by a gentle yet firm shaking of my trembling right shoulder, it persisted until it got through to the agitated recesses of my frantic brain.

"Ned," the gentle voice said. "Ned, darling. Wake up. It's all right. You're having a dream. Ned, wake up," it insisted.

I discovered that I could sit upright. And so, I did. I sat bolt upright in bed and the blanket and sheet fell down into my lap.

The rescuing female voice, I was happy to hear, was still there in my right ear, which seemed the only sane part of my head.

I turned and was somewhat startled to see my wife beside me, her soft, plump hand holding and gently shaking my shoulder.

I turned and looked into the big, green-gray eyes that were just a few inches from my sweat-covered face. The two big tears, one dangling precariously from the corner of each of those warm, reassuring eyes, looked to me like tiny crystal balls. They caught the light coming in from the electric candle on the table in the hallway. I felt relief flood over and down through me. My whole tense, stiffened body relaxed. I'm surprised, thinking back, that I didn't just collapse like a pile of cloth.

Then I remembered my ghastly visitor. I snapped my head back toward the ceiling. There was nothing there, except our ceiling fan, rotating slowly, creating shimmering shadows as its blades alternately reflected the soft, yellowish light from the hall.

Her gentle voice did not contradict this mad assertion. As if I had told her that Archie had just called, she asked in matter-of-fact tones, "What did he want, honey?"

"I'm not sure," I replied, her calmness catching, my own tone of voice level and fairly soft. "I don't know. Something about juice, I think."

"Juice?" Judy was as puzzled as I. Or was she amused and just pretending to be interested, as she did sometimes when I tried to tell her about some of my cases? "What about juice, darling?"

"Don't know," I mumbled, as an irresistible urge to get back to sleep came over me. I checked the clock on my night stand: 2:02 AM was the digital reading. "I don't know. Maybe he was thirsty."

It's the summer of 1987 and I'm seventeen years old. We're careening along Interstate 90, heading west through South Dakota. I'm driving, Mom is riding shotgun and keeping careful tabs on the quality of my driving. "Slow down, Ned. Let him pass you." "Watch out. Is that a motorcycle I see ahead there? Why don't they make them wear proper helmets out here?"

I'm doing my best to ignore her, as well as my fourteen-year-old sister, Katy, who is providing us with sporadic dramatic readings from something she just purchased called the "I Kid-You-Not Road Atlas."

"Hey, Ned-o," she says, "Listen to this. In Nebraska it's illegal for a barber to shave a customer's chest hair."

I reach for the volume knob on the radio-tape player and turn up the sound another notch. Though Mom is only allowing us to listen to classical music ("Both for my sanity and so you two cultural Neanderthals learn something during all the hours we'll be cooped up in the van."), Brahms in both ears is better than Mom in one and Katy in the other.

"Neddy, are you listening?" Katy is sprawled across the middle bench of the Plymouth Voyager that Pop drove brand-spanking-new from the showroom just three days ago. "In Arkansas it's illegal to blindfold cows on highways."

"Oh, my God," exclaims Mom at that moment. "Is that a cow up there on the road?"

"Well, don't pass him. Your father says motorcycles are liability lightning rods." Whatever that means, I think to myself.

"In Gainesville, Georgia, it's illegal to eat chicken with a fork," Katy plows on, giggling softly from time to time as well. I give up trying to ignore the two females in my life.

The Old Man, however, is having no such problem. Having curled his bulk into a big ball on the back bench of our new van, he is quietly snoring away, oblivious to Katy's dramatic reading of unusual American laws and Mom's running commentary on road conditions and the quality of my driving.

Like the van, the trip was Archie's idea. Both were the products of a new prosperity which had visited the McAdoo family of Havertown, Pennsylvania, in the wake of my Dad's successful settlement last August of a somewhat sensational (at least locally) lawsuit. The case involved AIDS discrimination in employment... something of a novelty in those days; the Old Man had successfully represented the plaintiff. [1] But the real news was that the guy killed himself in the midst of the litigation. No matter... Pop's publicity was excellent.

Always a solo practitioner, Archie had experienced a steady stream of new clients, including a labor union which had obtained his continuing counsel on employment law issues in return for a fairly handsome monthly retainer. So busy had he become that he had hired a part-time law clerk, a third year student from nearby Widener Law School, whom he had high hopes of being able to hire on a full-time basis after she graduated and passed the Pennsylvania bar.

And seemingly despite, rather than because, of Pop's notoriety as the successful advocate of a gay HIV victim, Mom's Christmas present from her employer, Regional Econometric Forecasting Group, at the end of 1986 had been a promotion from controller to chief financial officer. In short, the "long green", as Archie had taken to calling it, was rolling in. And, so, my Dad had decided it was time for the famiglia McAdoo to take a "real vacation."

In fact our family vacations to date had all been of the classic Havertonian variety: a week, two if we were really lucky, at the Jersey Shore. The more affluent your folks, the closer to the beach was your rented house. The McAdoos usually had a pretty long walk to the shoreline. Only in the past four or five years --- and then only because Mom had been promoted in 1982 from head bookkeeper to controller at REF Group--- did Katy and I discover how awesome it is to have a door that opens right out onto the dunes, the beach and the breaking waves. But, Mom, ever the frugal faction in her sometimes fractious marriage to my Dad, had continued to insist that a substantial portion of her salary be socked away for our college educations and their retirement at some indeterminate time beyond that.

Consequently, even with Dad's substantial fee from the HIV settlement, and the significant, steady increase in his income after that, Mom initially had resisted Archie's idea of a "real vacation to show the kids America."

Archie had lobbied hard and long. But I don't think his alternating rounds of cajoling and badgering would have moved Mom, if Maggie Mulhearn hadn't come into the picture. I think it was in mid-January that she approached Pop about representing her. Since the beginning of the New Year, Archie occupied a four-room office suite in a reconditioned old house, just a few blocks from our home. It had once been a branch location of the Haverford Township Library, and was now a 'professional building' of sorts. Another solo practitioner, Bernard "Bail Bond" Brennan, and an Indian chiropractor, Dr. Something Singh, occupied the two other, somewhat-larger suites in the building.

It was for the best that Maggie Mulhearn had turned up there and not in Pop's old office at home --- which had now reverted to its intended function of dining room, complete with antique table, chairs and sideboard, Mom's Christmas-cum-Promotion present to herself --- because Maggie Mulhearn, when I got a look at her a couple of months later, proved to be a Celtic heart-stopper.

Flaming red hair, which was either naturally curly or permed into the most romantic mane of bouncing ringlets my teenaged eyes had ever seen, topped a flawlessly smooth, white complexion. A prominent nose flanked by two big, radiant blue eyes, and underlined by full, pouting lips came together to create an effect far greater than the mere sum of the parts. Maybe much of the beauty came from within. I know now that can sometimes be the case. Back then I didn't analyze, I just appreciated.

Maggie Mulhearn was one of those Irish women who freckled, rather than tanned, in the summer, and then held onto some of those freckles on her nose and high cheekbones all year long. The freckles made her look adolescent --- and therefore just that much more attractive to little 'ol teenage me --- though she was 26 or 27 when she approached Archie in the winter of '87 with her unusual project.

Maggie Mulhearn, as Archie recalls vividly her telling him during their first consultation, was a direct descendant of Black Jack Kehoe. Film enthusiasts, like my Mom, remembered that the famous Scotch actor Sean Connery had played Black Jack in a 1970 film called "The Molly Maguires." In that movie, filmed by Paramount Pictures in a little Pennsylvania coal town about 90 miles north of Philadelphia, Kehoe is portrayed as the leader of a secret society that is remembered for wreaking murder and mayhem on the coal mine owners and supervisors who exploited their Irish miners and laborers in the 1870s.

"That's not true," Maggie Mulhearn had earnestly explained to Archie, her big, sincere eyes starring straight into his, until (he told me much later) he had to break the spell by turning and making a note on his legal pad.

"My great great grandfather was a labor leader and a politician," she continued. "The capitalists framed him because he and his union were becoming too powerful. His political organization was gaining too much influence in the mine patches." The mention of "capitalists" led Pop to detect a rare 1980s leftist concealed beneath the affluent --- in fact, independently wealthy --- Ms Mulhearn.

After allowing the ebullient Maggie to chatter on about Pinkerton detectives and biased juries and agents provocateurs, Archie finally tore his watery, middle-aged eyes from her seductive gaze and inquired, "What would you like me to do about all this? To me it sounds as if you have the material here for a very good book, Ms Mulhearn. Perhaps you should take a stab at writing it. Or maybe you could find a journalist, or maybe an historian at one of the local universities, who would have an interest in writing all this up. But that's not me... I'm just a lawyer." I can see Dad, who hates to tell a client or potential client --- especially one as attractive as Maggie Mulhearn --- "no," shifting uneasily from one big buttock to the other and staring at his legal pad or his size 12-trip-D shoes as he says this.

Maggie Mulhearn at this point in the consultation became perhaps a little impatient with what was, however unintended by my Father, a rather patronizing statement of the obvious. Just as clearly I can see her leaning forward and putting her determined face so close to the listener's that in this instance my slightly embarrassed Dad had no choice but to meet her eyes with his own limpid gray pools.

"I know you're a lawyer, Mr. McAdoo," she pressed on. "And a very good one from things I've read and heard lately. And it's a lawyer I want and need. I don't want my great great grandfather's story told again. I want him pardoned."

For some reason he could never quite articulate, Archie felt compelled to write her words down on his legal pad, very precisely. As I've said, I think he couldn't stand to stare into those extraordinary eyes for too long and used his note taking as a means of escape from them.

"Well, justice, they say, is blind," my Dad replied lamely, not knowing what to make of this beguiling, insistent young woman, who seemed determined to retain his services to somehow reopen a case that had climaxed in an official execution some hundred and ten years earlier. "Sometimes it loses sight of the truth, and eventually the truth is lost forever."

"That's just it," insisted Maggie Mulhearn. "Do you mind if I smoke?" She pulled a pack of Lucky Strikes and a cheap Bic butane lighter from her purse and lit up before Archie, a bit surprised that such a "wholesome" (his word) "girl" (also his) smoked (unfiltered cigarettes at that!), could say no. "That's it exactly: I want the world, and especially the justice system, to remove the blindfolds and see my great great granddad's innocence. And you're the lawyer who can do it... I think."

At last Archie turned away from his legal pad, swiveling his creaky oak sheriff's chair so that he faced his would-be client squarely. He turned so abruptly toward her that his reward was a face full of exhaled cigarette smoke.

"That's all right," my Dad half gasped. "Look, I still think a good historian is..." He was stopped in mid sentence by the check which she apparently had drawn from her purse along with the cigarettes. Made out in large green letters, the draft was for ten thousand dollars on the First Pennsylvania Bank.

"Perhaps this will express my seriousness, Mr. McAdoo," she stated flatly, holding the beige colored check with its Kelly green ink, almost directly under my Dad's bulbous nose... which no doubt could very nearly smell the money. "I am authorizing you, as my lawyer, to travel wherever you feel in your judgment you should, examine whatever relevant records you can locate --- starting with a good deal of material I have in the trunk of my car right now --- and when you have satisfied yourself of Black Jack Kehoe's innocence, institute whatever proceedings, or lobbying or whatever is required to have him pardoned."

Well, you've probably guessed that Pop took the check and the... what? The case? Not really. "Assignment" is what we have always called it, down to the present day. He also walked out to Maggie Mulhearn's car... it proved to be a Porsche ... and took custody of two cardboard boxes that she had jammed into its tiny boot. The boxes, appropriately labeled "Jameson's Irish Whiskey" and obviously obtained from a liquor store, were not filled with spirits. Or were they? The boxes, when Archie opened them after his new client had departed, where stuffed with books, articles and notes written in a neat, rather large penmanship that matched the handwriting on the green and beige check.

Archie walked the check down to the bank, then stopped on the way back at MacDonald's and wolfed down two Big Macs, a large order of fries and a strawberry shake in hearty celebration of this latest windfall from his new found reputation. On the way back to the office he distractedly munched one of Mickey D's apple pies.

Back in his office, seated not in the hard sheriff's chair but rather in a cracked-leather easy chair in the corner near the window, he idly browsed through the materials in the first Jameson's crate. Selecting a battered paperback, "The Molly Maguires" by a college professor named Wayne Broehl, he began reading. But soon the combination of warm sunlight streaming in the window with its western exposure, and the fairly massive amount of pure MacDonald's fat in my Father's stomach, sent Archie swirling downward into a somnambulant state from which he could not pull out. Broehl's tome resting in his ample lap, the great, crusading lawyer of Stanley Avenue, Havertown, Pennsylvania, snored rather delicately as he slept the remainder of the afternoon away.

The African American 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 tradition 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.

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."

"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."

"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.

"Ned McAdoo and the Molly Maguires" can be obtained at www.lulu.com

[1] See Why My Dad Hates Ice Cream (Vancouver: Trafford Publishers 1997).
[2] Maggie Mulhearn, "Is Violence Ever Justified?" RAMPARTS, June 1987, page 22.

Jim Castagnera, a Philadelphia journalist and lawyer, is the Associate Provost at Rider University and author of the weekly newspaper column "Attorney at Large."