Franklin Gowen and the Molly Maguires: The Railroad Man Who Prosecuted a Labor Movement

Few figures in the history of American labor relations were more consequential, or more contested, than Franklin Benjamin Gowen, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad from the early eighteen seventies. The railroad had its headquarters in Philadelphia, but its center of gravity was here, in Reading, where the machine shops, engine works, and management apparatus of the company defined the city's economic life.

Gowen was a complex and driven man. He was a skilled lawyer turned railroad president who believed, with apparent sincerity, that the stability of his railroad and the prosperity of the coal region depended on eliminating organized resistance among the miners and trainmen. In the eighteen seventies, a secret organization called the Molly Maguires had been blamed for a series of violent attacks on mine operators, foremen, and law officers in the anthracite coal counties north and west of Reading. Whether the Mollies were a genuine criminal conspiracy or a convenient label applied to labor organizers by operators seeking to destroy unions is still debated by historians.

What is not debated is what Gowen did. He hired the Pinkerton detective agency, which sent an undercover operative named James McParland into the coal communities. McParland spent years embedded among Irish-American miners, cultivating relationships and gathering evidence. His testimony, combined with Gowen's role as personal prosecutor in some of the trials, led to the conviction and execution of twenty men between eighteen seventy-seven and eighteen seventy-eight.

The executions were carried out on what came to be called Black Thursday: June twenty-first, eighteen seventy-seven, when ten men were hanged in a single day at jails in Pottsville and Mauch Chunk.

Gowen died by a gunshot in a Washington hotel room in December eighteen eighty-nine. The circumstances were ruled a suicide, though suspicion lingered for years after.