WITH JUSTICE FOR SOME. Lise Pearlman

region and lock them up without mercy. As expected, the French-Canadian, Irish, Welsh and Cornish locals then arrested without charges especially resented being herded into filthy bullpens by “niggers” called in by the government at the behest of the hated mine owners. Meanwhile, Idaho’s Attorney General Samuel Hays boasted to the press: “We have taken [the union] monster by the throat and we are going to choke the life out of it.”⁶

      Hays was obviously speaking not just for himself but for the Populist governor the Democratic union had helped elect. Republican governors had previously authorized mass arrests, but this time the illegal round-up was followed by federal troops enforcing a new county permit requiring all mine workers to deny or renounce membership in any militant union. The illegal ordinance was squarely directed at the local branch of the WFM – all done with the approval of Steunenberg. Union men turned on him, calling Steunenberg a “Benedict Arnold” to their cause.

      Though the WFM had recently broken with Samuel Gompers’ more collaborative American Federation of Labor in the East, the WFM and its supporters retained substantial national clout. Steunenberg was summoned to Washington to answer charges of misconduct. A specially convened congressional committee hearing addressed his wholesale suspension of the constitutional rights of so many Idaho citizens in the Coeur D’Alene region. Though Democrats were livid, the Republican majority stood firmly behind Steunenberg’s imposition of martial law. To the WFM, this was the final indignity. Steunenberg was condemned by its leaders, including Haywood, as an enemy of the working class. Death threats against Steunenberg followed.

      As the labor strife escalated, opposition to Steunenberg prevented his renomination. He retreated to private life as a farmer, banker and real estate developer. Steunenberg may have thought he was safe on the sidelines, but in the escalating labor wars, it was getting harder to find any haven. In 1904, in just one incident, thirteen strikebreakers died in a bombing at a Colorado train station. Rumor had it that WFM’s Big Bill Haywood ordered that hit, though the union claimed the bomb had actually been set off at the behest of local mine owners. By then, use of agents provocateurs was well-documented, but so was murder and mayhem by mine workers, who again faced brutal retaliation.

      Reformers in several states had succeeded in getting some protective laws passed, only to see victory snatched away by the United States Supreme Court in April of 1905. In a hotly contested case with national repercussions, a bare majority of justices in Lochner v. New York threw out protective legislation limiting bakers to sixty-hour weeks as an interference with freedom of contract. Over a vigorous dissent, the court interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the right of business owners and workers to negotiate any hours of employment they agreed upon, explaining that the employee might want the extra money from longer hours. State laws to protect workers from exploitation violated both the purchaser’s and seller’s “liberty of contract.”⁷ In reality, there were always workers desperate enough to take practically any job offered. The landmark ruling protected owners’ property interests in imposing working conditions that Progressive legislatures deemed inhumane.

      The Lochner case foreshadowed the invalidation of a host of other new laws for worker protection, but its most immediate impact was to galvanize the founding of the revolutionary IWW in June 1905. Just six months later, former Governor Steunenberg lost his life when he opened the booby-trapped side gate to his Caldwell, Idaho, farmhouse. The mine owners then secretly gave Idaho’s current governor the funds to hire Pinkerton’s chief of its Denver office, James McParland, to investigate the explosion. The assassination had all the earmarks of yet another violent episode in the ongoing class strife.

      McParland was the most famous private eye in America. He already had substantial experience with the Colorado Labor Wars, where mine owners kept him on retainer. The ace detective, now in his sixties, had catapulted to national fame almost thirty years before for his role in destroying another militant mineworkers’ organization in Pennsylvania. The Molly Maguires had originated as a secret society in Ireland that retaliated against oppressive British landlords. In the 1870s they were rumored to have reemerged in the Scranton anthracite minefields, where some Irish emigrants had settled following the devastating mid-century potato famine in their homeland. Yet it was never clear how active the Molly Maguires were in the deadly guerrilla warfare between union organizers on one side and, on the other, a coalition of mine owners, local police, and judiciary whom the mine owners controlled. It benefited management to tag any ardent union man with that label, realizing that “The name of Molly Maguire being attached to a man’s name is sufficient to hang him.”⁸

      The situation in Pennsylvania back in the 1870s differed little from that in the West at the turn of the century: “labor was at war with capital, Democrat with Republican, Protestant with Catholic, and immigrant with native.”⁹ By early 1875, a newly formed Irish union called a strike to challenge grueling working conditions. The strike ended when starving workers capitulated in June. Later that summer, the Molly Maguires reportedly started regaining strength. The Pinkerton Agency had already sent James McParland to Pennsylvania as an undercover agent using the pseudonym Jamie McKenna. He started out as a drinking buddy of Irish unionizers and eventually became secretary of the Molly Maguires.

      McParland succeeded in his charade for more than two years, all the while passing on information to Pinkerton. The Maguires suspected a spy in their midst when vigilantes organized by a mine owner raided a duplex where three members of the secret society resided, killing one of them and his pregnant sister. It did not take long for them to accuse the man they knew as McKenna, who, fleeing from a lynch mob, barely escaped with his life.

      McKenna later emerged as Pinkerton Agent James McParland, the state’s star witness against the gang. McParland’s testimony helped clinch twenty hangings on “Black Thursday” – June 21, 1877 – for the commission of revenge killings, many of which McParland likely knew about in advance and did nothing to prevent. Some of those who were hanged may have only been found guilty by association. Labor historian Joseph G. Rayback credits that trial with “temporarily destroy[ing] the last vestiges of labor unionism in the anthracite area. More important, it gave the public the impression . . . that miners were by nature criminal in character.”¹⁰ McParland’s nickname in the agency became “Pontius Pilate.” Three decades later, Irish Catholics in his own community still scorned McParland as a traitor to his people.

      By the time McParland arrived in Caldwell, Idaho, in January of 1906 an itinerant sheep dealer going by the name of Thomas Hogan had already been arrested for Steunenberg’s murder. Hogan was found with incriminating evidence in his hotel room. When questioned by the sheriff, Hogan admitted his name was Harry Orchard, that he had once lived in the Coeur D’Alene mining region and knew the WFM leadership. McParland befriended the prisoner and obtained a confession by assuring Orchard the state was really after the WFM inner circle. Orchard then implicated WFM Secretary-Treasurer Big Bill Haywood; its president Charles Moyer; and former WFM executive board member George Pettibone. Orchard claimed the three men gave him instructions in Denver to go to Idaho to kill Steunenberg as an example to other political enemies that they could never escape revenge. Orchard said it was only the latest of many terrorist acts he performed for the WFM.

      The Constitution did not permit extradition of the WFM leaders in Denver for ordering a murder in Idaho. Undaunted, McParland colluded with the governors of Idaho and Colorado, other state officials and the Union Pacific Railroad to kidnap the three WFM leaders. To make the kidnapping look legal, they prepared traditional extradition warrants falsely claiming the three WFM leaders were in Idaho on the night of the murder and were fugitives from justice. On a cue from McParland, the three suspects – who were already under surveillance – were then arrested on unspecified charges without being given an opportunity to alert family or their lawyers. The trio were then handcuffed and placed in leg irons and spirited across state lines on a train later dubbed “the Pirate Special.” The train arrived in Boise in record time and the three men were placed in cells on death row while awaiting trial for Steunenberg’s murder. Meanwhile, the Governor of Idaho publicly asserted his belief in their guilt, and McParland boasted in a press release, “They will never leave Idaho alive.”¹¹

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