The summer of '68 was an exciting time for my hometown of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. Paramount Pictures brought Sean Connery, Richard Harris, Samantha Edgar and Anthony Zerby to the hard coal region to film The Molly Maguires. What premiered about a year and a half later in early 1970 was the classic tale of capitalist oppression, reprisals by a secret society of Irish terrorists, betrayal by an undercover agent, and --- inevitably --- the day of the rope. Connery, looking to escape being typecast as a certain British spy, brought his license-to-kill over to the character of Black Jack Kehoe, presented to film goers as a coal miner with a pick ax to grind against the mine owners, bosses, and coppers. Harris was James McParland, aka Jamie McKenna, the Pinkerton detective on the make, who befriends and then betrays Kehoe and his cohorts.

Not a bad movie, except that it got much of the story wrong. Although he mined coal in his salad days, Kehoe was a Girardville tavern keeper and political leader when he was arrested, tried and hanged as the alleged King of the Mollies. And McParland… well, was he an undercover detective who later testified honestly to the Molly Maguire crimes he had witnessed? Or was he an agent-provocateur who instigated crime and violence in the mine patches, providing an opportunity for his masters --- the likes of Alan Pinkerton and President Franklin Gowan of the Philadelphia & Reading --- to break the power of organized labor and the Irish immigrants' own Ancient Order of Hibernians? These questions have bedeviled historians and stirred controversy for generations.

Clues to the correct answer may be found more than a quarter century and a couple of thousand miles from the Molly Maguire trials, in the Coeur d'Alene mining district of Idaho early in the twentieth century. Like the July 1916 terrorist attack on the Black Tom Island arsenal in New York harbor, written about at this website last month, the murder of Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg on December 30, 1905 in Caldwell, Idaho, has faded into history's mists, its lessons largely lost to our policy makers today. But Steunenberg's murder, caused by a terrorist's bomb tied to his garden gate, has a lesson to teach us about conspiracy and the two-edged nature of terrorism.

Coeur d'Alene was a region rich in precious metals and in labor union agitation. The Western Federation of Miners was militant and bare knuckled. During work stoppages, union terrorism took the form of dynamiting company mines and mills, capturing and imprisoning scab labor in the union hall, and hijacking trains. The dynamiting of the Bunker Hill Mining Company's major processing facilities in Wardner, Idaho, in May 1898, led Governor Steunenberg to call in federal troops, who arrested "every male --- miners, bartenders, a doctor, a preacher, even a postmaster and a school superintendent," in the nearby union bastion of Burke, Idaho. All together about 1,000 men were herded into the "Cow Pen," a kind of makeshift concentration camp and held for weeks without trial.

Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather, claimed that "revenge is a dish best served cold." Fully seven and a half years later the ex-governor, back home in Caldwell, opened his garden gate at six o'clock on the second-to-last, snowy evening of '05. The explosion of a homemade bomb, fastened to the gate by a fish line, took off Steunenberg's legs. He lingered an hour before bleeding to death in a downstairs bedroom, conscious to the bitter end.

A waitress at Caldwell's Saratoga Hotel fingered a long-term guest, one Thomas Hogan, as a possible suspect. A warrant-less search of Hogan's hotel room turned up plaster of paris in his chamber pot. Other detritus, that could have comprised bomb components, was found in his valise. On New Year's day, 1906, Hogan aka Harry Orchard was arrested and charged with first degree murder. Less than a week later, the State of Idaho hired America's most famous detective: none other than James McParland, who headed the Pinkerton Agency's Denver office.

McParland, the famed Molly Maguire-catcher, rushed to Boise, where he interrogated Hogan/Orchard relentlessly. The result? An astonishing 64-page confession to the killing of Frank Steunenberg and seventen others, all ordered, said Orchard, by the leaders of the Western Federation of Miners. On the strength of this confession, McParland led a posse by special train to Denver, where Colorado Governor McDonald had a warrant waiting for the arrest of WFM officers William "Big Bill" Haywood, Charles Moyer and George Pettibone. Denied any opportunity to contact their loved ones and lawyers, the three union leaders were kidnapped aboard the Idaho special and hauled to Boise for trial. The U.S. Supreme Court subsequently sanctioned their kidnapping to Idaho.

Luckier than Black Jack Kehoe and Yellow Jack Donohue, Big Bill Haywood and his comrades had Clarence Darrow on their side. Already a rising star, and later to win international fame in the Scopes Monkey Trial and Leopold-Loeb Thrill-Killing case, Darrow was the darling of the American Federation of Labor.

Looking for three bites at the union apple, the prosecution brought Big Bill to trial first. Harry Orchard --- like another alleged-turncoat, Kelly the Bum, in the Molly trials --- told his lurid tale of a life of crime, terrorism and murder on the witness stand. In a long and passionate closing argument, Darrow told the jury of ranchers and business men,

I don't believe that this man [Orchard] was ever really in the employ of anybody. I don't believe he ever had any allegiance to the Mine Owners Association, to the Pinkertons, to the Western Federation of Miners, to his family, to his kindred, to his God, or to anything human or divine. I don't believe he bears any relation to anything that a mysterious and inscrutable Providence has ever created. . . . He was a soldier of fortune, ready to pick up a penny or a dollar or any other sum in any way that was easy . . . to serve the mine owners, to serve the Western Federation, to serve the devil if he got his price, and his price was cheap.

Darrow's theory was that Orchard acted alone in belated revenge for being squeezed out of a lucrative silver-mine deal by Steunenberg years earlier.

In a direct attack on McParland and his methods, Darrow recalled for the jury the great detective's ambiguous role in bringing the Mollies "to justice," and expressly drew the parallel between the two cases, especially the Pinkerton's production of the snitch known as "Kelly the Bum" to bolster McParland's testimony for the prosecution.

Some say the jury's unanimous "not guilty" verdict was the result of Darrow's silver-tongued oratory. Less kind critics claim the twelve jurors were intimidated by the terrorist tactics of the WFM. But when George Pettibone was likewise acquitted, the prosecutors gave up the ghost and released the three defendants.

Were the WFM union officers guilty or innocent? Were Black Jack Kehoe and the other alleged Molly Maguires guilty or innocent? Or, in a climate of violence and terrorist tactics, did beleaguered government officials lay those indisputable acts of violence at the feet of political opponents they preferred to see removed from the stage?

Was Saddam Hussein in league with al-Qaeda? Or did the 9-11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington provide a later generation of our government officials with an opportunity to remove another political thorn from the side of our body politic?

If, as I am suggesting here, both the so-called Molly Maguires and the three top officers of the Western Federation of Miners were brought to trial as scapegoats for terrorist acts, not because they instigated or aided those acts, but because government and corporate interests wanted them removed as potentially-powerful opponents then, in the ongoing absence of evidence of weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda, might we not fairly wonder whether Saddam Hussein has been made the unlikely bed-fellow of Black Jack Kehoe and Big Bill Haywood? An unusual context in which to view his pending trial, perhaps, but one which in this writer's opinion cannot be dismissed out of hand.