Block Thursdoy

Abstract The executions of the Molly Maguires consisted of powerful intimidatory rituals. The heyday of public executions had ended before the Molly Maguires were hanged, but the hangings were public spectacles nonetheless. The Pennsylvania legislature had abolished public executions in 1834 and required that capital punishment be inflicted within the walls or yard of the jail in the county where the criminal was convicted. But the new privacy did not mean that executions ceased to be occasions of ritual and spectacle. “In principle,” as one historian has observed, “private executions were supposed to protect the sensibilities of all citizens, eliminate a scene of public chaos and confusion, and permit the prisoner to die quietly penitent.” In practice, “they became a theatrical event for an assembly of elite men who attended the executions by invitation while the community at large was excluded.” This was certainly the case in the lower anthracite region of Pennsylvania, where a few hundred citizens were granted the privilege of attending the executions of the Molly Maguires, while thousands of their fellow-citizens congregated outside the prison walls. Armed troops and policemen kept guard and ostentatiously paraded the streets of Pottsville and Mauch Chunk. Each of the participants in the rituals of execution had a carefully orchestrated role to play: the condemned men, the Catholic priests, the sheriff and the hangman, the jurors and the doctors, and the privileged observers. Once the hanging was done, the prison gates were thrown open and hundreds of men and women rushed in to inspect the gallows. Moreover, the privatization of hanging in the United States had coincided with the rise of an inexpensive popular press, so these ostensibly private events were portrayed in vivid colors for a wider audience than ever before. In the case of the Molly Maguires, the preparations, procedures, and aftermath of the executions were exhaustively reported in the press and in popular pamphlets and histories, not only in the anthracite region but throughout the United States. Most of this discourse was celebratory and some of it verged on the obscene.