The phrase “criminal fraternity” trips easily off the tongue and is well established in the modern lexicon of threats to society. It conjures up images of secret societies which, with dark rituals and bloody oaths, swear members to total obedience and absolute loyalty. The picture is familiar from countless films, books and documentaries. Real and fictional detectives and lawmen from Sherlock Holmes to Giovanni Falcone have exposed their evil conspiracies. They have been depicted on the screen as long ago as The Black Hand of 1905, and as recently as The Mafia's Greatest Hits (2012). But how true is the idea that crime has genuine fraternities – and, if it does, why?

Whether they exist today, it is certain that at various times, with a variety of evidence and for a diversity of reasons, people have believed in their existence in the past. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the times at which criminal fraternities were seen to be at their most powerful, and their most sinister, was at the time of the greatest expansion of fraternalism, in the most “fraternal” of nations. In the US in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the rage for joining associations of one form or another was so extraordinarily popular that it has become known as the “golden age” of fraternity. This name was by no means an exaggeration. The United States of 1900 was very different from that of 1860, and to many Americans fraternity seemed one way to cope with these changes. The scale of this belief is impressive, with one contemporary study claiming some 20 percent of all American men of all classes, ethnicities, occupations, backgrounds and types became members of at least one of the nation's hundreds of fraternities.Footnote ¹

Over the past thirty years there has been renewed interest in the history of fraternity. Among these studies some of the most important works have scrutinized fraternalism and transnationalism, such as with Jessica Harland-Jacobs in her work on Freemasonry and empire and Roger Burt's work on miners in South Africa.Footnote ² Their impact on US nation building has been examined in the likes of Stephen Bullock's Revolutionary Brotherhood and David Beito has looked at their impact on the American welfare state. By contrast, Jason Kaufman's For the Common Good looks at their appeal to the individual.Footnote ³

Studies have included investigations of the national and ethnic fraternities which represented black Americans, Jewish Americans or Italian Americans.Footnote ⁴ Others have concentrated on the sectional interests of their members, such as the highly inclusive Knights of Labor, who sought, often militantly, recognition for the rights of the workingman and -woman – regardless of ethnicity. Some have used fraternity to probe the contours of Victorian masculinity – perhaps most notably combined with Clawson's work on class, Koehlinger's on religion and Carnes's on fraternal ritual. Other scholars have shown that most of these fraternalists joined their various orders largely for benevolent reasons. The Knights of Pythias simply hoped to promote altruistic virtues of friendship and mutual aid. Others, like the Freemasons, were more interested in spiritual enlightenment. Some, like the Woodmen of the World, had more pragmatic goals centring on workplace and life assurance.Footnote ⁵

In contrast, there were fraternities founded less on idealism or sectionalism than on the reaction to perceived wrongs in American society. These “defensive” fraternities are perhaps best demonstrated by the emergence in the period of nativist organizations like the Junior Order of American Mechanics, or “law-keeping” groups like Montana's allegedly Masonic-based Vigilance Committee. Usually formed as a response to sudden social change – in these cases a massive upsurge in immigration, property crime and violence – they existed to counter the increased influence of undesirable peoples, behaviour and ideas on their communities.Footnote ⁶

Understandably, all of these organizations excited hostility. This was not simply through their moralism, exclusivity or inclusion. To some vocal non-fraternalists the associations represented, rather than resolved, the problems of the era. Even before their huge expansion in the late nineteenth century, opponents had portrayed the lodge house as a den for dividing up the spoils of aggressive and acquisitive self-interest.Footnote ⁷ Throughout the Gilded Age opponents condemned the secrecy of the fraternalists and argued that fraternal exclusivity encouraged and concealed monopolies, fostered greed. At best, it simply encouraged childish playacting and mumbo-jumbo. Given that not all Americans admired fraternities, it is hardly surprising that the notion evolved that some super-secret fraternities operated simply as nefarious networks for criminals – after all, if they were all above board, why the secrecy?Footnote ⁸

In the case of the three organizations in question in this study, the criminality was more overt – at least according to law enforcers of the time. In 1869 a federal grand jury declared the KKK a criminal organization. By the autumn of 1870, Attorney General Amos Akerman launched a concerted effort in South Carolina to break the Klan. By April, utilizing powers that had criminalized the order under the May 1870 and February 1871 Enforcement Acts, 533 men had been arrested for Klan-associated violence. At least during this stage of Reconstruction, there can be little doubt that the federal government, and a greater part of the nation, was convinced that the Klan was a criminal organization.Footnote ⁹ The position with the Molly Maguires is no less clear. According to the authorities in the Pennsylvania anthracite region, sixteen men were assassinated by the society. This led to the conviction and hanging of twenty members of the order for murder, and the imprisonment of twenty more for lesser crimes.Footnote ¹⁰

Ironically given the seeming interchangeability of the terms “Mafia” and “organized crime” in the twentieth century, the position with the Mafia in late nineteenth-century America is more nebulous. Eleven alleged mafiosi were lynched in New Orleans in 1891 for the murder of the city's police chief. Later in the decade other incidences of violence were recorded against Italians in general, and Sicilians in particular, for association with the Mafia. Nevertheless, there was no specific, legally sanctioned, action taken against individuals for their connection with the order, as such. However, it was generally felt that the order was in essence founded for the commission of crimes. Typical of this view are the comments of the sensationalist National Police Gazette, which argued that the Mafia was an “Italian assassination society,” and an “Italian stiletto society.” Littell's Living Age maintained the Mafia was a “band of criminals … a supreme power directed to every kind of evil … by violence, trickery and intimidation.” The New York Times was in no doubt that the Mafia were criminals. It lists sixty-two separate stabbings, assaults and murders linked to the society in New York in the nine months to April 1893 alone.Footnote ¹¹

Unsurprisingly, given their notoriety and the level of threat they were seen to pose, the activities and significance of all three organizations have been pretty well covered by historians, not to mention sociologists, criminologists and anthropologists – as well as many other scholars and interested amateurs. But the purpose, nature and significance of these organizations as “fraternities,” in the sense that the term may be applied to the Knights of Pythias, the Elks or the Odd Fellows, has not really been fully explored. However, as will be demonstrated, until recently few, if any, scholars have ventured to examine the advantages, uses and history of accepted forms of fraternal structure in criminal organizations. Where it has been undertaken it has largely been in a peripheral of way, as a part of a larger narrative, or over a different period.Footnote ¹²

Currently, the research of Craig Fox, Miguel Hernandez, Amy McDowell and Kathleen Blee is uncovering fascinating material about the importance of fraternal structure in the revived Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s – both on a national and a regional level, and in historical and sociological terms. All of these use fraternity as a very effective means to understand the apparently massive appeal of the legal Klan in the 1920s, as opposed to the structure of the outlawed Klan of Reconstruction.Footnote ¹³

Similarly, since the investigations of Eric Hobsbawm, Anton Blok and Diego Gambetta, the subject of the Mafia's fraternal roots in Sicily has played a central role in the historical narrative attached to the organization.Footnote ¹⁴ This has been expanded in recent years stemming from the work of Dwight Smith. Scholars like David Critchley, James Fentress, Mike Dash and John Dickie have maintained a lively debate over the roots of the Mafia myth. However, fraternity is largely incidental to their main narrative drives when investigating the emergence of organized crime in America.Footnote ¹⁵ Unlike existing, more general, histories, the objective of this piece is to examine the idea of fraternity and the uses and drawbacks it presents to the Mafia's organization.

The situation with the Molly Maguires is somewhat different. Of all three organizations, Kevin Kenny's unmatched history of the mythical order comes closest to recognizing the centrality of fraternity to the functioning and perception of the organization.Footnote ¹⁶ When combined with the findings of Toni Arritola, and evidence from court transcripts, they provide a thesis that places fraternity – albeit in a negative fashion – at the centre of the myth of the Mollys.Footnote ¹⁷ But at this point it is probably most constructive to return to a more basic investigation.

Given that the rituals, costumes and lodges of many fraternities over these years drew largely on “esotericism” – or less politely “mumbo-jumbo” – what possible advantages could accrue to such deadly serious organizations of being, or appearing to be, fraternities? Equally intriguingly, if they do exist as fraternities, from where did they originate and what does this tell us about the history of fraternity over those years? Can we find their historical roots in the legitimate, established fraternal tradition? How did these “criminal” fraternities relate to other contemporary, mainstream, orders?

All of these questions stem from the most obvious: what is a fraternity? Although it may seem a very clichéd starting point, in this case using a stock definition of “fraternal/fraternity” maybe as good a place as any to begin. Webster's dictionary defines “fraternal” as: “1. a: of, relating to, or involving brothers b: of, relating to, or being a fraternity or society <a fraternal order>.”Footnote ¹⁸ This only goes so far. It does not distinguish a “fraternal order” – a fraternity – from, say, a society, gang, club or even army. However, it would appear that there are actually remarkably few definitions of fraternity that are capable of succinctly analysing what distinguishes fraternalism, fraternities and fraternal orders from these other groupings.

That said, Bob James, of the Centre for Fraternal Studies, has spent considerable time looking for a definition and favours an idea that fraternities are “societies which use, or have used in the recent past, coded regalia, secret passwords, ritual and signs, and which have had a philosophy of brotherhood or mutual aid.”Footnote ¹⁹ Another leading scholar of the history of fraternalism, Jeffrey Tyssens, goes into more detail, claiming that a fraternity may be defined by “the exclusive membership of … a fictive family.” He points to secret rituals governing “mutual loyalty” that draw on an inherited “narrative wisdom” and are governed by “formalised hierarchies.”

Tyssens also points out that while members may be required to wear some form of “regalia” or symbol of membership, and deal with each other with an “interior currency,” they are fundamentally “formally apolitical” – although they may well have specific “socio-political goals.”Footnote ²⁰ Addressing this last point, Lynn Dumenil sees two types of fraternity: “expressive organizations … [concerned with] the social and personal needs of their members … [and] instrumental organizations [that] have specific goals to accomplish.”Footnote ²¹ So while definition is probably possible, it is, at best, contested and confused. Even the Academic Society for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternity (ASRFF) has not ventured to define “fraternity,” except to say that many fraternal organizations have “features and inner dynamics” in common.Footnote ²²

Keeping these “shared features” in mind, and applying them to criminal organizations, it might appear that the maintenance of secrecy or discipline is the most crucial of these defining elements. However, the evidence of this analysis seems to point in other directions. For example, the heritage and familial symbolism of both James's “wider message” and Tyssens's “narrative wisdom” can be seen as providing a narrative and gives a raison d’être for each of the three “fraternities.” Terrifying initiation rites and bloody oaths may be vital to the coherence and secrecy of the fraternities, but they are, in the case of these organizations, effectively ancillary. This is clearly demonstrated by an interesting coincidence, arguably something more, that the oldest of the fabulous histories in this study belongs to the most successful and long-lived of the organizations.

The Sicilian Mafia draws on a pedigree of persecution that is almost unrivalled. The Sicilian historical narrative is so complex, cyclical, repetitive and violently disputed that it becomes difficult to work out which set of invaders represents the original inhabitants. In the Mafia's creation myth, each incoming occupier, each new lord, was as exploitative as the one he replaced. As a consequence the Mafia, the Men of Honour, evolved a heritage of representing the “little man,” the peasant, in their dealings with these heartless bloodsuckers and their local lackeys. In this myth, resistance and lawbreaking were justifiable through the Honorable Society's allegiance to, and protection and representation of, the “true” Sicilians – the peasants.

There are a variety of creation myths the Mafia used to stress this long history of heroic defence of principle. In some it is claimed that the organization was founded on courtly ideals and fired by medieval acts of chivalry. Most vivid of these is the claim that the organization was the product of three honourable Spanish knights, brothers, who had fled their native land and settled in the isolated interior of Sicily after bloodily avenging their sister's rape. Others claim the organization had more prosaic, but nonetheless ancient and honourable, roots. They claim it was formed to drive out the French in the thirteenth century and remained active whenever a new overlord threatened genuine Sicilian interests.Footnote ²³

Whatever the roots of their “creation myth,” the most recent discoveries in the Sicilian archives would indicate that the Mafia cleverly and repeatedly made and remade its reputation as the representatives of the downtrodden Sicilian peasantry. It emerges that they achieved this through cultivating friendships with the victors, and erasing each trace of contact with the defeated, gaining positions of power in the new regimes and making themselves quietly indispensable as Sicily entered the modern world.Footnote ²⁴ Whichever interpretation is chosen, few – other than the Men of Honour themselves – would argue that it was nationalism that drove the so-called Honorable Society. However, nationalism played an important role – especially when coupled with fraternity – and not only in Sicily.

Popular histories favour an impression that the American Mafia was essentially the Sicilian Mafia transposed to the New World.Footnote ²⁵ They argue that it arrived in the New World sharing the same creation myths and the same pseudo-heritage. However, it emerges that these myths have less truth than was perhaps previously supposed. Current research seems to show that not only was the society younger and anything but altruistic, but in many cases the populace it thrived in, and on, was not composed of simple peasants who required protection – either in the Old World or in the New. Men of Honour were, more often than not, urban in their outlook, if not their origins. If they were not from Palermo or its suburbs, then they were often from other towns and cities around the island. Even those from the more inaccessible areas like Corleone were not, as many contemporary reporters claimed, simply transposed peasants, country folk scrabbling for a living. Although dominated by feudal landlords and their successors, and certainly grindingly poor, Sicily's so-called “agrotowns” of the interior had sophisticated networks of artisans, peasants and shepherds.Footnote ²⁶

Yet in many ways it benefited the Mafia to promote an image of itself as an Old World brotherhood devoted to protecting superstitious and backward peasants. They had done so at home in Italy, where the Risorgimento had highlighted the differences between the industrial north of the nation and the essentially medieval lifestyle of many of those in the south. As one Italian historian and race theorist charged, “South Italy represents, in comparison with north Italy, a true and genuine social atavism. It remains … tied to the civilization of past centuries.”Footnote ²⁷ Sicilians came in for especial vitriol, not least because of their continued violent opposition to unification. Many northerners, including the most educated, condemned the islanders as “lazy, incapable, criminal and barbaric [in] nature,” if not worse.Footnote ²⁸ Even when the Sicilians emigrated to America, things were very little better. As early as 1876, the New York Times damned the southern Italian as having “a natural inclination toward criminality” and saw them as a “besotted flock” of humanity.Footnote ²⁹

Few allegories could more clearly illustrate the reviled position of many Sicilians in American society than the fate of Edith LaBue. After she gave birth to a baby with very dark skin, she was accused by her irate husband of sleeping with a black man. Arguing that she had been frightened by a “Negro” during her pregnancy did not remove his suspicions, in spite of her doctor's support for this argument. The result was that her lover was prosecuted and convicted under Alabama's miscegenation laws. On appeal Jim Rollins was subsequently acquitted, in part because it emerged that his confession had been made at gunpoint, but more interestingly simply because Edith LaBue was a Sicilian immigrant. The appeal judge claimed, “The mere fact that the testimony showed this woman came from Sicily can in no sense be taken as conclusive that she was therefore a white woman, or that she was not a negro or a descendant of a negro.”Footnote ³⁰ In the entrenched, inflexible and unsubtle caste system of the South, it is difficult to imagine any other Europeans who ranked so low. What was more, their position was little better in the anti-immigrant hotspots of the metropolitan Northeast and Mid-west – the areas where the vast majority of Sicilians chose to settle.

This prejudice played up to the favoured Mafia narrative. These people were as powerless in the New World as they had been in the Old. The oppressive Catholic Church and the feudal barons may have gone, but landlords and bosses remained. Just as Tammany Hall “protected” the Irish, in its own propaganda the Honourable Society put itself forward as the means of individual improvement; a career option and source of security in a world which despised the ubiquitous “dago.” Perhaps most importantly, the Mafia, with its supposed continuation of traditions, was a lifeline to home in a hostile world. It may have had a dubious reputation, but at least it was a Sicilian reputation. According to the confessions of one ex-member turned state's evidence in 1910, the Mafia portrayed itself as being just like all other immigrant nationalist fraternities which flourished around this time.Footnote ³¹ Indeed, the Mafia soon learned to control other Sicilian bodies – most notably the Unione Siciliana over which such significant “bosses” as Ignatzio Lupo and Lucky Luciano would later go to great pains to gain control.Footnote ³²

To reenforce this fraternal tie, accounts of the Mafia stressed the centrality of recognizable initiation rites, first recorded by the Palermo police chief in February 1876. Within months, reports of similar, if not identical, rituals were reported in neighbouring villages. The first recordings of “American” Mafia rituals appeared in the wake of the lynching of eleven Sicilians after the Mafia apparently murdered the New Orleans police chief in 1890. They allege that branches of the fraternity had been operating in America for some time, practicing similar, if not identical, rituals.Footnote ³³

Such parallels suggested a commonality and continuity which would indicate at least some level of formal structure within the organization, a structure capable of surviving transoceanic shifts. In the public mind these were highlighted by a high-profile Mafia trial in Italy in early 1891.Footnote ³⁴ American newspapers would later attribute other violent acts to peculiarly American-style Mafia rituals, including a series of murders in New York in the early 1900s. The tabloid press reported at least three so-called “barrel murders.” The modus operandi was similar in each one: the victim had his throat slit, before being stabbed tens of times and his body then stuffed into a barrel and left out in the street. Those investigating the crimes argued they were ritual murders warning the Italian community and signalling the power of the fraternity with their seemingly ritualized stab wounds, their failure to hide the act and the nonchalantly brutal treatment of the corpse.Footnote ³⁵

Nevertheless, however the fraternal roots of the Mafia are slanted, there is little doubt that their foundation myths have served them well. They have essentially enabled them to hide in plain sight, on and off, on both sides of the Atlantic, obscuring the activities and very existence of the organization. Essential to this camouflage was the obscuring of the organization's very purpose. This involved denial of any fraternal links. To those outside Sicily, on mainland Italy and elsewhere, “Mafia” was not so much a fraternity as an attitude. This interpretation was expressed with flair by the Italian American novelist Francis Marion Crawford, who had one of his Sicilian characters explain to a curious Roman visitor, “The mafia is not a man.” She went on to say, “The mafia is the Sicilian character – Sicilian honour, Sicilian principles. It is an idea, not an institution. It is what makes it impossible to govern Sicily … [because] the mafia idea keeps them [the Sicilians] together like one man.”Footnote ³⁶

While the Mafia drew on and cultivated an ancient yearning for Sicilian nationhood and Sicilian virtues, the origins of the Molly Maguires date back to a wave of nationalism that was no less powerful and only slightly less ancient.

Whereas the Mafia managed to utilize the regional stereotypes associated with their foundation myth to their distinct advantage, the Mollys’ supposed origins proved to be their undoing. While the tales of their origins had some veracity in the Old Country, in its New World manifestation this link was at best tenuous, but, like a mirror image of the Mafia, contemporary commentators saw it as far more than a name transported to a new setting. To them it was a secretive and violent manifestation of an old problem. Present-day scholars are not so sure of that pedigree. That is not to say that any American group calling itself the Mollys would not have had a heritage to draw on. Emerging from religious and class sectarianism, and accusations and counterclaims of terrorism and atrocity of British colonial rule in Ireland, the original Mollys certainly existed.

The ancestral Mollys grew out of a number of nineteenth-century Catholic Irish secret societies. They were centred on ideas of self-defence and aspirational nationalism and had been founded largely in opposition to militantly Protestant fraternities like the Peep-O’-Day-Boys and the Orange Order. Commentators at the time and since have claimed that these secret societies, like the White Boys, the Defenders and the Ribbonmen, concentrated their efforts on local – if not parochial – agrarian problems. Emerging out of this tradition of agrarian disaffection, legend has it that Molly Maguire was an Irish peasant mother evicted from her smallholding around the time of the famine.Footnote ³⁷

According to the various tales surrounding her, the tragically heroic woman fought back against the English and their lackeys trying to evict her from her home, died in the process, and/or founded an eponymous resistance movement. In the account of the Pinkerton undercover agent who infiltrated the Pennsylvania Mollys, the insurgents in Ireland took the name out of respect for the universal Irish mother. He maintained that it was taken to “represent the Irish mother begging bread for her children.”Footnote ³⁸ Whatever the truth of the matter, the legendary Molly would lend her name to an infamous band of violent vigilantes, who, like the Rebecca rioters in Wales, would disguise themselves in women's clothes and wreak bloody revenge on their oppressors under the cover of night.

From the 1860s, when they first entered the American pubic imagination, the Molly Maguires were condemned as an essentially sociopathically violent secret society that had been brought over to America by disaffected, disruptive and unruly Irish immigrants. They would surface most notoriously as a militant organization representing the hard-pressed Irish immigrant miners of the anthracite coal on what was then a wild frontier region of Pennsylvania.

The historical community is divided, but generally sympathetic, regarding the motives of the Pennsylvania Mollys of the 1870s. For example, some see them as class warriors. Others claim they were brutalized by intolerable conditions, driving them to commit murder. Yet others claim the Mollys who were hanged were martyrs to the cause of trade unionism.Footnote ³⁹ By contrast, contemporary accounts almost universally saw them as brutal criminals. As the self-proclaimed “only reliable history of the Mollies ever published” told its readers, the Mollys were the “most noted band of cut-throats of modern times.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Others argued that, like most workers in the region, the Mollys’ “chief business is to engage in ‘strikes’ and to commit crime.”Footnote ⁴¹ As Jimmy Kerrigan, a Molly turned state's evidence, put it, “The purpose of the Molly Maguires, AOH [Ancient Order of Hibernians], is to kill people and burn down dwellings.”Footnote ⁴²

Kerrigan's comments are especially telling. Essentially he describes the Mollys as a subgroup of the largest ethnically based fraternity in America – the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Kerrigan was not the first to make this accusation that the Mollys were essentially fraternalists, albeit members of their own brand of “midnight, dark-lantern, murderous-minded fraternity.”Footnote ⁴³ The claim had been evident for some time in the anti-Catholic press and remained extraordinarily persistent both within and outside the region. For instance, the New York Times, which took a consistently hostile view of the “fugitive murderers and conspirators” of the “oath-bound brotherhood,” would relentlessly depict them as that “Irish secret society” during the period of their famous trials of the 1870s and beyond.Footnote ⁴⁴ This fraternal connection was especially vital to the Mollys’ opponents, for a variety of reasons.

The initial source seems to have been the Pottsville Miners’ Journal, a Republican, Whig, nativist and “free-labor” newspaper published in Schuylkill County, in the heart of Pennsylvania's anthracite region. The editor of the journal was a native of Pennsylvania, born to Welsh, Presbyterian parents who inculcated in him a culture of self-discipline, sobriety and self-sufficiency. Benjamin Bannan loathed Catholicism, and the Irish Catholics who represented it. To him they were drunken, lazy and immoral. As if to prove this immorality, they were also Democrat, and through their support of the abomination that was slavery they were willing to condone privilege and cruelty as long as their own jobs were protected. Given his background and beliefs it is no wonder that under Bannan the journal was the mouthpiece of small-scale entrepreneurial enterprise. It made complete sense that it advocated a form of aspirant, trickle-down capitalism which precluded any understanding of the labour activism of the hard-pressed Irish immigrant workers who made up nearly a half of the region's workforce and almost all of the property-less wage slaves.Footnote ⁴⁵

Bannan's fears of malign Catholic influence came to a head with the election of an overwhelmingly Democrat administration in Schuylkill County in 1856. He became convinced that the election was rigged and that, according to an 1857 account, throughout Pennsylvania the Irish vote had been controlled by

He called this organization the Molly Maguires, although similar accusations elsewhere held the corruption to be the work of the Ancient Order of Hibernians.Footnote ⁴⁷

By the opening of the 1860s this association of the Mollys with corruption had expanded into accusations of violence. Interethnic violence had been a feature of the anthracite region since the 1840s. The murder of an Irishman by a Welshman, who was subsequently acquitted and then murdered in turn, had kindled fears of a latent Irish vigilantism among the miners. True to form, Bannan made accusations that the increasing level of violence in the region was the work of the highly organized and secret brotherhood. The ideas took firm root in the national press. For example, when, in 1862 and 1863 respectively a mine foreman and a mine owner were murdered, the New York Times was quick to blame organized Molly Maguires, whose violence and secrecy it compared with the Thuggee cult of India.Footnote ⁴⁸ The result was that by the time that the trials for fourteen other murders took place in the late 1870s, the idea of a violent and secretive fraternity – the Molly Maguires – had national currency.

The idea that the Mollys were a fraternity helped their enemies explain why the powers of righteousness could not find hard evidence to reveal the full depth of the association's depravity. They could argue that its code of secrecy was so impenetrable that its evil nature was only visible in its actions. Some would claim that this was, as in the case of the Mafia, a result of grievous penalties threatened for breaking oaths of secrecy – but again little evidence of this exists. Although it is claimed that they had initiation rites, which would no doubt have sworn initiates to secrecy and loyalty, little is known of the actual ritual of the Molly Maguires.

In not altogether reliable testimony, the Pinkerton agent, James McParlan, posing as a coconspirator and renegade Irish nationalist, James McKenna, details his induction after an Ancient Order of Hibernians meeting. He describes in very vague terms a simple ceremony in which he found himself

This close relationship between the AOH and the Mollys was upheld by the testimony of prosecution witness Manus Cull in the murder trial of Molly Maguire Patrick Hester. A member of both the AOH and the Mollys, he saw the two as essentially interchangeable.Footnote ⁵⁰ Other contemporary commentators see the one as a subdivision of the other – a “side order,” in fraternal terms. They claim that membership of the Hibernians was an essential prerequisite test of eligibility for joining the Molly Maguires.Footnote ⁵¹

Another popular account written at the height of the “great (Molly) riots” in the 1870s argued that “if every member of the Ancient Order of Hibernians was not a Mollie Maguire, every Mollie Maguire was a member of the Hibernian order.”Footnote ⁵² That is not to say that the “murderous activities” of the Mollies would have been condoned by the vast majority of the six thousand lodges of the AOH throughout America. Rather, as one source claimed, the national convention of the AOH, meeting in April 1877, “denounced them [the Molly Maguires] in the strongest terms … [and cut] off from membership the entire territory [the Mollys’ stronghold of Schuylkill County, PA] in which they were operating.”Footnote ⁵³

This connection, or lack of it, is more than simply a question of pedigree. One of the most notable scholars of the organization maintains that the close association of the Molly Maguires with the Ancient Order of Hibernians was essentially a fabrication that emerged as a result of the trial of some forty members of the group for the murder of sixteen mine owners, foremen and scab labourers. Implying that the two organizations were synonymous, the court was treated to descriptions of the Hibernian's secret signs, a handbook of membership rules and details of their initiation oaths.Footnote ⁵⁴ It was an essential part of the prosecution's case since the depiction of the Mollies as a fraternity enabled their prosecution under conspiracy laws rather than the more difficult charges of murder.

Nowhere is this clearer than in prosecution lawyer Franklin B. Gowen's summing up to the jury. He argued that the accused were all members of “a secret organization, banded together for the commission of crime … [and] securing the escape of any of its members” via mutual alibis.Footnote ⁵⁵ This not only made the Irishmen appear far more sinister, it would also imply that each of the killings of the bosses and their employees was connected to the others, and that their execution was premeditated. Given this slant, they were not random acts of violence or retaliation for perceived slights or spites; they were part of an international Irish Catholic conspiracy.Footnote ⁵⁶ The most vocal exponent of this view, Gowen, had a major interest in securing the convictions. He was the self-made president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad – the holding company for the mines in which the majority of industrial action was taking place.

Gowen is also interesting in the context of Molly myth from another perspective. He was, like many of his Welsh and English foremen and senior miners, Protestant. However, unlike them he was also an immigrant from Ulster and would have been familiar with – and no doubt hostile to – the Catholic, Irish Molly Maguires of the earlier nineteenth century. The same was true of James McParlan, the Pinkerton agent, and the most influential witness for the prosecution. He was also an Ulsterman and an immigrant. As such, both would have been aware of the genre of hostile literature on Irish peasant lawlessness and violence.

One, or both, may well also have been familiar with a rather obscure novel by the well-known Irish writer William Carleton. In Rody the Rover (1845), striking Molly Maguires in an Irish mine are exposed by an agent provocateur. Although hostile to Rody, the infiltrator, the story contains rituals and plays up secrecy in a way which is remarkably similar to both Gowen's description of the Mollies and that of McParlan as the agent's boss – Alan Pinkerton. Given the claim and counterclaim, the interpretation and reinterpretation, and the controversy surrounding the Mollies that has continued even to today, it is nearly impossible to know how much of the myth of a mysterious fraternity is actually based on this fictional account.Footnote ⁵⁷

By contrast with the Mollys and the Mafia, the foundation myth of the Klan is, at the same time, more straightforward and more complex. While the narrative of its origins is rarely contested, its implications are. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in the small town of Pulaski, Tennessee sometime between Christmas 1865 and June 1866. Even the names of the six original members are well known to historians of the order. The so-called “Jolly Six” were all ex-Confederate soldiers, bored by small-town life in rural Tennessee after the excitement and action of the Civil War. This much is clear. The narrative becomes slightly more opaque when the reasons for the formation of the Klan are investigated. The accounts of several of the Jolly Six hold that the order was formed simply to provide entertainment, camaraderie and a social centre. As one put it,

This fraternal structure is not altogether surprising, but it is vital to understanding the founding myth of the Klan and its phenomenal growth in the 1870s.

Postwar Pulaski was a Masonic stronghold – boasting eight lodges. At least four of the original “Jolly Six” had fraternal ties before forming the new fraternity. Some of them had been members of college “frat houses” – most notably the ancient and prestigious Kuklos Adelphon, or “Old Kappa Alpha,” which had been formed in 1812 at the University of North Carolina. Some of them had also been practising Masons, before and during the war. One of the six, the aptly named James Crowe, would go on to become Masonic Grand Master of the York Rite in Tennessee.

A great deal has been drawn from these connections – both of them illustrate the standing in the local community of the original founders of the order. Unlike the image that the Klan portrays today, these connections ooze acceptability. Masonic membership demonstrates a certain level of affluence and breeding. A college frat house shows that these were educated men. Overall they serve to show that these were respectable men who founded a harmless and conventional order for their own amusement.

In many ways, although these claims for the Klan's harmless origins have a ring of authenticity, they should also inspire at least some scepticism. Since they were written by participants in the original rituals, it goes without saying that these men would have had an interest in showing themselves in the best possible light. Nevertheless, there is perhaps more reason to trust these sources than might immediately be thought. These accounts were published when the Klan's reputation was at its zenith, and in a period when the whole process of Reconstruction was seen as misguided.

In this reading, the whole process of Reconstruction was seen as a tragic mixture of idealism, triumphalism and cynicism practised on a powerless South by a small marauding clique of self-serving northern Republicans. This group were seen as being dedicated to raising up the black population, out of either a mistaken humanitarianism or a wish to create a grateful and pliant political power base. Either way, the view of these years in the half-century after the failure of the experiment was very different from the picture nowadays. The South was “redeemed,” it was returned to its old Democrat masters, and the “natural order” of the region was restored with Jim Crow policies. Increasingly, over these years the nightriding vigilantes of the Klan were seen by many Americans – North and South – as the saviours of the South.

The Pulaski Klan can realistically be seen as the reasonable reaction of a group of bored ex-Confederate soldiers, stuck in a small backwater in rural Tennessee. After the comradeship and excitement of war, at least the formation of a fraternity could provide some enjoyment. Given this interpretation, at the end of the nineteenth century the claims that the Klan's original purpose was simply to provide fraternal companionship and merriment for its members do not necessarily sound like the far-fetched excuse for bigotry, hatred and violence they appear today – especially if it is considered that one of the most cited texts was written by a founding member.Footnote ⁵⁹ Even if later developments did take the Klan in a direction far removed from the simple objectives of the Jolly Six, the connections with existing fraternities remained strong, with Masons in particular allegedly making up many of the leading figures in the organization.

This served an important function. Association with Masons gave pedigree and legitimacy to the young organization, virtues made all the more potent when linked with respected and celebrated individuals. Typical of these claims are the connections with Nathan Bedford Forrest. The very model of the dashing, cavalier, Confederate cavalry general, he became the Klan's first imperial wizard – its national figurehead. Much has been made of Forrest's interest in Masonry. Yet as with so much fraternal history – and especially when in connection with more controversial orders like the Klan – secrecy, deliberate obfuscation and ignorant misinformation play a large role. Although it is certain that he was a Mason, there is evidence to suggest that Forrest never graduated beyond the First Degree, so the craft's influence on him could not have been seen as life-altering, or even particularly serious.Footnote ⁶⁰

What was more, Forrest steadfastly refused to publicly acknowledge his position within the Klan, especially after the 1871 Force Act declared the organization criminal. This coyness about affiliation was replicated throughout the higher echelons of the Klan. The basis of these fraternal affiliations are largely histories, predominantly favourable, if not downright celebratory or hagiographic, accounts written around the turn of the twentieth century, years when the myth of the “Lost Cause” gained traction. Many of these interpretations claim that the majority of grand dragons (state-level leaders) of the Klan during these years were drawn from the ranks of the Masons. Secrecy makes such claims difficult to justify one way or the other, and they are all the more contestable because of the Masons’ reluctance to court any form of controversy after their disastrous connection with the scandal of the Morgan affair, which dogged the Masons from the late 1820s more or less until the Civil War.

Arguably the most controversial and enduring of these claims to direct connections has revolved around the leading Masonic figure of the day. It is claimed that Albert Pike played a pivotal role in the rise of both organizations.Footnote ⁶¹ This claim is at best debatable, and, given surviving evidence, almost unprovable – one way or the other. Still, investigation of the claims highlights the shared objectives of the Klan and of many Masons in the South. Pike not only supported slavery; he had risked his life to defend it. He was a former brigadier-general in the Confederate Army, albeit a rather unsuccessful, idiosyncratic and erratic one. What also makes the connection more likely is that Pike was certainly a member of those elites drawn to the new purposes of the Klan – most importantly “Home Rule” for the South. Even after their military demise, his allegiance remained steadfast to the defeated southern states, and his opinion of the increasingly radical racial integration policy of the early 1870s was clearly, obviously and frequently stated. He was against it. As he himself put it,

Pike was a master of Masonic ritual, and an expert in the esoteric, archaic and romantic elements which contributed so clearly to the appeal of the Masons in post-Civil War America. Association with a man like Pike reenforced a direct link between the Klan and an illustrious roll call of former Masons which included six former Presidents of the United States. However, it is probably not the Masons from which the Klan drew most of its original ritual, ideals and purpose. While the genuine influence does not have the status of the Masons, it does have an innocence which arguably contributes to the legendary benevolence of the Klan's original purpose. The most likely influence is the Sons of Malta, an order which, in spite of its Mediterranean name, emerged in the prewar South. The Sons of Malta were a short-lived society that preyed off the craze for secret societies in the mid-1850s. Originating in New Orleans in 1854, they rapidly spread across the South and edged up the eastern seaboard before spreading west and all but dying out by the late 1860s.

The object of the order was simply the fun of hazing a seemingly endless number of gullible new recruits. Those initiated would then go on to repeat the process in a new area. Alongside being made to recite complex and senseless oaths, the usual initiation would consist of the neophyte being blindfolded, put in a large basket and hauled to the ceiling of the lodge while the Sons of Malta ate dinner beneath him. There was also the Boston branch's notoriously terrifying “shooting the chute,” where the candidate was sent careening down a shaft which dropped a full three storeys. If he survived, it became his task to perform no other fraternal duties than to recruit further members and take their money. Judging by the fraternity's rapid growth, most initiates were happy to go out and find more unfortunate victims.Footnote ⁶³

In this respect the Ku Klux Klan was in its earliest days very similar to the Sons of Malta, especially in its objectives. One historian of the organization's first five years goes so far as to say, “The perpetuation of the initiation was really the principal object of the order.”Footnote ⁶⁴ What was more, the limited number of surviving firsthand accounts indicate that the Pulaski Klan's initiation rite draws more on the Sons of Malta's prankish tradition than on the solemnity of the more established and serious organizations like the Masons. The ghoulish titles, the alliterative “K”s, the outlandish costumes – all point to this ancestry.

Similarly, the initiation ceremony bears many of the hallmarks of the Sons of Malta. The rite was held in a riverside glade – the Klan's “Den” – which was laid out in some ways like a Masonic temple. According to historian of the early Klan Stanley Horn, even this was simply the result of the placing of random objects in order to increase the difficulty for initiates to negotiate the Den blindfold. The obstacles were designed to confuse and frighten the neophyte and entertain the fraternalists conducting the ceremony. This prankish interpretation is backed up by the account, given some years later, of two of the founders of the original KKK. It showed that the ritual involved little more than the hooded initiate hearing some threatening incantations from the “Grand Cyclops” and the “Grand Turk.” He would then take a pretty well meaningless set of oaths. On completion he was shown his reflection in a mirror on the Den's “royal altar.” To the general “hilarity” of the fraternity, it revealed that he was wearing a “regal crown” with donkey's ears and his face had been smeared with soot.Footnote ⁶⁵

This analysis of the fatuousness of the Klan ritual is important since it flags up the central issue of fraternity in these associations. It is undeniably possible to argue that at the more complex and sophisticated levels, the ideals of fraternity within these groups should be seen as being little more than simplistic and vestigial, a nod to an imagined ancestry. But then, that was not their purpose. Their essentially ersatz ceremonies were not devised to mimic the passage from ignorance to enlightenment, or boyhood to manhood, which has continued to attract members and fascinate anthropologists, sociologists and historians. Nor did they inspire pride in their status as workers, artisans or craftsmen. None of this, however, negates their importance. For all three organizations the idea of fraternity remained central. In essence it endorsed, justified, systematized and standardized their criminal activities and it is possible to see evidence of this in their legacies.

In the case of the Molly Maguires fraternity created the myth of an effective, recognizable and terrifying organization which gained notoriety on both sides of the Atlantic. Set against this there is increasing evidence which could indicate that they never really existed in America – at least not in the form which has inspired newspapers, journal articles and book-length “true accounts” of terrorism or proto-trade unionism. Moreover, their legacy has lived on in the fiction of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (The Valley of Fear, 1914) and in the onscreen presence of Sean Connery (The Molly Maguires, 1970), not to mention countless historical investigations – some rigorous and scholarly, others less so.

Nor are they alone in this fame. Sherlock Holmes also tangled with the Klan in the Sherlock Holmes story “The Five Orange Pips.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The Klan's secrecy and brotherly loyalty played a pivotal role in the “redemption” of the region's prewar, caste-based, system of government – albeit often more in the way in which the name Klan became the generic term for white supremacist organizations of the period. Nor does it end there. Fraternity, as the work of Miguel Hernandez and Craig Fox is showing, would be one of the chief motives for anywhere from four million to ten million American men and women to join the “Invisible Empire” in the 1920s, making it perhaps proportionately the largest fraternity in US history.

But it is the Mafia that has been the most successful of all three fraternities – in all respects. It has become a staple in both film and fiction, even creating its own genre. It is argued that its fraternal structure largely enabled the spread of the Sicilian model of organized crime. Similarly it is held that its fraternal secrecy has enabled it to become simultaneously ubiquitous and invisible. At times its very existence has been in question, and yet it is suspected that it controls a significant proportion of the US economy and greater shares of the economies of many other nations. Moreover, it has entered the popular vocabulary in a way unlike any other fraternity. The result is that any criminal fraternity, from the contemporaneous Neapolitan camorra, to today's Russian gangs, tends to be called a “mafia.”