"[15] Other notable instances included his closing argument as prosecutor in the 1876 murder trial of John Kehoe, vilified at the time as the "King of the Mollie Maguires," in which he portrayed the murders and other crimes attributed to Mollies as being an evil unparalleled in all human history, and as not locally motivated, but driven by orders from other places—Pittsburgh, New York—even other lands—England, Ireland, Scotland;[16] and his three-hour argument in 1881 before a gathering of outraged stockholders of the bankrupt Reading Railroad, inside Philadelphia's Academy of Music, by which he turned open hostility into enthusiastic rounds of applause[17] Kehoe received the death penalty and was hung.

In the post-Civil War climate of Northern industrial growth and prosperity, the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad even prior to Gowen's presidency was involved in dual processes of consolidating control over sub-regional carriers that fed into it, by either acquisition or lease; and of building connections through other lines to Pittsburgh and beyond.

This scheme was incorporated in July 1870 into the first written contract between miners and operators in the U.S. Gowen was not a disinterested party in the original dispute, however, his real concerns being to stabilize revenues for the Reading and to do so by introducing his own manipulations of anthracite prices.

He attacked the WBA generally, and its leader, John Siney, personally, as ignorant, demagogic, wrong-headed in their misunderstandings of the laws of supply and demand; as preventing men from working, forcing the poor to pay high prices for coal, and ruining the iron industry.

[23] It was in these same hearings that Gowen first began to formulate in public discourse his theory that the miners' union had at its core a murderous criminal association: This organization first came into full fledged existence, in all the [coal] regions, in 1869.

[25]This idea, already formed in his mind well before any pointed investigation of such a spectral secret society, Gowen was to expand and propound later in the decade into the image of an international conspiracy as the ultimate target behind the prosecution of coal-region Mollie Maguires.

"[27] The object of these deep diggings was to reach the famous Mammoth Vein, an undulating seam of high-quality anthracite twenty-five feet thick, projected as providing a virtually inexhaustible supply.

In the late 1840s and early 1850s, one of Gowen's predecessors as president of the Philadelphia & Reading, John Tucker, undertook to bolster the railroad's presence and control in Port Richmond with the aim of achieving unquestioned leadership of the coal trade on the Delaware.

The Reading's Port Richmond facilities in 1852 were estimated to comprise 49 acres (200,000 m2), including 20 wharves that would allow more than 100 vessels to be loaded simultaneously, and space for storage in slack times of a quarter million tons of coal.

Pinkerton's published account of the meeting depicts Gowen laying out in some detail the existence, background and nature of a criminal secret society called Mollie Maguires, transplanted from Ireland to the coal region of Pennsylvania.

[citation needed] A series of murders July and September 1875, following the breakdown of the WBA and its Long Strike, led to several arrests over the next year of men identified as Mollie Maguires.

Gowen himself acted as special prosecutor in more than one trial in Schuylkill, most notably in 1876 at that of John "Black Jack" Kehoe, whom he characterized in his summation as "chief conspirator, murderer, and villain" and "with having made money by his traffic in the souls of his fellow-men".

Gowen's multi-faceted role in particular—from his 1871 and 1875 testimonies positing a Mollie-like criminal enterprise at the heart of the WBA, which he also rhetorically linked to Communism; to the coincidental timing of the hopeless Long Strike precipitated by the Schuylkill Coal Exchange that Gowen had organized, on one hand, and his bankrolling the undercover anti-Mollie machinations, on the other; plus partially substantiated claims that McParland or other Pinkertons essentially on the Reading Railroad payroll instigated both Mollie-like activities and anti-Mollie vigilantism[38]—has eluded historical consensus.

[40] During Franklin Gowen's presidency, the Reading Railroad was one of the richest corporations in the world—running not only trains, but an empire of coal mines, of canals and oceangoing vessels; and even trying (unsuccessfully) a subsidiary rail venture in Brazil.

[41] Though its corporate management resided in Philadelphia, the motive power propelling the railroad emanated from Reading, roughly 60 miles (97 km) northwest of the larger city, where a 36-acre (150,000 m2) engineering/production shop complex sat adjacent to the downtown.

Local outrage at Gowen and the Reading was intensified as newly laid-off brakemen swelled the ranks of unemployed railroad men and strikebreakers saw their wages as a transparent effort to buy loyalty.

After the road's optimistic startup on a foundation of American capital in 1834, because it was "constructed without financial stint... the income from the company's operations had to be maintained at an unusually high level just to stay in the black.

He stated this belief forthrightly in the Reading Railroad annual report for 1870;[47] but already the use of lower-cost coke made from more widely available bituminous coal, together with expanding markets in the Midwest and West, was driving the center of the iron industry (and soon, steelmaking) to Pittsburgh.

After hearing from Gowen of a US$7 million floating debt that had never been discussed in any board meetings, Smith inspected the unpublished books of the subsidiary Coal & Iron Co., which issued no annual report of its own.

Smith raised the issue to the Reading's principal source of funds, the McCalmont Brothers investment banking firm in London, seeking Gowen's ouster, but was rebuffed.

Gowen's plan called for receivership to last for five years, for which time he projected increasingly improved business performance, reduction of fixed expenses to a manageable level, and liquidation of floating debt by the selling off of assets and/or conversion into preferred stock.

In late 1880 Gowen traveled to England to attempt repairing relations there, and at the same time sought to postpone the annual shareholder meeting, with its election of president and board, from its regular January schedule.

His argument to them was that the Reading was in danger of undermining influences from rival railroads but his hope was that the postponement would change the voting rules, and the absence of his allied shareholders would prevent a qualified quorum from being present.

His three-hour oration not only excoriated the McCalmont Brothers' "cowardly meanness", but accused them and their American agents, Kidder, Peabody, of working in league with the Pennsylvania Railroad in order to attempt moving the Reading into the sphere of control of that much larger corporation.

He published a plan that included having himself reappointed as a receiver, raising new millions of dollars, holding on to the Jersey Central (whose lease by the Reading was in jeopardy through litigation), and even to complete the elusive attainment of trunk line status for the railroad.

Notwithstanding the optimistic reorganization plan Gowen rode back into the presidency, shareholder enthusiasm and a board resolution were insufficient to remove the Reading from its deeply troubled circumstance.

Before Gowen was able to mobilize any of the money required to take action, Morgan reentered the arena, this time heading a syndicate that offered to return peace and prosperity to the company through a different means.

Involvement with literature was not new to him — recall his founding role in the Pottsville Literary Society decades before; and he was well versed enough in the stage to include lengthy descriptions of two plays in his speech at one of the Molly Maguire trials.

[citation needed] It was determined that Franklin B. Gowen died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head on December 13, 1889, at Wormley's Hotel in Washington, D.C. At the time, some had speculated that he was murdered by Molly Maguires in retaliation.

Gowen's financial rewards were meager, and while he did attain considerable public attention and the trappings of his office, this dynamic leader ultimately was consumed by his final failure and his career ended in tragedy.