Today, the individual reigns supreme
While rummaging around the 1930s microfilm at the library for a book I’m researching, I happened upon a story that serves to highlight one of the big differences between that era and ours.
The story goes something like this: there once was a strike of high school students because they preferred the principal they had rather than the one the school board was giving them.
The strike unfolded in April 1934, when some 250 North Union High School underclassmen boycotted classes after learning that school directors had hired former principal Robert W. Clark to lead the high school once more.
The board ousted the then current principal, J.D. Shaner, a student favorite.
The leaders of the school “holiday” – juniors James Cupp, James Holland and William Crowe Jr. and sophomores Floyd Holland and William Detweiler – had the wherewithal to issue a press release explaining the reasons for the walkout, beginning with their “fear” that “there will be other changes made by the school board that will disrupt the present school system, which is in smooth working order ..”
Principal Shaner, the students said, was responsible for “so many improvements and continually strived … to make school attractive.”
Among his accomplishments were enhanced commencement exercises and extracurricular and Honor Society dinners, all of which sound quite quaint to us but evidently meant a lot to the students.
The organizers of the strike also mentioned that Shaner had pulled the high school out of a $1,000 financial hole.
That was all well and good, but the students took their criticism a step too far, or that’s the way it must have seemed to the school board members who had voted to replace Shaner with Clark. (It was a 5-2 vote.)
The students charged the school board majority of playing politics. They said it was generally known that the recent elections of William Silbaugh and Joseph Paull to the board spelled the end of Shaner and the selection of Clark.
The aggrieved school directors struck back, charging that the students were pawns in the hands of adults with their own political axes to grind.
Now the thing is the students, both boys and girls, acted pretty much like their erstwhile brethren in the organized labor movement. They carried placards extolling Shaner. They sang songs. They marched. One day they trooped on down to Coolspring “Hollow”, the home turf of township tax collector Asa Martin, the man who was thought to be the power behind the throne.
The next day they marched to Whyel grade school, on Gallatin Avenue Extension. Getting there, they paraded down Main Street into the heart of downtown Uniontown, where they made their presence known to one and all.
It’s worth noting that only several weeks prior to the student march, Main Street had been clogged with placard-waving, flag-carrying (the students also carried American flags) labor union members bearing witness to their grievances and triumphs. It was the annual Mitchell Day observance, with coal miners celebrating the 8-hour work day amidst a long-simmering labor dispute with the H.C. Frick Co.
As many as 50,000 people, both marchers and spectators, were on hand for the parade.
It was a time of mass action, of communal thinking. Ours, on the other hand, is an age of, by, and for the individual.
Today, it’s impossible to think of any single issue that would stir people from their individual, insular concerns to send 50,000 of them into the streets of Uniontown, let’s say.
Or to prompt high school students – high school students! – to defy adult authority in the way the student strikers of 1934 did.
We are like isolated little islands floating in a sea of individuality. And, no, Facebook is not the answer.
In 1934, the United States was slowly climbing out of the Great Depression. The renewal of hope sparked by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal undoubtedly helped to spark the wave of labor strikes and general unrest which characterized the mid-1930s.
Change was in the air. People were all for taking chances, together. It was “all for one, one for all.”
Several gatherings of 300 or more parents took place during the student strike. At one meeting, a four hour long “heated” discussions took place between the parents of striking students and school directors before “an audience which taxed the capacity of the school gymnasium.”
Try replicating that level of intense community-involvement today.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.