A summer of violence in the county
This week nine decades ago Fayette County was on fire. The immediate cause of the unrest was union busting. The effect was widespread lethal disorder.
“Notwithstanding the earnest desire of the mine workers to preserve peace in Fayette County, it had been evident that the H.C. Frick Coal and Coke Co. has not been in a conciliatory mood and is fomenting increased trouble and violence,” wrote union president John L. Lewis to Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor in the administration of Franklin Roosevelt, as July 1933 came to a close.
Trouble had been brewing for months, even years in the coal and coke fields. The first in a chain of events which eventually led to the Lewis letter to Perkins took place on June 1, when Frick officials announced the formation of a “company union” to counter a successful organizing drive by the United Mine Workers.
Lewis and his band of Western Pennsylvania organizers were spurred on by the union-friendly National Industrial Recovery Act, an early New Deal measure devised to extract the country from its worst ever economic downturn. (As many as 40% of all American workers were out of work.)
Lewis, pulling the strings from UMW headquarters in Indianapolis, Indiana, and frequently from Washington, D.C., where he scurried as the newly installed Roosevelt administration scrambled to put together a recovery plan, played up the notion that FDR himself wanted miners to join his union.
The Frick company, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel headquartered in Scottdale, was anti-union from the get-go. That colossus of the coal fields, Henry Clay Frick, was long dead but the company he founded still operated in his image.
On the morning of July 25, a crowd that swelled to a thousand men and their families menaced Frick’s Colonial No. 3 mine at Rowes Run.
Later that same day, a crowd of 600 descended on the company’s Maxwell mine. By 3 p.m., the focus of action returned to Rowes Run.
“Conditions” in Fayette County are “very unsettled,” state police reported to Pennsylvania Gov. Gifford Pinchot. “The attitude of the pickets is vicious.”
Within days, state National Guard troops were activated. Pitching army tents near Brownsville, it was the first time troopers had been dispatched to the county since the coal strike of 1922.
On July 31, the day before Lewis wrote to Perkins, a mass protest at Maxwell escalated to the point that tear gas canisters were tossed at the crowd by Frick security forces.
In the midst of all this, Frick company president Thomas Moses implored Sheriff Harry Hackney to do more to stop the violence. In response, Hackney imposed a ban on “gatherings of three or more persons” which might prompt “riot, rout, unlawful assembly, or any affray.”
The sheriff’s order was quickly rescinded by Pinchot, an energetic pro-labor Republican progressive.
“Our men are being shot down like dogs by company guards,” Tony Rose, the president of UMW Local 5279 at Allison, declared in a telegram to Pinchot.
Before sunrise on the hot, sultry morning of Aug. 1, the situation escalated yet again on the two-lane roadway that runs past Rowes Run and connects Grindstone with Smock, when shots were aimed at pickets from a passing car.
“He got me, boys,” groaned Louis Podrasky, a 38-year-old union striker. Rushed to Brownsville Hospital, Podrasky died that afternoon.
Podrasky’s two assailants were apprehended several days later. The gunmen suffered injuries of their own, prompting a visit to a Smock doctor. William C. Brown received 25 stitches to repair a laceration above his right ear. Showered with rocks by pickets, Jack Brosius, the driver, told investigators he opened fire.
At Star Junction, striking miner Robert Russin faced down a Frick deputy who pressed a pistol against his stomach. “Go ahead and shoot,” Russin dared the officer. He later told authorities that he heard another Frick officer instruct still other officers, “Cock up your guns.”
On Aug. 3, Lewis noted, “The strike situation becomes more threatening daily.”
On Aug. 5, the union chief tried to console Louis Podrasky’s widow, writing that the miner’s death “may” – may – “help to bring happiness and security to many of his fellow men. I am truly sorry.”
Richard Robbins, the author of “Troubled Times: The Struggle for Wages, Recognition, and Power in the Age of Coal and Coke,” is working on a second volume. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.