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Hellraisers Journal – Monday July 19, 1909
McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania – Strikers of Pressed Steel Car Co. Battle Cossacks
From The Pittsburg Press of July 15, 1909:
4,000 RIOTERS ATTACK POLICE;
MANY ARE HURT
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Desperate Fighting Takes Place at Noon,
a Pitched Battle Raging Over Most of
McKees Rocks for Half Hour
–Sergeant of Constabulary Badly Wounded
—–FOUGHT LIKE DEMONS AGAINST OFFICERS
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Desperate fighting took place at noon today between 4,000 of the Pressed Steel Car Co. strikers and their sympathizers and the State Constabulary, a pitched battle raging over most of McKees Rocks for half an hour.
One striker was seriously shot; Sergeant Frederick Frash, of the constabulary, was badly wounded, his face being laid open with a piece of steel axle, and many others were injured.
Under a perfect rain of bricks, stones and clubs, the state officers fought their way back and forth from one end of McKees Rocks to the other, surrounded constantly by thousands of infuriated men and women, representing a large portion of the population of McKees Rocks. Fighting like demons, the strikers pressed the mounted constables so fiercely that in self-defense the officers were forced to use their rifles, several hundred shots being fired before they succeeded in beating off their assailants…..
[Photograph and emphasis added.]
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SOURCES
Quote Clarence Darrow, Labor Flesh Blood Life, ISR p203, Sept 1909
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=MVhIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA203
The Pittsburg Press
(Pittsburg, Pennsylvania)
-July 15, 1909, Evening
https://www.newspapers.com/image/141322414
IMAGE
McKees Rocks Strike, PA Mounted Constabulary, LoC, July Aug 1909
https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2014684213/
See also:
McKees Rocks Pressed Steel Car Strike of 1909
-July 13-Sept 8, 1909
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressed_Steel_Car_strike_of_1909
Strikebreaking and Intimidation
Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America
-by Stephen H. Norwood
Univ of North Carolina Press, Apr 3, 2003
(search: “pennsylvania’s black hussars”)
https://books.google.com/books?id=T6bqCQAAQBAJ
More from The Pittsburg Press of July 15, 1909:
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McKees Rocks Strike
Note: The IWW did not enter the strike until August. Haywood was not the leader of the IWW in 1909, he became General Secretary-Treasurer in 1915.
Homestead Strike Song – Pete Seeger