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Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday August 12, 1919
North Clairton, Pennsylvania – Iron and Steel Organizers Arrested
From the Duluth Labor World of August 9, 1919:
PITTSBURGH, Aug. 7.-When President Samuel Gompers and other officers and organizers at the Atlantic City convention all arose and pledged themselves to go to jail if necessary to unionize the iron and steel workers of the country they evidently were fully aware of the extremes to which the steel barons would go to prevent their men from organizing.
Last Sunday [Aug. 3rd], the first arrests were made at North Clairton, a suburb of Pittsburgh. Secretary Foster [Secretary of the National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers] and several other organizes were thrown into jail and a union meeting held on a private lot, the owner of which presided at the meeting, was broken up.
Steel Men Swarm Into Unions.
The struggle to secure the rights of free speech and free assembly in this section of Pennsylvania has been unending and discouraging. Yet the committee appointed by President Gompers to organize the iron and steel workers has made some progress, for in spite of the many arrests that have been made and the other harassing tactics that have been resorted to good progress is being made. For the first time in years union meetings are permitted in McKeesport, Rankin, Braddock and Homestead. In all of these places meetings have been held and men are swarming into the unions by the thousands.
But, surrounding Pittsburgh are boroughs and boroughs. Nearly all are important steel centers and all are bad. Some are worse than others. The worst one so far discovered is North Clairton.
North Clairton is a typical one-man steel town. It is a place where the steel trust has always had its own sweet, unhampered, autocratic way. The casual visitor to the Pittsburgh section would not likely ever hear of North Clairton. Yet, within its tyrannical borders, some 4,000 steel workers live out their miserable existences working in 10 and 14-hour shifts with its crushing, killing 24-four shifts at the weekly changes. The national committee could not ignore the plea for organization on the part of these enslaved human beings.
Permit Is Denied.
More than three weeks ago, an application to the Burgess of North Clairton for a permit to hold a meeting was made. It was instantly and insultingly refused. Repeated, but unsuccessful attempts were made to rent a hall. Hall owners in some cases were sympathetic, but the terrible reprisals against those who ignore the edicts of the steel trust have a fearful memory behind, and they did not dare.
P. H. Brogan owns a lot in North Clairton. He is local secretary for the national committee in that place. He is a fighting man who fights. “Hold your meeting on my lot,” he suggested. So it was arranged for Sunday afternoon, Aug. 3. Secretary Brogan had a sign which he had fastened over his little office torn down and destroyed. He suffered many other indignities. But the fights and all this made him mad. He was arrested for handing out bills advertising the meeting that he had arranged for on his lot. But the arrangements were completed, and just before the first speaker was ready to tell the story to the workers, Constable White and Burgess Williams came on the lot, came on the private property of Secretary Brogan, and forbade the meeting. “It is against the state law,” said the Burgess. “Hold the meeting at your peril,” warned the constable.
Gunmen Appear.
The meeting was opened by Organizer J. C. Brown, but at the end of a couple of minutes the constable, accompanied by a half-dozen Carnegie Steel Co. police, blustered up through the enormous crowd and arrested the speaker. Then, the constable completely lost his head. But there was another head there. Captain Bowen, chief of the Carnegie Steel Co. police, was on hand. He was one of the scabs of the great Homestead strike of 1892. His brutal tendencies, his hatred for unions has been developing in each of the 27 years since that time. He took charge of the situation. He pointed out six other organizers as by instinct. Organizer Joe Manley of the Structural Iron Workers was arrested for coming from Pittsburgh; Secretary Foster as “a suspicious character;” A. F. of L. Organizer J. L. Beaghen “for being along;” A. A. Lassich organizer of the mine, mill and smelter workers was asked if he was “a member of the American Federation of Labor.” He admitted it and was immediately arrested. R. L. Hall, organizer of the International Association of Machinists, was accused and convicted by Capt. Bowen of “doing nothing,” and taken in. Secretary Brogan was yanked to jail without explanation.
All the men were marched by the heavily armed gunmen up the big hill, through the streets of the town, across lots to the city jail in Clairton a mile away. Upon arrival, a demand was ignored and all the men thrown summarily into the filthy cells of the suffocating jail. This jail has cells so ingeniously constructed that a fair-sized man can neither stand up nor lay down straight. One can only sit in a humped-up position. Each was furnished with cell, a toilet that had apparently seen much use and little attention. The stench on a hot day like Aug. [3], was sickening.
A friend, seeing the door from the office open for a moment came in and asked the prisoners if he could be of service. One of them asked for a drink. At the moment, an officer of the Clairton police force stuck his head in the door. “Come out of there,” he thundered. The friend explained that he was only giving one of the men a drink. “They are always wanting something. Let them alone,” he commanded.
Were Held in Jail.
All the organizers were kept in the unspeakable jail till night, unable to communicate with either friends or their attorney, bail refused, and would have undoubtedly have had to spend the night there had it not been for the activities of some labor men from Pittsburgh who happened along just as the so-called arrests were being made. They raced around town, located the Burgess and forced him to fix the bail, furnished it, and just before dark the men were released.
Thus, these men were in jail for hours without a charge being placed against them. Their money refused for bail, they were made sport of by the small boys of the town, humiliated and sneered at by the hired gunmen of the Carnegie Steel Co.
All this happened in a state where men took their lives in their hands when they signed a declaration setting forth the fundamental principals for the establishment of a free government, and just following the world’s greatest war, during which millions of lives were sacrificed in the cause of liberty and democracy.
Mother Jones To Speak.
But the same spirit that impelled men to fight for freedom in other times is not dead now. Mother Jones gray-haired, stooped and bent under the load of her 89 years of fighting for labor, but with a soul on fire and the flash of her eyes undimmed, hearing of the outrages in North Clairton sent a wire demanding that she be billed for a speech in that place on Sunday, August 10. Her offer has been accepted. Thousands of mine workers, in grateful remembrance of the many sacrifices Mother Jones has made for them, insist that they too are going to be in North Clairton and if she is going to be dragged to jail by the brutal Carnegie Steel Co. police with the sanction of the municipal authorities they want to be eye-witnesses to the depths to which corporate hirelings can sink.
The spirit of liberty still lives! The American Federation of Labor proposes to plant its banner in every steel center in Western Pennsylvania. Other national figures in the labor movement will follow Mother Jones. Wires are pouring into the office of the national committee for organizing iron and steel workers announcing the names of men who wish to enlist “for the duration of the war.”
North Clairton and other autocratic boroughs will have to back up. Democracy is on the ascendency. Justice for labor is the cry that is encircling the world and wise men will heed this cry.
[Emphasis added.]
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SOURCES & IMAGES
Quote Mother Jones, Kaisers here at home, Peoria IL Apr 6, 1919
From:
The Speeches and Writings of Mother Jones
-ed by Edward M. Steel
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988
https://books.google.com/books?id=vI-xAAAAIAAJ
Speech by Mother Jones at Peoria, Illinois, on April 6, 1919
https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735035254105/viewer#page/216/mode/2up
The Labor World
(Duluth, Minnesota)
-Aug 9, 1919
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn78000395/1919-08-09/ed-1/seq-1/
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn78000395/1919-08-09/ed-1/seq-3/
See also:
For more on “National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers,” see:
Racial Competition and Class Solidarity
-Boswell, Brown, Brueggemann, Peters
SUNY Press, 2006
(search:”national committee for organizing iron and steel workers”)
https://books.google.com/books?id=wAAmU74dSrwC
The Great Steel Strike and Its Lessons
-by William Z. Foster
B. W. Huebsch, Incorporated, 1920
(search: “national committee”)
https://books.google.com/books?id=Hbt-AAAAMAAJ
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The Homestead Strike – Joe Glazer