Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  “It was segregated, but not in sports,” said Townsell “T-baby” Thomas, who arrived in town in 1925 and played basketball for Aliquippa High in the late ’30s. “That’s the one place where they didn’t go over the line.”

  The melting pot has been a staple of American thought since Independence; variations on the metaphor include a smelting pot, a crucible, even a steelmaking blast furnace. It also becomes fashionable, once a generation, for intellects to question whether the process of blending ethnicities into one “society” is ever as complete as advertised, but in Aliquippa, anyway, one detail is clear: Sport is where the melt in the pot began.

  2

  Little Hell

  Early in October 1934, a tall, lanky balding man with a strange handshake, soon to turn forty-six, drove his car twenty-five miles up from Pittsburgh to Ambridge. He slowed, parked, reached into his mouth, and removed his dental plate. Then he began the dusty four-mile walk to Aliquippa. Though his customary suit had been replaced by work slacks, a battered hat, and rough shoes, he was hardly slumming. Clint Golden had known dirt all his life. By seventeen he had worked a plow, driven mules, worked as a drill tender in a hillside mine, spent months wiping oil off engine parts, and fed locomotive tenders an endless gorge of coal. Yet something about Aliquippa’s filth offended him.

  It wasn’t just that, after a day there, Golden’s clothes came away with a new blackness all but woven into the wool. Or that in the short time between ordering a meal and receiving it, his hands would need scrubbing all over again. When a dense fog mixed with the usual mill spew, the air became like some oily second skin, insinuating itself into the tightest creases. He could feel the stuff working its way inside. Back, each night, in his plush room at the Pittsburgher Hotel, Golden could still taste coal smoke on his tongue, thick like the tar of a cheap cigar, resistant to the onslaught of strong drink and the most savory dinner. When he woke, no amount of water could flush the inky grit out of his nostrils and throat. Getting Aliquippa out of your system literally took days.

  It was as if the town couldn’t bear to let you go—or sought, like a disease, to keep killing long after exposure. Union-minded men like Golden weren’t surprised. Aliquippa was the hottest enemy turf going. Spies shadowed strangers. Company muscle itched for heads to crack. That’s why he wore the shabby clothes, made his mouth a gummy shame: J&L’s boys might overlook another shiftless tramp wandering in off Route 51.

  Golden worked his way through the bars on Franklin Avenue, the streetcorner clots of men who chattered and fell silent when a cop passed. The idle in Aliquippa talked women, baseball, basement stills and basement wine, those organizers huddling in Ambridge who managed to sneak in. He listened, seemingly harmless. Some spoke of the fiery speech the governor’s wife made in Ambridge five weeks before. Some took it further and spoke about the need for a union. And that’s about the time when someone would inevitably say, “Well, you know what happened to Georg, don’t you?”

  Golden had some idea. He had heard the rumors. The place dubbed “Little Siberia” had been at fever pitch for months. Twenty steelworkers who’d just been to Pittsburgh to testify against J&L to the National Steel Labor Relations Board were so scared to return home that the governor had sent state police to protect them. Then there’d been the desperate letter sent to the state capital by an Aliquippa housewife, but her story had seemed almost too incredible. But now, the wide eyes of the men, and the fear and near-awe that accompanied the news about Georg, all but confirmed that some new low had been reached.

  Golden edged away from the clusters of men and shambled back to the borough line, one more bum trying to hit the bridge before sundown. He reached his car, popped his teeth back in, and scribbled some notes. Then he returned to Pittsburgh, hoping to get clean.

  What happened to Georg? Debris from a society cracking. Fallout from a fight between two forces certain that they alone represented American ideals. Georg was a small-bore culmination of a high-strung era, one that began well before the great stock market crash and its manic bank runs. Things never should have gone as far as they did with the broken mill Hunky, but the logic of fear, the momentum of ever-escalating extremes, made it almost seem preordained.

  To see this, though, one must first know that the distilled image of the 1920s—amoral flappers swanning about a sea of bathtub gin—is but a dim caricature of a nation unnerved. The 1917 victory by Communists in Russia, and their stated aim of fomenting global revolution, touched off America’s first Red Scare. Anarchists tried twice to blow up Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Management successfully painted the 1919 strikes by coal miners, steelworkers, and the Boston police as Leninist plots—and smashed them all. Race riots erupted in thirty U.S. cities.

  This is how the “Roaring ’20s” began: On New Year’s Day 1920, more than 6,000 people nationwide were arrested, and hundreds deported, in so-called Palmer Raids. The Attorney General then spent the winter warning of a domestic Communist revolution set for May 1: it didn’t happen. But on September 16, hundreds were injured and thirty-eight killed when anarchists exploded a bomb on Wall Street. Later that year, Irish poet William Butler Yeats published “The Second Coming,” summing up in a line—“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”—the sense that life in the West was unraveling fast.

  Many credit F. Scott Fitzgerald with inventing the “Jazz Age,” but his best rendering of moneyed ephemera and romance also captured upper-class unease and a determination—personified by Tom Buchanan in 1925’s The Great Gatsby—to respond with a clenched fist.

  “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”

  “Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—”

  “Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.’”

  “We’ve got to beat them down,” whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.

  Life in Aliquippa was never so subtle, so arch. The town had acted out the republic’s industrial boom, its migratory ebbs and flows, in crude and broad strokes; by 1920 its five blast furnaces, four 250-ton tilting open hearths, and three Bessemers were churning out 900,000 gross tons of pig iron and 900,000 gross tons of steel ingots a year—and its struggles were becoming increasingly emblematic. U.S. Steel’s control of half the world’s steel market ensured industry preeminence, and by 1924 Bethlehem Steel had edged past J&L to become No. 2. But the company’s harsh tactics and glib superintendent lent it outsized stature among fellow “Little Steel” independents like Republic Steel, Inland Steel, and Youngstown Sheet and Tube, and partisans pro and con.

  “Girdler,” wrote Communist Howard Fast of J&L’s Aliquippa superintendent, “was the front, the testing ground, the trial balloon of the most reactionary forces in American capitalism.”

  And once Girdler’s J&L deputy, Harry Mauk, had his own deputy, the teetotaling, equally ruthless Michael “M. J.” Kane, installed as Aliquippa police chief, the populace was caught in a uniformed squeeze. Kane had ridden with John “Black Jack Pershing” in Mexico, vainly chasing down Pancho Villa: pursuit in a compact town, five thousand residents but growing fast, couldn’t compare. The chief rumbled about on his motorcycle, sidecar attached. He and his officers ransacked apartments, broke up dances, fraternal meetings, boardinghouse card games; if a discussion seemed the least bit suspect, Kane would gun his motorcycle through the kitchen door, shouting, “Break it up, you Hunkies!” He had his reasons. Crime. Union. Threats of any kind.

  “Woodlawn is governed and regulated by Fear. The self-­constituted Bosses, of whom we spoke in our last editorial, are afraid,” began a rema
rkable front-page screed in the March 30, 1923, Woodlawn News, not least because the paper was owned by one such boss, J. A. C. Ruffner, the town’s premier banker, tax collector, and chair of the local Republican Party. “They shrink from the light of public opinion. They want certain news suppressed. We know that well. They want free and honest discussion restrained. . . .

  “On the other hand, a large portion of the population are victims of fear. They fear that their means of livelihood will be snatched from them if they do not subordinate their self-respect to coercion and restraint. They sense that they are being shadowed by spies and gumshoers. They recoil in sullen submission, feeling helpless to combat the hidden menace which casts its shadow over their homes.”

  Four days later, the newspaper spoke of a network of J&L “informers” that “the former Kaiser, at the height of his glory, certainly would have envied.” It mentioned operatives planted in barbershops, pool halls, railroad stations, mill furnaces and floors, their ears pricked for any talk of union and any complaint, eyes gauging each worker’s actions for “loyalty.”

  That was, at the time, the most incendiary word in the nation’s discourse, applied as it was to immigrants, KKK critics, leftists, and anyone else whose patriotism was called into question. Loyalty—not the eight-hour day or six-day workweek—became the issue when the steel industry first executed its so-called American Plan, in 1919, to smash the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers’ bid to organize. More than 350,000 workers nationwide walked out, only to be swamped by a propaganda campaign denouncing the action as Marxist-led and foreigner-dominated. Posters of Uncle Sam stared down from walls, pointing and shouting “Go Back to Work” in seven languages; public support for the strikers withered. By the time it was over, fourteen weeks later, twenty workers were dead and $100 million in wages had been lost. Labor won nothing.

  In Aliquippa, though, The Family had gone about business as usual. The town’s isolation allowed J&L a strict defense of its “open shop”—a workplace open to nonunion personnel—which theoretically gave workers “freedom of choice” but in fact drained unions of all bargaining power. Mauk’s boys met organizers on the train platform and shadowed their every step; meeting with nervous workers proved impossible. The steel strike of 1919 shut down three-quarters of the mills in Pittsburgh, but not one department in Aliquippa. J&L’s happy employees, Girdler boasted, broke production records throughout. “Open shop” meant a closed town.

  “In that day you had to keep your mind shut,” said Angelo Razzano, who began work as a laborer at J&L in 1924. “You were not a free man in that day because the company controlled the mills; the company controlled Aliquippa. You had to do what the company wanted you to do. You had to be a good jackass.”

  But J&L’s power to just hire and fire or dump a family out of its home wasn’t a case of overreach; it had the backing of federal law. The 1917 Supreme Court ruling that legitimized “yellow-dog” contracts—the kind that made hiring contingent on a worker’s pledge to not join a union—also held that any inducement to join a union was a breach of said contract, and neatly split the rhetorical hair by ruling that the right to strike was not a right to instigate a strike. As one steel president, speaking for Girdler and every other steel executive, coyly put it: “We don’t discharge a man for belonging to a union, but of course we discharge men for agitating the mills.”

  “Agitating” being the era’s other incendiary word. What with the Great War, bomb threats, unrest, and the emotions stirred by the 1921 convictions of Sacco and Vanzetti and subsequent six-year death watch, the vast majority of Americans—the great middle that was neither hard-line management nor aggrieved labor, neither reactionary nor radical—had wearied of tumult. They wanted a return to the half-­mythical prewar state of harmonic dullness that President Warren Harding termed “normalcy.” Yes, Prohibition was an annoyance. But so long as there was money to be made—and the occasional bootlegger’s bottle to cadge—most seemed willing to trade the loss of a few civil liberties for a bit of quiet.

  Pennsylvania was one of the many states that passed a law against sedition—advocating violence to effect political or social change—after World War I; it became a handy bludgeon in Aliquippa. Pete Muselin, immigrant from Croatia at twelve and American doughboy at seventeen, returned home from the war a newly minted Communist. He held meetings in his barbershop, at the Croatian lodge, at the home of fellow traveler Tom Zima. One of the town’s few registered Democrats, Muselin gave speeches, passed out literature, pushed publicly for workers to organize. “It wasn’t so much union,” said J&L tin worker Michael Zahorsky. “They were actually talking revolution.”

  Such talk was anathema in mainstream America, but Muselin wasn’t living there. To him, Aliquippa was a “typical Cossack town,” the kind he’d supposedly left behind when his family left Eastern Europe. From the dining room window of his mother’s home he’d see Mauk’s men, outside the building that once held amusement park dances, blasting away on a shooting range with pistols, rifles, machine guns. Mauk controlled the council that controlled the permits for gatherings. Cops ransacked Muselin’s home, carted away his books, jailed him when he spoke out.

  But Muselin countered that he had a constitutional right, outlined in the First Amendment: freedom of speech, of peaceful assembly. At one Aliquippa council meeting, he stood and began reciting, “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary—”

  A cop cut Muselin off. “That’s communistic stuff you’re reading,” he said. Muselin resumed, making it to “all men are created equal” before the cop moved to arrest him. Aliquippa’s new chief of police, Charles O’Loughlin, walked in.

  “You dumb ——,” the chief reportedly cursed. “He’s reading the Declaration of Independence.”

  Not long after, in 1926, police broke up a meeting in West Aliquippa and arrested three dozen people. Most were released. Muselin and two others—Zima and Milan Resetar—were detained and charged with sedition. The prosecuting attorney was a volunteer: a longtime J&L lawyer. The next year all were found guilty—“though no evidence,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union, “was produced at trial to show they ever contemplated violence”—and sentenced to five years’ hard labor. In 1929 the men were sent to the state workhouse at Blawnox.

  “One of the dirtiest, the toughest jails in Pennsylvania. The food was repulsive,” Muselin said about Blawnox. “Any minor infraction of the rules, they’d put you in the hole. You’d get one or two slices of bread and one cup of water per day. With that one cup of water, you had the option of drinking it if you were thirsty, brushing your teeth, or washing yourself. And you slept on the floor, on a couple of boards nailed together. . . .”

  Calling them “political prisoners,” the ACLU took up the case just as the men’s time behind bars began. More than two years passed. Resetar died there. Muselin’s family went broke. Maintaining that he’d been framed, he refused an offer of early parole and demanded exoneration. Muselin’s disgust with lack of support from the Communists’ legal team made it easier to recant party membership, but that wasn’t the only reason why the State Board of Pardons, in February of 1932, finally set the two men free.

  Word had it that, behind the scenes, Cornelia Bryce Pinchot, wife of the governor, born rich but “hopelessly maladjusted to the butterfly existence my parents wanted for me,” had charmed and pressured the board members to clear and release the men. Few noticed this as her opening strike at J&L. Soon enough, though, workers in Aliquippa and beyond would be calling her a modern-day Joan of Arc.

  The Great Depression crippled American steelmakers. Production at J&L fell by two-thirds, and losses climbed to $4 million annually in the early 1930s. But in one sense the company’s hand was stronger than ever. In Aliquippa, The Family opted against mass layoffs and instead slashed man-hours, a production stratagem with the added virtues of seeming magnanimity and tighter control. Eleven thousan
d workers now jockeyed to hold on to a shift a week. When one extra “turn” decided whether the kids ate meat or bullion or not at all, a man thought twice before spouting off.

  “There was nothing,” said Joe Perriello of the employment prospects when he left high school in 1932. “We did all kind of odd jobs, carried coal for a couple, twenty-five, thirty cents a ton, in the summertime hauled ice, shoveled snow—did whatever we could to make a buck.”

  Town merchants fired staff, or closed altogether. “Sometimes we would have a customer for the day, sometimes two,” said Jesse Steinfeld, his forty-two-year-old father dead of a heart attack in 1931, his mother left to raise two boys and run a small notions shop in West Aliquippa. “It was not a store as we would think of these days; it was very, very poor. There was really no business.”

  Applying for work only reinforced one’s place in the pecking order. Every day, hundreds of men lined up hours before the local employment office opened, and “they’d bring in maybe twenty or thirty of us in this room, lock the doors; and we’d sit in there for no reason until four o’clock,” Perriello recalled of his 1932 application. Then they were told to go outside. “Every once in a while a company man would come out and say, ‘Any Dagos, niggers, or Serbs wants greasers or wipers jobs, c’mon in,’” Perriello said. “You’d get sick because you watched the expression on their faces. They were ashamed.”

  Never was a crisis so aptly named: Like the nation at large, battered by 25 percent unemployment, Aliquippa’s populace of 27,000 suffered now from an enervating lack of hope. The high school was so crowded it was running year-round—in two daily shifts—and graduating four classes each year: But into what kind of future? Belief in the capitalist model was being tested like never before, driving the beleaguered further left, delighting Communist Party recruiters. Then, in November 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president. And what had been a series of labor-management skirmishes escalated into all-out war.