Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  It’s perhaps difficult, now, to understand the intense loathing held for “that man” by his fellow millionaires, especially after the first hundred days of FDR’s term—replete with labor-friendly New Deal laws—confirmed their worst fears. Just before Black Monday sent the stock market plummeting, Tom Girdler, management’s unapologetic id, left J&L to begin an even more notorious tenure as the chairman of Republic Steel. Word had it that The Family had wearied of his manner and method, but the Depression did nothing to reduce Girdler’s belief in the primacy of American business.

  “What my father thought of Franklin Roosevelt?” said Tom Gird­ler Jr. “I don’t think it would be polite if I used the exact words. Father thought Franklin Roosevelt was a disaster to the United States.”

  The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933—as weak and poorly administered as it proved, and as unconstitutional as it was declared two years later—signaled the coming flood. For the first time, the power of the federal government swung behind the concept of collective bargaining, its Section 7(a) guaranteeing workers the right to form unions. Open-shop entities like J&L tried to skirt the law by creating company-run “employee representation plans”: workers who didn’t participate were frozen out or fired. Emboldened union ­organizers stormed once-impenetrable industries and factories, every isolated mill and mining town.

  Few had more symbolic value than the place called, on its best days, “Little Siberia.” On its worst, they called Aliquippa “Little Hell.” The Amalgamated’s first two organizers arrived in July; unable to rent rooms or office space, they slept across the river in Ambridge, suffered a beating and a fine for disorderly conduct, and were gone in less than a week. The Amalgamated sent two more the next month, both hard-bitten after years of organizing miners. One, fifty-one-year-old John Mayer, was attacked by two thugs—“You wanted to sign me up in the union,” one said. “How do you like it now?”—then jailed by Aliquippa police. Both he and his attacker were charged $5. J&L paid the attacker’s fine. The presiding authority was Michael “M. J.” Kane.

  The man had risen some since resigning as Aliquippa police chief in 1925: now, Kane was Aliquippa’s justice of the peace, and not the kindly, marrying kind. As state chairman of the “Constitutional Defense League,” an antiunion strike force spawned by the “Americanism Committee” of the American Legion, Kane regularly made speeches advocating violence against anyone whom he regarded as communist, and publicly called upon “patriots” to “take ’em out and hang a few” or to “nail a few of them to the mast.”

  In October ’33, the first full impact of FDR’s election hit Western Pennsylvania, when 75,000 coal miners walked out and a steel strike spread through the Beaver Valley and out to Weirton, West Virginia, and Steubenville, Ohio. Though it often felt like Aliquippa’s ­doppelgänger—a company town incorporated in 1905, settled by immigrant steelworkers and named for the American Bridge Company, a U.S. Steel subsidiary—Ambridge lacked the former’s suffocating control. Its burgess—or mayor—P. J. Caul, was a former American Federation of Labor plasterer, foe of Coal and Iron cops, and a Democrat. He would barely have been able to live in Aliquippa, much less run it.

  One by one, Ambridge’s steel mills had been organized, largely by a strong Communist Party cadre; one by one, its workers now took to the picket lines. There was strong talk about marching across the river on J&L. One of the organizers of the Ambridge action was Pete Muselin. When strikebreakers tried to enter the Spang, Chalfant and Co. tube plant on the morning of October 4, 1933, picketers beat them back amid clouds of tear gas.

  On October 5, Kane and his successor as Aliquippa police chief, Charles O’Loughlin, organized a force of two hundred Legionnaires, detectives, teenagers, and J&L workers in Aliquippa and armed them with shotguns, pistols, clubs, tear gas, and machine guns; at least one had a bayonet fixed to his rifle. Their convoy of buses crossed the ­Ambridge–Aliquippa Bridge and approached a crowd of a few hundred strikers armed with sticks and stones. O’Loughlin climbed out of a car and demanded they drop their weapons. The strikers roared back, “Come and take ’em!”

  But behind them, a hail of tear gas shells—and a hundred more Spang strikebreakers—emerged from the plant. Kane’s army surged, clubs high; the strikers were caught in a vise. Dozens of shots were fired, and dozens were injured. A fifty-year-old confectioner named Adam Pietrusaki lay dead with a bullet in his neck. “It was probably meant for me,” Muselin said. “My brother Tony was standing right next to Adam when he was shot. Tony and I looked almost like twins. They must have taken aim at Tony but hit Adam. I petitioned Governor Pinchot for a public hearing on the killing. . . . Some deputies were there who testified that they were gunning for me.”

  No charges were brought. The Aliquippa blitz ended the strike, the immediate threat to J&L, and warmed the hearts of city fathers disgusted by their softer counterparts in Ambridge. “One of the most wonderful things that ever happened in this valley,” exulted the publisher of the Aliquippa Gazette, J. A. C. Ruffner. “They were picketing! Whenever three or four men gather and make remarks that could be resented by another person, they are inciting to riot.”

  When Amalgamated officers managed—while trailed by a J&L plainclothesman—to pick up their charter and open a local, Beaver Valley Lodge #200, on August 4, 1934, J&L only stepped up its campaign of what the National Labor Relations Board called “violent terroristic action.” Stockpiles of arms, ammunition, tear gas bombs, and riot guns were stored at the Aliquippa Works; an inside bay was fitted out with beds and kitchenware to house workers for the expected strike. The union’s top leaders were beaten, evicted, forced to establish headquarters at a hotel in Ambridge. Any pretense about The Family’s noblesse oblige disappeared.

  “We want you to get busy on those black bastards and stop them from joining the union,” Harry Mauk said that month to an influential J&L employee, a deacon in one of Aliquippa’s Baptist churches. “If you black sons of bitches want a job at the J&L mill, you will have to help the company break up this organization or we will send all you black bastards back south.”

  No one doubted Mauk’s resolve. Ramrod posture, steely blue eyes, and great marksmanship made him the perfect personification of J&L might. “One of the most fearless, well-controlled people I’ve ever seen,” said Tom Girdler Jr. “There was a time, in the thirties, when a fellow went berserk in the payroll department and starting shooting at the people in there, and he come out the side door of the main office with a revolver in his hand.”

  Screams, panic: Everybody ducked. Mauk held his fire. The man leveled his pistol, but Mauk didn’t shoot and didn’t move. He wanted no one to accuse him of killing in cold blood. Dying himself didn’t seem an option.

  “He shot at me and missed, and I shot him three times and didn’t miss,” Mauk told Girdler Jr. “The first time, when he didn’t go down, I thought to myself, I must be getting old; I can’t shoot. I found the bullet hit a rib and slid right around his heart.”

  “Where did the other two go?” Girdler Jr. asked.

  “About an eighth of an inch away,” Mauk replied. “But they missed the rib.”

  Yet Aliquippa also moved to another lighter rhythm, dictated by the calendar and the daily rounds. There were the two Christmases to cele­brate: Western Christian on December 25 and Eastern Orthodox on January 7. The staggered graduations upended the seasons: Some teens had “summer” vacation in January. Weekends, there were movies at the Strand, the Temple and the State movie theaters, your pick of Clark Gable or Shirley Temple or Jean Harlow. There was the success of Nate Lippe’s Aliquippa High basketball team, and the high-scoring flair of Press Maravich; during the 1934–35 season Aliquippa would, for the first time, be good enough to dominate Moe Rubenstein’s boys in Ambridge.

  Sports was everywhere. No one swam in the river anymore, befouled as it was with sewage and chemical waste, but neighborhoods, churches, and various ethnic groups h
ad leagues for all ages, season upon season. The Amalgamated #200 organized a baseball team almost the moment it came to be; a Logstown store, Friedman’s, sponsored the Aliquippa Friedmans. There were endless intramural games in the J&L league—basketball, tug-of-war, the no-glove version of softball known as “mushball,” baseball, South Mill vs. North Mill, Blooming Mill vs. Coke Works—with a few blacks sprinkled in among the Croats and Itals and Serbs, and nobody making a fuss about it, either.

  How could they? Nate Lippe’s 1934 Aliquippa High football team was one of the best the town had seen yet, and it featured the high school’s first black star. Yet another transplant from Blakely, Georgia, tackle Major “Loggie” Powell was held in high enough esteem to be appointed cocaptain. With him anchoring both offensive and defensive lines, Aliquippa posted a 7-1 record and, along with Frank Hribar and Frank Gnup, Powell was named all-WPIAL.

  That Ambridge was responsible for the one blemish that season was only proper. Moe Rubenstein had long made it his business to torment Lippe. The two had been roommates and football and basketball teammates at Geneva College; a 1925 team photo shows Lippe glaring at the camera while the younger Rubenstein sits three seats away, grinning. He would always deny that their enmity arose from the much-trafficked rumor that he’d stolen Lippe’s girl (Aliquippa partisans inverted the legend) and married her. But, said one former Bridger, Rubenstein “always told us we had to win THAT game because of his wife.”

  Age and player eligibility, for both, didn’t seem high priorities. Since both Lippe and Rubenstein coached football, basketball, and baseball, they had all year to raid each other’s rosters, tattle to WPIAL officials about transgressions, endure the resulting forfeits, and storm off court and field in a rage. “Intense to say the least,” is how the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette described the men’s mutual antipathy. “Their frequent conflicts have brought them before the decisions committee on previous occasions.”

  Their personal animus dovetailed with the civic. Both towns claimed to be “the best”: Aliquippa boasted of having the county’s largest employer and, at 27,023 and rising, population; Ambridge’s 20,000 bragged that they’d built the gates of the Panama Canal, New York’s Chrysler and Empire State Buildings, and the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. The two played their first football game in 1920, a 6-0 win for the Bridgers, but it took completion of the Ambridge–Aliquippa Bridge in 1926 to breed the familiarity needed for true contempt. And then the jealousy kicked in.

  Football in the WPIAL, the nation’s largest high school conference, was dominated then by the likes of Wilkinsburg, Washington, and New Castle, but when the league created a Single-A division for smaller schools in 1932, Rubenstein’s Bridgers snuck in to win the inaugural championship. Aliquippa—it had no official nickname yet, but writers couldn’t resist “Steelers,” “Quips,” “Red and Black,” even the ­“Lippemen”—had never won a WPIAL title in any sport.

  Thwarted ambition was Lippe’s recurring theme. The Cleveland native wanted to be a doctor, but the University of Pittsburgh Medical School turned him down after it filled its Jewish quota, and after a few years of basketball barnstorming he settled into coaching. He would eventually win six Beaver County football crowns, but finish 3-15-4 against Rubenstein. Three times as a football coach, Lippe had the chance to go undefeated: each time, Rubenstein spoiled it. Perhaps the worst loss came in October 1934, when, on the eve of their showdown in Ambridge before fifteen thousand fans, Rubenstein revealed that star Aliquippa running back Mike Casp was over the age limit of twenty. Casp was disqualified, Ambridge won 14-0, and Aliquippa was knocked out of the title hunt. In 1935, Lippe finally beat Rubenstein for the first time—in an Aliquippa campaign made meaningless by four ties—but that only set up another excruciating result.

  On September 24, 1934, an unnaturalized Slovak named Mary Isasky, mother of seven living on $7 a week, thirty-seven but looking two ­decades older, sat down in what a reporter would call her “squalid, three-room shack” on Beaver Avenue in West Aliquippa, and tried to find the right words in English. It was her third language. She took up a balky fountain pen, dipped the nib into ink, and in the top left corner of a cheap piece of lined paper wrote a simple address: “Mrs. G. Pinchot/Harrisburg Pa.” She took a breath. Then she began:

  “Dear Madam: I am writing to you because I have no other one to look to for help. . . .”

  In any other state, and especially at that time, Isasky’s choice of savior would have made little sense. As the wife of Pennsylvania’s Republican governor Gifford Pinchot, Cornelia Bryce Pinchot technically wielded no power. The nation’s forty-eight First Ladies, like First Ladies in the White House, left matters of justice or politics to their husbands, whiling away their ornamental days at flower shows, teas, and other gatherings of well-heeled women.

  But Pennsylvania politics then wasn’t like any other state’s. Gifford, the conservationist famed for his close alliance with Theodore Roosevelt and his work as the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service, clashed with the powers in his own party and publicly supported FDR’s New Deal. And Cornelia was like no other First Lady, ever.

  Her father had been a congressman, foreign minister, and advisor to Theodore Roosevelt; a grandfather had been mayor of New York; a great-grandfather founded Cooper Union. After shirking the Daisy Buchanan lifestyle envisioned for her by her Long Island parents, Cornelia Bryce leveraged a $15 million fortune—and its $300,000 yearly income—into a life marked by eccentricity and sobering purpose. By thirty she had made her name in New York as a suffragette, social service doyenne, and defender of working women; by 1914, when she married the forty-nine-year-old Gifford—after a three-week courtship amid his first senatorial race—the thirty-three-year-old heiress had gained a shrewd appreciation for the ways and uses of power.

  “She had,” said Teddy Roosevelt, “one of the keenest political minds that I have ever known.”

  Cornelia gave nine speeches a day during Gifford’s senate campaign. A landslide loss did nothing to quell her enthusiasm: “At least he had dared,” she said. But the Republican Old Guard was quick to sense the source of Gifford’s ambition—and a substantial hunk of his campaign money. “Pinchot never dared,” sneered one of the party’s sharper analysts to the New York Times. “His wife did all the daring.”

  The 19th Amendment gave women the vote in 1920, and Cornelia turned them out in decisive droves during Gifford’s run for governor a year later. “Women,” she instructed him, “don’t want generalities and hot air.” As if in rebuke to the era’s Red-baiting hysteria, she reveled in the color: red auto, red dresses, her 5-foot-10 frame topped by a signature sweep of dyed hair invariably described as “titian” or “copper” or—right to the metaphorical point—“flame.” The state’s party machine opposed the progressive Pinchot in the primary; he was given 100-to-1 odds, and knew exactly why he beat them. “It was due to Mrs. Pinchot and the women she organized—far more than any other single factor,” Gifford wrote.

  Cornelia moved into the Governor’s Mansion in 1923 with three dogs, a pet parrot named Oscar, and an omnipresent bag of knitting. She pushed for labor reform, women’s and children’s workplace rights, the eight-hour workday, the setting of a minimum wage. No such laws were passed. But by the time the term ended in 1926, the state machine worried more about Cornelia’s acumen than Gifford’s considerable appeal; Gifford Pinchot, the joke went, is a politician’s husband.

  “All my speeches are extemporaneous and I love heckling,” she said. “What is the fun of wasting campaign speeches on people already converted?”

  Cornelia had gone to dancing school as a young girl with Eleanor Roosevelt; when the far shyer Eleanor moved into the White House in 1933, the standards—and limits—of an activist First Lady had been set. Mrs. Pinchot—everyone called her that—ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1928, helped steer Gifford to his second term as governor in 1930, ran unsuccessfully again for Congress in 1932. With
FDR’s election she became only more vociferous, the most dynamic weapon in her husband’s administration.

  Gifford’s hand was hardly untipped: He had officially abolished the owners’ Coal and Iron Police statewide in 1931, and when NIRA’s passage unleashed a wave of strikes in the summer of ’33, he mediated coal negotiations and released relief money to striking families. But his wife crisscrossed the state, joining textile picketers in Allentown and Reading, visiting strikers in Philipsburg and Altoona, addressing the first labor meetings ever in the steel bastions of Vandergrift and Duquesne. That town’s company-backed mayor once vowed she would never speak there so long as he was alive.

  “Well,” Cornelia said to the 3,500 people packing First Street to hear her. “Here I am.”

  In February 1934, she traveled to a Washington, DC, labor forum, made a speech calling FDR’s National Recovery Administration “a grisly farce” and calling out its head, General Hugh Johnson, for discouraging strikers while offering union members none of the NRA’s pledged protection. “I wonder if you ever stay awake at night, seeing the faces of the thousands of men and women who are pacing the streets of Pennsylvania towns, jobless and desperate—without resources, and with despair in their hearts,” she said. “Because they had faith in your promises and went ahead and organized a union and, for so doing, lost their jobs—and never a finger in Washington lifted to help them.”

  Stung and bewildered by the vague nature of his unelected, unappointed, unprecedented attacker, Johnson blustered, “Who is governor of Pennsylvania?”