Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  It wasn’t an idle question: By late summer, petitions had gathered ten thousand names to nominate Cornelia as an independent candidate to succeed her husband. Management derided her as an “enemy of capitalism”; labor regarded her as one of its great voices. When Cornelia came to Ambridge to speak on August 25 on a vacant lot next to the U.S. Post Office, a crowd of 3,500 turned out. Many from J&L crossed the bridge to be there.

  Mauk’s policemen tried to stop them, failed, then followed. Mill bosses went, too, taking note of any J&L workers and standing out so conspicuously that Ambridge burgess P. J. Caul ended the proceedings by sarcastically calling out Mauk’s “gumshoes” and warning that they—as well as communists or other subversives—have “no business on this side of the river.” Back on the other side, they took action. “For only just one reason I was fired: I went to hear Mrs. Pinchot in Ambridge,” said Joe Latone, an Aliquippa Works employee for twenty-six years. “My boss, he like me, I know it, but he had orders from the office.”

  Still, the fact that the First Lady could arrange and deliver a speech in Ambridge declaring the “need” for organized labor signaled a local momentum shift. J&L felt it. Union men were offered bribes to name members; company police went to the fired Latone and dangled a job for his son if he became an informer. Harry Mauk, accompanied by the Aliquippa burgess, called a meeting at Tony Ferro’s Plan 11 ­barbershop—a noted union venue. Mauk’s first words to the two hundred men gathered: “You black-handed mothers and son bitches, I am here to tell you if you don’t soon try and bust this association of the Amalgamated we are going to bust you people up. . . .”

  Three days later, Mary Isasky’s husband, Georg, was beaten by Aliquippa police, kidnapped, and committed without his family’s knowledge to the Torrance State Hospital, a mental institution east of Pittsburgh. His crime—his madness—was clear. He had been seen on Franklin Avenue, picking up union cards.

  Georg Isasky arrived in the United States in 1910. He was eighteen years old, like many immigrants starting a life in which even the most basic facts refused to gel. Homeland? He was a German-speaking Slovak born in the soon-to-be-demolished Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his country would change its name three times before he died. Name? He was at various times called Iseaky, Issoski, Isosky, Isarski, and Isorski, managing after twenty years to take slight hold of the matter by adding an “e” to the end of his first name. In 1916 Isasky landed work as a laborer in an Aliquippa blast furnace. He found no stability there, either.

  Nine months in, a scaffold beneath him collapsed and Isasky fell twenty-five feet into a steel pit. Spine wrecked, one vertebra crushed, he spent six weeks in the hospital. A J&L safety official dangled five hundred weeks of compensation—at $10 per—if he signed a piece of paper. Isasky signed. He received payment for only a few months; at war’s end he was fired. J&L later made Isasky a steamfitter’s helper, cutting his pay, but eventually tired of his complaints about back trouble and fired him again in 1930. The family survived on relief.

  After the Amalgamated approached him in August about passing out pledge cards, Isasky gathered a large number of signatures. After a week, three company cops began to harass and frisk him. He kept gathering pledges. Four days later, two of Mauk’s men came to his house in West Aliquippa, called Isasky outside, and berated him. Two days later, September 11, a company cop bought him a gin and a beer in a bar; then an Aliquippa policeman waiting outside arrested him for drunk and disorderly. He was last seen being hustled away, face thick with bruises. Upon arriving at the jail, he was beaten again.

  Within days, the Aliquippa police chief, O’Loughlin, asked for a “lunacy commission” to examine Isasky. Wife Mary, a baby on her hip, went to the Beaver County Jail expecting to visit him, but was instead met by Dr. Margaret Cornelius—whom the state secretary of welfare would soon declare the possible possessor of “rather neurotic and pathological tendencies”—and told that Georg was “very crazy” and unavailable. Cornelius insisted that she sign a paper declaring her husband insane. When Mary refused, the doctor threatened to cut off the family’s relief payments.

  A week later, Mary received a letter from the mental hospital in Torrance that her husband had been admitted and “has been quiet and orderly and cooperates with the hospital routine.” She wrote her letter soon after to Cornelia Bryce Pinchot. On September 29, the First Lady wrote back: She would be contacting the state’s secretary of welfare immediately. She wanted to know how and by whom Georg was beaten. “Let me know about this,” Cornelia wrote. “and I will do anything I can to help you and him.”

  But by then the wheels in Harrisburg had already started to turn. Clint Golden, one of the mediators under state Secretary of Labor and Industry Charlotte Carr, had been investigating stories of J&L intimidation for three weeks when the First Lady responded to Mary’s letter. On October 5, the same day Mary wrote back with the requested details, Golden was wandering the town, dressed as a bum. The following day, he returned. This time he didn’t go unnoticed.

  “Talk about the way the workers and peasents [sic] were handled under the Czar—it had nothing on the way the J&L Steel Co. handled them in that town,” Golden wrote to his wife that night. “I had no more than reached the outskirts today than I was spotted and followed.”

  But arriving, too, were the eight state policemen (a special, out-of-jurisdiction detachment from Butler, because Harry Mauk’s own brother was the state police captain in nearby Greensburg) charged with protecting testifying workers. When Golden met with the corporal in charge, his shadows disappeared; late that afternoon, for the first time in memory, J&L ordered Mauk’s police to confine themselves to company property. “You could almost feel the relief from the tension as you passed thro [sic] the darned town,” Golden wrote.

  Only then did he go to Mary Isasky’s home and hear her story firsthand. The next day, October 7, Golden traveled the forty-one miles east to Torrance and found Georg Isasky to be “as sane as I am.” When his report arrived in Harrisburg, Cornelia suggested the governor order an independent doctor’s examination; two days later the doctor, along with the medical staff at Torrance, declared Isasky’s mind perfectly sound.

  Sure that J&L had had Isasky railroaded for union activities, Golden tried tracing the request for his arrest, commitment, and harsh treatment at the Beaver County Jail to Mauk’s company police. He had no hard evidence, no paper trail, no witnesses willing to testify. And the company would deny any involvement. Meanwhile, Governor Pinchot, with a sane man sitting in one of his state’s insane asylums, began exploring whether he possessed the legal or medical authority to demand Isasky’s release.

  But the First Lady was impatient. She wanted Isasky’s martyrdom known. She wanted to be able to accuse J&L now. Because unlike Golden, who could retreat to his hotel in Pittsburgh; or her husband, who could stay in the mansion in Harrisburg; or even Isasky, who for the moment remained safe from reprisal at Torrance, Mrs. Pinchot was heading into the belly of the beast. She was going to Aliquippa, and she intended to give its precious “Family” hell.

  3

  Free Men

  Aliquippa’s revolution began forty-five minutes late. It was getting on early evening, October 14, 1934, the air unseasonably chill; men moved to keep warm, feet stamping, shoulders hunched, hands jammed in pockets. A crowd of 1,500 sat waiting in the Polish Hall in Plan 11. Hundreds more milled outside. A few thousand lingered along Franklin Avenue, and even more down near the tunnel. Across the river, another cluster of faces—including Burgess P. J. Caul, the Amalgamated’s vice president, three organizers, the bored, the curious—and scores of cars had gathered outside the Ambridge Hotel. Some had been there for hours. Some, in a sense, had been waiting for decades.

  It was a Sunday. Mrs. Pinchot had given a speech earlier in New Kensington, an hour away, and those waiting understood that such events never went off on time—though then again, they knew, there was always the chance that someone
had gotten scared and called it off. . . .

  But now her car approached. A roar broke out and grew at recognition of it; and then her red hair and squared jaw inside; and then the fact that, yes indeed, it truly was going to happen, now, rippled through the assembled like an electric charge. Everyone scrambled into cars. In a line they pulled out toward the bridge, scores of autos with little American flags fluttering on fenders, out of windows.

  When they arrived in Aliquippa minutes later, it was clear that something elemental had changed. Whether because of the eight state troopers, or the surety that the governor was paying heed, or the sudden leaning weight of massed men brave enough to flout J&L dicta—or all that, plus the fact that Georg Isasky’s commitment was unraveling fast—the company had dialed back its presence. The bullies, for this one afternoon at least, seemed quite docile. “It was wonderful!” reported the Amalgamated Journal. Mauk’s men, along with the Aliquippa police, politely directed traffic and, as the union account reported, “assisted in every way possible.”

  Cornelia, in a gold-spangled dress and red shoes, took her place at the head of a parade of workers that wound through town, past thronged sidewalks, protesting the denial of free speech and assembly. She led them all up to the Polish Hall, and with anywhere from 4,000 to 8,000 workers filling the seats and spilling outdoors and surrounding the building, and all of the proceedings being piped outside on loudspeakers, together they sang the first verse of “America.” Then, after many shouts and “deafening” applause, she opened the first public and independent labor meeting in the town’s history.

  “Friends,” she began. “I am glad you asked me here today. For some time I have wanted to come and talk to you—to ask if I couldn’t help you in any way. I am with you in the fight you are making for decent conditions—for the right to live—for the chance to call your souls your own.

  “I am against Jones and Laughlin first, last, and all the time—because of the brutal and un-American way they have been behaving towards their workers. . . .”

  This came, one reporter wrote, “with a swish of her neatly coiffured red head.” Mrs. Pinchot did not mention Georg Isasky, not by name.

  “I have only just been learning of the things that have been going on in Aliquippa,” she continued. “It is a horrible situation. I wish you had told me about it sooner, for I would have been with you, fighting long before this. It’s time that the Steel Operator should learn that the worker has some rights—that no employer . . . can set himself up above the law.

  “I have come a long way to be here with you tonight—and one of the reasons for my coming is that I wanted to read you a paragraph from a document that is apparently unknown to the Steel Operator. ‘Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. . . .’

  “I am told there is a man called Mauk, who needs to learn that the workers have some rights in America. If some of the stories that I hear are true, I believe that legal proceedings should be started. Perhaps if we can get this great man behind the bars he would have time to read the American Constitution, which he has evidently never heard of. . . .”

  Cornelia Pinchot went on to lambast J&L’s managers and “hired thugs” for a “reign of terrorism, brutality and oppression . . . that compares with the worst day of the Russian czars.” She vowed that her husband would protect any threatened workers and any independent union with state police, sneered at the company-directed “unions,” and said that the only way for workers to get their fair share was “a union that belongs to you.” The state’s First Lady also issued a threat:

  “We will see,” she said, “whether the J&L people can run this country forever or not.”

  When Pinchot finished, the Polish Hall thundered. She was handed two lovely bouquets: it was the least the Amalgamated leaders could do. They now had their legs beneath them. Ten days prior the membership of Beaver Lodge #200, exiled in Ambridge, had numbered two hundred. Within a month it would register near four thousand, half the mill’s workforce. Years of grueling work and true courage by many had led to that surge. But no one questioned the final, legitimizing factor.

  “Cornelia Bryce Pinchot,” said Harold Ruttenberg, the influential research director for the United Steelworkers of America, who began his career investigating the town in 1934. “She came to Aliquippa and spoke and broke the strong control that the company police had on the community. . . . And the control of the companies over the unionizing meetings was broken.”

  In the movie version that never was—with Elia Kazan directing—­Cornelia Bryce Pinchot’s speech would’ve been the dramatic end of the steelworkers’ struggle in Aliquippa, with shots of grimly determined men cheering in gritty black and white, with hard-assed workers walking tall, with a brassy, uplifting Leonard Bernstein score blaring as the screen goes black. Ruttenberg, speaking from the perspective of fifty-eight years later, had it mostly right: October 14 was a climax of sorts. It did mark the beginning of the end of the most blatant aspects of the “worker- and thought-control system” created by Tom Girdler, of the helplessness in the face of it, of the idea that no one in the outside world with any clout cared.

  God knows, the giddiness that trailed the men out of the Polish Hall that night spread and lasted for weeks; it was one of those rare times when life did feel like some Hollywood production, not least for Cornelia. She left Aliquippa thrilled by that over-the-top moment and the thought of creating more of them—legality, decorum, or her husband’s position be damned. Five days later she personally put up the $500 to bail out a striker in Allentown. Newspapers ate it up. Isasky’s continued confinement presented the chance for a far wilder flourish.

  “I had planned to kidnap him from the asylum in a very dramatic way,” she wrote a month later.

  Instead Governor Pinchot “knocked my plan galley west” by simply releasing Isasky. The freeing of the “small in stature and meek appearing” union operative on October 24—six weeks after Isasky’s arrest—sparked national headlines, complete with photos of the suffering wife and kids. “You know what this is,” Isasky said upon his release. “It’s the crazy house.” Charges flew about commitments of other sane union men in Aliquippa. The governor pledged to investigate.

  But by then statehouse tolerance for loose-cannon dramatics had seemed to cool. Cornelia’s initial contacts with Mary Isasky weren’t revealed, and she saw the merit in stepping back. The night before Isasky’s release, the First Lady telephoned a balky Clint Golden and demanded that he allow officials to publicize his role “as they saw fit.” Why? “I want somebody’s names besides those of a couple old women,” she explained. Golden gave in. “What a person!” he wrote his wife that night. And so, the next day, he was credited with being the first to uncover Isasky’s arrest.

  Meanwhile, though J&L had been publicly humiliated twice in a month, the company refused to be cowed. A spokesman declared that the mill “had nothing to do” with the Isasky matter. J&L’s political allies vowed to ignore any inquiry. “We can’t believe what that damn fool governor says or what the newspaper prints,” said the Beaver County district attorney. “If the governor wants to do anything let him do it with his attorney general or his state policemen.”

  The governor tried. Yet no one was prosecuted or lost their job because of Isasky’s confinement. No pattern involving other labor men and asylum commitments could be proven; the hearings were so feeble that Isasky himself never made it to the witness stand. Harry Mauk—and his private armed force of nearly three dozen men—remained very much employed.

  Because it turned out, of course, that life in Aliquippa wasn’t a movie. It was like life anywhere—slower, more complex, and more resistant to change than any cinematic dream. The mill still held the ultimate power, all the more pronounced at a time when Pennsylvania was suffering from 37 percent unemp
loyment. And the drive for unionization did not preoccupy all. Beneath the hard-core activists rumbled a variably rousable populace, many concerned less with abstractions like “civil liberties” than with living in a place peaceful enough to raise kids, keep a stable job, and grab a few drinks in the new beer gardens.

  Once Prohibition ended in 1933, bars had cropped up like mushrooms. “We had a happy town,” Perriello said. “You didn’t have much personal what you’d call movement. You couldn’t do everything you wanted, but as long as you followed their rules—which was, ‘Keep your mouth shut; don’t talk against J&L; don’t join any unions’—you were in good shape.”

  Indeed, even with Mrs. Pinchot and the Amalgamated and Isasky dominating the headlines, most workers were preoccupied with the scrounge for any loose shift, and worry over the ever-mounting debt with the Italian grocer. Everybody but bosses struggled; neighbors in mixed areas like Logstown learned to share the load. Blacks weren’t allowed inside certain beer gardens or restaurants, yet sometimes skin color didn’t matter a bit.

  “If my mother was sick, the neighbors, they would come over and help out—even though the neighbor was an Italian woman, a Serbian woman, a Polish woman—they would come over here and they would do the washing,” says James Downing Jr. “At that time, they washed it with a rub-board, you understand, wasn’t no washing-machine, see. Then there’d be someone would cook. My father’d be working in the mill, he’d come home, you know . . . dinner would be ready.”

  By the fall of 1936, too, relations between the rival towns seemed almost fraternal. Ambridge had been a union haven and ally against J&L, and strikes, beatings, and speeches, all sealed with blood or job losses, had forged a solidarity that transcended borders. On Labor Day, two competing worker parades—one supporting the company union in the morning, one for the independents in the afternoon—filled Aliquippa’s downtown. Fired J&L workers, followed by hundreds brandishing Roosevelt posters, finished the second by marching to the bridge and over the river into Ambridge for a massive flag-waving rally.