Remembering Pittsburgh

by Len Barcousky

  During his fourteen hours here, Lincoln greeted dozens of local politicians, including members of the Pittsburgh and Allegheny Councils, and he was seen by thousands of noisy supporters. He would give three brief extemporaneous talks and make one longer speech. In that address he urged Americans north and south of the Mason-Dixon line “to keep cool” during the secession crisis that followed his election in November 1860.

  “The rain was falling in torrents” as Lincoln left his train for carriages that would take him and his family from the depot to the Monongahela House, Pittsburgh’s fanciest hotel. “His appearance set the people wild with excitement, and cries of ‘speech,’ ‘speech,’ intermingled with continuous cheering, indicated that they were not to be put off without a word or two,” the Gazette reported. “When Mr. Lincoln reached the carriage, he stepped in and stood up, acknowledging the honor paid to him in a few remarks.” He promised to address them the next morning at greater length. “When he concluded, cheer after cheer was given for ‘Old Abe.’”

  The Monongahela House faced Smithfield Street between what is now First Avenue and Boulevard of the Allies. “So dense was the gathering [in front of the hotel], that the military had to clear a passage with their bayonets, when the President-elect stepped from the carriage and entered the hotel.” Once inside, Lincoln climbed on a chair and spoke briefly to the people assembled in the lobby, while “the crowd outside still clamored for a speech with extraordinary vehemence,” the Gazette said. Lincoln then stepped out on the hotel balcony to speak and be seen for the third time that evening. “Tomorrow morning I will address you in broad daylight…from this balcony when you will have an opportunity of seeing my handsome physiognomy,” he joked. Then he wished the crowd a good night.

  “A thundering ‘good night’ was echoed from the immense jam that blocked up the street below, and they then commenced retiring gradually, apparently satisfied that they had both heard and seen the great object of their curiosity.”

  The schedule for Friday morning, February 15, called for Lincoln to make a grand procession through both Pittsburgh and Allegheny, but the length of his speech required that plan be cut short. Lincoln devoted equal time in his morning address to the looming threat of southern states to leave the union and to his support for strong tariffs that would tax imports and protect American industries. That second topic would have been of great interest to Pittsburgh business owners and workers. Despite the decision of South Carolina to withdraw from the United States—an action soon copied by several other states in the South—Lincoln told the crowd he remained hopeful bloodshed could be avoided. “Notwithstanding the troubles across the river,” Lincoln said, gesturing south toward the Monongahela River, “there is really no crisis except an artificial one.” The February 16 Gazette reported that this remark was greeted by laughter and applause. “What is there now to warrant the condition of affairs presented by our friends ‘over the river?’” he asked. “I repeat it then, there is no crisis, excepting such a one as may be gotten up at any time by designing politicians. My advice then under such circumstances, is to keep cool.”

  His thirty-minute speech was interrupted more than a dozen times by “applause,” “immense cheering,” “tumultuous applause” and “laughter,” the Gazette reported. When Lincoln said, “But I am trespassing upon your patience, and must bring my remarks to a close,” the crowd shouted “no,” “no” and “Go on—We’ll listen.” After he finished his speech, soldiers once again had to clear a path for the president-elect to leave the hotel and get into a carriage that took him back to the Federal Street depot. There another crowd estimated in the thousands waited to see him off. The local militia units guarding Lincoln “made no effort here to press back the crowd, as it seemed next to impossible to obtain a passageway.”

  “Gen. [James S.] Negley, however, upon appealing to the people, succeeded in getting Mr. Lincoln from the carriage, and the party reached the platform one by one in Indian style.” A few minutes later, Lincoln’s train departed for Cleveland, his next stop on his journey to Washington, D.C., via Buffalo, Albany, New York City, Philadelphia, Harrisburg and Baltimore.

  During his passage through upstate New York, he made a brief stop in Westfield, New York, outside Buffalo. There he met Grace Bedell, the young girl who had written to him before the election, urging him to grow a beard. Lincoln shook her hand and kissed her on the cheek, Grace recalled in a letter she wrote after Lincoln’s assassination.

  A bronze plaque marks the 1861 visit by Abraham Lincoln to Pittsburgh and Allegheny City, which is now North Side. The plaque is at Federal Street and South Commons. Courtesy Robin Rombach of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

  Lincoln’s optimism in his Pittsburgh speech about a peaceful solution to the dispute between North and South was misplaced. On February 18—while Lincoln was still on his way to Washington—Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as provisional president of the Confederate States of America. Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4. A month later, on April 12, Confederate forces fired on U.S. Fort Sumter, near Charleston, South Carolina. The Civil War was on.

  1919: H.J. HEINZ: A GIANT PASSES

  H.J. Heinz never forgot his Sharpsburg roots and friends.

  Although he was born in 1844 in Pittsburgh, his family moved to Sharpsburg when he was five, and he grew up along the Allegheny River. As a young man, he had served as Sunday school superintendent at what was then called Grace Methodist Protestant Church in the borough. He later became involved with national and international Sunday school programs, traveling as far as Japan in support of the effort.

  “It had been his habit for a number of years to visit one or more Sunday schools each Sunday, wherever he might happen to be,” the Pittsburgh Gazette-Times reported on May 15, 1919. On May 4, “the last Sunday he was able to get out of the house, he made a visit to his old school at Grace Church…and was very cordially greeted by the older members as well as by the children.”

  The anecdote about Heinz’s final visit to Sharpsburg was included in the newspaper’s front-page story the day after his death on May 14. He was seventy-four, and the Gazette-Times reported the cause of death as pneumonia. Heinz passed away at Greenlawn, his mansion in Homewood, after a four-day illness. In the days before antibiotics, pneumonia vied with tuberculosis as a leading killer. He became ill on Sunday, May 11. “On Monday and Tuesday his condition seemed a little improved and Tuesday evening was the source of much encouragement,” his obituary stated. “The following morning about 10 o’clock he suffered a setback and became unconscious.” He died shortly before 4:00 p.m.

  One of Heinz’s sons, Howard Heinz, was absent from the bedside, the newspaper stated. He was in Constantinople—now Istanbul, Turkey—serving on a U.S. government commission overseeing distribution of food in the war-ravaged country.

  A born entrepreneur, H.J. Heinz had been his father’s bookkeeper by age sixteen. The following year he sold produce that was raised on the family’s four-acre Sharpsburg garden plot and had begun to bottle horseradish. He delivered his products via horse and buggy, making $2,400 that season, according to the newspaper. That is the equivalent of about $53,000 in modern currency. By 1919, his product line had extended well beyond horseradish. The newspaper said he headed “the Largest Pickling and Preserving Corporation in the World.” The main plant of the family-owned business was on Pittsburgh’s North Side, and it had sixteen branch factories.

  In an editorial two days after his death, the newspaper praised Heinz’s successful efforts to nurture an unrelated business in a Pittsburgh economy that was centered on steel. “There was no talk of diversification of industries when he laid the very modest foundation of his manufacturing and commercial house, yet what he has done stands as a demonstration that diversification is altogether practicable,” the newspaper opined. The editorial also praised his community work.

  The same sagacity and enterprise which he brought to the upbuilding of his business, Mr. Heinz contributed unselfishly in the prom
otion of civic welfare work and the development of altruistic and religious endeavors. In Sunday school work he was so active not only at home but throughout the world that it is not exaggeration to say that no other man could be so much missed from this important educational field. He was so useful in so many ways…that a whole company will have to be called to fill the void left by his going away.

  Heinz is buried in Homewood Cemetery.

  Two other Pittsburgh giants might have felt a chill when they read about the passing of their fellow industrial baron, especially if either put any credence in the superstition that prominent deaths come in threes. Andrew Carnegie, Pittsburgh’s King of Steel, died at eighty-three on August 11, 1919, at his home in Lenox, Massachusetts. He is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, New York. His longtime partner turned enemy, Henry Clay Frick, the King of Coke, died December 2, 1919, at his home in New York City. He was sixty-nine. Like Heinz, he was buried in Homewood Cemetery.

  H.J. Heinz was one of three Pittsburgh giants to die in 1919. Courtesy Senator John Heinz History Center.

  1927: SILENT CAL SPEAKS—BRIEFLY

  An often-repeated story about President Calvin Coolidge has him at a banquet, seated next to a Washington socialite. She tells the famously laconic Vermont native that she has made a bet that she could persuade him to speak at least three words to her. “You lose,” Coolidge is said to have replied before continuing with his dinner.

  Students attending Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University, would have had strong reason to believe that story. President Coolidge made a one-day visit to Pittsburgh to commemorate the Carnegie Institute’s thirty-first Founders Day on October 13, 1927. The Carnegie Institute was the original name for Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museums. His traveling companions included his wife, Grace, and Pittsburgh native Andrew W. Mellon, the longtime secretary of the Treasury. Mellon had been named to that post by Warren G. Harding, Coolidge’s predecessor, and would continue to serve under Coolidge’s successor, Herbert Hoover.

  “President Coolidge saw Pittsburgh in several ways in the tour of the city,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported the day after his visit. “He saw the material evidence of industrial supremacy in the mills, factories and business houses and the product of prosperity in the beautiful homes in the residential districts. All along the route he was greeted by school children, many of them waving small American flags.” The president’s stops included a visit to the Fort Pitt Blockhouse at Pittsburgh’s Point. The neighborhood around the oldest building in the city was very different more than eighty years ago. What is now green and open Point State Park was the center of a crowded, noisy and dirty industrial quarter in 1927.

  Arriving in Pittsburgh by train around 7:30 a.m., Coolidge and his wife, Grace, had breakfast and a brief rest at the Fifth Avenue mansion of Andrew Mellon’s brother, R.B. Mellon. “Police, under the direction of Superintendent of Police Peter P. Walsh and Assistant Superintendent Lou Coleman, patrolled the Mellon estate,” the newspaper reported. Coolidge met with visiting diplomats in a sunken garden on the property, “where they were photographed by news photographers and motion picture men.”

  “Reporters were not permitted within many feet of the President, for he had issued orders that he did not wish to be interviewed on any subject,” according to the Post-Gazette. “The newspapermen were instructed by secret service heads not to speak to the President.”

  While he was mum with reporters, Coolidge did agree to honor a request made by Samuel Harden Church, president of the Carnegie Institute. Carnegie Tech students had gathered in Carnegie Music Hall, a few blocks down Forbes Avenue from their campus. There they greeted Coolidge with “applause and a ‘Skibo’ yell.” “The ‘Hoot Mon’ yell was given for Mrs. Coolidge,” according to the Post-Gazette. “Colonel Church explained to the students that he had promised the President that he would be asked to speak only once in Pittsburgh, but that under the circumstances the President might say a few words.” His response was classic Coolidge.

  “I shall not break Colonel Church’s promise to you,” he said. “He retired amid applause,” according to the newspaper, after speaking just nine words.

  Coolidge was the main speaker at the Carnegie Institute Founders Day luncheon, where he predicted, just two years before the start of the Great Depression, a continuing era of industrial peace and economic advances. “It has brought a great harvest of contentment and a great increase in effort and efficiency in production,” he said.

  About 10:30 p.m. that evening, Coolidge departed as he had arrived—silently. “A tired figure stood on the observation platform of a special train in the East Liberty railroad yards, in a drizzle of rain, and waved a faint goodby to scores of police and detectives….As the train pulled out, the President glanced up at a few workmen…and to their shout of ‘goodby’ he waved again. He stood there until the darkness hid him.”

  1936: ROOSEVELT VERSUS LANDON, KNOX AND COUGHLIN

  As Allegheny County Republicans saw it, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had challenged them.

  Colonel Frank Knox, their vice presidential candidate, already had scheduled a speech at Duquesne Garden in Oakland for October 1, 1936. Then FDR’s reelection campaign announced the president would address Democrats that same night at Forbes Field, about a half-mile away. Many GOP leaders seated “on the mourners bench…dolorously said there wouldn’t be a crowd [to hear Knox], and attempted to have the meeting called off until a later date,” Post-Gazette reporter C.W. Dressler wrote on October 3, 1936.

  President Franklin Roosevelt waves to the crowd gathered at Forbes Field for a 1936 campaign stop in Pittsburgh. The next day’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette estimated he drew a crowd of fifty thousand. Courtesy the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

  Campaign chairman James H. Duff, who went on to become Pennsylvania’s governor and a U.S. senator, was undeterred. “We were perfectly willing to rely on the enthusiasm and loyalty of a revitalized Republican Party,” he told Dressler. “The Democrats gave us a challenge, and we were willing to accept it.”

  Knox drew more than nine thousand people to the ice rink–sports arena, the newspaper reported the day after the event. “It turned out to be the biggest indoor rally the Republican Party ever held here.”

  That record didn’t last long. Knox’s running mate, Kansas governor Alf Landon, made an appearance at the same location on October 27, one week before the election. “Pittsburgh gave Alfred M. Landon the greatest ovation of his presidential campaign last night as he entered Duquesne Garden to deliver an aggressive assault upon the New Deal’s ‘mismanagement,’” the Post-Gazette reported the next day. The newspaper estimated twenty thousand people “jammed and milled around the auditorium to stage one of the wildest demonstrations ever seen here. Members of the Landon party said the reception overshadowed in spontaneity and enthusiasm any they had seen, including those in Los Angeles and in Chicago.”

  The Landon-Knox team was riding high that fall. Former New York governor Alfred Smith, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1928, had endorsed Landon for president. The Literary Digest’s national poll, which had correctly predicted the outcome of the five previous elections, showed Landon with a comfortable lead over FDR. When Father Charles E. Coughlin, known as the Detroit radio priest, came to Pittsburgh, he blasted Roosevelt’s New Deal programs.

  “I do not say that President Roosevelt is a Communist,” he told a crowd of forty-five hundred at the Syria Mosque on October 8, 1936. “I do say that he has adopted Communistic activities.” Coughlin, however, turned out to be an equal-opportunity scold. “Do not think I would stultify myself by asking you to go back to Landon,” he said. “I’d no more ask you to vote Republican than I’d ask you to vote Communist.”

  And as for the media: “How long must we put up with a reportorial staff of morons?” Coughlin asked his audience.

  While Landon, Knox and Coughlin piled up impressive numbers during their Pittsburgh visits, FDR outdid them all by f
ar. A crowd of five thousand met him at Pittsburgh’s Baltimore & Ohio freight station when he arrived by private railroad car on October 1. The anonymous reporter made an indirect reference to Roosevelt’s inability to walk, the result of a bout with polio fifteen years earlier. “The President seemed a trifle weary,” the Post-Gazette said the next day. “Secret service men assisted him into the tonneau [open rear seat] of the car and helped him into an overcoat.”

  “Thousands of hat and hand-waving Pittsburghers, who cheered him along the path to Forbes Field, gave President Franklin Delano Roosevelt a tumultuous welcome last night,” the newspaper reported. “Men, women and children lined the presidential route four and five deep.”

  Roosevelt spoke to an estimated fifty thousand people at Forbes Field. Sounding like almost every presidential candidate since, FDR promised to balance the federal budget “without additional taxes…within a year or two.”

  A month later, Roosevelt beat Landon in a landslide, carrying forty-six of forty-eight states, including Pennsylvania. FDR went on to win reelection two more times. He died on April 12, 1945, less than three months after he was sworn into office for his fourth term.

  CHAPTER 2

  BAD GUYS—AND ONE GAL

  1818: NO JAIL COULD HOLD THIS PITTSBURGH THIEF

  Catching Pittsburgh bank robber Joseph Pluymart wasn’t that hard. Authorities did it several times.

  Keeping him in jail was.

  Joseph Pluymart and Herman Emmons were identified as prime suspects soon after the Farmers and Mechanics Bank of Pittsburgh was burglarized on April 6, 1818. The loot included about $100,000 in bank notes and $3,000 worth of gold and silver, according to an April 24 report in the Pittsburgh Gazette. The stolen items included coins and a gold medal presented in 1790 by Congress to General Daniel Morgan, hero of the Battle of Cowpens during the American Revolution. Morgan died in 1802, and the medal passed to his grandson, Morgan Neville, who was a bank cashier.