Marking Roe in a Depression-era fight
July marks another anniversary for the coal strikes that roiled Western Pennsylvania and, most especially, Fayette County in the early months of Franklin Roosevelt’s fabled New Deal.
The 1933 strikes by miners working for outfits like the rabidly anti-union H.C. Frick Coal and Coke Company were occasioned by congressional passage of the code-happy, Great Depression-fighting National Recovery Act.
The NRA, a hodgepodge of programs wrapped into one untidy package, was eventually declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. In that sense, it’s not unlike Roe v. Wade.
Until its recent demise, Roe, which guaranteed women nationally the right to terminate a pregnancy up to the time of fetal viability, stood for half a century. In contrast, the NRA was shot down less than 24 months after its passage.
The demise of the Blue Eagle – the New Deal symbol of national economic resurgence – was barely mourned. Not even Roosevelt was especially sorry to see it go.
Roe is different. Protests by abortion-rights proponents (as well as celebrations by abortion opponents) took place across the country. President Biden has vowed to carry on the pro-choice fight.
The end of the NRA was not without consequence, however. Following a series of such reversals in the Supreme Court, President Roosevelt proposed his ill-fated court-packing plan. The political crack-up of the plan is still being felt. Its failure is used as a warning to Biden: Don’t try to change the size of the court to fit the political moment. Not even Roosevelt at the height of his power and popularity could manage that.
Stay in your lane, Joe, critics say.
The National Recovery Act was a game-changer for organized labor, just as Roe was a liberating, gamer-changer for many women. NRA’s section 7a stipulated that workers were free to join a union of their own choosing.
The president of the United Mine Workers, John L. Lewis, seized on 7a to insist that Roosevelt himself wanted miners to become UMW members. (Not so. FDR was neutral.) The deception worked like a charm. Miners in the hundreds of thousands flocked to the union banner.
The struggle was on for the souls and bodies of miners. Protests, marches, union rallies proliferated. Violence – much violence – followed.
No region of the country was as impacted as much as Western Pennsylvania. And because Fayette County was the heart of soft coal country, no locality took it on the chin like Uniontown, Connellsville, and the scores of patch towns that wove through the countryside like chains in a link, each one linked to the other by grievances that were decades in the making.
Lewis likened section 7a to the freeing of the slaves. “From the standpoint of human welfare and economic freedom,” Lewis said, “we are convinced that there had been no legal instrument comparable with it since President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.”
Late in July 1933, 400 striking miners collapsed on Maxwell mine near Brownsville. A few days later, a thousand men gathered in Grindstone to shut down the mine there. Lewis bragged to the national press that a throng of 50,000 crowded into Uniontown for a UMW rally.
In August, more than a dozen striking miners were wounded by gunfire on the road leading to Rowes Run. Violence also broke out in Allison and Edenborn. The New York Times put the number of dead and wounded for the day at 25.
“Miners appear determined to shut down mines until the union is recognized,” the newspaper reported.
The Supreme Court mothballed the NRA in May 1935. Congress had delegated too much authority to the executive, a unanimous court said. FDR called it a “horse-and-buggy decision” that hamstrung a unified, national response to an event – the Depression – that was national in scope.
The court-packing plan came along in February 1937. Under the measure, Roosevelt would have been able to appoint six additional judges to the high court – six being the number of sitting Supreme Court justices 70 years of age or older.
Sprung on Congress and the nation without warning, the plan crashed and burned pretty quickly.
A straightforward expansion of the court might have gone down better. It had been expanded or contracted before – from six to five, to seven, to nine, to 10, to seven, and finally to nine in 1870, where it has stayed.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.