Local Labor Day parade of 1922 was full of protests
As many as 10,000 marchers, mostly miners, took part in the Labor Day parade in Uniontown.
This was 1922, a strike year in which what was known as the Connellsville Coke Region was convulsed. The fight was over a union contract for miners who worked for the the likes of the H.C. Frick Co.
Frick was staunchly non-union. In its wake were other large mining outfits such as Rainey and Thompson.
The strike, which began nationwide in the spring, was over by the time of the parade — over everywhere but in the Connellsville district, a thin sliver of real estate that stretched from Latrobe southward to Fairchance.
Fayette County was the heart of the district. Uniontown was its de facto capital.
The issue here was whether miners in the non-union coal and coke fields, which included the Klondike mines of Fayette County and mines in Westmoreland and Somerset counties, would join most of the rest of the country in the embrace of the United Mine Workers.
Frick and its brethren fought like bulldogs in defense of the prerogative to run their mines without having to negotiate wages and working conditions with the UMW.
Striking miners and their families, thrown out of company housing, lived in tents in the shadow of the mines where they had worked. Other families bedded down in barns and in makeshift dormitories.
Streams were polluted with human waste. Conditions were far from ideal.
Strike rallies were staged on street corners and in union halls from New Salem to Connellsville.
Both sides were armed. Men were shot. Some of them died. There were arrests, both miners and company guards taken into custody. It was charged that state police — the Pennsylvania constabulary — was in the backpocket of the companies.
The governor, William Sproul, was excoriated by miners as the witting tool of reactionary mine owners.
The president of the United Mine Workers, John L. Lewis, was pilloried by the other side as power-hungry; it was charged that Lewis turned a blind eye to violence; and in the case of a massacre of company guards in Illinois in June had encouraged the slaughter, though the reaction to Lewis by the president of the United States, Warren Harding, suggests that assessment was not universally shared.
Then came the Uniontown Labor Day parade. Uniontown Mayor William Smart, a Republican, declared that there was “something big in a cause that draws such a tremendous throng.”
The three Olivers sent the largest single delegation, 550. The last in the long line was the delegation from Orient, 220 strong, and they carried a banner, “Union or Bust.”
Lemont Furnace miners, led by two truckloads of singing children, marched with a banner that caused a ripple of applause and was like a dagger to the heart of Frick and its ubiquitous slogan, “The track is bad. The roof is worse. Where is your Safety First?”
The march banners said a lot about the state of miner opinion in the midst of the walkout. “Never, never surrender” was one. “Justice first, coal second” was another. “We will fight to the finish” was a third.
One banner read, “Be a man and join the union.”
Another banner, this one carried by miners from Fairchance, was longer, more involved. “We fought for World Democracy — Now we fight for Industrial Democracy.”
Quite a few veterans of World War I participated in the parade. Miners from the Continentals carried a large American flag.
After the parade, the marchers and thousands of spectators trooped over to the Reagan Lynch Lot, on the west side of Gallatin Avenue, for a program of speakers.
Quite a few speakers flayed the Harding administration for being anti-union. One speaker referred to officials in Washington as “dumbbells, fossils and ignoramuses.”
The same speaker, the state AFL president, referenced a recent fire in Pittsburgh which claimed the lives of several men working in the stead of striking railroad workers. The crowd cheered. It was an ugly moment.
The strike ended badly for Coke Region miners. Union membership was many years away. More tears and more blood would flow. More sacrifice and more courage would be required.
Labor Day 1922 was like none other. It whispers to us today, carried on a faint, fading breeze.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.