Arnold City once center of coal union battle
The Wikipedia entry for Arnold City goes like this: “Arnold City is an unincorporated community … in far northwestern Fayette County. As of the 2010 census the population was 498.”
Elsewhere on the internet you learn the median income in Arnold City (which, by the way, shouldn’t be confused with Westmoreland County’s plain old Arnold, which is nearby) is $18,309; and the median home value is $39,309 (though who can really value the worth of a home, sweet, home).
Rental frequency in Arnold City is 55 percent. The people living in Arnold City are pretty much split down the middle when it comes to gender; the overwhelming majority are white.
All in all, Arnold City is a nice enough place to live. But it’s not generally a place that causes even a ripple of excitement, at least among outsiders. The heart doesn’t race when you hear its name. Arnold City is a sleepy little place that history forgot.
Except when it didn’t. You see, Arnold City is like a lot of places: easy enough to dismiss until you know more. Once, history came calling, and for a brief moment, Arnold City was the epicenter of a long, sad, violent period in time.
Arnold City’s moment arrived at dawn on a June morning in 1931, when Mike Philipovich, hearing a commotion on the street, stepped outside his door.
It’s doubtful that Philipovich knew what struck him down. Hit in the chest and face by a hail of police bullets, Philipovich crumbled to the floor of his porch. His wife Mary struggled to pull him inside. “He started to ask them not to shoot at the store,” she recalled. “He died as we were bringing him inside.”
Mary later told newsmen that Mike had ventured onto the porch hoping to calm things down. “I heard some loud talking and went out, too,” she said. “A tear gas bomb hit me in the chest. Then the shooting started and (Mike) fell … He was not making any trouble. Why did they shoot him?”
Mike Philipovich had walked into the middle of a dispute that engulfed nearly all of western Pennsylvania in the summer of 1931 — a dispute that raged for many years prior to his death and would continue long after he was gone.
The dispute involved the future of coal, and whether or not the men who dug coal would submit to the dictates of coal mine owners or succeed in realizing a long sought goal of union representation in their battles with the likes of Henry Clay Frick, the Mellons, and countless other owners.
Mike Philipovich became a casualty in that struggle, even though he was not a coal miner himself. He was a storekeeper. He was also the father of five young children.
The hour of the shooting was six in the morning. Some 75 striking miners were jeering and tossing rocks as trucks rolled by carrying men to work at the nearby mine owned and operated by the Pittsburgh Coal Co., one of the largest coal concerns in the country.
The striking miners were incensed. The company had recently started legal proceedings to evict families from company houses.
Company deputies opened fire. In addition to the dead man, four other men were wounded. Fayette County sheriff Tom Aubrey, rushing to the scene from Uniontown, was asked if he intended to arrest any of his men in Philipovich’s death.
“They’re Pittsburgh Coal Co. men,” he said. “Of course, I swore them in, but they’re not mine.”
Aubrey’s answer mirrored a decades-old dispute over so-called Coal and Iron Police. The governor of Pennsylvania, Gifford Pinchot, was on the verge of ending the dispute once and for all. In a matter of weeks he would de-license company cops, ending the frequently malignant reign of state-sanctioned company officers throughout the coal fields of western Pennsylvania.
Mike Philipovich was laid to rest at Belle Vernon Cemetery. The procession from the family residence in back of the store was extravagant. At 2 p.m. on the 27th of June 1931, Mike’s big gray casket was removed to a little side street in Arnold City where a Catholic priest blessed the remains.
“The spirit of unrest” prompted by the strike was, for the moment, suspended. The “long march” to the cemetery was led by 50 boys and girls, one of whom hoisted a homemade banner proclaiming, “We will carry on the fight where our brother left off.”
Thus, storekeeper Mike Philipovich was drafted into the ranks of the distressed and restless men angling for a union.
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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 dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.