Coal and Iron Police rode roughshod over miners
Some time back, your columnist proposed the creation of a museum celebrating blue collar working life in these United States — the National Lunch Bucket and Thermos Museum, for want of a better name.
If that were ever to come about, one nook or cranny of the place might be devoted to the intense struggle waged by unions and workers against company police in the steel and coal industries.
The Coal and Iron Police rode roughshod over the civil liberties of generations of coal miners starting in the 19th century. Not infrequently, they shot first and asked questions later. And while the deaths attributed to Coal and Iron Police has never, to my knowledge, been tabulated, the number might well be astoundingly high.
Company police were the bane of mining families in Fayette, Greene, Washington, Westmoreland and Allegheny counties. Patrols maintained order in the patches and cracked heads when miners went on strike.
Sanctioned by the state, Coal and Iron Police were the enforcers of company-rule in the minefields of western Pennsylvania.
This all began to unravel officially 87 years ago this month — in January 1931. On Jan. 29, 1931, an aide to Pennsylvania Gov. Gifford Pinchot instructed the state’s secretary of industrial police to serve notice “on each corporation or industry having Industrial Police” that the governor would “terminate” and “revoke” all C&IP commissions on the last day of June.
It was the fulfillment of a campaign promise Pinchot made while running for office the previous year. A progressive Republican opposed by his party’s faction-ridden, business-oriented conservative wing, Pinchot was combative and tenacious, and didn’t give a feather whose fingers he dug his heals into; as long as the people he was offending were powerful and rich, he didn’t much care.
“I believe in organized labor, and I especially believe in preventing labor trouble by removing their causes,” he told voters in coal country, calling the Coal and Iron Police “one of the worst disturbers of the peace between workers and employers in this state.” Company police, he maintained, were responsible for “disorder and killings.”
A campaign ad in the Uniontown Morning Herald in the fall of 1930 declared that Pinchot was an “unbossed” champion of average Pennsylvanians who would “abolish the Coal and Iron Police.” On Oct. 20, 1930, while campaigning in Uniontown, Pinchot pledged, if elected, that “there will not be a single Coal and Iron policeman left in the state.”
Having triumphed at the polls, Pinchot served notice that he intended to push ahead with his pledge. “I recognize the necessity of police protection” in coal country, Gifford Pinchot said shortly after taking the oath of office, “but I believe it should be provided under conditions” less conducive to “such outrages” as murder.
There was a lot of scuttlebutt in the wake of the Jan. 29 termination announcement. Reports surfaced that the H.C. Frick Mine superintendent had issued orders, conveyed “verbally” to all employees, that they were to “strictly refrain from any conversation” about the change.
William Burchinal, Pinchot’s man in Fayette County, warned Harrisburg that “rumors” were “rampant” among mine bosses that the “new system” was designed to be the governor’s “personal means” of controlling “the police more directly with an aim to use them to enforce the liquor laws in the company towns.”
At least one county sheriff sounded vexed in the wake of the late January announcement. Westmoreland County sheriff Ray B. Johnston telephoned state police in Greensburg a few days later to ask for help in “maintaining order” near Adamsburg, where a mine strike was underway. Johnston said he and four deputies were stopped at five that morning by 150 “angry men” blocking a township road. No violence took place, but they were lucky, Johnston said, being police officers and all.
“This is a method likely to cause injury or death,” Sheriff Johnston warned. The sheriff said he wanted to be on record with a “problem which the High Peace Officer of Westmoreland County feels unable to cope with … My office is not equipped to take care of the situation.”
State police dispatched two troopers, who made one arrest.
Soon afterward, Gov. Pinchot moved to insure state police themselves were acting with clean hands.
He instructed the chief of state police, Lynn Adams, to issue orders prohibiting officers from “accepting meals … or favors of any sort from either side in industrial” disputes.
“If this has been going on I wanted it stopped once and for all,” the governor barked.
One wing of the museum devoted to the travails and triumphs of working class Americans might house artifacts of the Coal and Iron Police period, such as billy clubs and shotguns, as a reminder of just how awful things were.
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.