Free and fair elections not a new concern
With the machinery of democracy creaking and straining under the weight of an unscrupulous president, I thought it might be useful to look back a few decades when it must have seemed to some that free and fair elections were on life-support.
This story goes back to the fall of 1933 and a local municipal election conducted in the shadow of another election in a few days’ time: an election in the coal fields of Fayette County for union representation.
The nexus of the story involves an arrest. The leader of striking miners (also a school board candidate in Grindstone in 1933) spent a couple of hours in the slammer. His name was Martin Ryan.
Ryan was accused of assaulting an election official. His subsequent incarceration drew the ire of the U.S. attorney for Western Pennsylvania, Horatio Dumbauld of Uniontown.
“I can’t avoid preferring charges of conspiracy” against Fayette County Sheriff Harry Hackney, Deputy Sheriff John Malloy, municipal tax collector John Lynch, and poll watcher Joe McFadden, announced Dumbauld, who until recently had been the leader of the Democratic party in Fayette County.
It appears Ryan grabbed a paper list of voters out the hands of Malloy, who had gotten the paper from Lynch. All this took place just outside the Grindstone polling station. Within minutes, a posse of deputy sheriffs arrived on the scene, at which point Malloy yelled, “Arrest that fella.”
Ryan was taken into custody along with the two men he was speaking with at the time, George Bukolitch and Nick Dominick. Dumbauld claimed jurisdiction because on that day’s ballot was repeal of prohibition, in the form of an amendment to the Constitution. Dominick, he said, was denied the opportunity to vote on the 21st Amendment.
Uniontown labor lawyer Anthony Cavalcante showed up at the county jail with enough money to spring the men on bail. Chief Deputy Sheriff Alfred O’Neal told Cavalcante that he wasn’t even sure of the charges. Nor could he check with Sheriff Hackney, since he didn’t know where Hackney was exactly. At 7:15 that evening Ryan and the two others were let out on the word of a Uniontown alderman. Charges had yet to be filed.
Hackney, back in his office, released a statement in which he said the arrests “must have been done to preserve peace … at the polls.”
The sheriff added that on his rounds on election day he had never seen such disorder. “I found conditions I thought were impossible in this enlightened day and age.
“I found picket lines formed around the polls for the sole purpose of preventing qualified voters from exercising their right of the franchise.” Several polling places were temporarily closed because of such “interference.”
It took the intervention of his department’s deputies to “insure decent, law-abiding elements of the electorate” were “able to vote.” Even after polling stations were closed, the sheriff said, deputies were needed “to clear a polling station of 300 men who refused to leave to allow counting of the vote.”
Sheriff Hackney said he “sought only to do my duty and protect” voters. “I feel most of our good citizens were privileged to vote through the efforts of this office.”
Following his release from jail, Ryan went back to the Grindstone polling place, where he said he was knocked to the ground by one William Shaw. Shaw then pulled a gun on him, Ryan said. The labor leader pressed charges.
There was more than a whiff of gamesmanship in play on both sides here. The strike by coal miners had divided the county. Ryan and Hackney occupied polar opposite positions – Ryan was the captain of dissident miners in opposition to Frick mining interests; Hackney listened sympathetically to pro-Frick, anti-union miners who sought his protection in their attempts to return to work.
Dumbauld, as a party leader, whatever his legal concerns, appears to have been currying favor with the striking miners, many of whom were in the process of switching sides full-time from the Republican party to the Democratic party under the leadership of the new president of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt.
Everyone was aware that just three days earlier, in an effort to resolve the captive mine coal strike, which seemed to pose a threat to national recovery from the Great Depression, Ryan was part of a delegation that had met with Roosevelt himself at the White House.
From the White House to the hoosegow in 72 hours. Quite a trip.
Democracy is always precariously situated – in threat of being wrecked at any old turn of the screw under the intense gaze of politicians straining to win at all cost.
It is nearly always messy, uncertain, continually dependent on the good sense of flawed human beings to pull their weight against corruption and fraud. It’s the worst form of government, Winston Churchill said, except for everything else.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.