Aug 5, 2018 5 min read

It is easy to identify the reasons for the violence that engulfed Fayette County in the summer of 1933 — the Great Depression, the hope for better times following the election of Franklin Roosevelt to the presidency, and miners’ distrust and anger with coal companies, especially the dominant firm in the county, H.C. Frick, which exhibited zero tolerance for the right of workers to choose a union to bargain on their behalf.

The violence was also the product of the actions of individuals. Individuals as different as John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers, and Bill Brown and Jack Brosius.

Brown and Brosius were the two men who drove a car through a gauntlet of pickets near Rowes Run in the early morning hours of Aug. 1, 1933.

A picket died in the gun play from the car, a 38-year-old striking miner named Louis Podraskey.

Brosius and Brown were arrested after police were tipped off to a car that had undergone repairs at a Uniontown garage. A mechanic at the garage told authorities, “You could see a radiator had been hit by a rock, and that the left light was recently smashed. I did see a gun on the seat, and there was blood on the seat.”

The blood was Brown’s. He suffered a laceration above the left ear, presumably from a rock tossed by a picket. The cut required 25 stitches to close. The doctor in Smock who treated Brown said his patient was vomiting and “very much shocked.”

The doc asked what happened. The two men said they were stopped on the road by striking pickets at a series of checkpoints. After being waved on a final time, they heard someone yell “yellow dogs,” an epithet for scabs or strike-breakers. A shower of rocks followed and Brosius opened fire.

Brown and Brosius were scared, it seems. If John L. Lewis was ever scared, he never showed it. Instead he showed a lot of bravado. In a hearing in Washington in 1934, he listened as a company attorney spoke proudly of his days as a union miner.

Lewis rose from his seat to say how pleased he was that a former member of the UMW had done so well in life. “But,” he added, “it is a matter of sorrow and regret to see a man betray the union of his youth” — dramatic pause — “for thirty pieces of silver.”

The incensed attorney lunged at the union chief, who turning to the presiding official, said with an air of nonchalance, “Strike ‘thirty pieces of silver.’ Let it stand, ‘betray the union of his youth.'”

The attorney was Patrick Hurley, a former secretary of war.

The summer of ’33 found Lewis in a tight spot, squeezed at one end by striking miners and at the other by the demands of national politics. The Roosevelt administration was new and popular, and it would have been foolhardy to defy the president, who was seen as the custodian of national well being.

Following a deal brokered in Washington to send the men back work, Lewis took a step fraught with uncertainty. Not knowing if the miners of western Pennsylvania would heed his call, he asked that they put down their picket signs and return to the mine pits.

Not doing so “can only lead to further collective and individual distress among our own people,” Lewis said, “and will delay the … plans of the federal government to bring about economic stability.”

The country, Lewis said, was passing through a period of “supreme crisis.” He left unsaid the fact that people in many nations were turning to dictators and authoritarian rule as a way of relieving the distress.

It fell to union miners to “make a contribution” to “maintaining” American “institutions,” Lewis argued. “Let controversy cease …. Give time for the application of reason and logic to your problems.”

Lewis has been criticized through the years — for not being politically radical enough; for refusing to take notice of the bogeyman at every corporate desk; for all too frequently raising the specter of communism when all he really saw was a signal warning of danger to his own self-interest; for caving and trimming when he should have stood tall.

In the crisis summer of 1933, Lewis was practically on his knees asking miners to cooperate “with your union” and “with your president”, meaning FDR.

Was this an act of compliance necessitated by politics and Roosevelt’s great popularity, or an act of patriotism?

In the crisis summer of 2018, we might to take it as a lesson that in 1933 Lewis rose above narrow self-interest. The UMW president, it can be argued, recognized the danger posed by the Great Depression to democracy itself.

Lewis’ example can offer hope in these troubled times, but it cannot by itself provide the courage to act. That requires answering the question Lewis and others of his generation of leaders surely pondered. Which matters most: short-term political gain or long-term constitutional government?

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.