Red Pittsburgh - Left and labor history in Western Pennsylvania

Traces of Spanish anarchism in Donora

Post author By Red Pittsburgh
Post date March 25, 2023

An illustration from N.Y.-based “Spanish Revolution”

When right-wing generals launched a coup attempt in Spain in July 1936, the U.S. left leaped into action.

Representatives of the ruling Republican forces toured the country to draw support. Communists and socialists quietly recruited military volunteers. And in Donora, Washington County, a small but active community of Spanish-born anarchists organized support clubs and raised hundreds of dollars for their comrades overseas.

Little is recorded in English about the largely vanished Spanish community in Donora, and even less about its politics. But radical newspapers, antifascist clubs and donation records offer a glimpse into a once-active movement there.

Utopias

Harmony and the first days of socialism

Post author By Red Pittsburgh
Post date February 21, 2023

When the German communist Wilhelm Weitling stopped in Economy, Pa. during an 1851 U.S. tour, he remarked on the strange, plain-living Germans who had built a home there.

“If now someone asks me whether I could live among such people, I must admit: Yes!” the writer Karl J.R. Arndt quoted Weitling, a utopian-revolutionary communist whose ideas influenced the workers’ movement and drew criticism from Karl Marx.

The Harmony Society — whose members are known as Harmonites, Harmonists or sometimes Economites — left its mark in two local towns in Butler and Beaver counties. Members practiced celibacy, eschewed worldly pleasures and held their possessions in common. While they’re remembered as decidedly apolitical Christian pietists, they left their mark on the socialist movement, early communists and even one of the first U.S. Hegelians.

Lives on the left

Joseph Frick: A witness to the U.S. left

Post author By Red Pittsburgh
Post date January 8, 2023

When Joseph Frick died at Allegheny General Hospital in 1891, the newspapers didn’t mince words.

“Herr Frick has had a remarkable career. His effort while in this country seemed to be entirely devoted to a violent denunciation of the government,” the Pittsburgh Press said. “He hated the country of his adoption because it was his nature to do so.”

Frick had earned the reputation. He began his career as a “Forty-eighter” — one of the German revolutionaries forced to flee their homeland after a failed 1848 democratic revolt. During the following decades in Pittsburgh, he represented the local International Workingmen’s Association (of Karl Marx fame), was present at the creation of the U.S. anarchist movement and organized revolutionaries across western Pennsylvania.

An issue of Freiheit, the anarchist journal Frick worked for in later life.

Local left history

Mapping the birth of U.S. anarchism

Post author By Red Pittsburgh
Post date August 7, 2022

The anarchists who faced execution after the 1886 Haymarket riot. Albert Parsons, upper left, and August Spies, center, both attended the Pittsburgh conference.

Students of left-wing history may have heard of the “Pittsburgh Manifesto” — the 1883 statement that launched the American anarchist and syndicalist movements. The document, drafted by renowned anarchist-socialists including Albert Parsons, Johann Most and August Spies, would set the scene for the bloody Haymarket repression three years later.

What’s less well-remembered is exactly where in Pittsburgh the anarchists met. There are no markers or plaques to remind visitors where the conference took place. In fact, the anarchists met at two locations: one on the North Side and the other directly under today’s PPG Paints Arena. It was there, at a German hall near today’s David McCullough bridge and a saloon along Fifth Avenue, that American anarchism first took shape.

Local left history

The red Finns of the Mon Valley

Post author By Red Pittsburgh
Post date July 26, 2022

When Finns first migrated to Western Pennsylvania en masse, they brought with them a strong socialist culture — a culture that competed with the Christian church and made them a key constituency for the American left for decades.

There aren’t many Finns left in the Mon Valley, where most of the early arrivals settled. There are even fewer physical remnants of their socialist and Communist movements, although for a time they controlled several imposing “red” halls and a network of cooperative businesses. But, for a time, the Finns of Glassport, Monessen, McKeesport and Beaver County were among the region’s most active radicals.