Category: Lives on the left

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.

From party literature and press clippings, it seems as though Eloise Booth was singlehandedly running the Socialist Workers Party’s entire Pittsburgh operation.

The Trotskyist militant — a waitress who worked on union campaigns, reported for the party press and organized events from a Fifth Avenue office — spent several years in Pittsburgh before her sudden death in 1952. A key figure in the SWP but little-remembered outside the party, she seemed to be the sort of jack-of-all-trades activist who keep small radical groups afloat.

It was an important job for a party that believed a new American revolution was “the realistic program of our epoch.”

With some 2,000 people gathered near the McKeesport train station on Sept. 1, 1934, 22-year-old Carolyn Hart — dressed in red chained to a pole — began to speak.

As soon as the young Communist opened her remarks, police descended on the crowd. An officer covered Hart’s mouth with his hand; another battered her chains with a club. Tear gas scattered protesters and onlookers as police hustled the organizers into vans.

Hart was one of more than 20 protesters to face charges in the “riot,” held in protest of McKeesport mayor George Lysle’s attempts to silence them. Her experiences through the 1930s and ’40s reflect those of many militant women at the time: battles with police and conservative union leaders, objectification in the press and time in reformatory institutions.

After Benjamin Lowell Careathers died at South Side Hospital in 1964, a newspaper obituary offered a few final digs: “Prominence faded years ago . . . virtually unknown to the younger generation.”

But other lines hinted at his true influence: “Long-time Communist Party leader in the Pittsburgh district,” operator of the region’s “chief outlet for Communist Party literature.” In truth, Careathers was among the movement’s most active local members, a key figure on the Black left in his time — once called “the best known Communist in Pittsburgh.” Life would carry him from the Jim Crow South to Ohio Valley steel mills and to national prominence in a sedition case.