Category: Local left history

On the night of March 16-17 1941, with well over 100 passengers aboard, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Buckeye Limited leaped from the tracks near Baden and plunged into the frigid Ohio River.

Witnesses rushed to save the victims from cars scattered along the Beaver County riverbank. Officials later released the tally: Five people were dead, including an infant and three railroad employees, and more than 100 were injured.

Within days, investigators revealed disturbing details: Someone had removed spikes and shifted a 39-foot section of rail. Two figures were spotted watching the tracks through a blinding snowstorm. Dozens of visiting Soviet officials — the purpose of their visit unclear — had ridden the Manhattan Limited along the same spot just minutes before. And FBI investigators, it seems, considered American Trotskyists as potential suspects — suggesting they targeted the Soviet officials but destroyed the wrong train.

At the end of a 100-yard gravel road in West View sits a quiet cemetery, long used by Pittsburgh’s Lithuanian community. One large headstone reads: “In memory of our members — Lithuanian Workers Association — Branch No. 142.”

The marker is a rare surviving indication of a once-thriving left wing among the city’s Lithuanians, one of many early-20th-century immigrant groups that included significant socialist and communist factions. Today, we can trace the leftist Lithuanians by the remnants of their fraternal halls and the work of historical researchers.

For the June 2 anniversary of the 1919 anarchist bombings, I’m posting an excerpt from my book on the 1919 steel strike and that year’s political upheaval.

It was a late Monday evening on June 2, 1919, and much of Pittsburgh was already asleep. A group of young men walked down Aylesboro Avenue in Squirrel Hill on the way home from a wedding in the upper-class neighborhood.

An explosion roared, blasting shrapnel into several homes. At 5437 Aylesboro Avenue, home of high-ranking Pittsburgh Plate Glass official B.J. Cassady, the front porch was blown to pieces, the house’s entire front face was destroyed and the interior was wrecked. Next door, U.S. District Judge W.H.S. Thompson’s home sustained several hundred dollars’ worth of damage. Shrapnel and debris rocketed into nearby houses. The blast reportedly threw a baby into a pile of broken glass, where it somehow remained unharmed. Passersby rushed in to help, but no one was badly injured.

The American Marxist movement may not have been born in Pittsburgh. But it was arguably conceived here, at a Downtown meeting hall long since replaced by office towers. What began as a chaotic meeting of labor activists would end with a pledge to form a new political party — the first to be rooted in Karl Marx’s ideas.

Over several contentious days in April 1876, representatives of unions and socialist groups from across the country gathered in Pittsburgh. Their goal: to form a nationwide labor movement, possibly even a united political party. The conference drew political outsiders of all stripes, from craft unionists to paper-money supporters to the mysterious (to outsiders, anyway) social democrats.