This is the inaugural post of Red Pittsburgh, a blog covering Western Pennsylvania’s left-wing and labor history! I’ll cover local curiosities, strike stories and archival finds here. If you have questions or story ideas, email me at redpghblog@gmail.com. And follow on Facebook and Twitter.
About 2 miles east of North Park, in an overgrown patch hidden from the road and accessible only by foot, 100 or so gravestones bear English and Hebrew inscriptions.
There’s no suggestion that many of those buried there — at least 15 — were laid to rest under the auspices of the International Workers Order, an organization later labeled “subversive” and shut down by state and federal officials.
It’s not clear precisely when the IWO obtained the four-acre Wildwood property that today belongs to the Greenfield-based B’nai Emunoh Orthodox Jewish community. But burial services were in keeping with the organization’s mission: As a nationwide fraternal order with over 180,000 members, split into ethnic and regional divisions, the IWO offered cheap insurance, burial and health benefits at a time when the federal government left working people to fend for themselves. Robert M. Zecker says in A Road to Peace and Freedom: The International Workers Order and the Struggle for Economic Justice and Civil Rights, 1930-1954:
Imagine a mutual benefit society that offers low-cost life insurance as well as accident and sickness benefits to help tide its members over in times of need. . . . Imagine that your insurance carrier also offered members a chance to join choral groups; orchestras; mandolin clubs; theater troupes; and baseball, basketball, gymnastics and bowling teams. Imagine a life insurance society with lending libraries and ethnic dance performances, and you might be ready to join the IWO.
The IWO began with a split in the Jewish community. Left-wingers in the Workmen’s Circle or Arbiter Ring, a benefit society, broke off in the late 1920s and launched the more radical Jewish People’s Fraternal Order. In the early 1930s, they merged with a handful of other ethnic societies to launch the Communist-affiliated IWO.
Like many contemporary fraternal orders, the IWO offered insurance and a place to socialize. Unlike others, it had a firm political program — old-age pensions and rights for workers — and fought for civil rights. The organization included Black sections that provided benefits often denied by white-dominated insurance companies, Zecker notes. While the group’s membership extended far beyond the Communist Party and its sympathizers, it kept a firm pro-labor stance — Pittsburgh members even acted as volunteer organizers in the steel industry, party officials said at the time. Historian Roger Keeran describes the political atmosphere:
. . . IWO leaders urged the members to realize that, however valuable, IWO’s insurance did ‘not go far enough’ to cure workers’ economic insecurity. Such a cure required struggles against low wages and unsafe and unsanitary conditions and for social insurance.
Jewish burials appear to have begun at the Wildwood property about 1939. Several obituaries in the 1940s and early ’50s include the note: “Interment IWO cemetery, Wildwood.”
But even as living members held the rights to future plots, the authorities were preparing a crackdown on the IWO. In 1947, U.S. Attorney General Tom C. Clark labeled the group “subversive,” identifying it as a vehicle for the Communist Party. Members responded with legal and publicity campaigns; one Pittsburgh IWO officer gathered funds for a national drive, Zecker writes. The group managed to survive the first years of the Red Scare.
In 1954, however, New York state insurance officials won a legal battle to dissolve the IWO, claiming the group’s political activities put its members at “hazard.” The New York Insurance Department took control of the group’s Pittsburgh-area assets — including its Wildwood cemetery. In June 1956, it came into the hands of the B’nai Emunoh congregation. A 1957 letter, held in the University of Pittsburgh archive of attorney Hymen Schlesinger’s papers, tells supporters of its fate:
B’nai Emunoh is a relatively young, progressive synagogue in the Greenfield section of Squirrel Hill. I have met with their Cemetery Committee and they have assured me that they intend to keep and maintain the cemetery in a dignified manner in keeping with traditional Judaism. A few IWO members had purchased plots and B’nai Emunoh is honoring any deeds which had been issued.
Today, the cemetery appears as a small outcropping of the larger Torath Chaim cemetery off Wickline Road in Hampton Township. Later burials outnumber those from the IWO days, but the early markers remain — a rare physical remnant of the Communist movement’s heyday in Pittsburgh.