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.
Fighting “King George”
Hart was born Alice C. Burkhart about 1912 in Pennsylvania (she took Carolyn, sometimes rendered Caroline, Hart as a pseudonym — a not-uncommon practice among Communists). Her father, Archie “Logan” Burkhart, helped organize United Electrical Workers Local 601 at Westinghouse. The elder Burkhart was a member of the union’s left-wing Progressive Caucus. By 1930, the then-18-year-old Alice/Carolyn already worked as a filing clerk, likely at the same company.
It’s not clear precisely when Hart got involved in the movement, but by the mid-1930s she was already a prominent speaker at Communist events. The party had no shortage of activities: Members organized the unemployed amid the Great Depression, took active roles in unions and rallied for civil rights. In Hart’s hometown of McKeesport, GOP Mayor George Lysle — “King George” to the Communists — had a reputation for silencing leftists and union organizers.
Lysle had ordered the Communists to keep their frequent rallies to an out-of-the-way city lot. But on Sept. 1, 1934, they gathered against orders near the downtown train station. More than 2,000 people showed up, newspapers reported, before the police cracked down. Officers launched tear gas into the crowd and arrested some two dozen protesters, including Hart. A passing engineer had to stop his train after the gas blinded him, a reporter said.
Imprisoned
Twenty defendants were found guilty of riot charges in spring 1935. The newspapers made much of the “attractive and vivacious Carolyn,” running her photograph prominently and repeatedly on front pages. She kept up her work: Just days after her conviction, while her attorneys sought a new trial, Hart was already leading May Day parade contingents and addressing a North Side gathering of the Young Communist League. After a regional gathering of the American Youth Congress, she told reporters:
“I was very much stirred up over today’s meeting and the Republicans who spoke. I believe that more and more each year the majority of people are becoming communistic-minded, and the wealthy, Republican class is becoming smaller.”
Hart and her comrades were denied new trials, and officials sent her to the Industrial Home for Women in Muncy, Lycoming County for a minimum 18-month sentence. The facility (still a prison, now called SCI Muncy) aimed to train young women into what officials considered appropriate social roles. Inmates worked in a sewing shop, a cannery and a farm for 2 cents an hour; one later source said “each girl is encouraged to use nail polish, rouge, and lipstick, and to arrange her hair attractively.”
Civil liberties activists called for the McKeesport defendants’ release. In May 1937 — more than two years after her initial conviction — Hart secured a state pardon and release from Muncy.
Union battles
She later got work at a laundry company, where she was soon embroiled in internal union struggles. Her union, the AFL-affiliated International Laundry Workers Local 141, faced vicious internal fights through 1939 between alleged left-wing radicals and red-baiting enemies. Elected shop steward at the Independent Towel Supply Co. in Lawrenceville, she was blamed for slowdowns and “decreased productivity per worker.” Union officials stripped her of the steward job, and the company moved swiftly, dismissing her from work despite protests.
The company and union called in Pittsburgh’s “labor priest,” the red-baiting, union-backing Roman Catholic clergyman Charles Owen Rice, to determine whether Hart should be allowed to reclaim her job. Rice ruled against her, then blamed a Communist conspiracy for ensuing complaints against him. “She entered the low-paid laundry work for a purpose,” he told union members. “To control you and your union for the Communist International.”
The Red Scare years
Details of her life after the union battle are less clear. Hart married during her time at the laundry company, and according to spotty press accounts she worked professionally for the party during World War II. Further accounts cite local party head William Albertson having potentially expelled her as a “class enemy” around 1948 — a time when the Red Scare was accelerating and internal mistrust was rising. One late reference suggests she moved west (if you know more about her later life, email me at redpgh@gmail.com!).
In just a decade, Hart drew attention as a Communist youth organizer, a union activist and a prison cause célèbre. Her apparent disappearance from the public eye amid the Red Scare is unsurprising — many once-prominent activists were driven to silence in the late ’40s and ’50s. But her name remains alive in archives and memories of the Communist movement’s heyday.
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