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.
Immigrant beginnings
Lithuanians arrived in Pittsburgh by the thousands starting in the late 19th century, as Robert Medonis explained in a detailed 2002 analysis of their local ethnic politics. They split along political lines, with some joining the early socialist movement and others joining Roman Catholic and nationalist factions. World War I led to Lithuania’s independence from the Russian Empire as well as the Bolshevik revolution, inspiring some local immigrants to turn to the fledgling Communist movement.
It’s not easy to trace the various fraternal orders that existed across the country, but the Lithuanian Workers Association stands out. Some studies, like this history of Cleveland’s Lithuanian community by John F. Cadzow, identify the association as socialist-minded and focused on social functions:
“(T)he Association of Lithuanian Workers was formed as a result of an unsuccessful attempt by the communists to take over a convention of the Lithuanian Alliance of America in 1930. The Association of Lithuanian Workers was composed of leftists, running all the way from the mild socialist to hard core communist.”
Research is complicated by the fact that both the names “Lithuanian Workers Association” and “Association of Lithuanian Workers” (or Lietuvių Darbininkų Susivienijimas) appear in public records, sometimes interchangeably.
Pittsburgh radicals
The association controlled at least two halls in Pittsburgh, one on the North Side (1320 Medley St.) and one in Esplen (3351 W. Carson St.), blocks from McKees Rocks. The North Side location now lies under Route 65, while the West Carson location is an empty lot, sold to a private owner in the 1990s.
In 1936, the group took part in an ethnic fraternal conference with the Steel Workers Organizing Committee. A 1938 press account described the group’s national meeting in Pittsburgh: Members received badges, held a parade and played sports. But John Orman, one of its officials mentioned in the article, was also active in the Communist movement, Medonis notes.
Lithuanian Workers Association branches across the country were active on the left in the 1930s and ’40s. In Rochester, N.Y., members helped organize a May Day parade. In the anthracite coal region of eastern Pennsylvania, they joined unemployment organizing campaigns with the Communist Party, hosted talks with a Spanish Civil War veteran and held a Russian movie day to raise funds for the USO during World War II. Members in Pottsville attacked “big-stick atom bomb diplomacy” in 1945 and called on the U.S. to turn its nuclear arms over to the United Nations.
Communal division
Pittsburgh’s Lithuanians were sometimes sharply divided, Medonis says, particularly after the Soviet Union took control of Lithuania in 1940. The division is clear at the city’s handsome Lithuanian hall, which still stands (although no longer as an ethnic hall) at 1721 Jane St. on the South Side. In 1934, local Communists announced a grand celebration of the Russian Revolution there, featuring accordions, acrobats and the singing of “The Internationale.” Five years later in 1939, however, officials at the hall blocked a meeting of the International Workers Order — featuring speaker John Spivak, a prominent left-wing writer — on the grounds that it was a Communist front.
That policy appears to have been flexible, as the I.W.O. announced a musical event at the hall just months later, “abounding with the spirit and authentic folk culture of the Russian people.” National Communist leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn later hosted a celebration of the Daily Worker newspaper and a Soviet movie night at the hall.
In decline
With growing anti-Soviet sentiment in some European immigrant communities and the late-1940s Red Scare, radical fraternal groups lost members and appeared less frequently in the news. After World War II, the South Side Lithuanian hall hosted anti-Soviet protests and calls for Lithuanian independence.
At least some chapters of the Lithuanian Workers Association, meanwhile, endorsed left-wing Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry Wallace in 1948. The association was eventually listed among supposedly subversive organizations by the U.S. government, alongside dozens of other ethnic and fraternal groups with ties to the Communist movement.
The radicals may have been outnumbered, but they remained. In 1958, the Pittsburgh Press reported on a national gathering of the 8,000-member workers association in the city, led by one “J.K. Mazukna of the North Side branch.” That’s likely John Mažiukna, a bowling alley owner and Communist who backed the Soviet occupation and drew a hard line against the conservative and Catholic elements in his community, as Medonis describes him.
“However,” Medonis says, “he drove his wife to St. Casimir’s for Mass every Sunday and would wait for her in the car outside church.”
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