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.
“Enthusiastic young people”
Without immediate access to FBI files, details of their suspicions are limited. But it’s clear that officials drew a connection between the crash and the Soviet representatives who had passed the same spot. In a 1983 oral history held by New York University’s Tamiment Library, the longtime U.S. Trotskyist Ernest Rice McKinney recalled the investigation. Then in his 90s, McKinney — a Pittsburgh organizer who later worked in New York — seemed to confuse some details decades after the fact, but he recalled a visit from the FBI alongside Trotskyist leader Max Schachtman:
Well of course the FBI was looking into it, and the first thing they would think was, ‘Well, this must have been done by Trotskyists.’ The FBI man is interrogating Schachtman and me, and he said . . . ‘Would you think some of your enthusiastic young people may have been involved in this? Well, I was ready to burst out in a big laugh. This thing happened at 4 a.m. in the morning. You couldn’t have got our young people out in the woods at 4 a.m. in the morning.
Misremembering the incident as a bombing, McKinney noted: “What did they know about handling dynamite? They were more accustomed to handling a pen. And they weren’t very good at that.”
Russians and saboteurs
No Trotskyists were arrested after the crash. But questions swirled for weeks around the 44 mysterious Soviet passengers, who investigators suggested were the true targets. The Manhattan Limited’s conductor, who passed the crash site 18 minutes earlier, said he believed they were “Russian diplomats or engineers;” company officials later clarified that a group of diplomats had arrived with the engineers, but remained in the West. Another railroad officer said the guests had landed at San Pedro, Calif. from Vladivostok a few days earlier aboard the Annie Johnson, a Swedish ship used by the Soviet Amtorg trade company. A railroad official said it was “possible but very improbable” that someone outside the company would have seen a telegram concerning the Soviet passengers.
There was little doubt the cause of the wreck was sabotage. Investigators said whoever had moved the rail had left intact a wire that would have set an alarm if severed, suggesting someone with technical knowledge was involved. Wire reports claimed witnesses saw “two men standing motionless” near the crash scene. Police and FBI agents questioned at least two seemingly apolitical suspects — one of them a former railroad worker and ex-convict — but never filed charges for the crash.
Trotskyists may have seemed a logical target for the FBI. Leon Trotsky himself had been assassinated less than seven months earlier in Mexico, leaving his American supporters divided and marginalized. Trotskyists had clashed with Communist Party members since the 1920s, sometimes physically, although there was little to suggest an anti-Soviet terror campaign.
Crackdown
Whoever was responsible, government officials responded with a crackdown attempt. State Sen. James A. Geltz, a Pittsburgh Republican, cited the wreck in proposing a “Defense of American Freedom Commission” to root out so-called subversives and saboteurs. Reporters described it as a “Little Dies committee,” referring to the federal House Un-American Activities Committee already running in Washington. Another senator proposed a bill that would ramp up punishment for sabotage and trespassing. Geltz said: “It is no mere coincidence when fires, explosions and unnatural occurrences blot the course of defense energies. It is our duty as American citizens to ferret out the insidious work of destruction that characterizes the warped philosophy of foreign agents.”
Three months after the train wreck (although unrelated), federal agents raided the offices of the Socialist Workers Party, a prominent Trotskyist group, and charged members under the new Smith Act. The law made it a federal crime to teach or advocate the overthrow the U.S. government — a provision that would soon be used against mainstream Communists and other radicals.
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