In the midst of the Great Depression, Communist-led coal miners waged a vicious fight against Western Pennsylvania’s coal operators. That fight turned deadly on June 22, 1931, in a hail of bullets and shotgun shells along a rural road in Hampton Township.
When the chaos ended, one miner lay dead and several were left badly wounded. The shooting — carried out near the entrance to a sprawling mine not far from North Park — would stir public outrage against the police and draw charges against dozens of miners and supporters.
Coal war in Appalachia
The Appalachian coal fields were ablaze in 1931. The United Mine Workers struck some producers, while their bitter rivals, the Communist Party-affiliated National Miners’ Union, planned a struggle across several states. The two groups had split in the late 1920s, when Communist leaders ended their policy of “boring from within” and established the Trade Union Unity League, an array of radical unions that competed with their more conservative counterparts.
What the National Miners’ Union lacked in size, it made up for in fighting spirit. Leaders hoped to wage a revolutionary struggle from Pennsylvania to Kentucky, and in 1931 Communist leaders and organizers swarmed into the Pittsburgh coal fields. Harry Haywood, a prominent party member who organized in the Black community, discussed his South Hills assignment in his memoir Black Bolshevik (edited and republished as Black Communist in the Freedom Struggle):
On the train down from Pittsburgh, I had carefully read the strike call, acquainted myself with the miners’ vernacular, and committed the demands to memory. These included an increase in pay, the eight-hour day, and recognition of the NMU. . . . I became immersed in the work of the strike. Our immediate target was to close down the Pricedale mine. Every day there were picket lines. . . . The state police were also out in force. They were a hard-bitten lot — each looked like a one-man army with .30-30 Winchester rifles in their saddle holsters, .45 Colts, long riot clubs, and helmets.
Similar scenes played out across Western Pennsylvania, as radical organizers met with small knots of strikers — many of them Black and Eastern European migrants — and faced down armed police.
A plan for resistance
It was no different in Wildwood, where several hundred workers walked off the Butler Consolidated Coal Co. mine. A 1920s film produced by the federal Bureau of Mines shows scenes from the mine, with workers planting dynamite and dumping hundreds of tons of coal with advanced equipment. The mine, long since abandoned, covered a broad expanse around and under today’s North Park.
Strikers picketed near the mine entrance along Wildwood Road, with county sheriff’s deputies posted along Pine Creek to keep them in order. The standoff continued until mid-June, when county judge H.H. Rowland issued a broad injunction banning all pickets and gatherings at Wildwood. The scene seemed peaceful for a time, as Gov. Gifford Pinchot worked to reach a deal among the mine operators and the dueling unions.
Soon after the injunction, however, NMU members moved into action. William Z. Foster — head of the Trade Union Unity League, a top Communist officer and leader of the 1919 steel strike — held meetings and rallies to back further action. At a picnic near Cheswick, Foster and strike organizers discussed a plan to march on the Wildwood mine in defiance of Rowland’s order.
Miners under attack
On the morning of June 22, a crowd of picketers and supporters crested a hill a few hundred yards from the Wildwood mine. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter Frank Butler was on the scene:
They carried an American flag in the vanguard and halted at the junction of Wildwood and Gibsonia road, some 500 distant up a steep hill form the mine. About seven deputies were congregated at the entrance to the mine. Some had tear gas bombs; others had revolvers and there were a few blackjacks in evidence.
A few dozen picketers gathered on the hillside, while more than a dozen sheriff’s deputies awaited them, now armed with shotguns. Two cars drove toward the mine — carrying two scab workers, based on Butler’s description — and the pickets pelted them with bricks and rocks. The occupants drew revolvers, were soon joined by deputies, and within moments a blaze of gunfire had broken out. As Butler put it:
We cleared the brow of the hill and saw Herbert Reel, a deputy sheriff, backing out of an alley way between two houses firing into about 30 or 40 men and women. About 80 more miners came out from behind another building from the Gibsonia road, and started in the direction of Reel.
The other deputies began emptying their guns into the the throng and several in the front ranks were mowed down like wheat. . . . The deputies let go fusillade after fusillade of shots from pump guns and revolvers as the mob scattered and fled from the hail of bullets. . . . Reel rushed back to the sheriff’s van, reloaded his gun and with blood streaming down his face rushed back to the house into which most of the rioters had fled screaming ‘I’ll kill every son of a [bitch] in that house,’ and emptied his gun at the house.
Deputies swept up those picketers who sought shelter nearby. When the smoke cleared, as many as a dozen miners and supporters were wounded and Spiro “Pete” Zigaric, a 46-year-old Yugoslav-born miner, was dead. They had fired 130 shots, according to the New York Times; Butler said he didn’t see any rounds fired by the strikers.
“Picketing will continue”
Police took dozens of arrestees to Pittsburgh, but they soon faced a public outcry. Photographs circulated of Wildwood children who had hidden in terror as bullets ripped into their homes. One neighbor told reporters: “I am certainly not in sympathy with any ‘red’ union and believe that we must have protection, but this, in my estimation, was entirely the fault of the deputies for being too quick with their guns.” A second police killing that week, at a Fayette County picket, heightened the outrage. The Allegheny County coroner announced an investigation; the governor’s office launched its own.
The miners, meanwhile, prepared to carry on the fight. They announced plans for a “mass funeral” for Zigaric, while Communists held a “hunger march” on the North Side to demand miners relief. Another march on the Wildwood mine was planned, then scrapped. “Picketing will continue, no matter what force the operators and the sheriff may use against it,” NMU Secretary Frank Borich said. Someone firebombed one house containing replacement workers; someone fired shots into another.
Government officials and much of the press blamed both sides for the violence. Reporters painted scenes of cowardly Communist leaders sending dupes to their deaths for a propaganda victory. A coroner’s jury recommended manslaughter charges against Reel, the deputy, as well as against Tom Myerscough, the English immigrant mineworker and local Communist leader who had headed the Wildwood march.
Aftermath
Months later, a grand jury declined to pursue homicide charges against either man. But Myerscough was convicted of riot and incitement — along with dozens of fellow strikers — and sentenced to a term in the county workhouse. The sentence was handed down even as Myerscough ran as the Communist candidate for Allegheny County district attorney. Myerscough would remain a local cause celebre during his time in prison: Marchers later that year would attempt to picket the workhouse to demand his release.
The strikers trickled back to work across Western Pennsylvania, defeated. Haywood recalled: “We returned to the fields and called meetings of the strikers. The position made sense to them. But our action was not taken soon enough. Thousands of our best miners had already been locked out.” Some of the struck companies took heavy losses, as well. A month after the Wildwood attack, Butler Consolidated Coal Co. was placed under receivership for failure to make interest payments. It would remain in that state for a decade.
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