At midday on Nov. 25, 1931, a crowd set off from West Park on the North Side with a list of demands.
Groups had streamed in from surrounding regions; one truck from New Kensington bore a hammer-and-sickle sign, according to a Pittsburgh Press photo. The group — about 1,000 marchers, according to press accounts — headed across the Manchester Bridge and then on to the county commissioners’ office.
It was a “hunger march,” one of many carried out across the country during the worst days of the Great Depression. Organized by the Communist Party and its affiliated Unemployed Councils, the marches called for immediate relief and welfare programs for the unemployed. Pittsburgh was one of at least a dozen cities with Unemployed Councils in late 1931, according to a party newspaper. “Manifestly we must fight. It is either fight or starve,” the paper said.
Pittsburgh was host to several hunger marches, some held in solidarity with striking miners. The November 1931 march had a clear goal: relief for struggling workers. National unemployment had skyrocketed from just over 3 percent of the workforce in 1929 to nearly 16 percent in 1931, later calculations by the Bureau of Labor Statistics would find. Under President Herbert Hoover, little was being done to help starving families, and it was left to private charities and local governments to offer aid. The “Pittsburgh Plan,” a 1931 scheme by major businesses to gather donations, wasn’t enough to silence the Unemployed Council.
The marching crowd had a list of demands: cash relief for the unemployed and their dependents, free clothes and food for schoolchildren, a halt to evictions and home foreclosures for nonpayment of taxes and government-funded relief work at union wages. They insisted “that there be no discrimination against Negro, foreign-born, women or young workers in the administration of relief work.”
Police had prepared for the march. Dozens of armed detectives reinforced the county workhouse at Blawnox, guarding an imprisoned mineworkers’ leader whose release the protesters demanded. Officials in the region already had experience with the marches: Earlier that month, state and local police had closely tailed a hunger march at the Fayette County Courthouse in Uniontown.
The Pittsburgh marchers crossed Downtown under heavy escort, with lines of police blocking their way out. Led by a marcher with a U.S. flag, they called to bystanders, “Fall in, comrade, join the line,” according to less-than-positive news reports. A few Unemployed Council activists tried to break away and were pushed back by police, but later made their way to the county commissioners’ office to present their demands. A Post-Gazette photo shows them crowded around a desk at the county office, where a commissioner insisted their demands would be considered.
Other marchers had less success. A speaker outside the Blawnox workhouse was hustled off by police, along with a driver. Sheriff’s deputies milled around outside, prepared for further disturbances.
Did the marchers win their demands? It would be well over a year before Allegheny County officials conceived of a scheme to reduce the blow of evictions — helping to move families to new homes with landlords’ cooperation. But on the national level, the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration would carry out some of the Communists’ demands, albeit in reduced form.
In the meantime, the hunger marches continued. Just two weeks after the Pittsburgh march, hundreds of marchers (in cars and trucks) passed through from across the country en route to Washington, D.C. Some headed through Ambridge and Emsworth, staying in the city and gathering at radical and ethnic halls for speeches. A few marched eastward through Wheeling, W. Va., where police “armed with tear gas bombs and clubs” watched as they addressed crowds.