When police raided a gathering of Woodlawn Communists on Armistice Day, 1926, they kicked off a five-year legal battle that would draw national attention and end with one organizer dead.
Police in Woodlawn, Beaver County — later part of Aliquippa, and home to many Jones & Laughlin Steel workers — carried out the nighttime raids on Nov. 11, the eighth anniversary of World War I’s end. Initial reports from the American Civil Liberties Union suggested a dozen workers were snatched from three homes, one of which was host to a birthday party.
Several were charged under the state’s anti-sedition law, passed seven years earlier and aimed against supposedly subversive political activities. “They were all members of the Workers (Communist) Party of America, affiliated with the Third International of Moscow, a world-wide revolutionary organization,” the Pittsburgh Press would later report. “[T]here was evidence introduced to the effect that some of the defendants taught and spoke at meetings, advocating the overthrow of the government.”
Charges would stick against three of the men: Peter Muselin, Milan Resetar and Tom Zima, each of whom faced fines and five years’ imprisonment. Their case would become a minor cause celebre on the American left, fought alongside many sedition and “criminal syndicalism” cases across the country. Their attorneys challenged the state law as unconstitutional; International Labor Defense, a Communist-affiliated aid organization, raised funds and published articles in their defense.
In December 1929, Resetar himself wrote in the group’s monthly magazine, Labor Defender:
We were active in trying to organize the working class of Woodlawn. Why? Because through the analysis of the conditions in Woodlawn, we found that the Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation dominated in Woodlawn. . . . Local police are comprised from the J. & L. police. We know of the inhuman treatment imposed upon the workers as a result of this.
Woodlawn had a reputation for radical organizing. During the first Red Scare following World War I, West Virginia authorities arrested a group of accused Finnish I.W.W. members from the town and forced them to kiss an American flag, according to contemporary news reports. In 1921, federal agents reported a six-member “South Slavish group” of the newly aboveground Communist Party there.
At the close of 1929, found guilty and with their repeated appeals to the Supreme Court exhausted, Muselin, Resetar, and Zima turned themselves in. “Legal authorities regarded the court’s position as a direct blow at any efforts by Bolshevists to undermine the Federal government and as a strengthening of the state’s right to punish for sedition,” the Post-Gazette reported. They were sent to the Allegheny County Workhouse in Blawnox, where Resetar’s condition quickly deteriorated.
The prison was “swarming with bed bugs, roaches, lice and other vermin,” Resetar wrote, cited in American Political Prisoners: Prosecutions Under the Espionage and Sedition Acts by Stephen M. Kohn. Plagued by heart and lung conditions and allegedly receiving poor care, he died in 1931. In a December 1931 letter published in Labor Defender, Peter Muselin’s wife, Anne, referenced his death and her own struggles:
As for Resetar I suppose you have received a telegram that he is dead. Resetar had been a great friend to Pete and I, and his death has been a shock. I am laid up with a cold but I will try my best to go to the funeral. . . . You know that we must eat, and I know that the I.L.D. is doing their best towards me but I don’t know how I’ll ever get along.
The case drew I.L.D. activists to Pittsburgh, where they delivered speeches and circulated literature (police arrested and fined at least two for distributing pamphlets). The Woodlawn prisoners eventually secured representation through the ACLU from George Wharton Pepper, a Republican former U.S. Senator from Philadelphia. According to Kohn, the surviving pair became disillusioned with the Communist movement and agreed to renounce their beliefs for a pardon.
Whatever their views in the end, the two surviving men — Zima and Muselin — got their pardon. A Christmas Eve note in the Pittsburgh Press says the state Board of Pardons had approved their request after two years in the workhouse and more than six years after their arrest.
Thanks for reading Red Pittsburgh. Follow on Twitter and Facebook for articles, archive items and photos.