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Local left history

Pittsburgh and the dawn of U.S. Marxism

The American Marxist movement may not have been born in Pittsburgh. But it was arguably conceived here, at a Downtown meeting hall long since replaced by office towers. What began as a chaotic meeting of labor activists would end with a pledge to form a new political party — the first to be rooted in Karl Marx’s ideas.

Over several contentious days in April 1876, representatives of unions and socialist groups from across the country gathered in Pittsburgh. Their goal: to form a nationwide labor movement, possibly even a united political party. The conference drew political outsiders of all stripes, from craft unionists to paper-money supporters to the mysterious (to outsiders, anyway) social democrats.

The socialists and unionists gathered at Schiller Hall at Fourth and Liberty, today near Gateway Center and the River Vue apartments (map dated 1872).
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Labor struggle

J&L: Union victory in steel

At 11 p.m. on May 12, 1937, workers finishing their shifts walked out of Jones & Laughlin’s steel plants. The next shift was conspicuously absent.

At least 25,000 workers at the company’s major steel works, scattered along the Monongahela and Ohio rivers, had launched Pittsburgh’s first major steel strike in 18 years. The last strike had been a crushing defeat; this one would end in victory for the new Steel Workers Organizing Committee.

Jones & Laughlin workers and allies celebrate their victory at the South Side works. (Pittsburgh Press)
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Lives on the left

Pittsburgh’s “Best-known Communist”

After Benjamin Lowell Careathers died at South Side Hospital in 1964, a newspaper obituary offered a few final digs: “Prominence faded years ago . . . virtually unknown to the younger generation.”

But other lines hinted at his true influence: “Long-time Communist Party leader in the Pittsburgh district,” operator of the region’s “chief outlet for Communist Party literature.” In truth, Careathers was among the movement’s most active local members, a key figure on the Black left in his time — once called “the best known Communist in Pittsburgh.” Life would carry him from the Jim Crow South to Ohio Valley steel mills and to national prominence in a sedition case.

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Labor struggle

Striking coal in wartime

In late April 1943, as allied troops drove the last German forces to the tip of Tunisia, U.S. coal miners launched an unprecedented wartime strike wave that would last more than six months. Standing against their employers, the federal government and both the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, several hundred thousand miners would threaten war production — and ultimately win concessions.

The Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph on April 28, 1943, as wildcat strikes spread throughout the region.
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Local left history

“Fight or Starve”: The 1931 Hunger March

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.

A Pittsburgh Press photo shows a group of Allegheny Valley marchers.

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.

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