Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  A month later, Aliquippa kicked off a new era when it opened its pristine new football stadium on the hill above the high school in Plan 12. Twenty-one rows of bench seating—all California redwood and steel brackets daubed black—backed up the hillside in five sections, framing the “deep rich green turf,” said the Aliquippa Gazette. “It will be ideal to play on—dustless—comfortable—beautiful!”

  Hundreds of workers, part of a Works Progress Administration program to erect forty-eight such facilities statewide, had finished the 3,400-seat (officially, anyway) jewel in less than a year—and now here, on October 24, came Ambridge, the perfect foil with which to christen the place. Both teams were unbeaten. Aliquippa had scored 61 points the week before and looked unstoppable. . . .

  It didn’t matter. Rubenstein escaped the stadium—packed with an estimated 12,000 locals—with a 0-0 tie. Aliquippa and Ambridge then ran out their remaining three games without a loss; the Quips didn’t surrender another point all season. Aliquippa and Ambridge thus shared the 1936 county championship, lending the fractious days a rare and perhaps welcomed glimpse of harmony. Lippe’s thoughts on the matter, though, have been lost to history.

  No, J&L didn’t give in. It couldn’t. Thirty years earlier, the company had designed and built a town to make money, an entity that thrived on the feed of cheap, docile labor. This took a certain cool genius—one that even the NLRB conceded in summing up J&L as a “vast ­mechanism”—and genius rewarded rarely knows when to stop. The fact that, three generations on, the company was still controlled and run by its founding family made it unique; that it had expanded without benefit of merger or consolidation made it formidable. By the mid-1930s Jones and Laughlin Steel had indeed become a machine of estimable reach.

  Employing 22,000, valued at $3.2 billion in today’s dollars, J&L’s operation extended well beyond Pittsburgh and Aliquippa and into every stage of the steelmaking process. The industry lived off limestone, iron, and coal. J&L dug 40 percent of its limestone out of its own quarries in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. It controlled or owned mines in Michigan and Minnesota stocked with 60 million tons of iron ore, and the quartet of steamships on the Great Lakes needed to transport it. It owned mines in Pennsylvania stocked with 600 million tons of recoverable coal, and the 10 towboats and 165 barges needed to transport that.

  J&L also operated its own railroad, complete with 49 locomotives and 1,327 freight cars, and was the largest shipper on the corresponding Pittsburgh and Lake Erie line. It owned warehouses in Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati, and Memphis. It pioneered the hauling of its finished steel downriver to markets like New Orleans, in barges of its own design and making, and shipped 240,000 tons a year down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. It operated steel fabricating shops in New York and New Orleans. Through a wholly owned J&L subsidiary, it owned, leased, and operated stores, warehouses, and yards for the distribution of equipment for drilling and operating oil and gas mills, pipelines, refineries, and pumping stations. It had sales offices in twenty U.S. cities and a wholly owned subsidiary charged with distributing its products in Canada.

  “The ramifications of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation are thus as broadly extended as the nation itself,” the NLRB declared in 1936. “It is impossible to isolate the operations of the Works in Pittsburgh and Aliquippa or to consider them as detached, separate—‘local’—phenomena. These works might be likened to the heart of a self-contained, highly integrated body.”

  J&L was never going to be as massive as U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel. But the Aliquippa Works had become one of the largest integrated mills in the world, covering every step of the process from conversion of iron ore to the production of custom-finished shapes, and Aliquippa was now the nation’s largest steel company town. J&L owned the streetcar line, 128 acres of property, and 1,174 acres of farmland. Of its 30,000 citizens, 10,000 worked at its mill; factor in wives and children, and there was virtually no one in Aliquippa who didn’t feel its weight.

  “The company’s opposition to a union was very simple,” said Joe Perriello. “Would you want anybody interfering with your business if you had complete control over everybody that works for you? You tell them what to eat, you tell them where to live, you tell them how much water to drink, you tell them where to buy property, you tell them where to go to work. Now here comes a group of people who say, ‘Wait a minute. That isn’t all there is in this life. There also is a choice.’”

  But almost as soon as that choice was established, it began to dissolve. FDR had been the first Democrat to carry the state since 1856, and the 1934 gubernatorial election of Democrat George Earle—and his running mate, a former official with the United Mine Workers—seemed to reinforce the climate’s leftward tilt. Yet within two months, infighting at the Amalgamated gave J&L the legal opening to devastate the newly created lodge with a fresh offensive. Bosses and J&L police pressured employees to become stool pigeons and join the company-sanctioned union, threatening the loss of job and home.

  “My uncle was fired. My brother was fired, blackballed,” Perriello said. Three J&L policemen invaded Perriello’s home and threw the sleeping twenty-year-old out of bed while his mother watched; then two of them pulled out blackjacks to administer a beating. But Perriello played football with the semipro Aliquippa Indians on Crow Island, and the third cop, a football fan, recognized him, “Leave him alone,” he said. “I’ll talk to him.” The J&L men left. Perriello’s bed was broken. His mother was so frightened that she had soiled herself.

  In May 1935, the Supreme Court struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act, short-circuiting federal support for collective bargaining. Wage cuts slashed the average weekly pay at the Aliquippa Works from $19 to $17, and when Cornelia Bryce Pinchot returned for a speech on the eve of Labor Day that year, she met a crowd uncertain of lasting gains. “I have been reading over some of the cases of Jones and Laughlin men who have been discharged, suspended, and demoted in the last few months,” she said. “Not a pretty story.”

  By the summer of 1936, mill timekeepers and J&L police were handing out flyers promising a shuttering of the Aliquippa Works if the push for an outside union continued. Fourteen of the sixteen men who attended a union meeting in town were fired. Aliquippa Gazette editorials characterized organizers as bloodsuckers, parasites, and mad dogs deserving of beatings. The number of members in Lodge #200, once hovering near 5,000, had dwindled to less than 100. But help was coming.

  A year earlier, on July 5, 1935, FDR had signed the Wagner Act into law. The bill, technically known as the National Labor Relations Act, tied the right of independent unionization to the economy itself, protecting it as a matter integral to interstate commerce. It also created the National Labor Relations Board, with Clint Golden appointed as associate director of the Pittsburgh region. But all involved knew that only a constitutional nod by the Supreme Court could legitimate the Wagner Act. The lives of millions of workers would be affected; the test case needed to be airtight.

  Four days after the president’s pen hit paper, on July 9, J&L fired Martin Dunn, a charter member of the union, for leaving the key to his crane on a bench. Over the succeeding months, the company picked off Aliquippa union men one by one: Lodge president Harry Phillips, for failing to answer a whistle; vice president Angelo Volpe, for using his head and not his hands to signal while operating a crane; treasurer Martin Gerstner, after a nut fell off one of his inspected cranes; tractor driver Angelo Razzano—who had gone to see Cornelia Bryce Pinchot speak in Ambridge in 1934 and had signed up 1,500 members—for leaving open a mill door. Ten in all were fired, each a longtime J&L employee with an unblemished record, each for the most minor transgressions.

  After his dismissal, on January 13, 1936, Razzano walked out of the superintendent’s office and through the tunnel. He bumped into a friend who’d gone to law school. “Dominick, I’m finished,” Razzano said. Then he told him why.

  “There’s a train
at two-fifteen,” Dominick said. “Get that train and go to Pittsburgh.” He gave Razzano the name of a government attorney. Razzano climbed aboard, found the office. It took a while before the attorney called him in.

  “I worked for J&L from 1924 to 1936,” Razzano began. “I’ve got a good record. I’m always working; I’ve never missed work; I’m always doing more than what I’m supposed to do. The company is firing me, I guess, on account of the union activities. I can’t prove it, but . . . ”

  When he returned that night, Razzano bumped into Eli Bozich, a laborer fired the same day for waiting for a boss to tell him what to do. Razzano gave him the lawyer’s address. Soon he told Domenic Brandy, George Marell, Ronald Cox, and Royal Boyer, along with Dunn, Phillips, Volpe, and Gerstner—about the lawyer, too.

  Boyer was the lone black in the group. This didn’t seem striking at the time, at least beyond the NLRB’s description of him as “a Negro” and as one of a subset of workers possessing “special qualities as leaders of particular groups—Brandy, the Italian, Boyer, the Negro.” But his presence among the ten would give it symbolic heft, especially once John Lewis’s racially enlightened Congress of Industrial Organizations replaced the obsolete Amalgamated in the drive to organize the steelworkers.

  Relations between black steelworkers and organized labor had long been scarred by bigotry and mutual distrust. The American Federation of Labor, historically, either segregated its black members or excluded them outright, and the Amalgamated all but ignored black steelworkers in its membership drives. When steelworkers went on strike nationwide in 1919, management was only too happy to exploit the split. Some 30,000 newly arrived blacks—fresh from the Jim Crow South, unschooled in union aims, eager for a paycheck—were hired as strikebreakers and police deputies. The insults to supposed worker solidarity and white superiority sparked riots between white picketers and black scabs in Chicago; Gary, Indiana; and Donora, Pennsylvania, and violent attacks on blacks in the nearby Pennsylvania towns of Rankin, Duquesne, and Monessen. When the strike collapsed, the phrase “Niggers did it” caught on as the unofficial Amalgamated line.

  Boyer came to J&L five years later, at eighteen, hired as a common laborer. After becoming a machine operator in Aliquippa’s nail department in 1932, he quickly established himself as a union voice. He was one of the founders of Beaver Lodge #200 in Ambridge and signed up 250 of the mill’s 800 blacks. His boss told him to stop. The threat was implicit. In January 1933, in the nearby town of Industry, Beaver County officials raided a party and arrested fifty-six black adults. Ten paid $2.50 fines and were released; the other forty-six were illegally loaded into trucks and dumped over the West Virginia line with no food. In 1933, a black man was killed by one of Mauk’s policemen when he made the mistake of wandering into Aliquippa’s Plan 6—the white enclave, the bosses’ district—after dark.

  Boyer was fired a month before Razzano, suddenly, for making bad nails. About that time, Mauk’s police introduced a new tactic to sow division—pay or pressure blacks into assaulting white men around town, then release them while the outraged whites remained in custody.

  On January 23, 1936, the Amalgamated filed a formal complaint against J&L on behalf of the ten men fired in Aliquippa. Calling the Wagner Act—and thus the NLRB—unconstitutional, the company refused to take part in NLRB hearings or to obey its order to reinstate the ten and cease hindering union organizers. The board petitioned for enforcement. Gambling that the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans would rule faster, the NLRB got its wish—and nearly lost everything. On June 15, the court struck down the NLRB’s order, and the Wagner Act, by backing J&L’s contention that its employee relations were a local issue concerning manufacturing and production—not interstate commerce—and thus beyond the power of Congress under the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause. The federal government, in other words, had no power to regulate labor relations.

  The next day, the CIO’s Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) held its first meeting, in Pittsburgh, and sent one of its toughest organizers, Joe Timko of the United Mine Workers, into Aliquippa. On November 9, just after the town went Democratic—by a 2-to-1 margin—for the first time ever to help reelect Franklin Roosevelt, the Supreme Court agreed to take up National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation. On February 9, 1937, the court began to hear arguments. The decision would reconfigure the nation’s political and cultural life for the next fifty years.

  At noon on April 12, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes led the justices through a curtain and to their positions on the bench. In one account, the “silent intake of spectators’ breaths all but caused a vacuum in the courtroom.”

  Equating employees’ “fundamental right” to organize themselves with an employer’s right to arrange its business affairs, and finding that the Aliquippa Ten had been fired for union activity and to discourage union membership, Hughes announced the Court’s finding, 5–4, in favor of the NLRB.

  “When industries organize themselves on a national scale, making their relation to interstate commerce the dominant factor in their activities,” he said in the majority opinion, “how can it be maintained that their industrial labor relations constitute a forbidden field into which Congress may not enter when it is necessary to protect interstate commerce from the paralyzing consequences of industrial war?”

  The decision, which essentially endowed Congress with new power to regulate labor relations under the Commerce Clause, had titanic impact. In the big picture, it effectively spelled the end of court challenges to the New Deal, reinforced Roosevelt’s landslide reelection, and greatly expanded congressional might. One scholar calls NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin “a major turning point . . . for the whole course of American constitutional development.” Another says the ruling “revolutionized industrial relations in the United States and climaxed more than a century of labor history. . . . There no longer could be any question of a union’s right to exist. The very interference with its existence by an employer through unfair labor practices became outlawed.”

  J&L was ordered to rehire the ten fired men, with 18 months back pay; Royal Boyer received $2,040 ($34,215 today) and Angelo Razzano more than $1,000. J&L refused public comment. But reaction in corporate America, among Tom Girdler and his ilk, was hardly a secret. “I’m sure I know what it was,” says Tom Girdler Jr. “I’m sure it was one of utter disgust and dismay.”

  But for most of Aliquippa the news, hitting just after the afternoon shift change disgorged thousands into the streets, sparked jubilation. Angelo Volpe cheered and ran to tell his wife. Eli Bozich stopped tending bar to give a speech. Soon a parade steamed up Franklin Avenue, led by two cars filled with the now-reinstated ten. One featured a sign that read, “We Are the Ten Men Fired for Union Activity by J&L, We Are Ordered Back to Work by the Supreme Court.” The second read, “The Workers of Aliquippa Are Now Free Men.”

  “When I hear Wagner Act went constitutional, I happy like anything,” said one steelworker. “I say, ‘Good, now Aliquippa become part of the United States.’”

  Yet it wasn’t over. Still J&L refused to bend, never mind that its stand had become increasingly lonely. Revivified by Roosevelt’s landslide win, organized labor—and especially John L. Lewis’s CIO in its push to organize steel—began a chicken-egg cycle of victory begetting converts begetting victory. In February 1937, sit-down strikes by 192,642 workers paralyzed American industry; when Michigan’s governor refused to evict the occupying force at a General Motors plant in Flint, GM caved. In April, even as J&L lawyers were attacking the Wagner Act before the Supreme Court, U.S. Steel chairman Myron Taylor came to terms with the Steel Workers Organizing Committee.

  The move blindsided and enraged Little Steel operators like J&L and Republic. “I was bitter about this,” wrote Tom Girdler, Republic’s chief, in one of the era’s great understatements. Taylor was soon deposed as chairman of the producers’ federation, the American
Iron and Steel Institute; Girdler took over. “My father made the famous statement that before he’d sign a contract with John L. Lewis, he’d go back to raising apples on the farm,” said Tom Girdler Jr. “John L. Lewis, in my opinion, was a louse. And in his opinion, the same thing.”

  With the Supreme Court ruling, J&L shuttered its “Employee Representation Plan” and began tepid talks with the SWOC in Pittsburgh; it soon became clear that management had every intention of crippling the new steelworkers union, along with Aliquippa’s freshly minted Local 1211, in its infancy. The company pushed for a vote to decide between a new company-backed plan and SWOC, with both sides certain that the union would lose. Union leadership refused. The Aliquippa Works readied for battle. A Clint Golden spy reported a J&L stockpile near one plant gate of “at least 150 holstered .38-caliber revolvers, all neatly stacked on shelves,” ammunition for Thompson submachine guns, and “a great many” packages of what looked to be machine guns, tear gas, and ordnance.

  On May 12, both J&L Locals—the old 200 and the new 1211—voted to walk out, and the Aliquippa air carried an unprecedented feel of possibility, of the old order crashing. By 10 p.m. a mass of picketers had clustered in front of the tunnel, along with a union truck loaded with weapons. At 11 p.m. workers arriving for their shift moved into the crowd, becoming part of the strike, like it or not. The tunnel was the main entrance, the cavernous symbol of every man’s trudge into an oft-punishing job. Now the workers pinched it shut. J&L was under siege.

  One of the Aliquippa 10, Angelo Razzano, had been back in the seamless tube mill only a few days when the strike officially began at 12:01 a.m. on the thirteenth. For a few hours he roamed about the mill grounds—cutting telephone lines in the machinists’ shop, mulling whether to stuff his boss in a sack and hurl him into the river—finally emerging into the 4 a.m. bustle of a town transformed. He heard some strikebreakers planning to sneak into the mill via the railroad. In a frenzy, he chased one of them across the lawn of the Woodlawn Hotel, straight into the lobby.