LABOR: Horror in Pennsylvania

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"I have held strike-born babes in my arms who were brought into a shambles-like world within sight and sound of the other children of the family.

"It is less than two years since the writer returned from a tour of Russia, but in the brief survey of strike conditions in this city [Pittsburgh] she can safely say that she had never beheld the equal of the scenes of human squalor, degradation, poverty and misery that exist here on the outskirts of Pittsburgh.

"Day after day Public Opinion, passive, unbestirred, phlegmatic, flows past the cruel and ironic spectacle of miners' ex-homes boarded up and vacant, while the evicted families live opposite them in wooden huts, where even the most ordinary of human decencies cannot be observed.

". . . My fine lady of Pittsburgh, with the plumes in her hair, has had her garments jerked aside and beneath her finery she is covered with sores!"

As few other writers could have brought themselves to do, Writer Hurst described a strike-shack interior:

". . . Bright green mildew on the rug across which Mrs. Jsdiereier's youngest baby had crawled, and the barrel of rainwater which the Jsdiereiers kept indoors for washing, was filled with floating objects that seemed to make it smell. . . .

"The wife of this striking miner had a face of the thick lumpy texture of half-cooked oatmeal, and bony-headed, furiously smeared babies crawled over her while she tried to talk. She kept batting these children's hands out of her eyes and hair as I attempted to get her to explain to me the riddle of why she is willing to starve for a policy she only half understands ... a woman whose brain is dulled by months of malnutrition and whose eyes at 33 have the dry look to them of drained lake beds. . . . "

The day after Senator Johnson spoke in the Senate, a band of Negroes, hired by the Pittsburgh Terminal Coal Co. swaggered down a road near Horning, Pa., and fired revolver volleys into the windows of a school filled with strikers' children. One of the strikebreakers, arrested, said he had been paid $25 by the coal company to "shoot up" strikers in their barracks. This was reported as a "typical incident."

Blame. Who is to blame for the strike? Pennsylvania operators admit that they broke a wage agreement signed by them in 1924. They broke their word to escape bankruptcy, which faced them in the competition of non-union mines. When 50,000 miners struck,* non-union miners were found, mostly Negroes. When the strikers picketed, the operators posted police. Fights ensued with brutality on both sides but most effective on the side of the well-armed police. When the strikers refused to leave houses they had rented from the operators, the latter obtained injunctions and had them evicted. Dogged, the miners built shacks. They would not heed invitations to go back to work at low non-union wages. They ignored President Coolidge's hint (TIME, Dec. 5) that they had better change their trade; that U. S. coal mines are far overmanned. Their officers charged railroads, banks, power companies and manufacturers with conspiring to keep coal prices down. Operators potent enough to have reorganized their mines and made them begin to pay with non-union labor, resented and denied the accusation. Another winter came. . . .