Crucible of Freedom by Davin Eric Leif;

Author:Davin, Eric Leif;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

“A Democracy of Opportunity”

But in 1936, when Allegheny County Commissioners Kane and Rankin took office, the “equal opportunity” for the “little people” which these labor leaders promised was still to come. In the meantime, Pennsylvania’s Little New Deal had stalled in Harrisburg after the 1934 gubernatorial election. Although the labor-oriented Democrats had carried all the top state offices and a majority of the State House, as well as a majority of the State Senate seats up for election—they had failed to gain outright control of the State Senate due to staggered elections.

Holdover Republicans, therefore, continued to dominate the State Senate and, in this fashion, stymie virtually the entire Little New Deal legislative program. Just as, for example, the Republican majority never allowed the anti-McNair ripper bill to emerge from committee, so it similarly bottled up almost all of the labor legislation on which Earle had successfully campaigned.

Under David Lawrence’s guidance, a package of labor laws identical to the 1934 Democratic state platform on labor had been quickly introduced and passed by the Democratic-dominated House—only to fail in the Republican-dominated Senate. By 1936, the Democrats had only a handful of accomplishments they could point to after two years in office, important though these few were.

They had been able to abolish the detested Coal and Iron Police, the state-supported corporation police force which had dynamited the bootleg mines in Schuylkill County and had terrorized mining and steel towns throughout the state on behalf of the corporations for so many decades.

They had appointed Lt. Governor Thomas Kennedy, Secretary-Treasurer of the United Mine Workers (UMWA), as commander of the Pennsylvania State Police. This body had been originally created in 1905 specifically to suppress worker rebellions in mining and manufacturing communities, such as McKees Rocks. It was there, fighting the striking workers at the Pressed Steel Car Co. in 1909, that the first State Police officers had died in the line of their mandated duty.

And they had passed a provision for state financial aid to strikers. All of these 1936 accomplishments went far in redressing the balance of power between labor and capital and in encouraging workers in Western Pennsylvania to push for more.47

Additionally, the Democrats revised the Pennsylvania Civil Rights Act of 1887, thereby launching a “Little New Deal” specifically for the black citizens of Pennsylvania. On September 1, 1935, the 1887 Act was amended to grant all people “within the jurisdiction of the Commonwealth full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities and privileges of places of public accommodation, resort or amusement.” This action symbolized the fact that even in the absence of significant black pressure, there had developed among white Democrats a greater feeling of social justice and egalitarianism for all Pennsylvania citizens.

Actions such as this, amid the general atmosphere of freedom and equality on the march, greatly emboldened the black community. Before 1935, for example, few civil rights cases were ever heard in Allegheny County courts. After the revision of the law, civil rights cases reached the Allegheny County courts virtually every year,

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