By 1910, the miners of Westmoreland County had a grievance that started to establish a paper trail.
In 1905, the coal companies paid 69 cents for a wagon load weighing a ton and a half. By 1910, the same wagon brought 58 cents. Wages had been sliding for five years, and the men doing the digging had no say in where the slide stopped.
Then Keystone Coal and Coke decided the miners should also buy their own safety lamps and their own explosives; equipment the company had always supplied, suddenly reclassified as a personal expense.
It was the kind of decision that makes sense to nobody except the man who didn’t have to dig anything.
The miners at Keystone called a meeting. Other grievances came up along with the lamps and the powder. No pay for “dead work”; the hours spent shoring up timber and draining water before a man could swing a pick and get credit for it. No checkweighman to verify the tonnage the company logged against his name. No eight-hour day, the standard already won in the organized coalfields just to the west, close enough to see and far enough to not matter.
The meeting decided to ask Pittsburgh District 5 of the United Mine Workers of America for help.
On March 7, 1910, UMWA Vice President Van Bittner showed up and signed roughly four hundred men into the union before lunch. Nobody had said the word “strike” out loud yet.
Keystone said it for them. The company combed its rolls for every man who’d attended that meeting and fired everyone it could identify; about a hundred miners, several of whom had given the company twenty-five years apiece.
Two days later, the rest of Keystone’s workforce walked off in response, and the strike spread to every mine in the county within days, because the grievance at Keystone was the grievance everywhere.
It eventually covered a thousand square miles. Thirty coal companies, sixty-five mines, four basins — Irwin, Greensburg, Latrobe, Ligonier — all of it the same vein of Pittsburgh coal feeding the Pennsylvania Railroad east.
Six companies dominated the field: Keystone, the Westmoreland Coal Company, Jamison Coal and Coke, Penn Gas Coal, Berwind-White, and the Connellsville and Latrobe Coal and Coke Company.
Two of their presidents held public office while they ran the strike from their boardrooms. John Jamison sat in the state senate. George Huff sat in Congress. Neither man saw any contradiction in that arrangement, and neither did the men who kept voting for them.
The miners who walked out were Slovak, Polish, Italian, Irish, English, German. Roughly seventy percent were recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The rest were native-born families who’d been working Pennsylvania coal for a generation already. They didn’t work the strike the same way.
They worked it together, and that turned out to be the one thing the coal companies hadn’t planned for.
An Army for Hire
The strike needed enforcers, and Pennsylvania had a system for that already in place, one that had been running for decades and would keep running for decades more.
Coal companies paid the county sheriff. The sheriff supplied deputies. The deputies protected company property and, more to the point, protected the strikebreakers brought in to keep the mines running.
Everyone called this arrangement legitimate because a sheriff’s badge was attached to it. Nobody pretended the money behind the badge came from anywhere but the company ledger.
John E. Shields was the sheriff who ran this particular arrangement in Westmoreland County, and he ran it the way most sheriffs of his era did: for a profit.
He secured deputies through a Greensburg detective agency and, more often, through the Pittsburgh-based Taney Detective Agency, an outfit with a reputation for strikebreaking that preceded it into every coalfield it touched.
The companies paid Shields five dollars a day per deputy. His own cost ran closer to three-fifty. The difference was his to keep, multiplied by however many men he could field, for however long the strike lasted.
It was a tidy business, profiting off both sides of a fight he was nominally there to referee.
What makes Shields harder to file away neatly is that he didn’t behave like a man who’d been bought. He told his deputies not to brutalize the miners. He told them to leave peaceful marches alone. When deputies crossed that line, he fired them.
This was not the posture of a company sheriff. It was also not the posture of a labor sympathizer. It was the posture of a man trying to run a profitable sideline without losing control of the men he’d hired to run it; and in the spring of 1910, in the middle of the largest strike Westmoreland County had ever seen, that turned out to be an impossible balance to hold for very long.
Yukon
The Westmoreland Coal Company owned the town of Yukon outright; the houses, the streets, the ground under the church. It was the kind of company town where the company’s name on the welcome sign wasn’t a courtesy. It was a fact about who owned the welcome sign.
On May 8, 1910, a handful of strikebreakers at Yukon decided they’d had enough of the job. Miners had been talking to them for weeks, the way miners talked to every strikebreaker who’d walk close enough to hear it, and the talking finally worked.
Peter Leybeck and a few others told the company they were leaving. They moved their things to Mrs. Santine’s boarding house and waited to go.
Five deputies from the Taney Agency showed up first and tried to talk them out of it. The men held their ground.
Four hours later, twenty-five deputies and state policemen came back. They were armed and they were drunk, and they wanted Leybeck. They pushed Mrs. Santine aside, searched her house room by room, and found nothing; the men they wanted had already gone.
A crowd of striking miners had gathered outside to watch, and when the deputies came out empty-handed, the crowd laughed at them.
The deputies fired into the crowd.
Thirty people were hit. Paul Renomeno, standing by the gate of his own house, was killed.
Renomeno’s funeral became its own small act of rebellion. He’d worshipped at Our Lady of Sorrows, the Slovak Catholic church in Yukon; built, like everything else in town, on land the coal company owned.
Father Tusek, the parish priest, wanted to bury him on church property. The company’s mine superintendent sent Tusek a series of letters making clear that this would not be welcome.
Tusek buried him anyway. He later explained that he’d done it partly for the grieving parish, and partly because he wanted to give the company “a dose of their own medicine which they generally like to prescribe for other people but do not like to take themselves.”
A priest in a company town, telling the company exactly where it could put its objections. It’s a good line. It also happened to be true.
Sheriff Shields, when he learned what his deputies had done, pulled the commissions of every man from the Taney Agency.
The coal company simply had the Court of Quarter Sessions reappoint the same men as deputy constables instead; a different title attached to the identical thugs, which solved the company’s problem and created a new one for the sheriff’s authority, since he now had no say over who patrolled his own county.
Shields responded with a public proclamation. He declared that he regarded every deputy constable employed by a detective agency as “an impostor” to himself and to “every respectable citizen of the county,” named the Taney Agency’s owner specifically, and ordered the lot of them to stay out of any district under his authority.
It felt like a man drawing a line with no enforcement mechanism behind it, because that’s exactly what it was. The Court had already shown it would simply rehire whoever the sheriff fired.
Shields kept supplying deputies after Yukon. He just stopped working with Taney, advertised across the state for replacements, and gave the new men the same instructions as before: leave peaceful marches alone.
It didn’t take.
While the eighteen deputies from the Yukon shooting were out on bail, awaiting trial, one of them, Walter McCloskey, was involved in a second killing near Export.
A group of miners walking home from a union meeting passed coal company property. Twenty deputies and state troopers attacked them. Several miners were beaten badly. Mike Opacich, walking with a child in his arms, was shot dead.
A witness identified McCloskey as the shooter. The district attorney never requested, and the court never issued, a warrant for his arrest.
Shields accused the district attorney of sitting on the case deliberately. The star witness disappeared before trial. McCloskey was eventually tried for Opacich’s killing anyway, on what evidence remained, and the jury acquitted him on conflicting testimony. He served four months; for Yukon, not for Opacich.
Nobody went to prison for killing Mike Opacich.
Three weeks after that, the pattern repeated itself a third time, with a different cast and the same ending. Four foreign-speaking miners had been stopped by state troopers; an English-speaking miner named Mike Cheken came along and told them to run.
They ran. The troopers and a company superintendent named Frank Crowe turned on Cheken instead, chased him into the barn beside his own house, and killed him there.
At Crowe’s trial, Cheken’s widow testified that her husband had been begging for his life when he was shot. The two troopers who’d been present testified that Crowe had acted in self-defense.
Crowe was acquitted.
Three men dead within weeks of each other — Renomeno, Opacich, Cheken — and not one conviction among them. The pattern wasn’t subtle. When a deputy or a trooper killed a miner, the system found a way to look elsewhere. When a miner did anything at all, the system found him immediately.
That asymmetry would define the rest of the strike. Sheriff Shields hadn’t caused it. He’d spent the spring of 1910 trying, in his own limited and self-interested way, to hold a line against it.
The line did not hold. It was about to get a great deal worse, and the people making it worse weren’t even the sheriff’s men.
The Cossacks
The Pennsylvania State Police existed, on paper, to fix exactly the problem Yukon had just demonstrated.
The force had been created in 1905, five years before the Westmoreland strike, after the 1902 Anthracite Strike showed the state what private company police looked like when nobody was supervising them.
The idea was reasonably sound. Replace the company-paid Coal and Iron Police with a professional, state-funded force that answered to Harrisburg instead of a coal company’s payroll. Take the violence out of the equation by taking the profit motive out of the men carrying the guns.
It didn’t work, and it didn’t work in the most predictable way possible.
By the time the state police arrived in Westmoreland County, Slovak miners had already settled on a name for them: the Cossacks. It wasn’t a new insult; labor men in other Pennsylvania coalfields had been calling the constabulary the same thing since at least 1909, when the force broke the McKees Rocks strike with a brutality that earned it the nickname before Westmoreland ever needed one.
The state police had a reputation walking in the door. They lived up to it.
One young trooper, asked what the force did when “foreigners got out of hand,” answered without apparent embarrassment: “We ride in, scoop them up and beat hell out of them.”
That wasn’t a slip of the tongue from the cliche’ “one bad apple”. It was a job description, delivered cheerfully, by a man who saw nothing in it worth hiding.
What made this particularly galling to the men who’d built the deputy system was that the state troopers despised them right back; not out of sympathy for the miners, but out of professional contempt.
The deputies needed disorder to justify their jobs, so they manufactured it: dynamite under empty houses, gunfire in the dark, a striker beaten on the road for the crime of existing on it.
The troopers, drawing a flat sixty dollars a month whether the county was calm or on fire, would have preferred calm. They got disorder anyway, and supplied a fair share of it themselves.
In 1910, a socialist named James Maurer won a seat in the Pennsylvania legislature and decided to find out, systematically, what the state police were actually doing in strike zones across the state. He mailed out a questionnaire.
The responses came back from district after district, and they agreed with each other in a way that should have embarrassed somebody in Harrisburg. Violence went up, not down, wherever the police showed up. A letter from New Alexandria, in Westmoreland County itself, put it simply: troopers “rode their horses over men, women and children without cause or provocation.”
Maurer introduced a bill to abolish the force outright. He said the institution existed “not to protect property but is organized solely for the purpose of intimidating the workmen in Pennsylvania at such times as masters of our industry make living conditions unbearable.”
The bill went nowhere, which was the expected outcome for a socialist’s bill to dismantle a state agency in 1910 Pennsylvania. But Maurer wasn’t the only one keeping score. Five years later, the federal Commission on Industrial Relations reached, independently and under oath, almost the identical conclusion.
The commission’s report on the Pennsylvania State Constabulary called it “an extremely efficient force for crushing strikes”; and then noted, in the next breath, that it was not successful at preventing violence, not successful at protecting anyone’s legal or civil rights, and that violence reliably increased rather than decreased once the constabulary arrived.
A state legislator and a federal commission, working five years apart with no reason to coordinate, landed on the same sentence: the fix had become the problem.
Westmoreland County had, by the middle of 1910, two armed forces working the same strike. One was made of company-paid deputies who needed chaos to stay employed. The other was a state institution built explicitly to replace forces like the first one, and it was, by the state’s own later admission, worse.
Neither force answered to Sheriff Shields. He’d spent the spring trying to discipline his own deputies, only to watch the Court of Quarter Sessions re-deputize the same men the moment he fired them; the same workaround the coal companies had already used after Yukon.
The state police didn’t even need a workaround. They simply ignored him, the same way they ignored every local official without the rank to make them stop.
That left Shields, the elected high peace officer of Westmoreland County, presiding over a county where two separate armed forces operated outside his control, both of them aimed at the same group of men, and both of them, depending on the day, perfectly willing to murder its citizens.
The Sheriff’s Stand
By January 1911, Sheriff Shields had run out of patience with the deputy system he himself had built.
He started appointing striking miners as deputy sheriffs. They served without pay, which tells you something about what they wanted out of the arrangement; not a paycheck, just standing. A badge that said the law was, for once, theirs too.
It didn’t hold up well in court. In May, miners staged a peaceful march around Export. No violence, no property damage, nothing the injunction was ostensibly written to prevent.
Seventy-nine men were charged with violating it anyway, four of them Shields’s own miner-deputies — Joe Grevette, John Resardo, Joe Wonce, Fred Grace — fined fifty dollars apiece for contempt.
Shields argued they’d been there in an official capacity, accompanying a lawful march at his own direction. Judge McConnell ruled that their official capacity didn’t matter. The injunction didn’t care who was wearing the badge.
A month later, the conflict that had been building since Yukon finally produced its breaking point.
Miners marching past the gate of the Penn Gas Coal Company, under a permit, walking peacefully, came under fire. State troopers and Coal and Iron Police put roughly a hundred and fifty shots over their heads. Shields’s deputies identified three of the shooters, got a warrant, and went to make the arrest.
The company’s own chief deputy arrested them instead.
Justice of the Peace H.C. Meerhoff sentenced Shields’s deputies to five days for trespass; trespass, for showing up at a coal company with a warrant to arrest men who’d just fired on a legal march.
Shields refused to put them in jail. He’d spent over a year watching this county’s courts find every possible reason to protect armed men who shot at miners and none at all to protect the miners or the men trying to hold those shooters accountable. He drew the line here.
Three months later, on Meerhoff’s order, Shields was arrested himself and charged with malfeasance in office; for allowing prisoners to escape. He relented at that point and jailed his own deputies, who served their five days. The grand jury indicted him anyway.
The trial took twenty-one hours of jury deliberation to produce a guilty verdict, which is a long time for a jury to spend convicting a man everyone in the courtroom had already decided was guilty before they walked in.
Ten of the twelve jurors petitioned afterward for a new trial. The judge sentenced Shields to fifteen months of solitary confinement and hard labor regardless.
This is usually where the story ends, and it’s a good place to end it. Sheriff stands up for the men nobody else will protect, sheriff gets crushed for it. Tidy. Complete in the way a tragedy can be when the villain wins.
It isn’t where the story actually ends.
While Shields was appealing the malfeasance conviction, a second case appeared against him: embezzlement of public funds. The district attorney’s office had found a discrepancy in the sheriff’s books and built a criminal case around it.
It is worth being exact about what that discrepancy was, because the word “embezzlement” carries a specific connotation, and the record doesn’t support carrying it.
The case against Shields amounted to a bookkeeping error; the kind of accounting slip that, for any sheriff not currently at war with the coal companies, the state police captain, and the district attorney simultaneously, gets corrected with a revised ledger and an apology, not a felony indictment.
Shields had made enemies in every direction that mattered by 1911. The bookkeeping error was simply the next available instrument.
He was convicted again. A year and a month, also solitary confinement, also hard labor; a second sentence stacked on top of the first, for a man who hadn’t yet served a day of either.
On appeal, two of the Superior Court’s own justices dissented, writing that the trial judge’s remarks to the jury had been improperly prejudicial. The convictions stood anyway.
A petition went around Westmoreland County asking the court for a suspended sentence, a real legal option under Pennsylvania law for a first-time offender, which Shields technically was, whatever the jury had decided about his bookkeeping. A large number of county voters signed it.
The judge read it and reimposed the original sentence without comment.
The county had one more thing to say about all of this, and it said it the only way available to people who don’t sit on benches or write indictments. They voted.
In November 1911, after the malfeasance conviction, after the fifteen-month sentence, while Shields was still appealing and the second indictment was already in motion; Westmoreland County elected him county commissioner. Not narrowly. By the highest vote total of any candidate on that ballot, for any office, that year.
The courts had convicted him twice. His own neighbors, the people with the clearest possible view of what he’d actually done over the previous eighteen months, gave him the county’s top elected administrative job anyway.
Shields began serving his sentence in May 1912 and resigned the commissioner’s seat from inside Western Penitentiary that November, six months into a term he’d been elected to and could no longer perform. He was pardoned by the governor in December 1913.
By the time he walked out, the strike he’d spent a year and a half tangled up in had been over for two and a half years already. It had been settled the way these things usually get settled: the money ran out before the will did.
Another Tragedy That Got Lost
The strike didn’t end with Shields. It ended a month before his trial even started, and for the most ordinary reason a strike ever ends: the union ran out of money to keep paying for it.
The UMWA had distributed $1,064,865 in strike relief over sixteen months; tents, food, the shanties built when winter made tents alone a death sentence, the weekly checks that kept families fed while their husbands and fathers stood on picket lines instead of working.
It was an enormous sum for 1911. It still wasn’t enough. The coal companies had deeper pockets and other revenue streams to lean on; rental housing, company stores, in at least one case a brewery, and they could simply outlast a union paying its way through a county that had nothing left to sell.
On July 1, 1911, the UMWA’s executive board voted to stop sending money. The strike was called off four days later.
Most of the miners went back to work, because going back to work was the only option left to a man with a family and no income. About four hundred didn’t get that option. They were blacklisted, barred from every mine in the county, and had to leave Pennsylvania to find work at all.
Sixteen months. Sixteen deaths by the most conservative counts. Scores more wounded and beaten. A sheriff convicted twice and pardoned once. Four hundred men driven out of the only trade most of them knew, in the only county where they’d built a life around it.
And somehow, this strike barely registers even as a footnote in how most people understand American labor history.
Let’s look at that, because it isn’t an accident of bad luck.
Homestead got a battle people could picture; Pinkertons on barges, gunfire across a river, Henry Clay Frick himself getting shot in his own office a few weeks later.
Ludlow got a number that horrifies on its own: eleven children burned alive in a tent colony, a single image that could carry a whole movement’s outrage.
Blair Mountain got an actual battle in the geographic sense, miners and an army of deputies fighting across a literal mountain, planes dropping bombs on American soil.
Westmoreland got none of that. It got a year and a half of grinding, incremental cruelty; shootings here, a rigged trial there, a sheriff worn down case by case rather than struck down in one dramatic afternoon.
There’s no single image that captures it, because the strike’s whole character was that it was never simple enough to fit into one. It just kept happening, in small enough doses that no single dose made the front page outside Pennsylvania for long, until the money ran out and everyone went home.
A House committee did look into it. So did a separate House Labor Committee, investigating whether strikebreakers had been held against their will under conditions amounting to peonage.
Neither produced what the miners actually wanted, which was a federal investigation with teeth. The hearings happened, the testimony got entered into the record, and Congress moved on to other things.
The institutions that did the damage mostly walked away from it intact. The Pennsylvania State Police kept operating exactly as it had, the same force, the same tactics, deployed against the next strike and the one after that, for another two decades before the political climate finally turned against it.
The Coal and Iron Police survived as a legal entity until 1931, when the legislature finally let its commissions lapse; twenty years after Westmoreland, having done the same work in the meantime that it had done before.
What Westmoreland actually changed didn’t show up for another two decades. The National Industrial Recovery Act and the revitalized UMWA of the 1930s eventually delivered most of what the 1910 strikers had walked out asking for in the first place; recognition, a checkweighman, an eight-hour day, wages that didn’t depend on a company’s mood.
The men who’d gone out on strike in 1910 mostly weren’t there to see it. Some had left the county under blacklist. Some had simply aged out of the workforce in the two decades it took.
The strike’s vindication arrived eventually, folded into a much larger national shift that had plenty of other things competing for credit. A slow correction came somewhere close to what Westmoreland’s miners had wanted all along; no parade for it, no statue, no ceremony, no clean ending fit for a plaque.
That’s a harder story to remember than Homestead or Ludlow, because it doesn’t have a neat ending.
It just stops; and when the books finally closed on Westmoreland County’s coal strike, the only man convicted of anything was the sheriff who’d tried to arrest the men doing the shooting.
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