The Coal and Iron Police (C&I) was a private police force in the US state of Pennsylvania that existed between 1865 and 1931. It was established by the Pennsylvania General Assembly but employed and paid for by the various coal companies. The Coal and Iron Police worked alongside the Pennsylvania National Guard, and later the Pennsylvania State Police, beginning in 1877. The remaining Coal and Iron Police commissions were allowed to expire in 1931, ostensibly ending the state-sanctioned organization of a private police force. Industrial policing continued in limited form until the later 1930s, when the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and other federal legislation made armed industrial forces illegal. [1]
Prior to 1865 (and until 1905), Law enforcement in Pennsylvania existed only on the county level or below; an elected sheriff was the primary law enforcement officer (for each county). With the construction of the railroad, the Pennsylvania hinterlands were opened up to development. As mining and coal-powered industries like iron and steel manufacturing expanded, Coal, railroad and iron operators made the case that they required additional protection of their property. Thus the Pennsylvania State Legislature passed State Act 228. This empowered the railroads to organize private police forces. In 1866, a supplement to the act was passed extending the privilege to "embrace all corporations, firms, or individuals, owning, leasing, or being in possession of any colliery, furnace, or rolling mill within this commonwealth". The 1866 supplement also stipulated that the words "coal and iron police" appear on their badges. [2] For one dollar each, the state sold to the mine and steel mill owners commissions conferring police power upon whoever the owners selected. [3] A total of 7,632 commissions were given for the Coal and Iron Police. In 1871, Governor John White Geary instituted a $1 fee for each C&I commission. Prior to that, there was no cost associated with obtaining the legal right to hire a private policeman. [1]
Although the Coal and Iron Police nominally existed solely to protect company property, in practice the companies used them as strikebreakers, and to coerce and discipline workers and their families. [4] C&Is were sometimes used to crack down on unemployed miners and the families of miners' practice of "bootlegging" or picking up loose scraps of coal along the railways to sell or for use heating their homes. [1] Many coal miners disdained the C&Is and called them "Cossacks" and "Yellow Dogs". [5] Common gunmen, hoodlums, and adventurers were often hired to fill these commissions. They served their own interests and regularly abused their power.
The first Coal and Iron Police were established in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, under the supervision of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Beginning in 1873, the Coal and Iron Police worked with the Pinkertons, particularly with a labor spy by the name of James McParland, to infiltrate and suppress the Molly Maguires. During McParland's undercover investigation, Allan Pinkerton pursued a dual-track strategy, appointing R.J. Linden as head of the local Coal and Iron Police. McParland's undercover work led to the arrest and execution of 20 suspected Molly Maguires, but not without complications. Violence continued throughout the investigation. Tamaqua police officer Benjamin Yost was murdered in 1875 and the Mollies were blamed. This incident turned some of the public against the Mollies. Later that year, an Irish family was murdered by gunmen under suspicious circumstances. The attack was thought to have been motivated by revenge for the alleged murder of mine boss Thomas Sanger by Charles Kehoe, a leader of the Mollies. Though the gunmen were never brought to trial, later evidence implicated Pinkerton, McParland, and Linden. Many in the Irish-American working class at the time, and some scholars today, question whether tales of the Molly Maguires were invented by the Pinkertons to justify repression in the anthracite coal fields. Many suspected Mollies maintained their innocence throughout the proceedings against them. [1] [6]
The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 led to increased public-private police cooperation, with Pennsylvania National Guard regiments and eventually federal troops deployed when Pinkertons and Coal and Iron Police failed to quell disorder on their own. The difficulties faced by Pennsylvania authorities in routing entrenched strikers led to reforms in the state's National Guard, and established a stronger role for the state in preserving order in industrial disputes. [1]
Coal and Iron Police again played a significant role in the 1892 Homestead Strike. As in 1877, The C&Is were overwhelmed by striking workers. They were herded together with the sheriff and local militia and sent away from town on a boat. The state's National Guard was again summoned to put down the strike. [1]
In 1897, at least nineteen striking mineworkers were killed and dozens more were injured while marching to Lattimer, after a posse of deputies and company police fired on the unarmed crowd. The Lattimer Massacre bolstered sympathy and support for the miners' grievances and marked a turning point in the history of the United Mine Workers of America. None of the deputies or company police were convicted for the murder of the unarmed workers. [1]
The end of the Coal and Iron Police began in 1902 during what became known as The Anthracite Coal Strike. It began May 15 and lasted until October 23. The strike led to violence throughout seven counties and caused a nationwide coal shortage, driving up the price of anthracite coal. The strike did not end until President Theodore Roosevelt intervened. In the aftermath of the strike, there was growing determination that peace and order should be maintained by regularly appointed and responsible officers employed by the public. In March of 1903, Roosevelt's coal commission recommended the abolition of the Coal and Iron Police. [1]
Though the Roosevelt commission's recommendation was not heeded, it added to the public pressure which led to the formation of the Pennsylvania State Police on May 2, 1905, when Senate Bill 278 was signed into law by Governor Samuel W. Pennypacker. [7] The stated purpose was to act as fire, forest, game and fish wardens, and to protect the farmers, but some observers felt that it really was to serve the interests of the coal and iron operators because the same legislation created a "trespassing offense" that wherever a warning sign was displayed a person could be arrested and fined ten dollars. This was seen as a direct assault on picketing. [8]
The Coal and Iron Police continued to exist even after the establishment of the state police. The state police often collaborated with Coal and Iron Police to the benefit of industrial interests and the detriment of labor. [1]
The Coal and Iron Police, most of the time, are on the scene, and when they start something it is because the thugs and the Coal and Iron Police are armed and the strikers are not armed, and are not permitted to be armed; and they are beaten up by the thugs, and that is about the time the constabulary appear on the scene, and they come around, mounted like cavalry, and they come around and see the disturbance, and they always take good care to arrest only the strikers.
— James H. Maurer, President of the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor
During the Westmoreland County coal strike of 1910–1911, the Pennsylvania State Police worked with the Coal and Iron Police to suppress the strike. Coal and Iron Police served as enforcers on company property during the workday, and state police harassed and surveilled the workers outside of company property and time. The two police forces worked together to evict a mostly Slovakian workforce from company-owned homes, forcing the workers to spend the winter in tents provided by the UMWA. When the company imported strikebreakers to the region, many of whom had little to no English-speaking ability, the C&I corralled the workers in company housing complexes and forced them to work, even as some attempted to leave. [1] Sixteen strikers and their wives were killed during the strike. [9]
In August 1911 a Coal and Iron Policeman, Deputy Constable Edgar Rice of Coatesville, Pennsylvania, was shot and killed by Zachariah Walker; Walker was lynched by a mob a few days later. [10]
In 1919, labor organizer Fannie Sellins was beaten and shot by Coal and Iron Police when she intervened to stop the beating of Joseph Starzleski, a mineworker. Both Sellins and Starzleski were killed. [1]
A July 25, 1922, article in the Johnstown Tribune noted that additional Coal and Iron Police were hired during the national coal miner's strike in 1922. [11]
Michael Musmanno, in 1929 a Pennsylvania state legislator, fought to banish the Coal and Iron Police after they had beaten worker John Barkoski to death. The final disbandment was helped along by Musmanno's writing a short story based on the case, which was adapted into the 1935 film Black Fury . Decades later Musmanno released a novel of the same name.[ citation needed ]
In 1931, then-Governor Gifford Pinchot refused to renew or issue new private police commissions, thereby effectively ending the industrial police system in Pennsylvania. [12] The reasons for his act are not clear and may have included political payback for his defeat in a 1926 campaign by a candidate from Indiana County who had the strong support of the coal and steel operators, as a political gesture to the rising labor movement of the 1930s, out of personal disgust with the excesses of the Coal and Iron Police, or some combination thereof. His official statement indicates the latter, in reference to an assault perpetrated by a couple of Iron Policemen. [12]
The brutality of the Coal and Iron Police forms the background to some sections in Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy, focusing on miners' struggles and strikes in Pennsylvania. The Coal and Iron Police also feature in the Sherlock Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear , which is based loosely on the breaking of the Molly Maguires.[ citation needed ]
Pinkerton is a private security guard and detective agency established around 1850 in the United States by Scottish-born American cooper Allan Pinkerton and Chicago attorney Edward Rucker as the North-Western Police Agency, which later became Pinkerton & Co. and finally the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. At the height of its power from the 1870s to the 1890s, it was the largest private law enforcement organization in the world. It is currently a subsidiary of Swedish-based Securitas AB.
The United Mine Workers of America is a North American labor union best known for representing coal miners. Today, the Union also represents health care workers, truck drivers, manufacturing workers and public employees in the United States and Canada. Although its main focus has always been on workers and their rights, the UMW of today also advocates for better roads, schools, and universal health care. By 2014, coal mining had largely shifted to open pit mines in Wyoming, and there were only 60,000 active coal miners. The UMW was left with 35,000 members, of whom 20,000 were coal miners, chiefly in underground mines in Kentucky and West Virginia. However it was responsible for pensions and medical benefits for 40,000 retired miners, and for 50,000 spouses and dependents.
The Molly Maguires was an Irish 19th-century secret society active in Ireland, Liverpool, and parts of the eastern United States, best known for their activism among Irish-American and Irish immigrant coal miners in Pennsylvania. After a series of often violent conflicts, twenty suspected members of the Molly Maguires were convicted of murder and other crimes and were executed by hanging in 1877 and 1878. This history remains part of local Pennsylvania lore and the actual facts are much debated among historians.
The Coal strike of 1902 was a strike by the United Mine Workers of America in the anthracite coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania. Miners struck for higher wages, shorter workdays, and the recognition of their union. The strike threatened to shut down the winter fuel supply to major American cities. At that time, residences were typically heated with anthracite or "hard" coal, which produces higher heat value and less smoke than "soft" or bituminous coal.
Franklin Benjamin Gowen served as president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, commonly referred to as the Reading Railroad, in the 1870s and 1880s. He is identified with the undercover infiltration and subsequent court prosecutions of Molly Maguires, mine workers, saloonkeepers and low-level local political figures who were tried for multiple acts of violence, including murder and attempted murder of coal mine operators, foremen, workers, and peace officers.
The Lattimer massacre refers to a Luzerne County sheriff's posse killing at least 19 unarmed striking immigrant anthracite miners at the Lattimer mine near Hazleton, Pennsylvania on September 10, 1897. The miners were mostly of Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian and German ethnicities. Scores more miners were wounded in the attack by the posse. The massacre was a turning point in the history of the United Mine Workers (UMW).
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James McParland was an American private detective and Pinkerton agent.
The Westmoreland County coal strike of 1910–1911, or the Westmoreland coal miners' strike, was a strike by coal miners represented by the United Mine Workers of America. The strike is also known as the Slovak Strike because about 70 percent of the miners were Slovak immigrants. It began in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, on March 9, 1910, and ended on July 1, 1911. At its height, the strike encompassed 65 mines and 15,000 coal miners. Sixteen people were killed during the strike, nearly all of them striking miners or members of their families. The strike ended in defeat for the union.
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Black Fury is a 1935 American crime film directed by Michael Curtiz, and starring Paul Muni, Karen Morley, and William Gargan. It was adapted by Abem Finkel and Carl Erickson from the short story "Jan Volkanik" by Judge Michael A. Musmanno, and the play Bohunk by Harry R. Irving. The plot is based on a historic incident during a Pennsylvania walk-out in 1929, in which John Barkowski, a striking coal miner, was beaten to death by private company police.
The 1877 Shamokin uprising occurred in Shamokin, Pennsylvania, in July 1877, as one of the several cities in the state where strikes occurred as part of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.
John Barcoski was a Polish émigré miner brutally beaten to death by Pennsylvania's Coal and Iron Police on February 10, 1929. His passing and subsequent acquittal of his murderers on the first-degree murder charges provoked public indignation, which eventually led to the end of Pennsylvania's private anti-labor Coal and Iron Police system.
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Anti-union violence in the United States is physical force intended to harm union officials, union organizers, union members, union sympathizers, or their families. It has most commonly been used either during union organizing efforts, or during strikes. The aim most often is to prevent a union from forming, to destroy an existing union, or to reduce the effectiveness of a union or a particular strike action. If strikers prevent people or goods to enter or leave a workplace, violence may be used to allow people and goods to pass the picket line.
The Scranton general strike was a widespread work stoppage in 1877 by workers in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which took place as part of the Great Railroad Strike, and was the last in a number of violent outbreaks across Pennsylvania. The strike began on July 23 when railroad workers walked off the job in protest of recent wage cuts, and within three days it grew to include perhaps thousands of workers from a variety of industries.
When union violence has occurred, it has frequently been in the context of industrial unrest. Violence has ranged from isolated acts by individuals to wider campaigns of organised violence aimed at furthering union goals within an industrial dispute.
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