3:State Police Called In

From April 2nd to April 16th, according to all available accounts, the strike in Windber was both effective and peaceful. On the 16th, Easter Monday, however, a series of events occurred that culminated in the massacre of three miners and a young boy that evening. Many others were wounded. Private armed guards hired earlier in the strike by Berwind-White (Tanney company detectives, often mistakenly called Pinkertons) had fired into a crowd of people and passerbys assembled near the Windber jail. Immediately thereafter, at the company's request, the sheriff requested--and received--a contingent of troops from the state.

Troop "A" of the newly-formed Pennsylvania State Police quickly reached Windber from Greensburg by train, occupied the town, rode their horses through gatherings of more than two people whom they clubbed, and otherwise acted as strikebreakers. Although ostensibly stationed in Windber and elsewhere throughout the coal region in order to maintain "neutral" law and order, their real purpose--breaking the bituminous coal strike of 1906--rapidly became apparent. Moreover, the Pennsylvania State Police's own reports on its occupation of Windber indicate that these troops, exclusively American-born and English-speaking at this time, took great delight in forcefully subduing a largely immigrant working-class population of strikers.

Pennsylvania State Police, the "Cossacks," during Windber Strike of 1906. The caption reads in English "Brave murderers under the Russian law of the State of Pennsylvania. Slovák v Amerike, June 12, 1906 p. 2. Courtesy, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, Minn.

Immigrants learned of the antilabor, nativist actions of the Pennsylvania State Police in various ways. This photo, which appeared in a popular Slovak newspaper, was one of many that appeared in foreign-language newspapers that the immigrants read. Southern and eastern European miners and other workers popularly referred to these hated troops as "Cossacks" because they acted like the similarly repressive troops used by the czar against workers in Russia during the Revolution of 1905 and on other occasions. As the caption of this photo suggests, they also saw a close resemblance between the unjust laws of czarist Russia and the legal system of the state of Pennsylvania.

From April 16th on, the immigrant miners were at a great disadvantage in making known their side of the strike, the events of April 16th, the massacre itself. English-language and nativist newspapers quickly printed sensational and sometimes hysterical reports on the day's happenings, and they scathingly placed all responsibility for the company's massacre by its hired gunmen on stereotypical ignorant, foreign-born strikers, whom they now claimed had been violent, not at all peaceful, from the first day of the strike. The company had successfully made its version of events known to the Associated Press, and the country's leading newspapers had simply printed that version. The New York Times was one of many that put the company's narrative on the front page as a lead story.