Apr 3, 2023 4 min read

Ed Yankovich has trouble remembering the last big Mitchell Day celebration. Was it five years ago, 10 years ago? Yankovich, former president of the United Mine Workers district headquartered in Uniontown, was unable to pin it down.

“It was somewhere in that period of time,” he said the other day, speaking on the telephone from his home in Connellsville.

The retired labor leader did recall the location: Waynesburg. The Greene County county seat is proximate to the sole remaining union coal mine in the region, the one-time center of the coal and coke trade in the United States.

Starting in the latter half of the 19th century and for many decades thereafter, Southwestern Pennsylvania dominated the industry. The Connellsville and Klondike coal fields produced the high-grade coke that enabled Pittsburgh to become the steelmaking capital of the world.

Fayette County and to a lesser extent Westmoreland, Washington, and Greene counties put the black in the black and gold.

As for Mitchell Day, it honored John Mitchell, the mine workers’ president at the turn of the 20th century and celebrated for perhaps his greatest achievement: the eight-hour workday for miners.

Mitchell Day is every April 1. It remains a paid day off for union miners, even if nobody knows why.

It was once a big deal. In 1935, when the union was still struggling to wrest recognition from recalcitrant coal companies, Mitchell Day attracted a crowd of 50,000 to Brownsville, both marchers and spectators.

The following year, with UMW President John L. Lewis in attendance, another large crowd (again estimated at 50,000) converged on Greensburg.

Crowds of that size are hard to fathom nowadays. First is the matter of accommodations.

How on earth did 50,000 people fit into downtown Brownsville? According to the Post-Gazette, 25,000 attended the 1936 Lewis speech at Offutt Field in Greensburg. Offutt Field is still there, practically in the center of town. It probably hasn’t changed much in size these many years later. It’s hard to figure how 25,000 men, women, and children might have squeezed into the available space.

(There’s always the possibility that the numbers were inflated, either by union-friendly reporters or by organizers eager to score publicity points. It is interesting and perhaps instructive to note that the Pittsburgh paper and local papers agreed on crowd size. Maybe the reporters collaborated to tell a fib, all in an effort to fend off what might have seemed the irritating inquiries of office-bound editors.)

Beyond logistics, there’s the question of heat. What was it that generated so much attention and controversy that masses of people would literally pour into the streets?

Part of the answer has nothing to do with controversy at all. Large public gatherings were what people did in those days. Even local political meetings generated sizable crowds. It was entertainment, pure and simple.

Aside from that and specific to Mitchell Day in 1935 and 1936, these were years of maximum engagement for the UMW and the American labor movement in general. The mine workers’ union was in the middle of pulling off the biggest comeback in history: Left for dead in the Roaring Twenties, the UMW had risen to new heights of influence and power by the mid-thirties, thanks to Lewis’ response to the Great Depression and the New Deal under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Local UMW leader William Hynes told the Brownsville crowd, “If I were the president of the United States, I’d crush the hell out of every [tyrannical] corporation.”

In Greensburg a year later, Lewis gave voice to his determination to organize heretofore unorganized “steel, aluminum, and cement” workers.

Despite a steady rain, the crowd urged Lewis to continue to speak. “Go on, go on!” miners shouted.

Today, in 2023, these Mitchell Day celebrations are far in the rearview mirror. We can read about them. But we cannot experience them. The fervor is over, the enthusiasms are spent, the crowds have all dispersed. John L. Lewis, Billy Hynes, and Franklin Roosevelt are long dead. We march to a different beat.

Richard Robbins, who lives in Uniontown, is the author, most recently, of “Troubled Times: The Struggle for Wages, Recognition, and Power in the Age of Coal and Coke.” He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.