A shameful slice of Johnstown history
“BANISHED FROM JOHNSTOWN: RACIST BACKLASH IN PENNSYLVANIA (AMERICAN HERITAGE)”
By Cody McDevitt The History Press ($23.99)
Labor Day marks the 97th anniversary of the most shameful episode in Cambria County history. On Sept. 7, 1923, Johnstown Mayor Joseph Cauffiel ordered all black people and Mexican people who had lived in the city for fewer than seven years to leave immediately.
Most southwestern Pennsylvanians are unaware of this sorry episode, which has been erased from the public memory through willful amnesia and conscious neglect. Commendably, Cody McDevitt, a former reporter for the Somerset Daily American, has rescued it from the dustbin of history.
His new book, “Banished from Johnstown, Racist Backlash in Pennsylvania,’’ is essential reading — not only for what it says about Johnstown then, but also for what it says about who we are today. Cauffiel’s blatant flouting of the Constitution as well as state and federal laws shows what can happen when legitimate economic, racial and social anxieties are exploited by racist demagogues seeking political advantage.
As Mr. McDevitt notes, many families in the western Pennsylvania counties abutting the Mason-Dixon Line had been sympathetic to the Confederacy during the Civil War. The latent hostility toward African Americans finally exploded into the open immediately after World War I, when black families fled the Jim Crow South seeking safety and greater economic opportunity. More than a million black families had moved North by the 1920s. Johnstown’s African American population swelled from a handful of families to about 3,000 people by 1923. Many of the newcomers were recruited by Bethlehem Steel and other industries to address a labor shortage created by the United States’ strict limitations on European immigration.
The influx of black and Mexican labor from the South infuriated working-class white people. They blamed African Americans and Mexicans for depressing wages and taking their jobs, even though the minority laborers were consigned to the lowest-paying positions.
The seething anger led to the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan in Pennsylvania and other Northern states. In Johnstown, Klan membership grew to an estimated 1,500 by the 1920s. The Klan was a growing political force.
Both of Johnstown’s newspapers, the Democrat and the Tribune, condemned Klan activity. But they stoked racial tensions by highlighting crimes committed by black and Mexican people. News coverage of a crime spike in Rosedale, where most of the African Americans and Mexicans lived in squalor, fed the tinderbox in the summer of 1923. Robert Young provided the spark.
Young, a ne’er-do-well Kentuckian employed at the Cambria Steel Works, got into a loud argument with his wife, accusing her of adultery. Young ran off and got drunk on moonshine. When he returned, a second argument erupted. The police responded. A shootout ensued. Young shot six officers before he was shot dead. Four policemen died.
A week later, Cauffiel — a shady businessman widely suspected of being a
Klansman — issued his edict. He not only ordered all African Americans and Mexicans who had arrived within the past seven years to leave immediately, but also prohibited black people from all public gatherings except for church service, and required all black people visiting the city to register with the mayor or police chief.
McDevitt connects the dot between then and now with subtlety and perspicuity. Cauffiel’s order was clearly illegal, but county, state and federal officials were too cowardly to stop it. The steel companies were silent. Cauffiel demonized black people as violent drug fiends and justified his arrogation of power by declaring: “I’m the one that’s responsible for law and order.’’
When Gov. Gifford Pinchot said he would investigate, Cauffiel lashed out. He denied responsibility, and blamed the governor and the steel companies.
The Pennsylvania Department of Justice issued a censure letter, but it was too little, too late. The damage had been done. An estimated 1,500 or more African Americans had fled Johnstown. Nobody ever determined precisely where they went, but accepted wisdom was that some returned to the South and others moved west to Pittsburgh. (Most of the Mexican people stayed, protected by Bethlehem Steel and the Mexican consul.)
Johnstown’s reputation was shredded. “The Friendly City’’ had become a national and international symbol of racial intolerance. Cauffiel was compared to Mussolini and Russian czars.
Cauffiel’s ethnic cleansing backfired politically. He was soundly defeated in the Sept. 18 primary, finishing a distant fourth. He was re-elected mayor in 1928 but left office two years later following his conviction of perjury and extortion. Cauffiel served 18 months in prison before Gov. Pinchot pardoned him.
Assessing the incident’s impact, Mr. McDevitt sees a community in perpetual denial. There are no monuments or annual commemorations related to Rosedale. Who wants to be reminded grandpa was a racist? But there still are white militias and Klan recruitment fliers and Confederate flags flapping in the Johnstown breeze — a tableau that recalls Faulkner’s timeless observation: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’’
Steve Halvonik is a former Post-Gazette reporter and editor who teaches journalism at Point Park University.