Massacre at Lattimer, An American Rite of Passage: An Interview with Michael Novak

Why do so many kids from Pennsylvania make great quarterbacks?” Michael Novak, writer, teacher, theologian, and social philosopher leaned forward as he posed the question and then offered an answer. “Because they’re hard realists. You’re down by fourteen points with seven minutes to play. So, what’s new? That’s the way life has always been in this part of the world. You just lower your head and play football the best way you know how­ – tough-minded, don’t panic.”

Although Novak has traveled the world in his varied career and his writings reflect an enormous range of interests, he has always acknowledged the importance of his Pennsylvania roots. “Before they embrace the whole human community,” he has observed, “people begin by embracing a particular world, a particular tradition within it.” His life’s work – as a writer and scholar – has been a testament to the deep connection he holds with his own ethnic heritage. Novak grew up, the eldest of five children, in Johnstown, Cambria County, and his “particular world” consisted of the strong spiritual and cultural traditions of his Slovak immigrant grandparents.

Novak’s parents nurtured that tradi­tion and emphasized the importance of education. After attending both public and parochial schools in western Penn­sylvania, he enrolled in a preparatory school on the campus of Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana. In 1956, he graduated summa cum laude from Stonehill College and two years later earned a degree in theology from Gregorian University in Rome, graduat­ing cum laude. Novak further pursued history and religious studies at Catholic University of America and at Harvard University, where he received a master’s degree in 1966 in history and philosophy of religion.

In the public domain, Novak has served both Democratic and Republican administrations, heading the United States Delegation to the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, in 1981 and 1982, and to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in 1986. In 1994, at a ceremony at Buckingham Palace, he was presented the distinguished Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. For several sum­mers he has led an Institute on the Free Society in Eastern Europe.

The author of twenty-five books and hundreds of articles, Novak goads the intellectual imagination of hi.s readers, forcing them to ask basic questions about everything from the meaning of liberty, to the ethical implications of sports, to the moral challenge of business. Novak’s books provoke serious thought. In The Experience of Nothingness (1970), he looks with a critical eye at America’s contemporary cultural institutions and the absence of meaning in modern file. The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (1972) explores with great passion the merits of cultural diversity. His 1976 The Joy of Sports: End Zones, Bases, Baskets, Balls, and the Consecration of the American Spirit praises life’s lessons that can be learned from achievements in competition and the heroic efforts it incites. In his highly influential The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982), he suggested, long before the fall of the Soviet Union, the reasons why socialist systems are inherently bound to fail, and why democratic capitalism, not socialism, is the best hope for humankind. Confession of a Catholic (1983) offers his reflections on each line of the Nicene Creed.

Of all his books, though, none has meant more to Michael Novak than The Guns of Lattimer (1978), which tells the story of a “sudden flash of bloodshed that erupted near Hazleton, Pennsyl­vania, on the scorching afternoon of September 10, 1897.” On that Friday, under a blazing sim, four hundred anthracite workers – most of them Poles, Slovaks, and Hungarians, hardly able to speak English – marched towards the mines of Lattimer, a hamlet in Luzerne County, tucked away in the mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania.

Unarmed, and proudly bearing the American flag, they marched from the small village of Harwood to Lattimer in support of fellow miners, mostly Italian, who also worked for the Lehigh Valley Coal Company. They protested poor working conditions, low wages, and frequent layoffs. Their major grievance, however, was a daily tax of three cents approved by the General Assembly of Pennsylvania and imposed on all alien adult male workers.

Waiting for the dissenters on the road leading into Lattimer were Sheriff James Martin and his deputies. With the first signs of unrest at the collieries, and at the behest not of civic officials but of coal company managers, Martin had pro­claimed a state of disorder under an 1860 riot act. His next step was to form a posse, drawing on influential citizens of Hazleton, most of whom directly or indirectly owed their livelihoods to the hard coal interests. An estimated ninety men were issued new rifles, heavy­-shelled bullets, and buckshot.

As the band of marchers approached the entrance to Lattimer, Sheriff Martin ordered them to halt. The front of the column stopped to hear the proclama­tion, but the rear column kept pushing forward. Within minutes, deputies aimed and, fired directly into the throng. Nineteen men died and at least thirty­-nine were wounded. Many miners were shot in the back. In a subsequent trial, the individuals responsible for the massacre – the most serious act of labor violence in the history of Pennsylvania, and one the largest labor massacres in United States history-were acquitted. Ethnic identity is nowhere more central in Novak’s work than in The Guns of Lattimer, in which he sets the scene with highly detailed and sensitive vignettes about the lives of the immigrant miners, and in which their day-to-day tribula­tions, hopes, and dreams are brought forth with astonishing poignancy. On the occasion of the one-hundred-year anniversary of the massacre, Michael Novak remembers not only the chal­lenges and joys of writing the book that commemorates the tragedy, but the events of his growing up within his own Slovak heritage – events that have created the powerful sensibilities that make this work so engaging. This interview took place at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, December 11, 1996.

Are your family roots are in Pennsylvania?

Exactly when my grandfather, Stephen Novak, came to the Johnstown area is not quite clear; probably late in the 1870s or early 1880s. It seems he came to Maryland first, just over the line, and worked in a rural area and then came up to work in the mines in the Johnstown area. My grandmother on my father’s side came here as a young woman in response to a request – “Gentleman seeking wife” – sent through a priest. The ad got back to her in Slovakia. She got off the boat and a pastor from Passaic met her and put her up for the night and then on a train for Johnstown. That’s the way the story comes down. My grandfather’s first wife had died and left him with three children. With my grand­mother, Johanna, he had four children. Stephen died in a carriage accident a little over a year after my father was born. So, grandmother had to go to work to support the boys, and the boys all went to work early in life.

On my mother’s side, part of the family had been in Johnstown since approximately the Civil War period. I’m a little vague on the history of the Timchaks, and my mother’s family. My mother’s father was Ben Sakmar. The Sakmar brothers came to Johnstown just after the turn of the century. Two brothers went to Connecticut and two to Johnstown. In my mother’s family, there were three children, and my mother and my father were childhood sweethearts from about sixth or seventh grade.

Did they know each other in church and school?

Yes, but my father was pulled out of school in sixth grade to go to work to help support the family.

Where did he work?

He worked in the Sanitary Dairy Company. A cold job, he made up ice cream treats for schools and things like that. And then he worked later for Glosser Brothers Department Store, in the cheese department. About the time of my birth he went to work for Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and was with them for the rest of his life. My mother did well in school and graduated from high school and went to work as a secretary – she was quite popular and successful. In the fashion of those days, my father was always very proud that she didn’t have to work once they were married.

How many children were in your family?

There were five of us, four boys and a girl: Rich, a missionary priest who was slain in Bangladesh in 1964; Jim, a business executive in the Far East and a writer; Ben, a lawyer in State College; and Mary Ann, a deputy secretary at the Department of Energy under President Jimmy Carter.

How did you learn about the value of education?

My father was making eighteen dollars a week when he married, was working six days a week. But before they had a home, really, the first purchase he made was a set of Harvard Classics. He loved to read, because he had had to break off his education to go to work after his father died. He finally did get his high school diploma at age fifty-eight or so, through equivalency and writing exams.

Do you consider your father an intellectual influence?

My father loved to read about history and encouraged us to read. He offered me one hundred dollars if I would read all the Harvard Classics. I never did. They were too difficult. But just the thought that I ought to read the best things was a wonderful guide. I had excellent teachers both in the private and public schools. In high school at Notre Dame, the teachers were of university quality.

Did any one particular volume of the Harvard Classics that you did read make an impression on you?

It was more the impression of the set as a whole. To this day, I like to be surrounded by books. 1 have a strange theory, but I believe you learn things by osmosis, that being surrounded by books – just seeing their titles – influ­ences you when you’re writing and thinking. That set of Harvard Classics and then another set of books that I really loved as a boy were the Gary Grayson football books.

How did you come to those?

My father was an insurance man and he used to visit homes. From time to time he would come home with books somebody was throwing out. Some of them were just junky. But he hated to lose a book. He treated books with great reverence. Well, anyway, he got me this [Gary Grayson] football series. To me, they were so stirring. Gary Grayson was such a wonderful straight-shooter and so concentrated in difficult moments. These books went together very well with Ivanhoe, and The Knights of the Roundtable.

What was it like growing up in Johnstown?

Before he was married, my father took my mother to Southmont, a lovely area on the hill above the mills in the valley, and promised to move her there. Within seven years he bought a big house there, on Arlington Street. He believed it was better to own something good, and save and pay for it, than to rent and end up with nothing. He was considered bold because ours was the first Slovak family to move out of the Cambria City­-Morrellville area, where the Slavic immigrants lived.

My father had been born in Cambria City. In a way, that was home. Cambria City is a straight flat stretch within Johnstown right along the river bank, just downstream from where the Johnstown Flood of 1889 got dammed up by the Stony Creek Bridge. We still go back almost every year for the ethnic folk festival in September, where every one of the sixteen churches in the ten-block area is set up with food tables and amusement games.

Doesn’t that area have many churches? Aren’t a number of them Catholic?

We have relationships with a lot of those churches. For instance, I went to school at St. Columba’s, which is the Irish church named for the Irish monk, Columba. I was confirmed at St. Emerich, the Hungarian church. I was brought often to St. Stephen’s, the ancestral Slovak church of my mother and father. My cousin is now pastor at Immaculate Conception, the German church a block away. My Aunt Ann went to St. Mary’s, the Greek Byzantine Church.

How did your family perceive and value education?

My cousin, Gene Novak, became president of an advertising firm in New York, having begun as a writer during World War II for the Stars and Stripes [the armed forces’ publication] in Europe. When he was ready to graduate from eighth grade, the principal planned to send him to the vocational high school, which meant tools and a trade. My father raised a terrible stink, first with Gene’s father, my father’s brother Johnny, who worked in the mill. Johnny wasn’t as well-read as my father. My father raised hell about getting Gene into an academic high school. Gene was college material, but my Uncle Johnny didn’t know what to do. So my father went to the principal and he fought; he forced him to put Gene in the academic high school. Gene did very well and told me this story himself.

Your cousin wasn’t encouraged to pursue academics?

He wasn’t tracked for academics. They did that in those days. Slovak boys were sent to the vocational high school. As a matter of fact, most of the Slovak families were probably content with that because they didn’t know higher education and they thought a good trade is something that you can always have. They could understand that. You could always fall back on that and if you’re out of work, you can do things. That was a fairly common attitude. But my father really resisted. Every one of his kids was going to go to college and he tried to get everybody he could to do the same. He was an apostle of education. That, and life insurance, which was his business. And saving money. These were his three great worldly passions.

Why did your father choose the insurance business?

I truly don’t know what first interested him in Metropolitan Life. I think he didn’t want to go into the mills like his brother Johnny. I remember Uncle Johnny telling me about the mills – a young fellow losing his balance and falling into the open hearth, terrible bums, and people moving iron beams around and hitting someone. Johnny didn’t want his youngest brother, my father, to go into the mills. The other brother, Charlie, worked at Glosser Brothers Department Store as a buyer and eventually Charlie changed his name to a more Jewish name – all the buyers that he dealt with in New York and Chicago were Jewish. I’ve always thought it was an interesting twist, choosing a Jewish name.

Did Johnstown have a Jewish community?

Johnstown has a good Jewish commu­nity. One of my father’s friends, a rabbi, published a beautiful family memoir about it. We lived chiefly in a Jewish neighborhood. Until I went to Harvard, I had never heard the term WASP [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant] coined by E. Digby Baltzell (author and University of Pennsylvania sociologist], who died just last year. He really opened my eyes. He made me look at Pennsylvania anew. I read his books when l was at Harvard. He also helped me see Boston in a totally different way.

For Baltzell, the connection between religion and culture is almost like the genetic coding that a culture receives.

Cultural coding, yes. The difference he pointed out between the influence of religion on the development of Boston and Philadelphia [in Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, published in 1979) was wonderful. I’m happy I had a chance to tell him how much his books meant to me.

What did a college education mean in your community and family?

The story of my cousin Gene is indicative of the tracking system most faced. In our case, my father’s children really looked forward to college. My predicament – to compare generations – ­was very different from my son’s. For me, going to college was a great opportu­nity that my father never had. I loved it. All my brothers and my sister were hungry for college. Since the seventies and eighties, for youngsters with a middle class background, it’s been practically mandatory to go to college. My son had almost no choice but to go to college. It wasn’t a matter of routine in the fifties.

Who were your mentors?

Let me begin with high school. When I went out to Notre Dame I entered what was called “the little seminary,” begin­ning in ninth grade. A rather rare thing. Nowadays it’s not done at all, but in those days it was still possible to begin studying for the priesthood so young. I was quite good in football. I had big hands and was very fast. Coach Weigel at McKeesport, where we were living when I was in the eighth grade, had already come and watched my eighth grade football team play and talked to me about coming to the high school. 1 think that day I scored three touchdowns in the part of the game he was watching. I was just fast and if you put the ball anywhere near me I would catch it. It was a matter of honor with me that anything my hands touched, I caught. But I felt if l would have gotten interested in football and girls I just wouldn’t be serious. I needed to go to the little seminary. I guess it was romantic for me, too. I had a cousin out at Notre Dame in the semi­nary and so I went out there. It was a great prep school. We took Latin, Greek, and French, with a very solid program in literature and the history of ideas.

This school was located in South Bend?

Yes. It’s right on the Notre Dame campus. The Holy Cross priests who ran the seminary were not only teachers, but researchers. So, the idea of leading an intellectual life was very much a voca­tion. They were great men and great teachers. I really liked it. So, that’s where my intellectual tastes and interests were located.

Did you drop your interest in football?

Oh no, I played on the seminary team. We had seminary leagues. Being on the sports team was good for me because it gave me a “cover.” Since I was bookish, I would have been teased mercilessly for being a brain. But my cover was I was good in sports.

Did you spend your youth in western Pennsylvania until you went away to school?

Yes. I was raised in Johnstown mostly and then in sixth grade my father was transferred to the Indiana [Pennsylvania] office and later to McKeesport. He’d get all kinds of awards; he was a good salesman.

Did your parents live their entire lives in Pennsylvania?

Yes. Except in the last years, my father bought a condo in Florida and he just couldn’t believe how somebody who grew up as poor as he rud could afford to do that: have two homes, and go to winter in Florida.

That must have been a great change for him.

My father wouldn’t let a nickel go until the buffalo cried “ouch.” He used to say that you should save five cents out of every dollar. He would keep a little tin of change and empty his change into this little cup, and then he’d put that in the bank. He would give me a dime to go to a football game and say “Bring home the change,” or “I expect you to bring that back.” You know, if we children worked, it went into the house savings. It wasn’t for us to spend.

Did you work at part-time jobs?

Yes. Always. He insisted on that. My kids always did, too.

When and how did the story of the Lattimer Massacre come to your attention?

Not until I was well out of college. I read about it in graduate school, proba­bly in the early seventies. I was interested in ethnicity, and was writing my book on that subject [The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in the Seventies], which came out in 1972. I read Victor Greene’s book [The Slavic Community on Strike: Immigrant Labor in Pennsylvania Anthracite, 1968). There’s a little bit in there about the Lattimer mines massacre. I had a guide to labor violence in American history, listing more than three hundred episodes, and it wasn’t in there. I looked in the standard encyclopedias and couldn’t find a mention. So I wrote to Victor and said, “Are you sure this happened?” And he referred me to a privately printed pamphlet by Edward Pinkowski. It had footnote references to the Hazleton and Pottsville newspapers. These and other newspapers with accounts of the massacre were held in the Pennsylvania State Library. I had had a research assistant, Kathleen Kennedy, when I was teaching at Stanford in 1968 who returned home to Harrisburg. She checked the archives for me and photocopied the articles. She did a terrific job.

Were newspapers your only sources?

Yes. And then I found through friends, by accident, stories in newspapers from as far away as Utica, New York. And so I pieced together my own little archive. Just about that time Pennsylvania Heritage published an article by George Turner [see “The Lattimer Tragedy of 1897” in the Summer 1977 edition]. I was so grateful to him because, again, I had that nagging feeling that, if it hasn’t been written about, it doesn’t really exist. So, the fact that such an eminent historian and serious professional journalist as George Turner wrote about the massacre gave credibility. I felt I needed that to show my publishers. I thought, if I don’t write up the full account – from the files in my possession – the memory may perish. I have an obligation to the material. Let me stop for a year, and just do it.

Wasn’t this a sharp turn from everything else you’d been writing?

Well, I thought it would fit everything else I was doing, in a way. My long-term ambition was to write about a theology of American culture. This work would get me into labor history: I thought at the time that the story of labor was one of the less-told stories. In the seventies [when the book was published] the old labor intellectuals of the thirties were nearly gone. You could count them on the fingers of one hand. When I was at the Rockefeller Foundation in 1973, I tried to get a program going to offer grants to intellectuals, writers, and professors to go into labor history, but I couldn’t get the AFL-CIO and the others interested in it as sponsors. Nobody particularly wanted to do it. Labor was out of fashion in the 1970s. The unions were getting burned by intellectuals at that time. They were being written about very negatively and they didn’t really trust the Rockefeller Foundation, even though their president was on the board of the foundation. Or maybe it was just the intellectuals they didn’t trust. There they were surely right, at that time.

And so you wrote the book?

I wrote it, and I’ve gotten a handful of touching letters over the years from people around the country whose families had been involved. Many had felt a certain shame, and now felt a weight was lifted from them. In that locality, people had preferred to let the subject die.

Why did you introduce a fictional couple within a work of nonfiction?

Originally, I wanted to find enough material to tell the story from the point of view of one of the Slavic protagonists. However, few of them spoke English, and no extended interviews with any of them were ever published. A few translated phrases were quoted, but there simply wasn’t enough material to show their feelings about events, their own position, and the claims of justice. So I thought I would use a little family history to mark off one or two characters who are fictional, and – to fit historic­ally – are cut from the cloth of north­eastern Pennsylvania. All the other people in the book are historical figures, and virtually every sentence in the book is backed up by a source in the published record.

What about the point of view of the protagonist?

We had to tell it from the point of view of the slaughtered miners because that was the side of the story that had not been told. If it were told from the point of view of the deputies and police, who were either Irish or English, it would be a different story. They looked on the slaughtered miners as a menace­ – ruffians and law-breakers – and themselves as defending good order. It is a very different story, depending upon your point of view, even if you agree about all the relevant fads.

What was the critical reaction to the book?

The reviews were very good. Robert Nisbet, whom I deeply admired, gave a glowing comment. He was very fond of that book, and thought it helped add flesh to his own ideas about community, which most students have encountered in The Quest for Community. He thought of me as a brother-in-arms, which really touched me. James Michener gave a splendid comment. The actor Jack Palance, it turns out, is from Lattimer Mines, and he bought a movie option on it. I wish someday he’d go back and make that film.

In your introduction to the new edition you write that it is a story worthy of dramatization.

It touches on a number of important themes that still are very important in American history. At Lattimer came the first major use of the National Guard to quell a civil riot. The strike marked the beginning of the right of women to open banking accounts in their own name. This came about through the Slovak miners, because it was the women in the Slovak families who kept the money – men would bring the money home and turn it over to their wives. The episode also stimulated the rise of the Pennsyl­vania State Police, to fill the gaps between local police jurisdictions. In 1902, President Teddy Roosevelt sided with the miners, and Lattimer had been the major turning point in the union’s organizing history. Yet at Lattimer, the Slavic miners were on their own. When they suffered injustice, they recognized it as such. But they were not cry-babies.

You write about Mary Septak.

Big Mary, as she was known. By the best evidence, she was the instigator who drove the men … shamed the men into marching and to striking. She led the women to make a big demonstration when the men wouldn’t do it. She held the National Guard at bay because they were loathe to move on the women. She set a precedent for the power of strong women in politics.

Would you comment on collective versus individual action? Are Americans more comfortable talking about individuals in history rather than groups or collective action?

It seemed to me that in the eastern and southern European community there was a somewhat lesser sense of the individ­ual, but a very strong sense of family. The family had greater psychological weight than the individual. You didn’t do things without the approval of your mom and pop. Reality was the family, and anything merely individual was an epiphenome­non. That’s a different feeling about life than the Anglo-American’s strong sense of individual freedom.

But that strong sense of belonging, of keeping people within the group, could also be a powerful positive force. It enabled the Slovak miners to cope in this country, and to make a united presence felt – one that neither the English nor the Trish before them had been able to muster. The United Mine Workers began to prosper when the Slavs went on strike and made it stick.

It’s interesting to note that the Slavs were marching to support the Italian workers in Lattimer. Was it unusual for two ethnic groups to work so closely together?

There was a sense of miner solidarity. It was miners together, and that overrode ethnic considerations.

Although you have authored at least twenty-five books, you claim that nothing gave you more satisfaction than writing The Guns of Lattimer. Why?

I loved the chance to pay a debt to Pennsylvania, and to my grandfather’s generation. These miners came home from work as the sun was going down, at dusk or even in the dark. They had gone into the mines before daylight, and would come home stiff and dirty and peel off their clothes, wash, eat supper, go to bed, get up, and go back into the mines. Such lives deserve a tribute.

Did anything you discover while writing The Guns of Lattimer surprise you, or challenge your basic assumptions?

I was surprised at how little socialism had to do with it. In other areas of the country, such as California and New York, the socialists were involved in labor issues. Also, I hadn’t thought about the ethnic: differences among the miners before, the different social status, translated into specialties and pay scales. I wasn’t shocked, but until I saw it, I wouldn’t have known. And I felt a certain unexpected sympathy for the mine owners. l mean, these guys were often born just as poor and just as ignorant and Jived in just as mean conditions as the workers. But they really were bright and inquisitive. In one way or another, they got an education and they figured out new devices for mining, for how to locate coal and how to get it out, and which kinds of coal to use where, and how to market it. They were admirable pioneers. And some of them were also, in human terms, sympathetic, and some of them were kindly towards their workers. Their wives, typically, were even more philanthropic in raising money and sponsoring charities, and so forth. So I became a little more suspicious of the language of class struggle. That language is not complex enough to pick up what happens in America.

As much as the story is seen through the miners’ eyes, it’s also the story of Sheriff James Martin who, for all his imperfections, found himself in an extremely complex and difficult situation. You learn a certain sympathy for all these people when seen in context, the world as they knew it. Events got out of control; I can see why in that generation they’d want to forget them.

What about the miners who were shot down?

A great injustice was done to these men, fifty-eight of them shot down. But they weren’t whiners. There was a trial, and while they weren’t vindicated, if they had been in Central Europe, it would have been much worse. They wouldn’t have looked forward to as bright a future as they felt their children would have here. They had a much more gritty sense of America. They did not idealize or romanticize it; but they had a lot of hope in it. And that difference between Utopia and hope is the crucial difference. People who have a hard realism don’t expect as much and aren’t disappointed as much.

In your introduction to the new edition of The Guns of Lattimer, you hoped for a “splendid” centennial. How do you remember a painful, tragic event and turb it into something that is a public observance or celebration?

Here were men who marched under the American flag and were proud to do it. People who didn’t speak English … immigrants. They were proud to march under that flag and they believed it protected them. On the other side were deputies made panicky by the strikes, day after day, which they’d never seen to be so persistent. And they were being driven by the mine owners to keep some order. There were random acts of violence in the countryside. You can sympathize with the deputies’ lot. It looks to me as though the final firing was more by accident than planned. The evidence seems contrary to the idea that on a predetermined signal they fired. So, here you have a tragic event, but it happened in the name of good things. The realists of those days did not idealize, they did not have infantile expectations of America. They expected America to offer more justice then elsewhere, not perfect justice … there isn’t any such thing … and, you know, in the end America did not fail them. They had courage to stand up for their rights and stand up for their brothers who were suffering – who were not of their kind in ethnic terms. That’s a good lesson for all times and places.

The consequence was to bring about a settlement of the strikes in 1902 through the intervention of the president of the United States. The fact that there had been blood spilled in the Lattimer massacre blocked the road of further violence. Lattimer offers one of those great, recurrent lessons in history: It reminds me of the Passover meal. You slay the lamb and you taste the bitters. You get to the Promised Land. But it’s not easy. Lattimer was a Passover feast for Americans – a rite of passage for America – a Good Friday.

For Further Reading

Baltzell, E. Digby. Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia. New York: The Free Press, 1979.

Meltzer, Milton. Bread – and Roses: The Struggle of American Labor. New York: Knopf, 1967.

Morawska, Ewa T. For Bread with Butter: The Life-Worlds of East Central Europeans in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1890-1940. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Novak, Michael. The Experience of Nothingness. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.

____. The Guns of Lattimer. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1996.

____. The Joy of Sports: End Zones, Bases, Baskets, Balls, and the Consecra­tion of the American Spirit. New York; Basic Books, 1976.

____. The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.

____. A Theology for Radical Politics. New York: Herder and Herder, 1969.

Pinkowski, Edward. The Lattimer Massacre. Philadelphia: Sunshine Press, 1950.

Brent D. Glass has served as executive direc­tor of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission since 1987. He is also State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO) for the Commonwealth. From 1976 to 1980, he served as Deputy SHPO for North Carolina. He has written articles and books on urban, industrial, and public history. He is a frequent contributor to Pennsylvania Heritage.