History's Headlines: Bethlehem Steel's violent strike of 1941

Since its founding, Bethlehem has always prided itself on its love of music. So, it is not surprising that on the evening of March 24, 1941, a crowd of 1,500, some in formal wear, packed Liberty High School Auditorium to hear Metropolitan Opera Company diva Helen Jepsen enthrall them with operatic selections from Massenet and Gounod. Arias from Jepsen's highly praised performance as Marguerite in Gounod's Faust were almost certainly on the program. If Bethlehem Steel's Charles Schwab had been there, he almost surely would have attended. A lover of operatic music, but not necessarily operas, Schwab had no desire, as the Cole Porter lyric had it, to "sleep through Wagner at the Met." He once said, "I have no interest in watching somebody taking 20 minutes to die warbling the whole time."

But Schwab, a broken man thanks to the Depression and unsuccessful stock speculations, had died in 1939 and been buried on the grounds of his estate at Loretto in western Pennsylvania. His huge New York mansion Riverside stood unwanted. When his estate had offered it to the city of New York as an official residence, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, perhaps aware of what his Depression scarred constituents would think, exclaimed "What! Me live in that?"

Read Frank Whelan's full story at WFMZ.com:
https://www.wfmz.com/features/history...