Rosedale: 100 Years The downfall of 'Fighting Joe' Cauffiel

Aug. 28—This story is the second of a two-part portrait of Johnstown Mayor Joseph Cauffiel.

Armed with almost unlimited power as Johnstown's mayor and magistrate, Joseph Cauffiel had been issuing ruthless punishments to Black people for years by 1923.

A year earlier, he had sentenced two Black juveniles to be shot at sunrise on "suspicion" of criminal acts.

Cauffiel fired blanks at them at close range. One youth collapsed in fright, newspapers reported.

"Scares the hell out of them, and they'll leave," Cauffiel said at the time, according to Randy Whittle's 2005 book "Johnstown, Pennsylvania: A History, Part One."

By 1923, the city was becoming numb to Cauffiel's attention- seeking antics. He found himself in an uphill, seven-challenger battle for his mayor's seat, under constant criticism for his actions and facing dozens of lawsuits alleging that he had swindled local residents through his real estate business.

Then, on Aug. 30, 1923, a young, drunk Black man named Robert Young opened fire on police officers in the Rosedale neighborhood. The shooting claimed three lives, and another officer succumbed to a heart attack while recovering, bringing the toll to four.

Soon afterward, on Sept. 7, Cauffiel issued his now-infamous "order" banishing Black and Mexican people who had been living in the city for fewer than seven years.

It took days for The Johnstown Tribune to even mention Cauffiel's "banishment" in ink.

The Johnstown Democrat published the edict — but it was joined by an editorial scolding Cauffiel. Democrat Editor Warren Bailey was so irritated by the edict that he contacted the American Civil Liberties Union.

The moment shocked the nation, too.

'It is utterly unjust'

The proclamation drew national headlines, criticism from newspapers across the country and terse words from the NAACP and Pennsylvania Gov. Gifford Pinchot, who ordered an investigation into the order.

"It is utterly unjust to condemn and punish all members of any race ... for the crimes of a few," The Johnstown Democrat wrote.

Still, Cauffiel defended his move. He argued that the Black community was no longer safe in the city.

To Pennsylvania Highlands Community College Library Services Dean Barbara Zaborowski, who has spent years researching Johnstown's Black history, the mayor's move was absurd. Even in the 1920s, the banishment order seemed like "political suicide," she said.

"First, even though Cauffiel said that his edict didn't apply to the already established Black community — the people who had been living and working here for decades — how are they going to react?" she said.

The move also would have been a direct challenge to Johnstown's largest employer, she said.

"When you're talking about evicting 2,000 people, those are all Bethlehem Steel workers," Zaborowski said. "He was driving their workers out of town."

Yet, Cauffiel's move was almost certainly a calculated one, Whittle wrote. The timing was hardly arbitrary, either.

'Birth of a Nation'

Johnstown's early days, per some newspaper accounts, suggested relative harmony between early Johnstowners, both white and Black — the latter of whom were among the community's earliest settlers. But race relations in the northern U.S. shifted around the time of World War I.

Idled by a boll weevil infestation that eroded the South's vast plantations and lured by manufacturers in the North, Black people from Alabama, Georgia and neighboring states migrated north to fill the war-driven economy's demand for workers.

Southern powers watched with frustration as generations of cheap farm labor headed north, rail car by rail car.

One response, a Kentucky-born filmmaker's "The Birth of a Nation," became a big- budget blockbuster, captivating and frightening northerners with a narrative about the so-called dangers of "brutish" southern Black people.

The movie twisted Civil War history with harmful fiction.

Reimagining the Ku Klux Klan as a heroic, religious army, the silver-screen hit almost single-handedly revived the organization as a powerful force — not just in the South, but also in cities across the Northeast and Midwest, said Thomas Pegram, a retired Loyola University history professor who chronicled the era in his 2011 book "100 Percent American."

Unlike its more violent predecessor 50 years earlier, the "New Klan" was more of a white Protestant men's lodge that used public relations tactics and its members' political muscle to assert itself or to provoke trouble covertly, Pegram said in an interview with The Tribune-Democrat.

Much of the Klan's attention was focused on the perceived "Catholic threat."

"These were people who saw themselves as the true American citizens, and sort of biologically fitted for democracy in a way the Catholics and the Eastern European groups were not," he said.

This was happening as Cambria Steel was ramping up efforts to import Black labor to Johnstown, often 50 men at a time, to make up for the sudden halt of European immigration during World War I. The great 1919 steel strike only further complicated the effort, frustrating the company's preexisting workforce and further enflaming anti-Black sentiment.

Northern newspapers, regardless of whether they were fascinated or troubled by the Klan, spread stories about the group that only increased its public presence.

For a few years, even The Johnstown Tribune — led by Anderson Walters, a onetime Republican U.S. congressman and one of the city's most powerful men — covered the Klan's exploits extensively, with stories sometimes referencing their events as "enjoyable." A 1922 article described the appearance of a burning cross above Main Street as a "wonderful" glow.

Given that similar scenarios were playing out across the country, the Ku Klux Klan gained a powerful voting bloc that Southern Democrats and some Republican politicians across the North sought to court.

At its height, opposing political factions avoided criticizing the organization, at minimum.

"People tend to think hate groups like the Klan simply pop up throughout history," Pegram said, "but it didn't invent these issues. It feeds off them. It's very similar to the issues we're facing today, where you have these (moments) where people are seeking to protect their idea of Americanism while infringing on the rights of others who are also American."

Historical accounts show that Klaverns — local Klan chapters — endorsed candidates in Bedford, Westmoreland and Blair counties during the early 1920s.

In Johnstown, the Klan cited Cauffiel's order as a rallying cry.

Group members burned crosses on a hillside above the city the night after the Rosedale shooting, The Tribune reported.

Studies of the Klan in the years that followed the Rosedale incident showed that its ranks multiplied before fading out just as quickly years later — not just in Johnstown, but across the North.

And the moment didn't provide much of a boost for Cauffiel on Election Day. The incumbent mayor finished fourth out of seven candidates.

Cauffiel was replaced as mayor by Louis Franke in 1924.

Undeterred, he ran again in 1927. After losing in the Republican primary, Cauffiel got back on the ballot as an independent, managing to edge out both the Republican and the Democratic nominees for the job that fall.

The Johnstown Democrat newspaper raised concerns that the powerful city official used voter fraud to regain office.

In the end, it mattered little.

Cauffiel's final term was short-lived.

In March 1929, a jury found Cauffiel had secretly been taking payments from a seasoned downtown Johnstown gambling house operator, Joseph Rager, whose business had apparently never been raided by Cauffiel's active forces.

Rager said he paid Cauffiel 40% of his profits. The jury found that Cauffiel received the equivalent of $268,000 in today's dollars over one five-month period cited in court.

Cauffiel's assets were frozen.

In a plea to his brother, Daniel, he asked for help.

"The only thing I can say to you is that they caught me and I am short of money," he wrote in a March 1929 letter preserved as part of Daniel Cauffiel's personal papers archived by The Hagley Museum in Delaware.

In court and to his brother, who was not involved in the case, Joseph Cauffiel maintained he was being framed by his enemies. He said his business dealings were being pulled into focus by underworld "low-lives" he spent his career fighting to drain from Johnstown — crooked cops, gamblers and political foes.

Jurors disagreed. Cauffiel was found guilty of extortion, perjury and using illicit funds to support his re-election campaign. The Cambria County court conviction stripped him of his powers as mayor, and he was ordered to spend up to two years in jail.

He appealed. But in November 1929, a panel of seven Pennsylvania Superior Court judges sided with the Cambria County court's ruling, forcing Cauffiel to remain behind bars.

Cauffiel contended that he remained Johnstown's mayor, even behind bars. But by 1931, his health was failing.

Cauffiel was pardoned by Pinchot and released to his Moxham home, where he received ongoing care until his death on July 9, 1932. His death certificate shows he succumbed to bladder cancer. Cauffiel was returned to where he started — a plot near his family homestead in Jenner Township.

Across the country, a few newspapers paid notice, among them the New York Times.

But by 1932, the nation's focus was preoccupied by the era of organized crime, bootlegging and violent gangland murders that Prohibition inspired.

Six months after Cauffiel's death, Congress had seen enough of Prohibition, passing federal legislation that would lay the groundwork to repeal the Volstead Act that had banned alcoholic drinks. The Noble Experiment had ended.