Phillip Bonosky wanted to be a Catholic priest growing up during the Great Depression amid the slag heaps of a nearby steel mill in Duquesne, a gritty steel town 12 miles southeast of Pittsburgh in the Monongahela Valley, but instead, he became an internationally known socialist writer whose work went unpublished by mainstream publishing houses in the United States for one reason — Bonosky was a communist.
His novel, Burning Valley, remained unpublished in the United States until 1998 when the University of Illinois Press reprinted the work as part of its series “The Radical Left Reconsidered.” Bonosky filled a literary void because few authors at the time were writing about the labor movement and the issues facing the working man. The working class lacked heroes but Bonosky found his heroes in the workers themselves who struggled to form unions in the face of strong opposition by steel companies.
When the novel was originally published, it was criticized as “anti-Catholic propaganda” and an attempt “to ridicule Chrisian teachings.” When it was reissued, one reviewer wrote Burning Valley was a “thoughtful” tale about conflict between poor workers and the Catholic Church. It also told a story about the struggle of eastern European immigrants and African Americans to stop a steel company from evicting residents in an industrial town so it could increase production by expanding the mill.
The book is a coming-of-age novel about an altar boy, Benedict Bulmanis, a devout Catholic from a working-class Lithuanian family who turns from Catholicism to Communism after his church refuses to stand up for the steel workers who are fighting to form a union. Bulmanis no longer felt the deep spiritual feeling, the odor of burning incense and candle wax, the smell of wilting flowers on the altar or the peaceful serenity that made his skin tingle when he entered a church. He tasted the acrid smell of sulfur in the air spewing from the Duquesne Works, where his father worked for forty years, twelve hours a day, six days a week while raising eight children.
He saw the hardship the families of steel workers were forced to live with. The memories provided the realism he needed. He believed the church was supposed to side with workers, but Catholicism was the avowed enemy of Communism and provided workers with a false hope for social justice so he rejected his faith.
While he may have been an unknown literary figure in America, Burning Valley was a bestseller in socialist countries. Bonosky found the recognition in eastern Europe that he was denied in America. Soviet publishers printed 100,000 copies of his book which would have been a bestseller in the U.S and would have topped the best seller list at The New York Times. Other socialist countries followed suit. Editions published in China, Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. When he passed through customs in East Germany, an officer looked at the name on his passport and at once recognized him.
“Bonosky, didn’t you write Burning Valley?” The officer had read it in German, and there was a big discussion in the German press about it. So, there was a literary life that existed for me, but not here in America. I am still unknown here,” said Bonosky. Communist publishing houses embraced the novel because its theme was ideologically sympathetic to workers and critical of capitalism. At the same time his work gave readers an insight into the thinking of American blue-collar workers and their struggle for a better life.
“What, in sum, was it like to be a Marxist in the HUAC years? You were living in this reality . . . the rawness of the struggle was debilitating. You were in the midst of a trauma,” he said. The House Un-American Activities Committee subpoenaed suspected communists interrogating them whether they were, or ever had been, members of the Communist Party. If they admitted under oath that they were once communists, congressmen demanded they name names of others in the party.
The late 1940s and early 1950s was not a good time to be a communist in Pittsburgh. They faced political isolation and were ostracized and watched by the government. Some party members were tried for sedition or faced deportation if they were not American citizens.
The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was beginning to heat up. The Korean War began in 1950 when North Korea invaded the south sending American troops reeling. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953 for espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union, the same year Burning Valley was published.
McCarthyism sent liberals and progressives running for cover. Americans in the 1950s feared a social revolution and conformity created a “black silence of fear.” Pittsburgh became the “violent epicenter” of McCarthyism and was known as the “Mecca of the Inquisition” for its heavy-handed treatment of communists, Progressives, liberals and the foreign-born who faced the wrath of anti-communist zealots and the threats of prosecution for sedition or deportation. Bonosky was caught up in that ideological storm when he was fired from his job at Duquesne Steel for trying to form a union and came under scrutiny of the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Thomas Bell brought the plight of workers to the forefront when he wrote Out Of This Furnace in 1941, a generational tale of three Slovak families in America, by portraying the brutal working conditions immigrant steel workers faced. Bell, whose real name was Adalbert Thomas Belejcak, grew up in Braddock and, like Bonosky, used his ethnic heritage to add realism to his story. He was not a communist, but Bell joined the Civil Rights Congress and League of American Writers, both Communist Party front groups. Like Burning Valley, Out Of This Furnace was out of print until Carnegie-Mellon University English Professor David Demarest persuaded the University of Pittsburgh Press to reissue it in 1976.
Bonosky’s literary career began at the age of five after receiving a library card from the local branch of the Carnegie Library. He wrote his first poem at ten years old on butcher’s paper. After graduating from high school, he wanted to attend college but was rejected by every school where he applied. Bonosky’s first piece of professional writing appeared in Collier’s magazine. He also published short stories in the Communist Party publication, The New Masses. His proud mother told her son that she “wanted him to write for her, for the immigrants, for the people who could often neither write nor read,” wrote Norman Markowitz in Public Affairs.
Bonosky’s career as a journalist took him from Duquesne to China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Moscow. He was one of the first reporters to enter China after Mao’s rise to power. He interviewed Ho Chi Minh in 1960 and saw the downfall of the despotic Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in 1980. He reported from Afghanistan before the rise of the Taliban and served as the Moscow correspondent for the Daily World, the party’s newspaper.
He continued to write books. The Magic Fern refers to a Lithuanian fairy tale that claims a magical fern has the power to make wishes come true but only for others. Leo, the book’s main character, wishes for socialism in America but he knows he can’t achieve any justice for others if he just wishes it for himself. Brother Bill McKie: Building the Union at Ford, is a biography of a Communist Party organizer who helped found the United Auto Workers at Ford’s River Rouge plant. Published in 1953, Bonosky tells the story of McKie, a pivotal figure in union organizing attempts in the face of violent corporate opposition. Dragon Pink on Old White, published in 1963, is a travelogue about his trip through China before Mao’s revolution.
In A Bird in Her Hair and Other Stories, a collection of short stories, published in 1967, Bonosky returns to a familiar theme, the working-class struggle against capitalism and racism. Beyond the Border of Myth, From Vilnius to Hanoi, came out in 1967. Bonosky recounts his travels from Lithuania to North Vietnam. After visiting Afghanistan, he wrote Afghanistan – Washington’s Secret War, about the rise of the Taliban. Devils in Amber:The Baltics came out in 1992. The work recounts the mixture of folk tradition and pagan rituals in the Baltics.
Workers in Duquesne lived in Oliver Hollow but the steel mill filled the valley with slag from the mill’s furnaces, hauling the debris on trains, then dumping the heaps down the hillside like rolling balls of flame to build a foundation for enlarging the mill. The burning slag forced some residents to scatter after the fire ignited several homes.
Bonosky was born Felix Baranauskas in Duquesne in 1916, the fourth of eight children to religious Lithuanian immigrants who lived in Oliver Hollow, a patch that extended from ‘Polish Hill’ in Duquesne to the railroad tracks underneath the Thompson Run Bridge to the Monongahela River. Bonosky refers to the location as “Hunky Hollow” in the book. His parents, Jonas and Barbara Maciulute Baranauskas, emigrated from Dzukija, a poor, heavily forested region in southeastern Lithuania.
Duquesne was an inhospitable place for immigrants who were confined to the most run-down part of the city in places with derogatory names like ‘Hunky Hill’ or ‘Hunky Town.’ Workers’ families kept their distance from native-born Americans who worked in management at the mills or who held the better paying jobs that were out of reach to immigrants. Workers lived in ubiquitous company-built shacks that were indistinguishable from one another. Children of steel company officials would stand on the ridges above the hollow and taunt the children of workers with ethnic slurs. “ We eat cake, they eat slop.”
Bonosky graduated from high school in 1932 but the early years of the Great Depression shattered his dreams of college. There was absolutely nothing for me,” he wrote. “So, I had to leave. I left home. Goodbye.” Bonosky hopped on a freight train and landed in Washington, D.C. where he lived in a warehouse run by the Transient Bureau.
Bonosky met Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1959 in Moscow at the Third Writers Conference of Writers of the Soviet Union in which Bonosky praised the Soviet leader. The mention didn’t escape the committee’s notice, which quoted Bonosky in a report.
“We stood beneath the insignia of the Czars, military victories emblazoned on the walls around us and I said to Khrushchev that the greatest proof to me that workers really owned and ran this country was our standing here in the Kremlin – an ex-steelworker and an ex-miner- and drinking a toast together. Khrushchev agreed and quoted from the Internationale: “we have been naught; we shall be all,” noted in the committee’s report.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Bonosky remained a communist in name only, believing the party had abandoned revolutionary theory by embracing “Browderism.” Bonosky continued to write until his death even though he lost his ability to see because of macular degeneration. At 92, he was working on his autobiography and a novel, Benedict, a sequel to Burning Valley. Bonosky died in 2013 in New York City at the age of 96 but the death of this ‘proletarian writer’ from the Monongahela Valley went unnoticed in Pittsburgh news outlets and barely rated mention in the national media. The New York Times published Bonosky’s obituary but his death was shrouded in anonymity.
