THE BITUMINOUS COAL MINES ALSO.
The sway of the Vanderbilts, however, extends not only over the anthracite, but over a great extent of the bituminous coal fields in Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio and other States. By their control of the New York Central Railroad, they own various ostensibly independent bituminous coal mining companies. The Clearfield Corporation, the Pennsylvania Coal and Coke Co., and the West Branch Coal Company are some of these. By their great holdings in other railroads traversing the soft coal regions, the Vanderbilts control about one-half of the bituminous coal supply in the Eastern, and most of the Middle-Western, States.
According to the Interstate Commerce Commission's report, in 1907, the New York Central Railroad and the Pennsylvania Railroad owned in that year about forty-five per cent. of the stock of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, and the New York Central owned large amounts of stock in other railroads. "The Commission, therefore, reaches the conclusion," the report reads on after going into the question of ownership in detail, "that, as a matter of fact, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company, the Norfolk and Western Railroad Company, and the Philadelphia and Reading Railway Company were practically controlled by the Pennsylvania Railroad Company and the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad Company, and that the result was to practically abolish substantial competition between the carriers of coal in the territories under consideration." Although the Standard Oil oligarchy now owns considerable stock in the Vanderbilt railroads, it is an undoubted fact that the Vanderbilts share to a great extent the mastery of both hard and soft coal fields.
It is not possible here to present even in condensed form the outline, much less the full narrative, of the labyrinth of tricks, conspiracies and frauds which the railroad magnates have resorted to, and still practice, in the throttling of the small capitalists, and in guaranteeing themselves a monopoly. A great array of facts are to be found in the reports of the exhaustive investigations made by the United States Industrial Commission in 1901-1902, and by the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1907.
Thousands of times was the law glaringly violated yet the magnates were at all times safe from prosecution. Periodically the Government would make a pretense of subjecting them to an inquiry, but in no serious sense were they interfered with. These investigations all have shown that the railroads first crushed out the small operators by a conspiracy of rates, blockades and reprisals, and then by a juggling process of stocks and bonds, bought in the mines with the expenditure of scarcely any actual money. Having done this they formed a monopoly and raised prices which, in law, was a criminal conspiracy. The same weapons destructively used against the small coal operators years ago are still being employed against the few independent companies remaining in the coal fields, as was disclosed, in 1908, in the suit of the Government to dissolve the workings of the various railroad companies in the anthracite coal combination. [Footnote: See testimony brought out before Charles H. Guilbert, Examiner appointed by the United States District Court in Philadelphia. The Government's petition charged the defendants with entering into a conspiracy contrary to the letter and the spirit of the Sherman act.]