What, however, of the workers in the mines? While the combination was high-handedly forcing the consumer to pay enormous prices, how was it acting toward them? The question is almost superfluous. The railroads made little concealment of their hostility to the trades unions, and refused to grant reforms or concessions. Consequently a strike was declared in 1900 by which the mine workers obtained a ten per cent increase in wages and the promise of semi-monthly wages in cash. But they had not resumed work before they discovered the hollowness of these concessions. Two years of futile application for better conditions passed, and then, in 1902, 150,000 men and boys went on strike. This strike lasted one hundred and sixty-three days. The magnates were generally regarded as arrogant and defiant; they contended that they had nothing to arbitrate; [Footnote: It was on this occasion that George F. Baer, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, in scoring the public sympathy for the strikers, justified the attitude of the railroads in his celebrated utterance in which he spoke "of the Christian men and women to whom God in His infinite wisdom has intrusted the property interests of the country," which alleged divine sanction he was never able to prove.] and only yielded to an arbitration board when President Roosevelt threatened them with the full punitive force of Government action.
By the decision of this board the miners secured an increase of wages (which was assessed on the consumer in the form of higher prices) and several minor concessions. Yet at best, their lot is excessively hard. Writing a few years later, Dr. Peter Roberts, who, if anything, is not partial to the working class, stated that the wages of the contract miners were (in 1907) about $600 a year, while adults in other classes of mine workers, who formed more than sixty per cent, of the labor forces, did not receive an annual wage of $450. Yet Roberts quotes the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics as saying that "a family of five persons requires $754 a year to live on." The average number in the family of a mine worker is five or six. "This small income," Roberts observes, "drives many of our people to live in cheap and rickety houses, where the sense of shame and decency is blunted in early youth, and where men cannot find such home comforts as will counteract the attractions of the saloon." Hundreds of company houses, according to Roberts, are unfit for habitation, and "in the houses of mine employees, of all nationalities, is an appalling infant mortality." [Footnote: "The Anthracite Coal Communities": 346-347.]
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.]
THE HUGE PROFITS FROM THE COAL MINES.
No one knows or can ascertain the exact profits of the Vanderbilts and of other railroad owners from their control of both the anthracite, and largely the bituminous, coal mines. As has been noted, the railroad magnates cloud their trail by operating through subsidiary companies. That their extortions reach hundreds of millions of dollars every year is a patent enough fact. Some of the accompaniments of this process of extortion have been referred to;— the confiscation, on the one hand, of the labor of the whole consuming population by taxing from them more and more of the products of their labor by repeated increases in the price of coal, and, on the other, the confiscation of the labor of the several hundred thousand miners who are compelled to work for the most precarious wages, and in conditions worse, in some respects, than chattel slavery.
But not alone is labor confiscated. Life is also immolated. The yearly sacrifice of life in the coal mines of the United States is steadily growing. The report for 1908 of the United States Geological Survey showed that 3,125 coal miners were killed by accidents in the current year, and that 5,316 were injured. The number of fatalities was 1,033 more than in 1906. "These figures," the report explains, "do not represent the full extent of the disasters, as reports were not received from certain States having no mine inspectors." Side by side with these appalling figures must be again brought out the fact adverted to already: that the owners of the coal mines have at all times violently opposed the passage of laws drafted to afford greater safeguard for life in the working of the mines. Being the owners, at the same time, of the railroads, their opposition in that field to life-saving improvements has been as consistent.