For the period of the war, the coal industry functioned as a cooperative public service. The coal budget, based upon a detailed analysis of the country's resources and needs, set a definite standard of performance both for the industry and the railroads, and made it possible for them to cooperate intelligently. The zones served as tools for the control and direction of the flow of coal called for by the budget. Mr. C. E. Lesher, Director of the Bureau of Statistics of the Distribution Division, writes: “In the short period of a few months after the work of the Fuel Administration was begun, it was determined that the requirements of the United States for bituminous coal in the coal year ended March, 1919, were 624,000,000 net tons, compared with a production in 1917 of 552,000,000 tons of bituminous coal, and for anthracite 100,000,000 net tons, but slightly more than in 1917…. To provide coal was the problem of the Distribution Division of the Fuel Administration; to provide transportation was the problem of the Railroad Administration…. The adoption of the zoning system represented the supreme effort of the Railroad Administration to overcome the transportation tangle in connection with coal…. So closely did the officials of the two administrations work, and so effective were the measures employed, that the results surprised all…. The Director of Operations of the Railroad Administration in May, when production of bituminous coal was averaging 11,500,000 tons a week, believed that 11,800,000 was the highest that could be expected in 1918, as the railroads were believed to have reached their maximum capacity. Within a month records of 12,500,000 tons a week were reached, and in July, and again in September, the 13,000,000 ton mark was passed…. When the armistice was declared, New England, farthest from the mines, with an average of 20 weeks' supply, was literally gorged with soft coal, and eastern New York and Pennsylvania, with from 6 to 9 weeks' stock, had abundant supplies…. From April 1 to July 6, 1918, rail shipments to New England were 3,058,000 net tons, or 98 per cent of the schedule of 3,150,000 tons; on September 28, shipments were 6,164,000 tons, or 105 per cent of the schedule for that date. The schedule for shipments to tidewater from April 1 to July 1 called for 11,916,000 net tons. By December 21 shipments were 9 per cent ahead of the program. The Lake program called for 28,000,000 tons of cargo coal; a total of 28,153,000 tons was supplied. With similar precision and certainty munition factories, arsenals, powder works, and by-product plants were kept running, while stocks were accumulated, insuring uninterrupted operations throughout the winter. In the same manner retail dealers were given supplies for their domestic trade. Such results were possible only because of complete control of shipments and the full information on which to proceed.”
This was an amazing and illuminating demonstration of the fact that our greatest national resource could be administered for the benefit of the whole nation. It was no longer a mere possibility, the thing had been done.
It has been said that this achievement was possible because during the war the people had a common object which so challenged their higher ideals that they were able to subordinate their individual and special group interests to the service of the nation, to make their consciousness of kind as a people triumphant over the acquisitive instinct. Again it is said that human nature being what it is, similar unselfish consecration is not to be expected in the sluggish days of peace. But if the historical record teaches us anything it is the essential falseness of this assertion. That record shows us the gradual irresistible spread of the consciousness of kind from one realm of human activity to another as the acquisition of a surplus makes this possible. It shows human understanding reaching out to give all men religious freedom, to assure them equal political rights; shows it asserting human brotherhood in the right to education, health, happiness—and these things not under the stress of war, but in the conditions of peace. The possibility hangs not on any technical inability, but on the better preparedness of the minds of men, on their clearer vision, their ability to see the spiritual implications of their technical triumphs.
CHAPTER V
The Awakening of the Miners
With the declaration of the armistice and the removal of the incentive to cooperation in public service which the war gave, the Fuel Administration and its elaborate system of statistical control of production and distribution was broken up as rapidly as it had been organized. During the war, there had been gross examples of profiteering just as there had been occasional local strikes, but by and large the operators like the miners had conducted themselves conscientiously as servants of the republic. To a remarkable degree they subordinated their acquisitive instinct to their consciousness of kind as citizens of the nation whose life was threatened from without. But within a year after the armistice, speculative profiteering was rampant and the coal industry was paralyzed by a general strike. Mr. Herbert Hoover, addressing the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, described the situation as a “national emergency,” due to the fact that “this industry, considered as a whole, is one of the worst functioning industries in the United States.”
How shall we account for this wide, swift swing of the pendulum? Operators and owners who had offered their skill to the government during the national crisis, rebelled against all further “interference with their private business.” They rebelled not only against price fixing and the regulation of distribution, but even against all attempts on the part of governmental agencies to keep congress and the public informed of the elementary facts of ownership, costs, wages, prices, and profits, without which public opinion is helplessly blind. They sued out an injunction against the Federal Trade Commission to block its efforts to search out and publish these essential facts. The unions also chafed under governmental restraint upon their freedom of action, especially when the government lifted its limitation on prices and left the consumer at the mercy of an open market. As prices and profits mounted, they felt entitled to commensurate wage increases. The war, they said, was over though peace had not been formally declared, and they demanded release from the restraints of wartime legislation so that they might freely exercise their economic pressure to secure wage increases as the operators were taking increased profits. For the first time in almost a generation they laid down their tools, and finally submitted to the arbitration of federal commissions only under threat of an injunction and the imprisonment of their leaders. Economic war and group rivalry took the place of cooperation in public service.
The main reason for this violent reaction is probably to be found in the fact that our modern democracies, the United States in particular, were born in rebellion against the autocratic authority of the feudal state, the fear and hatred of which still attaches even to our representative government. The memory of the Stuarts and Bourbons and Hohenzollerns is still fresh in the modern democratic consciousness, and accounts for the maxim that the government is best which governs least. Through the revolutions of the eighteenth century the merchants, manufacturers, and business men wrested from the monarch his autocratic power, and it is against this same power as exercised by the owners of property that the organized labor movement is today in rebellion. But as against the state when it exercises such autocratic authority as during the war it exercised through the Fuel Administration, both groups, owners and workers, unite. They assert the right of self-government within their industry. Like the economists and business men of the nineteenth century, they contend that the conflict and balance of their selfish interests will by some mysterious provision of nature neutralize and resolve these selfishnesses to the advantage of the community. The essence of this acquisitive philosophy is expressed in the quaint nineteenth-century maxim that “greed is held in check by greed, and the desire for gain sets limits to itself.” But this leaves the service of the community at the mercy of a blind conflict of forces within the industry, as formerly it was at the mercy of force exercised by the monarch who was the state, and the public is increasingly dissatisfied with the result. The public service conception of industry, and especially of such basic industries as coal, is rapidly taking possession of the public mind. People are coming to see that the uncontrolled conflict of forces, like autocratic force itself, is incompatible with the principle of service. Neither will force exercised by the state through the courts solve the difficulty. Compulsion is contrary to the spirit and genius of democracy. The great problem of our generation is to discover how industrial freedom can be reconciled with the service of the public. For an answer we shall have to look into the spirit and structure of such government as our industries have themselves evolved. For democracy is not, as its earlier critics declared, synonymous with anarchy. Democracy is a government of laws, not of men; and laws in a democracy are not emanations of superior minds, but the codified experience of the people.