“When farmers came into mining towns,” writes Andrew Roy out of his own experience, “prospective purchasers of their produce would ask them, ‘Will you take scrip?’ And if the answer was in the affirmative, a dicker would immediately be entered into as to the amount of discount to be allowed.”
Independent merchants had gradually ventured into Blossburg. To them the scrip was a competitive injury. When the operators limited the miners to credit at the company stores, the independent merchants protested to the Treasury Department of the United States that the compulsory circulation of company scrip was an illegal infringement of a governmental function. The governor of Pennsylvania took alarm at this appeal over his head and sent the State Secretary of Internal Affairs to investigate. He made a report condemning the operators' practice. The attendant publicity scandalized public opinion and turned it to the miners' side. This time the strike was won.
So by ebb and flow of the consciousness of kind, the elements of a governing structure, the balance of forces between the operators and the miners, gradually formed within the industry. But in the main the balance was determined by public opinion; and public opinion, like the law, was by inherited tradition upon the side of the owners, the accepted custodians of property and the national wealth. Episodes like the use of company scrip tended to even the balance. And more important still in their effect upon the traditional hostility of public opinion toward the unions in their infringement upon the vested rights and privileges of the owners were the great mine disasters.
Some of our coal crops out at the surface in places where through the ages wind and weather have worn away the overlying clay, stone, and slate. This can be gathered like wood in the forest without danger. The amount of such coal is commercially unimportant. Some lies only a few feet underground so that it is possible to take it by stripping away the thin overlying material and blast and scoop it out with a steam shovel. There are some stripping mines in the anthracite field and a considerable number in the alluvial plains of the West. But the great bulk of our coal is reached by driving drifts or headings into the veins through the sides of hills or by sinking shafts scores, or hundreds, or thousands of feet down through the earth to where the coal lies. From the mouth of the drift or the foot of the shaft, a tunnel or main heading or gangway is driven on and on into the coal usually for miles, with secondary tunnels giving off the main heading into the pitch-black rooms where the miners work. In the cryptlike terminal rooms, the miner with his buddy undercuts the “face” of the coal with his pick or with an undercutting machine, drills shot-holes into the face, sets his charge of powder and tamps it in, and then shoots the coal down. Sometimes, for the sake of speed, he shoots it down without undercutting, and in the anthracite mines where the coal is too hard for undercutting, direct shooting from the face is the general practice. This blasting of a friable and inflammable substance fills the cellared air with minute particles of highly explosive dust. As the mines go deeper and further away from the opening they accumulate gas and underground water. The greatest number of injuries and deaths in the mines, and coal mining is among the most hazardous of all occupations, result from the falling of overhanging rock and coal; but the catastrophies which have shocked public opinion into a sympathetic attitude toward the commoners of the mines do not come from this steady death toll but have resulted from explosions or fires that have trapped and suffocated or burned their scores and hundreds.
It seems incredible, in view of the known hazards of underground work, that there should ever have been opposition to the installation of all available safeguards. But it must be remembered that we are still very close to primitive man, that the consciousness of kind and the instinct of brotherhood are still hard pressed by the primal acquisitive instinct. In America in spite of potential plenty the community's first preoccupation was escape from hunger, the winning of individual and national economic security. The prevailing attitude toward death and injury in the mines was, and to a great extent still is, much the same as the prevailing attitude toward death and injury in battle. In ordinary days of peace we do not glorify the soldier. Similarly, it is only at time of disaster that our sympathetic understanding goes out to the shock troops in our war against nature, the men who with pick and powder win coal underground.
“So numerous and heartrending,” says Roy, “had these accidents become (in the anthracite field) that the miners of Schuylkill county in the year 1858 appealed to the legislature for the passage of a law to provide for official supervision of the mines, and a bill for the purpose was introduced the same year; but it found no countenance, and never came to a vote. In 1866 it was again introduced, and passed the lower house, but it was defeated in the Senate. In 1869 it was reintroduced, passed both houses and received the approval of the governor of the state. It provided for one mine inspector for Schuylkill county, the other counties being left out. The law had been in operation only a few months when the Avondale shaft in the adjoining county of Luzerne took fire and suffocated every soul in the mine including two daring miners who went down the mine after the fire, in the hope of rescuing some of the entombed men. The shaft had but one opening…. The whole underground force of the mine, 109 souls, were suffocated to death by the gases emanating from the burning woodwork in the shaft and the breakers on top of it…. No catastrophe ever occurred in this country which created a greater sensation than this mining horror. The public press united in demanding the passage of all laws necessary for the protection of the health and lives of the miners…. When the legislature met in the following January a committee of representative miners was sent to Harrisburg to have a mining bill enacted into law for the proper security of the lives, health, and safety of the anthracite miners of Pennsylvania, which was promptly done.”
Stirred by the Avondale disaster, the miners of the Mahoning Valley in Ohio had a bill introduced into the Ohio legislature calling for two separate openings in all mines employing more than ten men underground, for the forced circulation to the face of the coal of at least one hundred cubic feet of air per minute for each underground worker, the daily inspection of all gaseous mines by a fireviewer before the miners were allowed to enter, the appointment of four state mine inspectors, and the right of the miners to appoint a check-weighman at their own expense to see that their coal was fairly weighed at the tipple. As soon as the bill was printed, a committee of thirteen operators representing every mining district in the state, supported by legal counsel and the state geologist, appeared in opposition. Their contention was that the miners of the state did not want the law, that the bill was the invention of professional demagogues and labor agitators who sponged a fat living off the ignorance and cupidity of their misguided followers, that there was neither gas nor bad air in Ohio mines, that the lives and fortunes of the miners were safe in the hands of their employers, that the bill was special legislation and unconstitutional and that if enacted by the General Assembly of Ohio it would be set aside by the Supreme Court. The bill was defeated, but a commission of inquiry was appointed. At the next session of the General Assembly the miners' bill was reintroduced and passed by a unanimous vote. But before it was sent to the governor, the operators again sent a committee to defeat it. It was amended and all provision for state inspection of the mines stricken out. In the following June a disaster occurred in a mine in Portage county owned by the member of the legislature who had emasculated the bill. This mine, too, had but one opening which an accidental fire converted into a furnace. There were twenty-one men in the mine. Ten were burned to death and the eleven who managed to escape through the smoke and flame were terribly injured. The miners' bill was reintroduced and again opposed. Judge Hoadly, afterwards governor of Ohio, speaking in opposition very accurately expressed the prevailing state of mind. “We have tried to make men sober and moral by law,” he said, “and now we are going to try to surround them with protection against carelessness and danger, and enable them to shut their eyes and walk in darkness, satisfied with the care and protection of the state. I admit that there is a line to which the right of the legislature—the duty of the legislature—may go without infringing on the natural right of the citizen; but what I want to suggest as the safe side, is to leave the people free, and to allow mishap and disaster to have its natural effect as the penalty for and the cure of the evils which result from negligence which causes mishap and disaster.” But in spite of this persuasive reasoning, the miners' bill, after years of effort, was finally enacted into law.
Thus slowly the consciousness of kind worked through the public to the miners, under the influence of such understanding as mining catastrophies shocked into the public mind. But the main force that made for the improvement of their conditions of work, for the development of standards of living among them and of orderly processes of government within the industry as a whole was the operation of the consciousness of kind within their own group.
The processes of civilization like all cosmic processes are slow. The period of recorded history is but a minute in the unnumbered years of man's life upon earth. It was by slow stages that the blind herd instinct which sends wolves hunting in packs and leads birds to migrate in flocks merged into the consciousness of kind and the spirit of service among men. So in the coal industry, the miners organized slowly, first in local groups, then by districts, then on a national scale with the beginnings of international affiliations. They drew together into unions, broke apart, drew together again. As they acquired strength, their interests came into conflict with the interests of the coal owners. There were strikes and lockouts, local joint agreements, then strikes and lockouts again, then other agreements for arbitration and conciliation, then more strikes and lockouts. That process still goes on as in the bitter civil war in West Virginia. But in the main it reached a culmination so far as the coal industry is concerned when in 1902 President Roosevelt intervened in the interests of the consumers, asserted a balance of power between and over the two groups, and established the foundations of orderly government within the industry. The processes by which representative government has grown up within the industry run closely parallel with the processes by which the parliamentary government arose in the European political states, with property owners performing the very important function of technical organization and development which in the early stages of national life the monarch and his executives performed, and the miners playing the rôle of the commoners. It is upon this historical structure that the future of the industry as a public service depends.