The Coming of Coal

by Robert W. Bruère

This unique achievement made Siney a national figure. Local leaders in all parts of the country appealed to him to call another national convention. On his initiative, the Miners' National Association was constituted by the convention held in Youngstown, Ohio, in October, 1873. The convention elected Siney president. National headquarters were opened in Cleveland.

Wearied with endless strikes the convention had made arbitration, conciliation, and cooperation the basic principles of their constitution. Fortified with these principles, Siney and an associate visited the offices of all the coal companies in Cleveland. All except one of the operators turned them down. They would have nothing to do with a union. The exception was Marcus A. Hanna. When Siney assured Hanna that no strike would be called without previous resort to arbitration and that the officers of the union would order the men to keep at work even if an award went against them, Hanna accepted their proposition and undertook to bring the other operators into line. In spite of the widespread depression in the coal trade the National Association grew rapidly. Twenty-one thousand members were represented at the second convention held in Cleveland in October, 1874. But notwithstanding Hanna's great influence, many of the operators remained hostile to the union. Toward the close of 1874, the operators of the Tuscarawas Valley in Ohio announced a wage cut from ninety to seventy cents a ton. The miners determined to strike. Siney induced them to resort to arbitration. The umpire admitted a reduction to seventy-one cents. The miners were bitter against the decision which had gone almost completely against them. Only the great influence of Siney restrained them from striking at once.

Then one of the operators, the Crawford Coal Company, took advantage of the discontent. This company had refused to join Hanna and his associates in dealing with the union. During the arbitration proceedings, the Crawford Company locked out their men for demanding a check-weighman, and appealed to the operators' association for support. The associated operators refused. The Crawford Company then offered their locked-out men an advance of nine cents a ton above the rate fixed for the union miners by the arbitration award. The acquisitive instinct was stronger than the consciousness of kind among the non-union miners. They accepted and went back to work.

This turn of the wheel broke Siney's control over the organization. His followers threatened to desert unless he repudiated the arbitration award. He refused. But his executive board, in a desperate effort to save the union, overruled him and yielded. Strikes and lockouts followed in quick succession. Hanna was as helpless as Siney. Strike breakers were imported, under cover men and troops were brought in. Arbitration, constitutional government, and the union went on the rocks.

Similar misfortune attended Siney's pioneer efforts to establish the union and constitutional government in his home district at Clearfield, Pennsylvania. No sooner had the miners joined the National Association than they expected Siney and his fellow executives to achieve quick redress of their grievances and to force an advance in wages. They grew impatient with the slow processes of negotiation. They struck against the advice of Siney. Immediately the operators in the Clearfield district followed the precedent of Tuscarawas. They brought in strike breakers and troops. A brief civil war followed. Some heads were broken. The strike was lost. In spite of his heroic efforts to keep the peace and to establish orderly processes of government, Siney was arrested for conspiracy and thrown into jail. The morale of the Miners' National Association was broken, and like its predecessors it went by the board.

Like the tides of the sea, the consciousness of kind ebbed and flowed among the miners. They drew together into local, state, and national organizations, held for brief periods, and then scattered again under the impact of the operators supported by prevailing public opinion. They had not become fully group conscious; neither had the public come to recognize their unions as essential arms of constitutional government within the industry.

In the bounteous days of national expansion, in the exuberant '70's and '80's, a vague belief was abroad that America would never develop a permanent working class. Every man was “as good as” another, and the hustling, self-made business man was the American ideal. In accord with this theory was one of the significant actions of the Miners' National Association, an attempt to buy coal lands to be operated by the miners, not as a workers' cooperative association, but as a corporation of business men. During the '70's and the '80's also the Knights of Labor built up a great following among the wage-workers, largely on the philosophy that if they kept free of “class-conscious” trade unions and went in for a mass movement of all workers, they could by some strange alchemy of the American spirit rise to the status of independent business men. The Knights of Labor played much the same rôle among the wage-workers that the various “populist” movements played among the farmers before the development of such group-conscious tendencies as those which in our day have developed the farmers' cooperative societies and the agricultural bloc.

The labor movement as we know it today in America began when in 1886 Samuel Gompers became first president of the American Federation of Labor, an office which with the interruption of a single year he has held ever since. Mr. Gompers led the wage-workers to a frank acceptance of the prevailing business and acquisitive ideals as the basis, not of individual escape from the working class, but of their consolidation into trade unions for the businesslike control and sale of their craft skill through collective bargaining. It is significant that the immediate precursor of the American Federation of Labor—the Organized Trades Unions of the United States of America and Canada, over whose councils Mr. Gompers exercised great influence—demanded the legal incorporation of trade unions and a protective tariff for American labor, as well as the prohibition of child labor under fourteen, the eight-hour day, the abolition of conspiracy laws, and the other reforms which constitute the present program of organized labor. By the frank recognition of the basic force of the acquisitive instinct in human nature, the realistic leaders of the new labor movement were able to release and consolidate the consciousness of kind for effective operation within the wage-working group.

The influence of this new philosophy made itself felt throughout all the skilled trades and notably among the miners. After the break-up of the Miners' National Association, the miners maintained state organizations in Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and in several other states. They steadily took the initiative in seeking conferences and negotiations with the operators of their districts. In spite of the failure of arbitration under the pioneering leadership of Siney, they supported the agitation which resulted in the Trade Tribunal Act of Pennsylvania (1883), and the similar arbitration act of Ohio (1885).

But the process of overdevelopment which has always characterized the American coal industry created sharp fluctuations of prosperity and market depression and afforded an unstable basis for the establishment of the machinery of orderly government. Both miners and operators showed a tendency to run wild. Conferences were held, arbitration agreements occasionally entered into, but now one side, now the other, repudiated the awards as the fluctuating market sent prices erratically up and down. The needs of the community have always called for the integration of the industry, but the happy-go-lucky American spirit persistently shied away from public regulation as long as the acquisitive instinct could be satisfied at however great a cost in profligate use and waste. But this very overdevelopment, with its destructive effect upon wages and regularity of employment, continually brought the miners back to a consciousness of the need for national organization.