The Coming of Coal

by Robert W. Bruère

In 1885, John McBride, president of the Ohio Miners' State Union, and later, for a single term, president of the American Federation of Labor, issued a call to the miners of the United States to meet in convention on the ninth of September in Indianapolis. Seven states sent delegates. The National Federation of Miners and Mine Laborers was formed and its Executive Board issued a call to the mine operators of the United States and territories inviting them to a joint meeting for the purpose of adjusting market and mining prices in such a way as to avoid strikes and lockouts, and to give to each party an increased profit from the sale of coal. Only one operator, Mr. W. P. Rend of Chicago, paid any attention to this call. He inspired the miners to persevere. They sent out a second invitation. A dozen or so operators met with the executive board in Chicago and agreed upon a joint call for a national joint convention to be held in Pittsburgh in December.

“The undersigned committee,” the invitation said, “consisting of three mine owners, and three delegates representing the miners' organization, were appointed to make a general public presentation of the objects and purposes of this convention, and to extend an invitation to all those engaged in coal mining in America, to lend their active cooperation toward the establishment of harmony and friendship between capital and labor in this large and important industry…. Apart and in conflict capital and labor become agents of evil, while united they create blessings of plenty and prosperity…. Capital represents the accumulation, or savings, of past labor, while labor is the most sacred part of capital…. It is evident that the general standard of reward for labor has sunk too low…. It is equally true that the widespread depression of business, the overproduction of coal, and the consequent severe competition have caused the capital invested in mines to yield little or no profitable returns. The constant reductions of wages that have lately taken place have afforded no relief to capital, and, indeed, have tended to increase its embarrassments…. This is the first movement of a national character in America, taken with the intention of the establishment of labor conciliation….”

In response to this call a small joint meeting was held in Pittsburgh in December. It adjourned for a second conference in Columbus, Ohio, in February, 1886. Here the operators were represented by seventy-seven delegates, principally from Ohio, but also from Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, Maryland, and West Virginia. They adopted a national wage scale, established a national board of arbitration, and provided for the creation of similar state boards to maintain industrial peace and to develop the structure and processes of constitutional government.

The agreement held and worked in spite of the opposition of groups of operators, notably in the West Virginia field and the steel district of Pittsburgh, and the individualistic lethargy of many of the miners. The new philosophy of business trade unionism gripped the miners, made the trade union policy triumphant over the vaguely utopian policy of the Knights of Labor, and resulted in the consolidation of the miners' organizations into the United Mine Workers of America in 1890. But the process of overdevelopment continued in the industry. The workings of the joint machinery creaked and faltered under the impact of strikes and lockouts due in the main to market fluctuations, and for a decade the United Mine Workers, in spite of periods of prosperity and rapid growth, was perpetually threatened with the fate of its predecessors.

This fate was averted by the economic developments which had converted the compact anthracite field into a virtual monopoly under the combined control of the anthracite railroads and the great banking houses of the East that owned the railroads. While the bituminous industry sprawled and overdeveloped, the anthracite combination gradually restricted the production of anthracite to the calculable demand of the market. This made for stability in the anthracite field, which is reflected in the fact that while even today the average working year in the bituminous fields is approximately two hundred and fifteen days,—an average working day when spread over the year, of less than four hours,—the working year in the anthracite field gradually rose until today it holds steady at something more than two hundred and sixty days a year.

This stability enabled the anthracite miners to accumulate an economic surplus above their immediate needs and set the consciousness of kind in vigorous operation among them. By 1900 they had developed the nucleus of a strong organization. Their wages, however, had lagged behind the wages of the miners in the better-organized bituminous fields. On their demand, the national officers of the United Mine Workers called a convention of anthracite representatives in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, “to devise means by which a joint convention of operators and miners can be held” to consider the upward readjustment of the anthracite wage scale and “methods to abolish the pernicious system now in vogue in the anthracite region by which a part of the earnings of the mine workers is taken from them by the infamous system of dockage, and by the practice of compelling mine workers to load more than 2240 pounds for a ton.” The operators disregarded the convention's invitation to a joint conference. The men struck. The operators made concessions but refused to deal with the union. The men accepted the concessions and returned to work. During the next two years they fortified their treasury and prepared to strike again. John Mitchell had become president of the United Mine Workers. In February, 1902, he addressed a circular letter to the presidents of the anthracite railroads inviting them to a joint conference. The railroad presidents refused to have anything to do with the union. The anthracite miners then made a public proposal that the issues should be submitted to the arbitration of the Industrial Branch of the National Civic Federation, of which Senator Hanna was chairman, or of Archbishop Ireland, Bishop Potter, and one other person to be selected by these two. But all such tentatives were also rejected by the operators. It was about this time that Mr. George F. Baer, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal Company and of the Reading Railway System, made his interesting declaration that “the rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for, not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God has given the control of the property interests of the country.”

Efforts at conference and arbitration having failed, the anthracite miners called a strike. Only a minority of the men had previously joined the union, but ninety men in a hundred obeyed the strike call. The bituminous miners were eager to declare a sympathetic strike, but they had collective agreements in the more important fields and their president, John Mitchell, and their secretary, William B. Wilson, afterwards Secretary of Labor in President Wilson's cabinet, insisted upon honoring these contracts. Trade union discipline had grown stronger since the days of Siney and Mitchell's counsel prevailed. The anthracite strike dragged on throughout the summer. Winter was approaching. President Roosevelt decided to intervene. There was no precedent for such intervention in the coal industry, which though basic to the industrial life of the nation, was held sacred to the traditional rights of private ownership and business initiative. In his address to the miners and operators, President Roosevelt expressed his sense of the unprecedented character of his action.

“As long,” he said, “as there seemed to be a reasonable hope that these matters could be adjusted between the parties it did not seem proper for me to interfere in any way. I disclaim any right or duty to interfere in any way, upon legal grounds or upon any official relation that I bear to the situation. But the urgency and the terrible nature of the catastrophe impending, where a large portion of our people, in the shape of a winter fuel famine, are concerned, impel me after anxious thought to believe that my duty requires me to use whatever influence I personally can bring to bear to end a situation which has become literally impossible.”

In spite of his disavowal of legal authority or official responsibility, President Roosevelt's action was publicly regarded as the official action of the nation's chief executive. It gave the public its first intimation of the status of coal as that of a public utility. It stamped upon the coal industry the character of an essential public service which has attached to it ever since. Backed by public opinion, which would have sustained him if he had declared the existence of a public emergency and had taken over the anthracite industry as the government did the entire coal industry during the war, he was able to force the submission of the dispute to a commission of arbitration by whose decision both sides pledged themselves to abide. The strike was settled. A machinery of government was established and put into operation. As the result of President Roosevelt's action, collective bargaining was for the first time given public sanction not only in the anthracite field but throughout the coal industry. For seventeen years, and indeed, with the exception of a brief interval in 1919, for twenty years, peace and constitutional government prevailed not only in the anthracite field, but, with the exception of a few districts, notably certain counties in West Virginia and the coking fields subsidiary to the steel industry in Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Alabama, throughout the bituminous fields also.

The structure of this government and its basic laws are written into collective contracts, which, together with the policies formulated by the two parties through their national organizations, must be our guides in the quest for an answer to the question as to how, short of the autocratic control of the Fuel Administration, the coal industry is to be developed into an integrated, dependably governed, public service.