CHAPTER VII
The Rise of Democracy
The historians of the growth of democratic government in the coal industry generally date the establishment of collective bargaining as a permanent institution from 1898, when the operators of the Central Competitive Field—Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois—in a joint conference with the representatives of the United Mine Workers of America entered into an agreement which with minor modifications was periodically renewed from that time onward. From that year to 1922 operators and miners alike recognized the agreement in the Central Competitive Field as basic to the agreements in all other fields and the central competitive conference as the necessary prelude to all other conferences. But it was President Roosevelt and the Anthracite Strike Commission which he appointed that lifted human relationships within the industry out of the limbo of frontier strife and periodic guerrilla warfare and stamped them with the quasi-public character of a self-governing constitutional democracy.
From the beginning, certain of the coal owners, notably those in sections of West Virginia and Alabama, whose coking coals make them economically subsidiary to the steel industry, have held strongly to the autocratic powers and privileges which the conception of property carried over from the pre-revolutionary monarchical days when the king was generally recognized, Dei gratia, as the custodian of the national hoard. But the Roosevelt Commission took the stand which has increasingly won public acceptance, that autocracy in industry is incompatible with democracy in the political state, and that they must both rise or fall together. Forms may change, but it may be taken as axiomatic that if democracy is the law determining the evolution of political civilization,—if it is the condition of the full development of the individual personality and the attainment of the good life and human brotherhood,—it will survive and grow in industry as well as in the political realm. It is from this principle of democratic evolution, and not from the strikes and lock-outs and barterings over wages, hours, and profits incidental to its development, that collective bargaining and industrial democracy derive their fundamental significance.
In appointing the Commission “at the request both of the operators and of the miners,” President Roosevelt asked them not only to pass upon the questions in controversy, but also “to establish the relations between the employers and the wage workers in the anthracite fields on a just and permanent basis.”
In arbitrating the immediate questions in dispute,—questions of wages, hours, and working conditions,—the Commission, even after months of hearings at which hundreds of witnesses appeared, found themselves in the usual predicament of arbitrators and the lay public in such circumstances. The facts about the industry,—its capital investment, its financial organization, its earnings and profits, the cost of living in the district, the organization of work in the mines, the character of the work, the skill which it required, and its attendant hazards,—had never been scientifically determined. Then as now these essential facts were held to lie within the sacred province of private business enterprise and not within the legitimate scope of public inquiry and revelation. In instance after instance, they found that statistics of the kind presented were “rather too inexact for a satisfactory basis on which to make precise calculations.” On the demands of the miners and the counter-demands of the operators, they were reluctantly constrained to adopt the usual refuge of arbitration tribunals set up in an emergency; they “split the difference.” The miners, for example, asked for a twenty per cent increase in their rate of wages; the Commission granted them ten per cent. Other issues were not susceptible of such definite arbitrament, but in general the Commission, striving to hold the scales of justice even, followed the rule of fifty-fifty.
In presenting their award, the Commission, keenly aware of the almost impossible burden which the absence of scientific knowledge with respect to this basic industry placed upon them, declared that “all through their investigations and deliberations the conviction had grown upon them that if they could evoke and confirm a more genuine spirit of good will, a more conciliatory disposition in the operators and their employes in their relations toward one another, they would do a better and more lasting work than any which mere rulings, however wise and just, may accomplish.” It was with this end in view that they set up a scheme of constitutional democratic government within the industry.
Quotation is often dull, but nothing can take the place of direct quotation in the case of a document of epoch-making importance. By way of justifying their action the Commission declared that “in the days when the employer had but a few employes, personal acquaintance and direct contact of the employer and employe resulted in mutual knowledge of the surrounding conditions and the desires of each. The development of the employers into large corporations has rendered such personal contact and acquaintance between the responsible employer and the individual employe no longer possible in the old sense. The tendency toward peace and good-fellowship which flows out of personal acquaintance or direct contact should not, however, be lost through this evolution of great combinations. There seems to be no medium through which to preserve it, so natural and efficient as that of an organization of employes governed by rules which represent the will of a properly constituted majority of its members, and officered by members selected for that purpose, and in whom authority to administer the rules and affairs of the union and its members is vested.”