My own interest in Wilkes-Barré and this entire region indeed dated from the great anthracite coal strike in 1902, in my estimation one of the fiercest and best battles between labor and capital ever seen in America. Who does not know the history of it, and the troubles and ills that preceded it? I recall it so keenly—the complaints of the public against the rising price of coal, the rumors of how the Morgans and the Vanderbilts had secured control of all these coal lands (or the railroads that carried their coal for them), and having this latter weapon or club, proceeded to compel the independent coal operators to do their will. How, for instance, they had detained the cars of the latter, taxed them exorbitant carrying charges, frequently declining to haul their coal at all on the ground that they had no cars; how they charged the independent mine operator three times as much for handling his hard coal (the product of the Eastern region) as they did the soft coal men of the west, and when he complained and fought them, took out the spur that led to his mine on the ground that it was unprofitable.
WILKES-BARRE
A rich, smoky, sketchy atmosphere
Those were great days in the capitalistic struggle for control in America. The sword fish were among the blue fish slaying and the sharks were after the sword fish. Tremendous battles were on, with Morgan and Rockefeller and Harriman and Gould after Morse and Heinze and Hill and the lesser fry. We all saw the end in the panic of 1907, when one multimillionaire, the scapegoat of others no less guilty, went to the penitentiary for fifteen years, and another put a revolver to his bowels and died as do the Japanese. Posterity will long remember this time. It cannot help it. A new land was in the throes of construction, a strange race of men with finance for their weapon were fighting as desperately as ever men fought with sword or cannon. Individual liberty among the masses was being proved the thin dream it has always been.
I have found in my book of quotations and labeled for my own comfort “The Great Coal Appeal,” a statement written by John Mitchell, then president of the United Mine Workers of America, presenting the miners' side of the case in this great strike of 1902 which was fought out here in Wilkes-Barré, and Scranton and all the country we were now traversing. It was written at the time when the “Coal Barons,” as they were called, were riding around in their private cars with curtains drawn to keep out the vulgar gaze and were being wined and dined by governors and presidents, while one hundred and fifty thousand men and boys, all admittedly underpaid, out on strike nearly one hundred and sixty days—a half a year—waited patiently the arbitration of their difficulties. The total duration of the strike was one hundred and sixtythree days. It was a bitter and finally victorious protest against an enlarged and burdensome ton, company houses, company stores, powder at $2.75 a keg which anywhere else could be bought for ninety cents or $1.10.
The quotation from Mitchell reads:
In closing this statement I desire to say that we have entered and are conducting this struggle without malice and without bitterness. We believe that our antagonists are acting upon misrepresentation rather than in bad faith, we regard them not as enemies but as opponents, and we strike in patience until they shall accede to our demands or submit to impartial arbitration the difference between us. We are striking not to show our strength but the justice of our cause, and we desire only the privilege of presenting our case to a fair tribunal. We ask not for favors but for justice and we appeal our case to the solemn judgment of the American people.
Here followed a detailed statement of some of the ills they were compelled to hear and which I have in part enumerated above. And then:
Involved in this fight are questions weightier than any question of dollars and cents. The present miner has had his day. He has been oppressed and ground down; but there is another generation coming up, a generation of little children prematurely doomed to the whirl of the mill and the noise and blackness of the breaker. It is for these children that we are fighting. We have not underestimated the strength of our opponents; we have not overestimated our own power of resistance. Accustomed always to live upon a little, a little less is no unendurable hardship. It was with a quaking of hearts that we called for a strike. It was with a quaking of hearts that we asked for our last pay envelopes. But in the grimy, bruised hand of the miner was the little white hand of the child, a child like the children of the rich, and in the heart of the miner was the soul rooted determination to starve to the last crust of bread and fight out the long dreary battle to the end, in order to win a life for the child and secure for it a place in the world in keeping with advancing civilization.
Messieurs, I know the strong must rule the weak, the big brain the little one, but why not some small approximation towards equilibrium, just a slightly less heavily loaded table for Dives and a few more crumbs for Lazarus? I beg you—a few more crumbs! You will appear so much more pleasing because of your generosity.