With the declaration of the armistice and the removal of the incentive to cooperation in public service which the war gave, the Fuel Administration and its elaborate system of statistical control of production and distribution was broken up as rapidly as it had been organized. During the war, there had been gross examples of profiteering just as there had been occasional local strikes, but by and large the operators like the miners had conducted themselves conscientiously as servants of the republic. To a remarkable degree they subordinated their acquisitive instinct to their consciousness of kind as citizens of the nation whose life was threatened from without. But within a year after the armistice, speculative profiteering was rampant and the coal industry was paralyzed by a general strike. Mr. Herbert Hoover, addressing the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, described the situation as a “national emergency,” due to the fact that “this industry, considered as a whole, is one of the worst functioning industries in the United States.” How shall we account for this wide, swift swing of the pendulum? Operators and owners who had offered their skill to the government during the national crisis, rebelled against all further “interference with their private business.” They rebelled not only against price fixing and the The main reason for this violent reaction is probably to be found in the fact that our modern democracies, the United States in particular, were born in rebellion against the autocratic authority of the feudal state, the fear and hatred of which still attaches even to our representative government. The memory of the Stuarts and Bourbons and Hohenzollerns is still fresh in the modern democratic consciousness, and accounts for the maxim that the government is best which governs least. Through the revolutions of the eighteenth century the merchants, manufacturers, As we approach the problem of government in our basic industries as in the nation, we discover two seemingly conflicting tendencies, two great elements in our population apparently pulling in opposite directions. In the question of national security and defence, the one instinctively follows the ancient tradition of European nations, piling up armies and navies, and striving to make America the most formidable military power in the world; the second leans to a policy of reconciliation, striving by conference and understandings with other nations to prevent disagreements and to avert wars. The first makes it a matter of national honor to emphasize individual American rights on land and sea, the property rights of Americans, our financial and economic interests in backward countries, and the military force necessary to enforce those interests; the second aims to establish international relations in which such rights and interests shall be secure to all nations without the constant threat of force. To the one, the world is an arena in which to fight or starve is the eternal choice; to the second, the world is a communion table at which all men are brothers. These same tendencies, these same manifestations of the acquisitive instinct and the consciousness of kind, appear in the record of our basic coal industry. As the industrial revolution got into full swing in America, during and immediately following the Civil War, there was a rush for the possession of the coal mines comparable to the rush for land. Among the men who won possession, there were some who were keenly aware of the public obligations of ownership, who in friendly cooperation During the early days of the industry, the miners, like American manual workers in general, were under the popular illusion that democracy meant the passing of a permanent working class. With the Declaration of Independence the old social stratification of feudal Europe had been wiped out forever. There was plenty of room at the top. Everybody might with perseverance and thrift get to the top. This illusion took on considerable substance from the fact that when the industrial revolution first invaded the coal fields America still offered great tracts of unoccupied lands to satisfy the universal land hunger, whereas in England, for example, the policy of “Their ambition in life,” writes Andrew Roy, himself at the time a miner, “was to save enough money to buy a farm in Iowa or Wisconsin. They would go back to the mines in the autumn after harvesting, work all winter, and return with their fresh stake in the spring. None of them ever returned permanently to the mines.” But as the fertile lands were preempted and America became increasingly a manufacturing nation, the coal industry acquired a measure of stability and drew into the mining communities an increasing body of men for whom mining was to be a life's work. The condition of life for these permanent miners was largely determined by the camps or villages which the companies built at the mines. These were generally mean, cheap, temporary affairs. For the faster the miner works, the faster he skims the cream, leaving the more inaccessible coal to waste where it lies, the greater the profit, the better the wages, and the sooner the mine is worked out and abandoned. This, and the caprice of the market in its effect upon the overexpanded industry, meant that the miner must live in his knapsack always prepared to move; and it meant cheap homes and a mean domestic equipment, houses or shacks that might be abandoned without serious loss. To this The isolation and transitory character of the mining towns made the miners almost completely dependent upon the owners of the mines not only for homes but also for tools and powder; all their mining, as well as their household, supplies. To this day in the non-union fields of West Virginia the operators finance and control, not only the stores, but the schools, the hospitals, the doctors, the churches, and the police. Independent merchants were slow to invest their fortunes in such difficult ground, and since the company store was a convenient means of supplementing the profit from the mines, independent merchants were not encouraged to compete. These conditions tended on the one hand to breed arbitrary management,—autocracy sometimes benevolent, sometimes tyrannical,—and on the other, restlessness, discontent, and the spirit of individual and organized revolt. It set the consciousness of kind in action among the miners especially, and resulted in innumerable local lockouts and strikes. A sequence of such local struggles occurred in the Blossburg district of Pennsylvania in the '60's and '70's. The Civil War created an abnormal demand for coal, and In 1873 the swing was reversed. Most of the mine owners of Blossburg were also either bankers or retail merchants through their company stores. They were hard hit by the panic of 1873. Without consultation or warning they announced an arbitrary reduction in wages and deferred payment of wages already due. In November they posted notices that the miners might get such goods as they absolutely needed at the company stores, but that no wages would be paid until the following April. Then the miners again drew together in a union. The operators “The strikers gathered on the public highway in front of the barracks,” says Andrew Roy, “and insisted on the right to talk with the strikebreakers through one of their interpreters. The managers declined to allow this to be done. But finally a Swedish miner got in among them, and within an hour, the whole of the imported men marched out upon the highway and joined the strikers. The strangers were formed into line, with a Scotch piper at their head, who marched them out of town to the stirring tune of the McGregors' Gathering.” Prevailing public opinion in the '70's, like the prevailing judicial interpretation of the law, frowned upon concerted action by the workers as having the nature of a conspiracy much as the concerted action of the commoners in monarchical days was frowned upon as conspiracy. But curious sorts of circumstances have occasionally arisen to modify opinion in one case as in the other. The Boston Tea Party is our historical example in the political realm. In Blossburg, before this strike of 1873, the miners had been compelled to take their pay in company scrip. Except at the company store, this scrip was worth only from seventy to ninety cents on the dollar. “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 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 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 “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 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 Thus slowly the consciousness of kind worked through 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 |