THE VANDERBILT FORTUNE IN THE PRESENT GENERATION
With the demise of William H. Vanderbilt the Vanderbilt fortune
ceased being a one-man factor. Although apportioned among the eight
children, the two who inherited by far the greater part of it--
Cornelius and William K. Vanderbilt--were its rulers paramount. To
them descended the sway of the extensive railroad systems
appropriated by their grandfather and father, with all of the allied
and collateral properties. Both of these heirs had been put through a
punctilious course of training in the management of railroad affairs;
all of the subtle arts and intricacies of finance, and the grand
tactical and strategic strokes of railroad manipulation, had been
drilled into them with extraordinary care.
Their first move upon coming into their inheritance was to surround
themselves with the magnificence of imposing residences, as befitted
their state and estate. A signatory stroke of the pen was the only
exertion required of them; thereupon architects and a host of
artisans yielded service and built palaces for them, for the one at
Fifth avenue and Fifty-second street, for the other at Fifth avenue
and Fifty-seventh street.
Millions were spent with prodigal lavishness. On his Fifth avenue
mansion alone, Cornelius expended $5,000,000. To get the space for
three beds of blossoms and a few square yards of turf, a brownstone
house adjoining his mansion was torn down, and the garden created at
an expense of $400,000. George, a brother of Cornelius and of William
K. Vanderbilt, and a man of retiring disposition, spent $6,000,000 in
building a palatial home in the heart of the North Carolina
mountains. For three years three hundred stonemasons were kept busy;
and he gradually added land to his surrounding estate until it
embraced one hundred and eighty square miles. His game preserves were
enlarged until they covered 20,000 acres. So, within thirty years
from the time their grandfather, Commodore Vanderbilt, was extorting
his original millions by blackmailing, did they live like princes,
and in greater luxury and power than perhaps any of the titular
princes of ancient or modern days. But the splendor of these abodes
was intended merely for partial use. At their command spacious,
majestic palaces arose at Newport, whither in the torrid season some
of the Vanderbilts transferred their august seat of power and
pleasure.
Hardly had they settled themselves down in the vested security of
their great fortunes when an ominous situation presented itself to
shake the entire propertied class into a violent state of uneasiness.
Hitherto the main antagonistic movement perturbing the magnates was
that of the obstreperous and still powerful middle class. Dazed and
enraged at the certain prospect of their complete subjugation and
eventual annihilation, these small capitalists had clamored for laws
restricting the power of the great capitalists. Some of their demands
were constantly being enacted into law, without, however, the
expected results.
THE GREAT LABOR MOVEMENT OF 1886
Now, to the intense alarm of all sections of the capitalist class, a
very different quality of movement reared itself upward from the
deeps of the social formation. [Footnote: It may be asked why an
extended description of this movement is interposed here. Because,
inasmuch as it is a part of the plan of this work to present a
constant succession of contrasts, this is, perhaps, as appropriate a
place as any to give an account of the highly important labor
movement of 1886. Of course, it will be understood that this movement
was not the result of any one capitalist fortune or process, but was
a general revolt to compel all forms of capitalist control to concede
better conditions to the workers.]
This time it was the laboring masses preparing for the most vigorous
and comprehensive attack that they had ever made upon capitalism's
intrenchments. Long exploited, oppressed and betrayed, starved or
clubbed into intervals of apathy or submission, they were again in
motion, moving forward with a set deliberation and determination
which disconcerted the capitalist class. No mere local conflict of
class interests was it on this occasion, but a general cohesive
revolt of the workers against some of the conditions and laws under
which they had to labor.
In 1884 the Federation of Trades and Labor Unions of the United
States and Canada had issued a manifesto calling upon all trades to
unite in the demand for an eight-hour workday. The date for a general
strike was finally fixed for May 1, 1886. The year 1886, therefore,
was one of general agitation throughout the United States. With
rapidity and enthusiasm the movement spread. Presently it took on a
radical character. Realizing it to be at basis the first national
awakening of the proletariat, progressive men and women of every
shade of opinion hastened forward to support it and direct it into
one of opposition, not merely to a few of the evils of wage slavery,
but to what they considered the fundamental cause itself--the
capitalist system.
The propertied classes were not deceived. They knew that while this
labor movement nominally confined itself to one for a shorter
workday, yet its impetus was such that it contained the fullest
potentialities for developing into a mighty uprising against the very
system by which they were enabled to enrich themselves and enslave
the masses.
The moment this fact was discerned, both great and small capitalists
instinctively suspended hostilities. They tacitly agreed to hold
their bitter warfare for supremacy in abeyance, and unite in the face
of their common danger. The triangular conflict between the large and
small capitalists and the trades unions now resolved into a duel
between the propertied classes of all descriptions on the one hand,
and, on the other, the workingmen's organizations. The Farmers'
Alliance, essentially a middle-class movement of the employing
farmers in the South and West, was counted upon as aligned with the
propertied classes. On the part of the capitalists there was no unity
of organization in the sense of selected leaders or committees. It
was not necessary. A stronger bond than that of formal organization
drove them into acting in conscious unison--namely, the immediate
peril involved to their property interests. Apprehension soon gave
way to grim decision. This formidable labor movement had to be broken
and dispersed at any cost.
But how was the work of destruction to be done? This was the
predicament. Vested wealth could succeed in bribing a labor leader
here and there; but the movement had bounded far beyond the elemental
stage, and had become a glowing agitation which no traitor or set of
traitors could have stopped.
One effective way of discrediting and suppressing it there was; the
ancient one of virtually outlawing it, and throwing against it the
whole brute force of Government. The task of putting it down was
preŽminently one for the police, army and judiciary. They had been
used to stifle many another protest of the workers; why not this? As
the great labor movement rolled on, enlisting the ardent attachment
of the masses, denouncing the injustices, corruption and robberies of
the existing industrial system, the propertied classes more acutely
understood that they must hasten to stamp it out by whatever means.
The municipal and State governments and the National Government,
completely representing their interests and ideas, and dominated by
them, stood ready to use force. But there had to be some kind of
pretext. The hosts of labor were acting peacefully and with
remarkable self control and discipline.
* * * * * * *
THE PROPERTIED CLASSES STRIKE BACK.
The propitious occasion soon came. It was in Chicago that the blow
was struck which succeeded in discrediting the cause of the workers,
stayed the progress of their movement, and covered it with a
prejudice and an odium lasting for years. There, in that maddening
bedlam, called a city, the acknowledged inferno of industrialism, the
agitation was tensest. With its brutalities, cruelties, corruptions
and industrial carnage, its hideous contrasts of dissolute riches and
woe-begone poverty, its arrogant wealth lashing the working
population lower and lower into squalor, pauperism and misery,
Chicago was overripe for any movement seeking to elevate conditions.
In the first months of 1886, strike followed strike throughout the
United States for an eight-hour day. At McCormick's reaper works in
Chicago [Footnote: The McCormick fortune was the outgrowth, to a
large extent, of a variety of frauds and corruptions. Later on in
this work, the facts are given as to how Cyrus H. McCormick, the
founder of the fortune, bribed Congress, in 1854, to give him a time
extension of his patent rights.] a prolonged strike of many months
began in February. Determined not only to refuse shorter hours, but
to force his twelve hundred wage workers to desert labor unions,
McCormick drove them from his factory, hired armed mercenaries,
called Pinkerton detectives, and substituted in the place of the
union workers those despised irresponsibles called "scabs"--
signifying laborers willing to help defeat the battles of organized
labor, and, if the unions won, share in the benefits without
incurring any of the responsibilities, risks or struggles. On May 1,
1886, forty thousand men and women in Chicago went on strike for an
eight-hour day. Thus far, the aim of inciting violence on the part of
the strikers had completely failed everywhere.
The Knights of Labor were conducting their strikes with a coolness,
method and sober sense of order, giving no opportunity for the
exercise of force. On May 2, a great demonstration of the McCormick
workers was held near that company's factories to protest against the
employment of armed Pinkertons. The Pinkerton detective bureau was a
private establishment, founded during the Civil War; in the ensuing
contests between labor and capital it was alleged to have made a
profitable business of supplying spies and armed men to capitalists
under the pretense of safeguarding property. These armed bands really
constituted private armies; recruited often from the most debased and
worthless part of the population, as well as from the needy and
shifty, they were, it was charged, composed largely of men who would
perjure themselves, fabricate evidence, provoke trouble, and
slaughter without scruple for pay. Some, as was well established,
were ex-convicts, others thugs, and still others were driven to the
ignoble employment by necessity. [Footnote: The prevailing view of
the working class toward the Pinkerton detectives was thus expressed
at the time in a chapter on the mine workers by John McBride, one of
the trade union leaders: "They have awakened," he wrote, "the hatred
and detestation of the workingmen of the United States; and this
hatred is due, not only to the fact that they protect the men who are
stealing the bread from the mouths of the families of strikers, but
to the fact that as a class they seem rather to invite trouble than
to allay it.... They are employed to terrorize the workingmen, and to
create in the minds of the public the idea that the miners are a
dangerous class of citizens that have to be kept down by armed force.
These men had an interest in keeping up and creating troubles which
gave employers opportunity to demand protection from the State
militia at the expense of the State, and which the State has too
readily granted."--"The Labor Movement": 264-265.] During the course
of the meeting in the afternoon the factory bell rung, and the
"scabs" were seen leaving. Some boys in the audience began throwing
stones and there was hooting. Fully aware of the combustible accounts
wanted by their offices, the reporters immediately telephoned
exaggerated, inflammatory stories of a riot being under way; the
police on the spot likewise notified headquarters. [Footnote: In a
statement published in the Chicago "Daily News," issue of May 10,
1889, Captain Ebersold, chief of police in 1886, charged that Captain
Schaack, who had been the police official most active in proceeding
against the labor leaders and causing them to be executed and
imprisoned, had deliberately set about concocting "anarchist"
conspiracies in order to get the credit for discovering and breaking
them up.] Police in large numbers soon arrived; the boys kept
throwing stones; and suddenly, without warning, the police drew their
revolvers and indiscriminately opened a general fire upon the men,
women and children in the crowd, killing four and wounding many.
Terror stricken and in horror the crowd fled.
There was a group of radical spirits in Chicago, popularly branded as
anarchists, but in reality men of advanced ideas who, while differing
from one another in economic views, agreed in denouncing the existing
system as the prolific cause of bitter wrongs and rooted injustices.
Sincere, self-sacrificing, intellectual, outspoken, absolutely
devoted to their convictions, burning with compassion and noble
ideals for suffering humanity, they had stepped forward and had
greatly assisted in arousing the militant spirit in the working class
in Chicago. At all of the meetings they had spoken with an ardor and
ability that put them in the front ranks of the proletarian leaders;
and in two newspapers published by them, the "Alarm," in English, and
the "Arbeiter Zeitung," in German, they unceasingly advocated the
interests of the working class. These men were Albert R. Parsons, a
printer, editor of the "Alarm;" August Spies, an upholsterer by
trade, and editor of the "Arbeiter Zeitung;" Adolph Fischer, a
printer; Louis Lingg, a carpenter; Samuel Fielden, the son of a
British factory owner; George Engel, a painter; Oscar Neebe, a well-
to-do business man, and Michael Schwab, a bookbinder. All of them
were more or less deep students of economics and sociology; they had
become convinced that the fundamental cause of the prevalent
inequalities of opportunity and of the widespread misery was the
capitalist system itself. Hence they opposed it uncompromisingly.
[Footnote: The utterances of these leaders revealed the reasons why
they were so greatly feared by the capitalist class. Fischer, for
instance, said: "I perceive that the diligent, never-resting human
working bees, who create all wealth and fill the magazines with
provisions, fuel and clothing, enjoy only a minor part of this
product, while the drones, the idlers, keep the warehouses locked up,
and revel in luxury and voluptuousness." Engel said: "The history of
all times teaches us that the oppressing always maintain their
tyrannies by force and violence. Some day the war will break out;
therefore all workingmen should unite and prepare for the last war,
the outcome of which will be the end forever of all war, and bring
peace and happiness to mankind."]
The newspapers, voicing the interests and demands of the intrenched
classes, denounced these radicals with a sinister emphasis as
destructionists. But it was not ignorance which led them to do this;
it was intended as a deliberate poisoning and inflaming of public
opinion. Themselves bribing, corrupting, intimidating, violating laws
and slaying for profit everywhere, the propertied classes ever
assumed, as has so often been pointed out, the pose of being the
staunch conservers of law and order. To fasten upon the advanced
leaders of the labor movement the stigma of being sowers of disorder,
and then judicially get rid of them, and crush the spirit and
movement of the aroused proletariat--this was the plan determined
upon. Labor leaders who confined their programme to the industrial
arena were not feared so much; but Parsons, Spies and their comrades
were not only pointing out to the masses truths extremely unpalatable
to the capitalists, but were urging, although in a crude way, a
definite political movement to overthrow capitalism. With the finest
perception, fully alert to their danger, the propertied classes were
intent upon exterminating this portentous movement by striking down
its leaders and terrifying their followers.
THE HAYMARKET TRAGEDY.
Fired with indignation at the slaughter at the McCormick meeting,
Spies and others of his group issued a call for a meeting on the
night of May 4, at the Haymarket, to protest against the police
assaults. Spies opened the meeting, and was followed by Fielden.
Observers agreed that the meeting was proceeding in perfect quiet, so
quietly that the Mayor of Chicago, who was present to suppress it if
necessary, went home--when suddenly one hundred and eighty policemen,
with arms in readiness, appeared and peremptorily ordered the meeting
to disperse. It seems that without pausing for a reply they
immediately charged, and began clubbing and mauling the few hundred
persons present. At this juncture a small bomb, thrown by someone,
exploded in the ranks of the police, felling sixty and killing one.
The police instantly began firing into the crowd.
No one has ever been able to find out definitely who threw the bomb.
Suspicions were not lacking that it was done by a mercenary of
corporate wealth. At Pittsburg, in 1877, as we have seen, the
Pennsylvania railroad hirelings deliberately destroyed property and
incited riot in order to charge the strikers with crime. In the coal
mining regions of Pennsylvania, subsidized detectives had provoked
trouble during the strikes, and by means of bogus evidence and packed
juries had hung some labor leaders and imprisoned others.
The hurling of the bomb, whether done by a secret emissary, or by a
sympathizer with labor, proved the lever which the propertied classes
had been feverishly awaiting. Spies, Fielding and their comrades were
at once cast into jail; the newspapers invented wild yarns of
conspiracies and midnight plots, and raucously demanded the hanging
of the leaders. The trifling formality of waiting until their guilt
had been proved was not considered. The most significant event,
however, was the secret meeting of about three hundred leading
American capitalists to plan the suppression of "anarchy." Very
horrified they professed themselves to be at violent outrages and
destruction of property and life. Their views were given wide
circulation and commendation; they were the finest types of
commercial success and prestige. They were the owners of railroads
that slaughtered thousands of human beings every year, because of the
demands of profit; of factories which sucked the very life out of
their toilers, and which filled the hospitals, slums, brothels and
graveyards with an ever-increasing assemblage; every man in that
conclave, as a beneficiary of the existing system, had drained his
fortune from the sweat, sorrow, miseries and death agonies of a
multitude of workers. [Footnote: This seems a very sweeping and
extraordinary prejudicial statement. It should be remembered,
however, that these capitalists, both individually and collectively,
had contested the passage of every proposed law, the aim of which was
to improve conditions for the workers on the railroads and in mines
and factories. Time after time they succeeded in defeating or
ignoring this legislation. Although the number of workers killed or
injured in accidents every year was enormous, and although the number
slain by diseases contracted in workshops or dwellings was even
greater, the capitalists insisted that the law had no right to
interfere with the conduct of their "private business."] These were
the men who came forth to form the "Citizens' Association," and
within a few hours subscribed $100,000 as a fighting fund.
JUDICIAL MURDER OF LABOR'S LEADERS.
The details of the trial will not be gone into here. The trial itself
is now everywhere recognized as having been a tragic farce. The jury,
it is clear, was purposely drawn from the employing class, or their
dependents; of a thousand talesmen summoned, only five or six
belonged to the working class. The malignant class nature of the
trial was revealed by the questions asked of the talesmen; nearly all
declared that they had a prejudice against Socialists, Anarchists and
Communists. Soon the blindest could see that the conviction of the
group was determined upon in advance, and that it was but the visible
evidence of a huge conspiracy to terrorize the whole working class.
The theory upon which the group was prosecuted was that they were
actively engaged in a conspiracy against the existing authorities,
and that they advocated violence and bloodshed. No jurist would now
presume to contend that the slightest evidence was adduced to prove
this. But all were rushed to conviction: Spies, Parsons, Fischer, and
Engel were hanged on November 11, 1887, after fruitless appeals to
the higher courts; Lingg committed suicide in prison, and Fielden,
Neebe and Schwab were sentenced to long terms in prison. The four
executed leaders met their death with the heroic calmness of
martyrdom. "Let the voice of the people be heard!" were Parsons' last
words. Fielden, Neebe and Schwab might have rotted away in prison,
were it not that one of the noblest-minded and most maligned men of
his time, in the person of John P. Altgeld, was Governor of Illinois
in 1893. Governor Altgeld pardoned them on these grounds, which he
undoubtedly proved in an exhaustive review: (1) The jury was a packed
one selected to convict; (2) the jurors were prejudiced; (3) no guilt
was proved; (4) the State's attorney had admitted no case against
Neebe, yet he had been imprisoned; (5)the trial judge (Gary) was
either so prejudiced or subservient to class influence that he did
not or could not give a fair trial. Even many of those who denounced
Altgeld for this action, now admit that his grounds were justified.
THE LABOR UPRISING IN NEW YORK.
In the meanwhile, between the time of the Haymarket episode and the
hanging and imprisonment of the Chicago group, the labor movement in
New York City had assumed so strong a political form that the ruling
class was seized with consternation. The Knights of Labor, then at
the summit of organization and solidarity, were ripe for independent
political action; the effects of the years of active propaganda
carried on in their ranks by the Socialists and Single-Tax advocates
now began to show fruit. At the critical time, when the labor unions
were wavering in the decision as to whether they ought to strike out
politically or not, the ruling class supplied the necessary vital
impulsion. While in Chicago the courts were being used to condemn the
labor leaders to death or prison, in the East they were used to
paralyze the weapons of offense and defence by which the unions were
able to carry on their industrial warfare.
The conviction, in New York City, of certain members of a union for
declaring a boycott, proved the one compelling force needed to mass
all of the unions and radical societies and individuals into a mighty
movement resulting in an independent labor party. To meet this
exigency an effort was made by the politicians to buy off Henry
George, the distinguished Single-Tax advocate, who was recognized as
the leader of the labor party. But this flanking attempt at bribing
an incorruptible man failed; the labor unions proceeded to nominate
George for Mayor, and a campaign was begun of an ardor, vigor and
enthusiasm such as had not been known since the Workingmen's party
movement in 1829.
The election was for local officers of the foremost city in the
United States--a point of vantage worth contending for, since the
moral effect of such a victory of the working class would be
incalculable, even if short-lived. To the ruling classes the triumph
of the labor unions, while restricted to one city, would unmistakably
denote the glimmerings of the beginning of the end of their regime.
Such rebellious movements are highly contagious; from the confines of
one municipality they sweep on to other sections, stimulating action
and inspiring emulation. The New York labor campaign of 1886 was an
intrinsic part and result of the general labor movement throughout
the United States. And it was the most significant manifestation of
the onward march of the workers; elsewhere the labor unions had not
gone beyond the stage of agitation and industrial warfare; but in New
York, with the most acute perception of the real road it must
traverse, the labor movement had plunged boldly into political
action. It realized that it must get hold of the governmental powers.
Its antagonists, the capitalists, had long had a rigid grip on them,
and had used them almost wholly as they willed.
But the capitalist class was even more doggedly determined upon
retaining and intensifying those powers. Government was an essential
requisite to its plans and development. The small capitalists
bitterly fought the great; but both agreed that Government with its
legislators, laws, precedents, and the habits of thought it created,
must be capitalistic. Both saw in the uprising of labor a prospective
overturning of conditions.
From this identity of interest a singular concrete alliance resulted.
The great capitalists, whom the middle-class had denounced as
pirates, now became the decorous and orthodox "saviors of society,"
with the small capitalists trailing behind their leadership, and
shouting their praises as the upholders of law and the conservators
of order. In Chicago the same men who had bribed legislators and
common councils to give them public franchises, and who had hugely
swindled and stolen under guise of law, had been the principals in
calling for the execution and imprisonment of the group of labor
leaders, and this they had decreed in the name of law. In New York
City a pretext for dealing similarly with the labor leaders was
entirely lacking, but another method was found effective in the
subjugation and dispersion of the movement.
CAPITALIST TRIUMPH BY FRAUD.
This was the familiar one of corruption and fraud. It was a method in
the exercise of which the capitalists as a class had proved
themselves adepts; they now summoned to their aid all of the ignoble
and subterranean devices of criminal politics.
In the New York City election of 1886 three parties contested, the
Labor party, Tammany Hall and the Republican party. Steeped in
decades of the most loathsome corruption, Tammany Hall was chosen as
the medium by which the Labor party was to be defrauded and effaced.
Pretending to be the "champion of the people's rights," and boasting
that it stood for democracy against aristocracy, Tammany Hall had
long deceived the mass of the people to plunder them. It was a
powerful, splendidly-organized body of mercenaries and selfseekers
which, by trading on the principles of democracy, had been able to
count on the partisan votes of a predominating element of the wage-
working class. In reality, however, it was absolutely directed by a
leader or "boss," who, with his confederates, made a regular traffic
of selling legislation to the capitalists, on the one hand, and who,
on the other, enriched themselves by a colossal system of blackmail.
They sold immunity to pickpockets, confidence men and burglars,
compelled the saloonkeepers to pay for protection, and even extorted
from the wretched women of the street and brothels. This was the
organization that the ruling class, with its fine assumptions of
respectability, now depended upon to do its work of breaking up the
political labor revolt.
The candidate of Tammany Hall was the ultra-respectable Abram S.
Hewitt, a millionaire capitalist. The Republican party nominated a
verbose, pushful, self-glorifying young man, who, by a combination of
fortuitous circumstances, later attained the position of President of
the United States. This was Theodore Roosevelt, the scion of a
moderately rich New York family, and a remarkable character whose
pugnacious disposition, indifference to political conventionalities,
capacity for exhortation, and bold political shrewdness were mistaken
for greatness of personality. The phenomenal success to which he
subsequently rose was characteristic of the prevailing turgidity and
confusion of the popular mind. Both Hewitt and Roosevelt were, of
course, acceptable to the capitalist class. As, however, New York was
normally a city of Democratic politics, and as Hewitt stood the
greater chance of winning, the support of those opposed to the labor
movement was concentrated upon him.
Intrenched respectability, for the most part, came forth to join
sanctimony with Tammany scoundrelism. It was an edifying union, yet
did not comprise all of the forces linked in that historic coalition.
The Church, as an institution, cast into it the whole weight of its
influence and power. Soaked with the materialist spirit while
dogmatically preaching the spiritual, dominated and pervaded by
capitalist influences, the Church, of all creeds and denominations,
lost no time in subtly aligning itself in its expected place. And woe
to the minister or priest who defied the attitude of his church!
Father McGlynn, for example, was excommunicated by the Pope,
ostensibly for heretical utterances, but in actuality for espousing
the cause of the labor movement.
Despite every legitimate argument coupled with venomous ridicule and
coercive and corrupt influence that wealth, press and church could
bring to bear, the labor unions stood solidly together. On election
day groups of Tammany repeaters, composed of dissolutes, profligates,
thugs and criminals, systematically, under directions from above,
filled the ballot boxes with fraudulent votes. The same rich class
that declaimed with such superior indignation against rule by the
"mob" had poured in funds which were distributed by the politicians
for these frauds. But the vote of the labor forces was so
overwhelming, that even piles of fraudulent votes could not suffice
to overcome it. One final resource was left. This was to count out
Henry George by grossly tampering with the election returns and
misrepresenting them. And this is precisely what was done, if the
testimony of numerous eye-witnesses is to be believed. The Labor
party, it is quite clear, was deliberately cheated out of an election
won in the teeth of the severest and most corrupt opposition. This
result it had to accept; the entire elaborate machinery of elections
was in the full control of the Labor party's opponents; and had it
instituted a contest in the courts, the Labor party would have found
its efforts completely fruitless in the face of an adverse judiciary.
THE LABOR PARTY EVAPORATES.
By the end of the year 1887 the political phase of the labor movement
had shrunk to insignificant proportions, and soon thereafter
collapsed. The capitalist interests had followed up their onslaught
in hanging and imprisoning some of the foremost leaders, and in
corruption and fraud at the polls, by the repetition of other tactics
that they had long so successfully used.
Acting through the old political parties they further insured the
disintegration of the Labor party by bribing a sufficient number of
its influential men. This bribery took the form of giving them
sinecurist offices under either Democratic or Republican local, State
or National administrations. Many of the most conspicuous organizers
of the labor movement were thus won over, by the proffer of well-
paying political posts, to betray the cause in the furtherance of
which they had shown such energy. Deprived of some of its leaders,
deserted by others, the labor political movement sank into a state of
disorganization, and finally reverted to its old servile position of
dividing its vote between the two capitalist parties.
From now one, for many years, the labor movement existed purely as an
industrial one, disclaiming all connection with politics. Voting into
power either of the old political parties, it then humbly begged a
few crumbs of legislation from them, only to have a few sops thrown
to it, or to receive contemptuous kicks and humiliations, and, if it
grew too importunate or aggressive, insults backed with the strong
might of judicial, police and military power.
When it was jubilantly seen by the coalesced propertied classes that
the much-dreaded labor movement had been thrust aside and shorn, they
resumed their interrupted conflict.
The small capitalist evinced a fierce energy in seeking to hinder in
every possible way the development of the great. It was in these
years that a multitude of middle-class laws were enacted both by
Congress and by the State legislatures; the representatives of that
class from the North and East joined with those of the Farmers'
Alliance from the West and South. Laws were passed declaring
combinations conspiracies in restraint of trade and prohibiting the
granting of secret discriminative rates by the railroads. In 1889 no
fewer than eighteen States passed anti-trust laws; five more followed
the next year. Every one of these laws was apparently of the most
explicit character, and carried with it drastic penal provisions.
"Now," exulted the small capitalists in high spirits of elation, "we
have the upper hand. We have laws enough to throttle the monopolists
and preserve our righteous system of competition. They don't dare
violate them, with the prospects of long terms in prison staring them
in the face."
THE SMALL CAPITALISTS' LOSING FIGHT.
The great capitalists both dared and did. If specific statutes were
against them, the impelling forces of economic development and the
power of might were wholly on their side. The competitive system was
already doomed; the middle class was too blind to realize that what
seemed to be victory was the rattle of the slow death struggle. At
first, the great capitalists made no attempt to have these laws
altered or repealed. They adopted a slyer and more circuitous mode of
warfare. They simply evaded them. As fast as one trust was dissolved
by court decision, it nominally complied, as did, for instance, the
Standard Oil Trust and the Sugar Trust, and then furtively caused
itself to be reborn into a new combination so cunningly sheltered
within the technicalities of the law that it was fairly safe from
judicial overthrow.
But the great capitalists were too wise to stake their existence upon
the thin refuge of technicalities. With their huge funds they now
systematically struck out to control the machinery of the two main
political parties; they used the ponderous weight of their influence
to secure the appointment of men favorable to them as Attorneys
General of the United States, and of the States, and they carried on
a definite plan of bringing about the appointment or election of
judges upon whose decisions they could depend. The laws passed by the
middle class remained ornamental encumbrances on the statute books;
the great capitalists, although harassed continually by futile
attacks, triumphantly swept forward, gradually in their consecutive
progress strangling the middle class beyond resurrection.
Such was the integral impotence of the warfare of the small against
the great capitalists that, during this convulsive period, the
existing magnates increased their wealth and power on every hand, and
their ranks were increased by the accession of new members. From the
chaos of middle-class industrial institutions, one trust after
another sprang full-armed, until presently there was a whole array of
them. The trust system had proved itself immensely superior in every
respect to the competitive, and by its own superiority it was bound
to supplant the other.
Where William H. Vanderbilt had thought himself compelled to
temporize with the middle class agitation by making a show of
dividing the stock ownership of the New York Central Railroad, his
sons Cornelius and William ignored or defied it. Utterly disdainful
of the bitter feeling, especially in the West, against the
consolidation of railroads in the hands of the powerful few, they
tranquilly went ahead to gather more railroads in their ownership.
The Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad (popularly
dubbed the "Big Four") acquired by them in 1890 was one of these. It
would be tiresome, however, to enter into a narrative of the complex,
tortuous methods by which they possessed themselves of these
railroads. By the beginning of the year 1893 the Vanderbilt system
embraced at least 12,000 miles of railways, with a capitalized value
of several hundred million dollars, and a total gross earning power
of more than $60,000,000 a year. "All of the best railroad
territory," says John Moody in his sketch entitled "The Romance of
the Railways," "outside of New England, Pennsylvania and New Jersey
was penetrated by the Vanderbilt lines, and no other railroad system
in the country, with the single notable exception of the Pennsylvania
Railroad, covered anything like the same amount of rich and settled
territory, or reached so many towns and cities of importance. New
York, Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Detroit,
Indianapolis, Omaha--these were a few of the great marts which were
embraced in the Vanderbilt preserves." So impregnably rich and
powerful were the Vanderbilts, so profitable their railroads, and
their command of resources, financial institutions and legislation so
great, that the panic of 1893 instead of impairing their fortunes
gave them extraordinary opportunities for getting hold of the
properties of weaker railroads.
It was now, acting jointly with other puissant interests, that they
saw their chance to get control of a large part of the fabulously
rich coal mines of Pennsylvania. These coal mines had originally been
owned by separate companies or operators, each independent of the
other. But by about the year 1867 the railroads penetrating the coal
regions had conceived the plan of owning the mines themselves. Why
continue to act as middlemen in transporting the coal? Why not vest
in themselves the ownership of these vast areas of coal lands, and
secure all the profits instead of those from merely handling the
coal?
The plan ingratiated itself as a capital one; it could be easily
carried out with little expenditure. All that was necessary for the
railroad to do was to burden down the operators with exorbitant
charges, and hamper and beleaguer them in a variety of compressing
ways. [Footnote: See testimony before the committee to investigate
the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad Company, and the Philadelphia
and Reading Coal and Iron Company, Pennsylvania Legislative Docs.
1876, Vol. v, Doc. No. 2. This investigation fully revealed how the
railroads detained the cars of the "independent" operators, and
otherwise used oppressive methods.] As was proved in subsequent
lawsuits, the railroads frequently declined to carry coal for this or
that mine, on the pretext that they had no cars available. Every
means was used to crush the independent operators and depreciate the
selling value of their property. It was a campaign of ruination; in
law it stood as criminal conspiracy; but the railroads persisted in
it without any further molestation than prolix civil suits, and they
finally forced a number of the well-nigh bankrupted independent
operators to sell out to them for comparatively trifling sums.
[Footnote: Spahr quotes an independent operator in 1900 as saying
that the railroads charged the independents three times as much for
handling hard coal as they charged for handling soft coal from the
West--"America's Working People": 122-223.]
By these methods such railroads as the Philadelphia and Reading, the
Delaware, Lackawana and Western, the Central Railroad of New Jersey,
the Lehigh Valley and others gradually succeeded, in the course of
years, in extending an ownership over the coal mines. The more
powerful independent operators struck back early at them by getting a
constitutional provision passed in Pennsylvania, in 1873, prohibiting
railroads from owning and operating coal mines. The railroads evaded
this law with facility by an illegal system of leasing, and by
organizing nominally separate and independent companies the stock of
which, in reality, was owned by them.
To the men who did the actual labor of working in the mines--the coal
miners--this change of ownership was not regarded with alarm. Indeed,
they at first cherished the pathetic hope that it might benefit their
condition, which had been desperate and intolerable enough under the
old company system. The small coal-owning capitalists, who had
emitted such wailings at their own oppression by the railroads, had
long relentlessly exploited their tens of thousands of workers. One
abuse had been piled upon another. The miners were paid by the ton;
the companies had fraudulently increased the size of the ton, so that
the miners had to perform much more labor while wages remained
stationary or were reduced.
But one of the most serious grievances was that against what were
called "company or truck stores." Ingenious contrivances for getting
back the miserable wages paid out, these were company-owned
merchandise stores in which the miners were compelled to buy their
supplies. In many collieries the mine worker was not paid in money
but was given an order on the company store, where he was forced to
purchase inferior goods at exorbitant prices.
To blast in the mines powder was necessary; the miner had to buy it
at his own expense, and was charged $2.75 a keg, although its selling
value was not more than $1.10 or 90 cents. In every direction the
mine worker was defrauded and plundered. "Often," says John Mitchell,
long the leader of the miners, and a compromiser whose career proves
that he cannot be charged with any deep-seated antagonism to
capitalist interests, "a man together with his children would work
for months without receiving a dollar of money, and not infrequently
he would find at the end of the month nothing in his envelope but a
statement that his indebtedness to the company had increased so many
dollars." [Footnote: "Organized Labor": 359. Mitchell's comments were
fully supported by the vast mass of testimony taken by the United
States Anthracite Coal Commission in 1902. Mitchell is, at this
writing (1909), in the employ of the Civic Federation, an
organization financed by capitalists. Its alleged purpose is to bring
about "harmony" between capital and labor.] Mitchell adds that the
Legislature of Pennsylvania passed anti-truck store laws, "but the
operators who have always cried out loudest against illegal action by
miners openly and unhesitatingly violated the act and subsequently
evaded it by various devices." [Footnote: Ibid.] The wretched houses
the miners occupied "also," says Mitchell, "served as a means of
extortion, and, in other instances, as a weapon to be used against
the miners." In case they complained or struck, the miners were
evicted under the most cruel circumstances. Many other media of
extortion were common. In the entire year the miners averaged only
one hundred and ninety working days of ten hours each, and, of
course, were paid for working time only. According to Spahr 350,000
miners drudged for an average wage of $350 a year. [Footnote: "The
Present Distribution of Wealth in the United States": 110-111.]
SEIZING RAILROADS AND COAL MINES.
This system of abject slavery was in full force when the railroads
ousted many of the small operators, and largely by pressure of power
took possession of the mines. In vain did the miners' unions implore
the railroad magnates for redress of some kind. The magnates abruptly
refused, and went on extending and intrenching their authority. The
Vanderbilts manipulated themselves into being important factors in
the Delaware and Hudson Railroad, and in the Delaware, Lackawana and
Western Railroad, which had deviously obtained title to some of the
richest coal deposits in Wyoming County, and they also became
prominent in the directing of the Lehigh Valley Railroad.
The most important coal-owning railroad, however, which they and
other magnates coveted was the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad. At
least one-half of the anthracite coal supply of Pennsylvania was
owned or controlled by this railroad. The ownership of the Reading
Railroad, with its subordinate lines, was the pivotal requisite
towards getting a complete monopoly of the anthracite coal deposits.
William H. Vanderbilt had acquired an interest in it years before,
but the actual controlling ownership at this time was held by a group
of Philadelphia capitalists of the second rank with their three
hundred thousand shares.
Unfortunately for this group, the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad
was afflicted with a president, one Arthur A. McLeod, who was not
only too recklessly ambitious, but who was temerarious enough to
cross the path of the really powerful magnates. With immense
confidence in his plans and in his ability to carry them out, he set
out to monopolize the anthracite coal supply and to make the Reading
Railroad a great trunk line. To perfect this monopoly he leased some
coal-carrying railroads and made "a gentlemen's agreement" with
others; and in line with his policy of raising the importance of the
road, he borrowed large sums of money for the construction of new
terminals and approaches and for equipment.
Now, all of these plans interfered seriously with the aims and
ambition of magnates far greater than he. These magnates quickly saw
the stupendous possibilities of a monopoly of the coal supply--the
hundreds of millions of dollars of profits it held out--and decided
that it was precisely what they themselves should control and nobody
else. Second, in his aim to have his own railroad connections with
the rich manufacturing and heavily-populated New England districts,
McLeod had arranged with various small railroads a complete line from
the coal fields of Pennsylvania into the heart of New England. In
doing this he overreached his mark. He was soon taught the folly of
presuming to run counter to the interests of the big magnates.
AND THE WAY IN WHICH IT WAS DONE.
The two powers controlling the large railroads traversing most of the
New England States were the Vanderbilts and J. Pierpont Morgan. The
one owned the New York Central, the other dominated the New York, New
Haven and Hartford Railroad. The Pennsylvania Railroad likewise had
no intention of allowing such a powerful competitor in its own
province. These magnates viewed with intense amazement the effrontery
of what they regarded as an upstart interloper. Although they had
been constantly fighting one another for supremacy, these three
interests now made common cause.
They adroitly prepared to crush McLeod and bankrupt the railroad of
which he was the head. By this process they would accomplish three
highly important objects; one the wresting of the Philadelphia and
Reading Railroad into their own divisible ownership; second, the
securing of their personal hold on the connecting railroads that
McLeod had leased; and, finally, the obtaining of undisputed
sovereignty over a great part of the anthracite coal mines. The
warfare now began without those fanciful ceremonials, heralds or
proclamations considered so necessary by Governments as a prelude to
slaughter. These formalities are dispensed with by business
combatants.
First, the Morgan-Vanderbilt interest caused the publication of
terrifying reports that grave legislation hostile to the coal
combination was imminent. The price of Reading stock on the Stock
Exchange immediately declined. Then, following up their advantage,
this dual alliance inspired even more ruinous reports. The credit of
the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad was represented as being in a
very bad state. As the railroad had borrowed immense sums of money
both to finance its coal combination and to build extensive terminals
and other equipment, large payments to creditors were due from time
to time. To pay these creditors the railroad had to borrow more; but
when the credit of the railroad was assailed, it found that its
sources of borrowing were suddenly shut off. The group of
Philadelphia capitalists had already borrowed large sums of money,
giving Reading shares as collateral. When the market price of the
stock kept going down they were called upon to pay back their loans.
Declining or unable to do so, their fifty thousand shares of pledged
stock were sold. This sale still more depressed the price of Reading
stock.
In this group of Philadelphia capitalist were men who were reckoned
as very astute business lights--George M. Pullman, Thomas Dolan, one
of the street railway syndicate whose briberies of legislatures and
common councils, and whose manipulation of street railways in
Philadelphia and other cities were so notorious a scandal; John
Wanamaker, combining piety and sharp business;--these were three of
them. But they were no match for the much more powerful and wily
Vanderbilt-Morgan forces. They were compelled under resistless
pressure to throw over their Reading stock at a great loss to
themselves. Most of it was promptly bought up by J. P. Morgan and
Company and the Vanderbilts, who then leisurely arranged a division
of the spoils between themselves.
This transaction (strict interpreters of the law would have styled it
a conspiracy) opened a facile way for a number of extremely important
changes. The Vanderbilts and the Morgan interests apportioned between
them much of the ownership of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad
with its vast ownership of coal deposits and its coal carrying
traffic. [Footnote: An investigation, in 1905, showed that the
"Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and the New York Central and Hudson
River Railroad owned about 43.3 per cent. of the entire capital stock
of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad Company." "Report on
Discriminations and Monopolies in Coal and Oil, Interstate Commerce
Commission, January 25, 1907": 46.] The New York, New Haven and
Hartford Railroad grasped the New York and New England Railroad from
the Reading's broken hold, and there were further far-reaching
changes militating to increase the railroad, and other, possessions
of both parties. [Footnote: A good account of this expropriating
transaction is that of Wolcott Drew, "The Reading Crash in 1903" in
"Moody's Magazine" (a leading financial periodical), issue of
January, 1907.] It was but another of the many instances of the
supreme capitalists driving out the smaller fry and seizing the
property which they had previously seized by fraud. [Footnote: One of
the particularly indisputable examples of the glaring fraud by which
immense areas of coal fields were originally obtained was that of the
disposition of the estate of John Nicholson.
Dying in December, 1800, Nicholson left an estate embracing land, the
extent of which was variously estimated at from three to five million
acres. Some of the Pennsylvania legislative documents place the area
at from three to four million acres, while others, notably a report
in 1842, by the judiciary committee of the Pennsylvania House of
Representatives, state that it was 5,000,000 acres. Nicholson was a
leading figure in the Pennsylvania Land Company which had obtained
most of its vast land possessions by fraud. Some of Nicholson's
landed estate lay in Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South
Carolina, Georgia and other States, but the bulk of it was in
Pennsylvania, and included extensive regions containing the very
richest coal deposits.
The State of Pennsylvania held a lien upon Nicholson's estate for
unpaid taxes amounting to $300,000. Notwithstanding this lien,
different individuals and corporations contrived to get hold of
practically the whole of the estate in dispute. How they did it is
told in many legislative documents; the fraud and theft connected
with it were a great scandal in Pennsylvania for forty-five years. We
will quote only one of these documents. Writing on January 24, 1842,
to William Elwell, chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the
Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Judge J. B. Anthony, of the
Nicholson Court (a court especially established to pass upon
questions arising from the disposition of the estate), said:
"On the 11th of April, 1825, an act passed the Governor to appoint
agents to discover and sell the Nicholson lands at auction, for which
they were allowed _twenty-five per cent_. A Special Board of
Property was also formed to compromise and settle with claimants.
From what has come to my knowledge in relation to this Act, I am
satisfied that the commonwealth was seriously injured by the manner
in which it was carried out by some of the agents. It was made use of
principally for the benefit of land speculators; and the very small
sums received by the State treasurer for large and valuable tracts
sold and compromised, show that the cunning and astute land jobbers
could easily overreach the Board of Property at Harrisburg. ... Many
instances of gross fraud might be enumerated, but it would serve no
useful purpose." Judge Anthony further said that "very many of the
most influential, astute and intelligent inhabitants" and "gentlemen
of high standing" were participants in the frauds.--Pennsylvania
House Journal, 1842, Vol. ii, Doc. No. 127: 700-704.]
The Vanderbilts' ownership of a large part of the shares of
railroads, which, in turn, own and control the coal mines, may be
summed up as follows: Through the Lake Shore Railroad, which they
have owned almost absolutely, they own, or until recently did own,
$30,000,000 of shares in the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad with
its stupendous anthracite coal deposits, and they owned, for a long
time, large amounts of stock in the Lehigh Valley Railroad with its
unmined coal deposits of 400,000,000 tons. In 1908 they disposed of
their Lehigh Valley Railroad ownings, receiving an equivalent in
either money or some other form of property. The ownership of the
Delaware, Lackawana and Western Railroad with its equally large
unmined coal deposits is divided between the Vanderbilt family and
the Standard Oil interests. The Vanderbilts, according to the latest
official reports, also own heavy interests in the Delaware and Hudson
Railroad, the New York, Ontario and Western Railroad, $12,500,000 of
stock in the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, and large amounts of stock
in other coal mining and coal carrying railroads. [Footnote: See
Special Report No. 1 of the Interstate Commerce Commission on
Intercorporate Relationship of Railroads: 39. Also Carl Snyder's
"American Railways as Investments": 473.]
Here, then is another important step in the acquisition of a large
part of the country's resources by the Vanderbilts. A recapitulation
will not be out of place. His first millions obtained by
blackmailing, Commodore Vanderbilt then uses those millions to buy a
railroad. By further fraudulent methods, based upon bribery of
lawmaking bodies, he obtains more railroads and more wealth. His son,
following his methods, adds other railroads to the inventory, and
converts tens of millions of fraudulently-acquired millions into
interest-bearing Government, State, city and other bonds. The third
generation (in point of order from the founder) continues the methods
of the father and grandfather, gets hold of still more railroads, and
emerges as one of the powers owning the great coal deposits of
Pennsylvania.
THE DICTATION OF THE COAL FIELDS.
The Vanderbilt and Morgan interest at once increased the price of
anthracite coal, adding to it $1.25 to $1.35 a ton. In 1900 they
appeared in the open with a new and gigantic plan of consolidation by
which they were able to control almost absolutely the production and
prices. That the Vanderbilt family and the Morgan interests were the
main parties to this combination was well established. [Footnote:
Final Report of the U. S. Industrial Commission, 1902, xix: 462-463.]
Already high, a still heavier increase of price at once was put on
the 40,000,000 tons of anthracite then produced, and the price was
successively raised until consumers were taxed seven times the cost
of production and transportation.
The population was completely at the mercy of a few magnates; each
year, as the winter drew on, the Coal Trust increased its price. In
the needs and suffering of millions of people it found a ready means
of laying on fresher and heavier tribute. By the mandate of the Coal
Trust, housekeepers were taxed $70,000,000 in extra impositions a
year, in addition to the $40,000,000 annually extorted by the
exorbitant prices of previous years. At a stroke the magnates were
able to confiscate by successive grabs the labor of the people of the
United States at will. Neither was there any redress; for those same
magnates controlled all of the ramifications of Government.
What, however, of the workers in the mines? While the combination was
high-handedly forcing the consumer to pay enormous prices, how was it
acting toward them? The question is almost superfluous. The railroads
made little concealment of their hostility to the trades unions, and
refused to grant reforms or concessions. Consequently a strike was
declared in 1900 by which the mine workers obtained a ten per cent
increase in wages and the promise of semi-monthly wages in cash. But
they had not resumed work before they discovered the hollowness of
these concessions. Two years of futile application for better
conditions passed, and then, in 1902, 150,000 men and boys went on
strike. This strike lasted one hundred and sixty-three days. The
magnates were generally regarded as arrogant and defiant; they
contended that they had nothing to arbitrate; [Footnote: It was on
this occasion that George F. Baer, president of the Philadelphia and
Reading Railroad, in scoring the public sympathy for the strikers,
justified the attitude of the railroads in his celebrated utterance
in which he spoke "of the Christian men and women to whom God in His
infinite wisdom has intrusted the property interests of the country,"
which alleged divine sanction he was never able to prove.] and only
yielded to an arbitration board when President Roosevelt threatened
them with the full punitive force of Government action.
By the decision of this board the miners secured an increase of wages
(which was assessed on the consumer in the form of higher prices) and
several minor concessions. Yet at best, their lot is excessively
hard. Writing a few years later, Dr. Peter Roberts, who, if anything,
is not partial to the working class, stated that the wages of the
contract miners were (in 1907) about $600 a year, while adults in
other classes of mine workers, who formed more than sixty per cent,
of the labor forces, did not receive an annual wage of $450. Yet
Roberts quotes the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics as saying that
"a family of five persons requires $754 a year to live on." The
average number in the family of a mine worker is five or six. "This
small income," Roberts observes, "drives many of our people to live
in cheap and rickety houses, where the sense of shame and decency is
blunted in early youth, and where men cannot find such home comforts
as will counteract the attractions of the saloon." Hundreds of
company houses, according to Roberts, are unfit for habitation, and
"in the houses of mine employees, of all nationalities, is an
appalling infant mortality." [Footnote: "The Anthracite Coal
Communities": 346-347.]
THE BITUMINOUS COAL MINES ALSO.
The sway of the Vanderbilts, however, extends not only over the
anthracite, but over a great extent of the bituminous coal fields in
Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio and other States. By
their control of the New York Central Railroad, they own various
ostensibly independent bituminous coal mining companies. The
Clearfield Corporation, the Pennsylvania Coal and Coke Co., and the
West Branch Coal Company are some of these. By their great holdings
in other railroads traversing the soft coal regions, the Vanderbilts
control about one-half of the bituminous coal supply in the Eastern,
and most of the Middle-Western, States.
According to the Interstate Commerce Commission's report, in 1907,
the New York Central Railroad and the Pennsylvania Railroad owned in
that year about forty-five per cent. of the stock of the Chesapeake
and Ohio Railroad, and the New York Central owned large amounts of
stock in other railroads. "The Commission, therefore, reaches the
conclusion," the report reads on after going into the question of
ownership in detail, "that, as a matter of fact, the Baltimore and
Ohio Railroad Company, the Norfolk and Western Railroad Company, and
the Philadelphia and Reading Railway Company were practically
controlled by the Pennsylvania Railroad Company and the New York
Central and Hudson River Railroad Company, and that the result was to
practically abolish substantial competition between the carriers of
coal in the territories under consideration." Although the Standard
Oil oligarchy now owns considerable stock in the Vanderbilt
railroads, it is an undoubted fact that the Vanderbilts share to a
great extent the mastery of both hard and soft coal fields.
It is not possible here to present even in condensed form the
outline, much less the full narrative, of the labyrinth of tricks,
conspiracies and frauds which the railroad magnates have resorted to,
and still practice, in the throttling of the small capitalists, and
in guaranteeing themselves a monopoly. A great array of facts are to
be found in the reports of the exhaustive investigations made by the
United States Industrial Commission in 1901-1902, and by the
Interstate Commerce Commission in 1907.
Thousands of times was the law glaringly violated yet the magnates
were at all times safe from prosecution. Periodically the Government
would make a pretense of subjecting them to an inquiry, but in no
serious sense were they interfered with. These investigations all
have shown that the railroads first crushed out the small operators
by a conspiracy of rates, blockades and reprisals, and then by a
juggling process of stocks and bonds, bought in the mines with the
expenditure of scarcely any actual money. Having done this they
formed a monopoly and raised prices which, in law, was a criminal
conspiracy. The same weapons destructively used against the small
coal operators years ago are still being employed against the few
independent companies remaining in the coal fields, as was disclosed,
in 1908, in the suit of the Government to dissolve the workings of
the various railroad companies in the anthracite coal combination.
[Footnote: See testimony brought out before Charles H. Guilbert,
Examiner appointed by the United States District Court in
Philadelphia. The Government's petition charged the defendants with
entering into a conspiracy contrary to the letter and the spirit of
the Sherman act.]
THE HUGE PROFITS FROM THE COAL MINES.
No one knows or can ascertain the exact profits of the Vanderbilts
and of other railroad owners from their control of both the
anthracite, and largely the bituminous, coal mines. As has been
noted, the railroad magnates cloud their trail by operating through
subsidiary companies. That their extortions reach hundreds of
millions of dollars every year is a patent enough fact. Some of the
accompaniments of this process of extortion have been referred to;--
the confiscation, on the one hand, of the labor of the whole
consuming population by taxing from them more and more of the
products of their labor by repeated increases in the price of coal,
and, on the other, the confiscation of the labor of the several
hundred thousand miners who are compelled to work for the most
precarious wages, and in conditions worse, in some respects, than
chattel slavery.
But not alone is labor confiscated. Life is also immolated. The
yearly sacrifice of life in the coal mines of the United States is
steadily growing. The report for 1908 of the United States Geological
Survey showed that 3,125 coal miners were killed by accidents in the
current year, and that 5,316 were injured. The number of fatalities
was 1,033 more than in 1906. "These figures," the report explains,
"do not represent the full extent of the disasters, as reports were
not received from certain States having no mine inspectors." Side by
side with these appalling figures must be again brought out the fact
adverted to already: that the owners of the coal mines have at all
times violently opposed the passage of laws drafted to afford greater
safeguard for life in the working of the mines. Being the owners, at
the same time, of the railroads, their opposition in that field to
life-saving improvements has been as consistent.
Improvements are expensive; human life is contemptibly cheap; so long
as there is a surplus of labor it is held to be commercial folly to
go to the unnecessary expense of protecting an article of merchandise
which can be had so cheaply. Human tragedies do not enter into the
making of profit and loss accounts; outlays for mechanical appliances
do. Assuredly this is a business age wherein profits must take
precedence over every other consideration, which principle has been
most elaborately enunciated and established by a long list of exalted
court decisions. Yea, and the very magnates whose power rests on
force and fraud are precisely those who insidiously dictate what men
shall be appointed to these omniscient courts, before whose edicts
all men are expected to bow in speechless reverence. [Footnote: This
is far from being a rhetorical figure of speech. Witness the
dictating of the appointment and nominations of judges by the
Standard Oil Company (which now owns immense railroad systems and
industrial plants) as revealed by certain authentic correspondence of
that trust made public in the Presidential campaign of 1908.]