BEAUTIFUL WILKES-BARRÉ
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.
[Illustration:
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.
Wilkes-Barré proved a city of charm—a city so instinct with a certain
constructive verve that merely to enter it was to feel revivified. After
our long, dreary drive in the rain the sun was now shining through
sultry clouds and it was pleasant to see the welter of thriving
foundries and shops, smoky and black, which seemed to sing of
prosperity; the long, smooth red brick pavement of the street by which
we entered, so very kempt and sanitary; the gay public square, one of
the most pleasing small parks I have ever seen, crowded with long
distance trolley cars and motors—the former bearing the names of towns
as much as a hundred and a hundred and fifty miles away. The stores were
bright, the throngs interesting and cheerful. We actually, spontaneously
and unanimously exclaimed for joy.
Most people seem to have concluded that America is a most uninteresting
land to travel in—not nearly so interesting as Europe, or Asia or
Africa—and from the point of view of patina, ancient memories, and the
presence of great and desolate monuments, they are right. But there is
another phase of life which is equally interesting to me and that is the
youth of a great country. America, for all its hundreds and some odd
years of life, is a mere child as yet, or an uncouth stripling at
best—gaunt, illogical, elate. It has so much to do before it can call
itself a well organized or historic land, and yet humanly and even
architecturally contrasted with Europe, I am not so sure that it has far
to go. Contrasted with our mechanical equipment Europe is a child. Show
me a country abroad in which you can ride by trolley the distance that
New York is from Chicago, or a state as large as Ohio or Indiana—let
alone both together—gridironed by comfortable lines, in such a way that
you can travel anywhere at almost any time of the night or day. Where
but in America can you at random step into a comfortable telephone booth
and telephone to any city, even one so far as three thousand miles away;
or board a train in almost any direction at any time, which will take
you a thousand miles or more without change; or travel, as we did, two
hundred miles through a fruitful, prosperous land with wonderful farms
and farming machinery and a general air of sound prosperity—even lush
richness? For this country in so far as we had traversed it seemed
wonderfully prosperous to me, full of airy, comfortable homes, of
spirited, genial and even witty people—a really happy people. I take
that to be worth something—and a sight to see.
In Europe the country life did not always strike me as prosperous, or
the people as intelligent, or really free in their souls. In England,
for instance, the peasantry were heavy, sad, dull.
But Wilkes-Barré gave evidences of a real charm. All the streets about
this central heart were thriving marts of trade. The buildings were new,
substantial and with a number of skyscrapers—these inevitable evidences
of America’s local mercantile ambitions, quite like the cathedrals
religionists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries loved to build. As
the Florentines, Venetians and European high mightinesses of the middle
ages generally went in for castles, palaces, and “hotels de Ville,” so
Americans of money today “go in” for high buildings. We love them. We
seem to think they are typical of our strength and power. As the
Florentines, Venetians, Pisans and Genoese looked on their leaning
towers and campaniles, so we on these. When America is old, and its
present vigor and life hunger has gone and an alien or degenerate race
tramp where once we lived and builded so vigorously, perhaps some
visitors from a foreign country will walk here among these ruins and
sigh: “Ah, yes. The Americans were a great people. Their cities were so
wonderful. These mouldy crumbling skyscrapers, and fallen libraries and
post offices and city halls and state capitals!”
In Wilkes-Barré it was easy to find a very pretentious restaurant of the
“grill” and “rathskeller” type, so familiar and so dear, apparently, to
the American heart—a partly underground affair, with the usual heavy
Flemish paneling, a colored frieze of knights and goose girls and an
immense yellow bill of fare. And here from our waiter, who turned out to
be one of those dreadful creatures one sees tearing along country roads
in khaki, army boots and goggles—a motor cyclist—we learned there were
not good roads west of Wilkes-Barré. He had motorcycled to all places
within a hundred or so miles east of here—Philadelphia, Dover, the Water
Gap; but he knew of no good roads west. They were all dirt or rubble and
full of ruts.
Later advice from a man who owned a drug and stationery store, where we
laid in a stock of picture postcards, was to the same effect. There were
no large towns and no good roads west. He owned a Ford. We should take
the road to Binghamton, via Scranton (our original “Scenic Route”), and
from there on by various routes to Buffalo. We would save time going the
long way round. It seemed the only thing to do. Our motor-cycling waiter
had said as much.
[Illustration: A COAL BREAKER NEAR SCRANTON]
By now it was nearly five o’clock. I was so enamored of this town with
its brisk world of shoppers and motorists and its sprinkling of black
faced miners that I would have been perfectly willing to make a night of
it here—but the evening was turning out to be so fine that I could think
of nothing better than motoring on and on. That feel of a cool breeze
blowing against one, of seeing towns and hills and open fields and
humble farm yards go scudding by! Of hearing the tr-r-r-r-r-r of this
sound machine! The sun was coming out or at least great patches of blue
were appearing in the heavy clouds and we had nineteen miles of splendid
road, we understood, straight along the banks of the Susquehanna into
Scranton and thence beyond, if we wished. As much as I had come to fancy
Wilkes-Barré (I promised myself that I would certainly return some day),
I was perfectly willing to go.
Right here began the most delightful portion of this trip—indeed one of
the most delightful rides I have ever had anywhere. Hitherto the
Susquehanna had never been anything much more than a name to me. I now
learned that it takes its rise from Otsego Lake in Otsego County, New
York, flows west to Binghamton and Owego and thence southeast via
Scranton, Wilkes-Barré and Harrisburg to the Chesapeake Bay at Havre de
Grace. Going west over the Pennsylvania I had occasionally seen a small
portion of it gemmed with rocky islands and tumbling along, thinly
bright it seemed to me, over a wide area of stones and boulders. Here at
Wilkes-Barré, bordered for a part of the way by a public park, alongside
of which our road lay, it was quite sizable, smooth and greenish grey.
Perhaps it was due to the recent heavy rains that it was so presentable.
At any rate, sentineled by great hills, it seemed to come with gentle
windings hither and yon, direct from the north. And the valley through
which it moved—how beautiful it really was! Here and there, on every
hand between Wilkes-Barré and Scranton were to be seen immense breakers
with their attendant hills of coal or slag marking the mouths of mines.
As we rode out tonight, finding it easy to make five to thirty miles an
hour, even through the various mining towns we encountered on the way,
we were constantly passing groups of miners, some on foot, some in
trolleys, some in that new invention, the jitney bus, which seemed to be
employed even on these stretches of road where one would have imagined
the street car service was ample. How many long lines of miners'
cottages and yellowish frame tenements we passed! I wonder why it is
that a certain form of such poverty and work seems to be inseparably
identified with yellow or drab paints? So many of these cheap wooden
tenements were thus enameled, and then darkened or smudged by grey soot.
Many of the dwellers in these hives were to be seen camped upon their
thresholds. We ran through one long dreary street—all these towns
followed the shores of the river—and had the interest of seeing a
runaway horse, drawing a small load of fence posts, dashing toward us
and finally swerving and crashing into a tree. Again a group of boys,
seeing the New York license tag on our car, hailed us with a
disconcerting, “Eh, look at the New York bums!” Still farther on,
finding some difficulty with the lamps, Speed drew up by the roadside to
attend to them while Franklin made a rough sketch of a heavenly scene
that was just below us—great hills, a wide valley, some immense breakers
in the foreground, a few clouds tinted pink by the last expiring rays of
the day. This was such a sky and such a scene as might prelude a voice
from heaven.