COAL IN AMERICA
The human significance of coal lies in the effect which the release of
its energy has exercised upon the struggle between the acquisitive
instinct and the consciousness of kind for ascendancy over the soul of
man. Through its creature, the industrial revolution, it has given man
command of an economic surplus and set him free to win the good life for
each individual and to substitute mutual aid for war in international
relations if he will.
But the first effect of coal was not to usher in the good life but to
intensify the ancient struggle, widening its stage from pocketed
civilizations to the world. For more than a hundred and fifty years, the
abundant and readily accessible coal of Great Britain made her the
protagonist in the world drama. Her acquisitive instinct, charged with
cosmic energy, shot lines of imperial expansion out across the seas to
America, India, Australia, China, and Africa. Her coal-created wealth
enabled her to maintain the mastery of the ocean highways which she had
won from Spain and Holland and to hold it against Napoleonic France and
later against imperial Germany. It gave her an economic surplus upon the
basis of which the consciousness of kind welded her people into one
nation and ended the civil wars which from the time of the Danish
invasion and the landing of William the Conqueror had kept each little
group within the island armed against every other little group. And it
transformed her with jarring rapidity into a country that lived by
manufacture and by trade and supported a far larger population than
could have lived upon the island if it had been merely an agricultural
country raising its own food.
In order that this swelling population might go on getting coal out of
the mines and turning out products from the factories it must be
adequately and cheaply fed. The place where its food came from was
chiefly America. During the hundred and fifty years of England's
primacy, America was not only her granary but increasingly the granary
of other nations, and the great reservoir for all their overflowing
populations. For the industrial revolution in England was followed by
the harnessing of coal in France, then in Germany, then later in Japan,
and this set in motion among them the processes of imperial expansion,
whose friction and clash culminated in the World War.
It was as necessary to the success of the industrial revolution,
particularly in specialized little England, that the surplus populations
which were poured by the million into America should send back food to
Europe, as it was that their factory machines should have coal to drive
them. This interdependence was not conscious, not a deliberate effort on
either side, but it was an extremely practical fact nevertheless. In
order that England might live by trade, some other land must live by
agriculture, and during the first hundred and fifty years of the
industrial revolution that land was America.
To live by agriculture was an easy thing in the New World, easier than
it had ever been anywhere before,--to live and to feed a continent
besides. For America is the only great modern nation whose history is
written not against a background of famine but against a background of
economic abundance. After the first thin stream of colonial adventurers
and exiles for conscience' sake had established themselves upon the
Atlantic coast, her seemingly boundless domain opened up before the
hungry millions of Europe like the promised land of milk and honey.
Unlike the peoples of the great Asiatic and European folk-wanderings,
they found no comparably developed peoples to bar their way. As they
spread from the Atlantic to the Blue Ridge and Alleghenies, then along
the Great Lakes and down the Ohio; on across the Mississippi, the Kansas
prairies, the Great Desert, the Sierras and Rockies to California and
the Golden Gate, they found only hunting tribes or the fading remnants
of cliff-dwelling and primitive agricultural clans. These they could
meet not only with effective weapons of defence but also with a highly
developed agricultural technique.
At first America's planless prosperity had little to do with coal and
nothing at all with manufacture. It was a prosperity made up of the sum
of her food products, and men skimmed the soil and the forests with only
one thought, to make that sum immediately great. Exploitation got into
their blood. It was the method by which they grew rich, and when the
wealth of the coal deposits was added to the wealth of the fields and
forests, they carried the same methods of planless exploitation over
into the coal mines. England must still depend on them for food, but
they did not have to depend so abjectly on her for manufactures after
the industrial revolution crossed the Atlantic at the call of the
Pennsylvania coal fields.
After the industrial revolution harnessed their unique reservoirs of
coal, the people of the United States enjoyed a degree of economic
security such as no other people ever enjoyed. Had they been
spiritually prepared, they might have used this economic abundance to
establish brotherhood among men. But after all, they themselves were
Europeans who had fled from the ancient tyranny of hunger. To them
America was naturally more an escape from that haunting menace than a
challenge to the good life. Here and there, as in the Puritan theocracy,
they heard and tried to obey the challenge. But they were not prepared.
The hungry immigrant millions swarmed across the continent, laying waste
the forests, skimming the fresh fertile soil, growing prosperous by
destruction rather than by thrift and planful use. They caroused and
swaggered like prodigals. They glorified mere acquisition, measuring a
man's worth by the money he owned. As they filled the continent, the old
world fever of imperial expansion entered their blood. They seized Cuba
and the Philippines, Haiti and Santo Domingo. They set about building
the greatest navy in the world. After a few faltering efforts to lead
the warring nations to peace through conference and conciliation, they
threw the weight of their wealth and numbers into the balance and with
fire and sword imposed a victorious peace. And they were able to do this
in the last analysis because of the enormous power of their coal supply,
for coal in a modern industrial civilization means guns and munitions of
war, transportation systems to set armies in the field, and the ability
to supply them after they get there. America's coal-wrought wealth made
her decisive in battle. Even so today her unique reserves of coal make
her the arbiter between peace and war. Possessed of the richest coal
fields in the world, she holds the destiny of the nations in her hands.
For coal has grown to mean food and clothing and shelter,
transportation and communication, and the economic surplus and the
leisure without which science, invention, art, representative
government, democratic education, and enlightened organized religion
would atrophy and perish.
Since coal means all these things, and since America owns the world's
greatest available reserves of coal, it is obvious that the manner in
which her people develop and govern their coal fields is of crucial
importance, not only to themselves, but also to the rest of the world.
Before the United States entered the World War, her people were hardly
aware of this fact; even the momentous experience of the war has but
dimly impressed its meaning upon the national mind.
Our coal measures underlie an area of more than four hundred and sixty
thousand square miles. They contain almost four thousand billion tons of
lignite, bituminous, semibituminous, anthracite, and semianthracite
coals. About two-fifths of the world's annual output is mined in the
United States.
The very abundance of the supply has made us enormously wasteful in its
exploitation, as we have been wasteful in the exploitation of our
forests. Unlike the forests, coal once destroyed does not grow again.
The most valuable of our coals are in the Appalachian bituminous fields
that stretch from northern Pennsylvania to Alabama, and in which some of
the best sections have already been gutted and abandoned. In our greedy
grasp for wealth, we have left one ton of coal to waste underground for
every ton we have brought to the surface. More than one hundred and
fifty thousand miners have been drawn into the mines in excess of
efficient requirements. Planless overexpansion of the industry has
resulted in such irregular operation of plant and equipment that for
more than a generation the miners have lost an average of ninety-three
days in the working year of three hundred and eight days, and a needless
overhead charge has been imposed upon the consumer which Mr. F. G. Tryon
of the U. S. Geological Survey calculates at a million dollars for each
working day. Planless exploitation has made the most basic of our basic
industries the prey of technical inefficiency and social unrest, the
extent of which we as a people ignored until they threatened national
and international disaster at the crisis of the war.
This trouble might have gone on some time longer undiagnosed if we had
not met our first modern national emergency in 1917. Of necessity the
weight of the military structure was added to the weight of the
industrial civil structure and the combined load was more than the coal
industry could bear. It bent and broke under it, and in order to
prosecute the war, the government was forced to take hold of the
formless inchoate thing and reshape it into a stable prop for the
national need. As a first step it was necessary to find out what this
great unwieldy coal industry was.
Coal mines are systems of tunnels driven into the veins where they crop
out along the slopes of hills, or from the foot of shafts sunk through
the overlying strata. These tunnels run for miles underground. Secondary
tunnels run from the main tunnel or heading into the rooms where the
miners work. The surveyor's diagram of a mine looks like a crushed
centipede. The getting of coal out of the mines, after it has been
picked or blasted down by the miner, like its distribution after it is
brought to the surface, is almost entirely a problem of transportation.
Even in times of peace our railroad transportation was an intricate and
complicated thing. It had been repeatedly regulated and re-regulated to
bring it more in line with community needs. Among other regulations was
a law, designed to give the public the benefit of as much competition
between operators as possible, which required the railroads to furnish
sidings and cars to all coal mines in proportion to their production,
with a preferential provision for new operations. The double demand for
coal sent up prices and the rise in prices led to the opening of new
coal mines and the re-working of old abandoned ones. All the eleven
thousand mines, scattered more or less at random over thousands of
square miles of territory, clamored for their legal quota of cars and
transportation to market. This competitive din aggravated the confusion
upon our already overtaxed railroads. At the critical moment when the
essential movement of troops and munitions was straining the resources
of the railroads, the sprawling coal industry made their task
impossible.
In peace times one-third of our ordinary bituminous production is used
to generate steam for transportation, and more than one-third of all the
tonnage carried by the railroads is coal. The weight of the coal which
the railroads normally carry is double the weight of iron ore, steel,
lumber, wheat, corn, oats, and hay combined. The problem of hauling this
huge load is needlessly complicated by competitive cross-shipments of
coal from one mining state into or across another. The producers of
Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Indiana sell their coal in from eighteen to
twenty states, many of them coal-mining states. A part of this
cross-shipment is necessary, because certain mining states like
Illinois, for example, do not produce the grade of coking coal which
their steel plants need and which must, therefore, be brought from West
Virginia or southern Pennsylvania. But most of it is due to blind
competitive planlessness and waste.
Upon this tangled mesh the critical demands of the war placed a crushing
burden. The nation's safety made it imperative not only that coal should
be produced, but that it should be delivered where it was needed. The
miners were digging more coal than had ever been produced before, yet
cries of coal shortage went up from domestic consumers and manufacturers
all over the land. The railroads themselves resorted to the confiscation
of coal in transit to keep their engines running. To avert impending
catastrophe to the nation and the world, the national consciousness of
kind asserted itself over the acquisitive instinct of individuals and
groups, and through the federal government created the Fuel
Administration which brought the mines under unified public control and
converted the coal industry, for the period of the war, into a unified
public service.
From the high central tower of the Fuel Administration, the people of
the United States for the first time caught a fleeting glimpse of the
coal industry as a whole and of the relation it bears to the national
and international industrial life. They discovered that coal bears much
the same relation to our modern industrial structure that the water
supply bears to the life of a great municipality. When America entered
the war, she resembled with respect to her primary source of mechanical
energy a municipality dependent for its water supply upon eleven
thousand separate wells, owned and operated primarily in their
individual interests by thousands of enterprising individuals, with
hundreds of separate delivery systems jostling in the highways that
needed to be kept clear for soldiers and guns, its people bidding
against one another, offering fabulous prices for water, yet parched
with thirst.
"Basic industries and transportation," writes Dr. Garfield, in
describing what he saw as head of the Fuel Administration, "were caught
in a vicious circle. Steel could not be manufactured without coke, coke
could not be made without coal; coal could not be commercially produced
without transportation; transportation was dependent upon coal....
Industrially we were in a wild scramble of manufacture, production, and
shipment.... It was no longer a question of withholding coal from
non-war industries but rather a question whether any coal could much
longer get through to any consumer."
With eleven thousand coal mines in operation, the engines of the nation
were running cold for lack of coal.
Created to avert impending catastrophe, the Fuel Administration went
about the service of the nation much as an engineer would tackle the job
of converting eleven thousand wells into a modern system of water
supply. It dealt with the coal fields as a single great reservoir of
fuel and power. It worked out a budget covering the needs of the
essential industries, the railroads, steel plants, munition factories,
gas and electric utilities, as well as the domestic consumers. It made
maps charting the coal-producing and coal-consuming territories, divided
the nation into regional zones, established these zones as fuel
reservoirs, created a distributing organization by zones and states like
a great system of water mains. It called the experienced operators and
technical managers into public service and entrusted to them the
technical problems of production and distribution. It fixed prices
limiting profits to an estimated fair return. It converted the miners'
union and the operators' organizations into administrative arms of the
government for the industry, with committees for conference and
conciliation at the mines, and in the various producing districts,
heading up in a Bureau of Labor at Washington as a final court of appeal
for the adjustment of disputes over wages and working conditions.
For the period of the war, the coal industry functioned as a cooperative
public service. The coal budget, based upon a detailed analysis of the
country's resources and needs, set a definite standard of performance
both for the industry and the railroads, and made it possible for them
to cooperate intelligently. The zones served as tools for the control
and direction of the flow of coal called for by the budget. Mr. C. E.
Lesher, Director of the Bureau of Statistics of the Distribution
Division, writes: "In the short period of a few months after the work of
the Fuel Administration was begun, it was determined that the
requirements of the United States for bituminous coal in the coal year
ended March, 1919, were 624,000,000 net tons, compared with a production
in 1917 of 552,000,000 tons of bituminous coal, and for anthracite
100,000,000 net tons, but slightly more than in 1917.... To provide coal
was the problem of the Distribution Division of the Fuel Administration;
to provide transportation was the problem of the Railroad
Administration.... The adoption of the zoning system represented the
supreme effort of the Railroad Administration to overcome the
transportation tangle in connection with coal.... So closely did the
officials of the two administrations work, and so effective were the
measures employed, that the results surprised all.... The Director of
Operations of the Railroad Administration in May, when production of
bituminous coal was averaging 11,500,000 tons a week, believed that
11,800,000 was the highest that could be expected in 1918, as the
railroads were believed to have reached their maximum capacity. Within a
month records of 12,500,000 tons a week were reached, and in July, and
again in September, the 13,000,000 ton mark was passed.... When the
armistice was declared, New England, farthest from the mines, with an
average of 20 weeks' supply, was literally gorged with soft coal, and
eastern New York and Pennsylvania, with from 6 to 9 weeks' stock, had
abundant supplies.... From April 1 to July 6, 1918, rail shipments to
New England were 3,058,000 net tons, or 98 per cent of the schedule of
3,150,000 tons; on September 28, shipments were 6,164,000 tons, or 105
per cent of the schedule for that date. The schedule for shipments to
tidewater from April 1 to July 1 called for 11,916,000 net tons. By
December 21 shipments were 9 per cent ahead of the program. The Lake
program called for 28,000,000 tons of cargo coal; a total of 28,153,000
tons was supplied. With similar precision and certainty munition
factories, arsenals, powder works, and by-product plants were kept
running, while stocks were accumulated, insuring uninterrupted
operations throughout the winter. In the same manner retail dealers were
given supplies for their domestic trade. Such results were possible only
because of complete control of shipments and the full information on
which to proceed."
This was an amazing and illuminating demonstration of the fact that our
greatest national resource could be administered for the benefit of the
whole nation. It was no longer a mere possibility, the thing had been
done.
It has been said that this achievement was possible because during the
war the people had a common object which so challenged their higher
ideals that they were able to subordinate their individual and special
group interests to the service of the nation, to make their
consciousness of kind as a people triumphant over the acquisitive
instinct. Again it is said that human nature being what it is, similar
unselfish consecration is not to be expected in the sluggish days of
peace. But if the historical record teaches us anything it is the
essential falseness of this assertion. That record shows us the gradual
irresistible spread of the consciousness of kind from one realm of human
activity to another as the acquisition of a surplus makes this possible.
It shows human understanding reaching out to give all men religious
freedom, to assure them equal political rights; shows it asserting human
brotherhood in the right to education, health, happiness--and these
things not under the stress of war, but in the conditions of peace. The
possibility hangs not on any technical inability, but on the better
preparedness of the minds of men, on their clearer vision, their ability
to see the spiritual implications of their technical triumphs.