THE AWAKENING OF THE MINERS
With the declaration of the armistice and the removal of the incentive
to cooperation in public service which the war gave, the Fuel
Administration and its elaborate system of statistical control of
production and distribution was broken up as rapidly as it had been
organized. During the war, there had been gross examples of profiteering
just as there had been occasional local strikes, but by and large the
operators like the miners had conducted themselves conscientiously as
servants of the republic. To a remarkable degree they subordinated their
acquisitive instinct to their consciousness of kind as citizens of the
nation whose life was threatened from without. But within a year after
the armistice, speculative profiteering was rampant and the coal
industry was paralyzed by a general strike. Mr. Herbert Hoover,
addressing the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers,
described the situation as a "national emergency," due to the fact that
"this industry, considered as a whole, is one of the worst functioning
industries in the United States."
How shall we account for this wide, swift swing of the pendulum?
Operators and owners who had offered their skill to the government
during the national crisis, rebelled against all further "interference
with their private business." They rebelled not only against price
fixing and the regulation of distribution, but even against all
attempts on the part of governmental agencies to keep congress and the
public informed of the elementary facts of ownership, costs, wages,
prices, and profits, without which public opinion is helplessly blind.
They sued out an injunction against the Federal Trade Commission to
block its efforts to search out and publish these essential facts. The
unions also chafed under governmental restraint upon their freedom of
action, especially when the government lifted its limitation on prices
and left the consumer at the mercy of an open market. As prices and
profits mounted, they felt entitled to commensurate wage increases. The
war, they said, was over though peace had not been formally declared,
and they demanded release from the restraints of wartime legislation so
that they might freely exercise their economic pressure to secure wage
increases as the operators were taking increased profits. For the first
time in almost a generation they laid down their tools, and finally
submitted to the arbitration of federal commissions only under threat of
an injunction and the imprisonment of their leaders. Economic war and
group rivalry took the place of cooperation in public service.
The main reason for this violent reaction is probably to be found in the
fact that our modern democracies, the United States in particular, were
born in rebellion against the autocratic authority of the feudal state,
the fear and hatred of which still attaches even to our representative
government. The memory of the Stuarts and Bourbons and Hohenzollerns is
still fresh in the modern democratic consciousness, and accounts for the
maxim that the government is best which governs least. Through the
revolutions of the eighteenth century the merchants, manufacturers, and
business men wrested from the monarch his autocratic power, and it is
against this same power as exercised by the owners of property that the
organized labor movement is today in rebellion. But as against the state
when it exercises such autocratic authority as during the war it
exercised through the Fuel Administration, both groups, owners and
workers, unite. They assert the right of self-government within their
industry. Like the economists and business men of the nineteenth
century, they contend that the conflict and balance of their selfish
interests will by some mysterious provision of nature neutralize and
resolve these selfishnesses to the advantage of the community. The
essence of this acquisitive philosophy is expressed in the quaint
nineteenth-century maxim that "greed is held in check by greed, and the
desire for gain sets limits to itself." But this leaves the service of
the community at the mercy of a blind conflict of forces within the
industry, as formerly it was at the mercy of force exercised by the
monarch who was the state, and the public is increasingly dissatisfied
with the result. The public service conception of industry, and
especially of such basic industries as coal, is rapidly taking
possession of the public mind. People are coming to see that the
uncontrolled conflict of forces, like autocratic force itself, is
incompatible with the principle of service. Neither will force exercised
by the state through the courts solve the difficulty. Compulsion is
contrary to the spirit and genius of democracy. The great problem of our
generation is to discover how industrial freedom can be reconciled with
the service of the public. For an answer we shall have to look into the
spirit and structure of such government as our industries have
themselves evolved. For democracy is not, as its earlier critics
declared, synonymous with anarchy. Democracy is a government of laws,
not of men; and laws in a democracy are not emanations of superior
minds, but the codified experience of the people.
As we approach the problem of government in our basic industries as in
the nation, we discover two seemingly conflicting tendencies, two great
elements in our population apparently pulling in opposite directions. In
the question of national security and defence, the one instinctively
follows the ancient tradition of European nations, piling up armies and
navies, and striving to make America the most formidable military power
in the world; the second leans to a policy of reconciliation, striving
by conference and understandings with other nations to prevent
disagreements and to avert wars. The first makes it a matter of national
honor to emphasize individual American rights on land and sea, the
property rights of Americans, our financial and economic interests in
backward countries, and the military force necessary to enforce those
interests; the second aims to establish international relations in which
such rights and interests shall be secure to all nations without the
constant threat of force. To the one, the world is an arena in which to
fight or starve is the eternal choice; to the second, the world is a
communion table at which all men are brothers.
These same tendencies, these same manifestations of the acquisitive
instinct and the consciousness of kind, appear in the record of our
basic coal industry. As the industrial revolution got into full swing in
America, during and immediately following the Civil War, there was a
rush for the possession of the coal mines comparable to the rush for
land. Among the men who won possession, there were some who were keenly
aware of the public obligations of ownership, who in friendly
cooperation with their employes strove to develop their properties in
the interest of the public as well as of their employes and themselves.
But owners and miners alike took their spiritual color from their social
environment and in the soul of the people the acquisitive instinct
remained in the ascendant. Men did not go into business or swing their
tools for their health. Their first duty, as they saw it, was to make
all the money they could as fast as they could, and to put themselves
and those dependent upon them on easy street. "God helps them," they
said, "who help themselves." They gutted the richest veins for quick
profit, as our forests and new lands had been gutted. More mines were
opened than the nation could possibly use. There was a gluttonous
overdevelopment of the industry which swung up and down in high peaks
and low plunges of prosperity and depression, high prices and "no
market," feverish employment and long stretches of intermittent work,
which for hundreds of thousands of miners meant no work at all, and for
many operators meant bankruptcy. The level of government in the industry
was in all essential respects the level of hunting tribes.
During the early days of the industry, the miners, like American manual
workers in general, were under the popular illusion that democracy meant
the passing of a permanent working class. With the Declaration of
Independence the old social stratification of feudal Europe had been
wiped out forever. There was plenty of room at the top. Everybody might
with perseverance and thrift get to the top. This illusion took on
considerable substance from the fact that when the industrial revolution
first invaded the coal fields America still offered great tracts of
unoccupied lands to satisfy the universal land hunger, whereas in
England, for example, the policy of enclosure barred poor men from such
untilled land as there was. This circumstance accounts for the slow and
erratic development of group organization among American miners as
compared with the English. There were many cases like that of the
bituminous miners in Maryland, who went into the mines; took wages and
working conditions as they found them; organized; fought for better
wages and working conditions; accumulated a little money; and then,
instead of using it to build a permanent organization, broke away for
the free lands of the West.
"Their ambition in life," writes Andrew Roy, himself at the time a
miner, "was to save enough money to buy a farm in Iowa or Wisconsin.
They would go back to the mines in the autumn after harvesting, work all
winter, and return with their fresh stake in the spring. None of them
ever returned permanently to the mines."
But as the fertile lands were preempted and America became increasingly
a manufacturing nation, the coal industry acquired a measure of
stability and drew into the mining communities an increasing body of men
for whom mining was to be a life's work. The condition of life for these
permanent miners was largely determined by the camps or villages which
the companies built at the mines. These were generally mean, cheap,
temporary affairs. For the faster the miner works, the faster he skims
the cream, leaving the more inaccessible coal to waste where it lies,
the greater the profit, the better the wages, and the sooner the mine is
worked out and abandoned. This, and the caprice of the market in its
effect upon the overexpanded industry, meant that the miner must live in
his knapsack always prepared to move; and it meant cheap homes and a
mean domestic equipment, houses or shacks that might be abandoned
without serious loss. To this day the great majority of mining villages
have the worst characteristics of city slums intensified by the
isolation and loneliness of the country, once beautiful, but now
stripped of its forests, its streams running black with the sulphurous
waste of the mines. Such moderately attractive cities as Scranton,
Wilkes-Barre, and Hazleton in the anthracite region are exceptional. The
mining towns that sprawl between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, or that
follow the Panther Creek Valley, are incredibly hideous things. And what
is true of the compact and peculiarly prosperous anthracite region is
even more true of the sprawling bituminous fields.
The isolation and transitory character of the mining towns made the
miners almost completely dependent upon the owners of the mines not only
for homes but also for tools and powder; all their mining, as well as
their household, supplies. To this day in the non-union fields of West
Virginia the operators finance and control, not only the stores, but the
schools, the hospitals, the doctors, the churches, and the police.
Independent merchants were slow to invest their fortunes in such
difficult ground, and since the company store was a convenient means of
supplementing the profit from the mines, independent merchants were not
encouraged to compete. These conditions tended on the one hand to breed
arbitrary management,--autocracy sometimes benevolent, sometimes
tyrannical,--and on the other, restlessness, discontent, and the spirit
of individual and organized revolt. It set the consciousness of kind in
action among the miners especially, and resulted in innumerable local
lockouts and strikes.
A sequence of such local struggles occurred in the Blossburg district of
Pennsylvania in the '60's and '70's. The Civil War created an abnormal
demand for coal, and sent up the price as well as the cost of living
generally. In 1863 the miners of the district organized and succeeded in
raising their wage rate from thirty-five cents to a dollar and ten cents
a ton. At the end of the war, the market broke and the coal fields were
flooded with returning soldiers. To protect the standard of living to
which during the war they had attained, the miners decided upon a
defensive offensive and demanded a further increase of fifteen cents a
ton. The operators insisted upon the liquidation of labor. A strike
followed. The owners ordered the miners to vacate their company houses.
They refused. The local courts issued writs of eviction. To avoid a
clash with the sheriff and his deputies, the miners made a holiday in
the hills, leaving their hearthstones to their wives. By passive
resistance and otherwise, the women held their castles. Then the
operators appealed to the governor who sent in the famous Bucktail
regiment just victoriously back from the war. They put the miners, their
families, and their household goods on the street. The strike was
broken. Such miners as were not deported or blacklisted were compelled
to accept the terms that were offered, including a pledge to abandon and
keep out of their union. So the pendulum swung in 1865.
In 1873 the swing was reversed. Most of the mine owners of Blossburg
were also either bankers or retail merchants through their company
stores. They were hard hit by the panic of 1873. Without consultation or
warning they announced an arbitrary reduction in wages and deferred
payment of wages already due. In November they posted notices that the
miners might get such goods as they absolutely needed at the company
stores, but that no wages would be paid until the following April. Then
the miners again drew together in a union. The operators organized in
opposition. A lockout strike followed. Strike breakers were brought in,
principally a group of recent Swedish immigrants, and marched to a
barracks especially prepared for them.
"The strikers gathered on the public highway in front of the barracks,"
says Andrew Roy, "and insisted on the right to talk with the
strikebreakers through one of their interpreters. The managers declined
to allow this to be done. But finally a Swedish miner got in among them,
and within an hour, the whole of the imported men marched out upon the
highway and joined the strikers. The strangers were formed into line,
with a Scotch piper at their head, who marched them out of town to the
stirring tune of the McGregors' Gathering."
Prevailing public opinion in the '70's, like the prevailing judicial
interpretation of the law, frowned upon concerted action by the workers
as having the nature of a conspiracy much as the concerted action of the
commoners in monarchical days was frowned upon as conspiracy. But
curious sorts of circumstances have occasionally arisen to modify
opinion in one case as in the other. The Boston Tea Party is our
historical example in the political realm. In Blossburg, before this
strike of 1873, the miners had been compelled to take their pay in
company scrip. Except at the company store, this scrip was worth only
from seventy to ninety cents on the dollar.
"When farmers came into mining towns," writes Andrew Roy out of his own
experience, "prospective purchasers of their produce would ask them,
'Will you take scrip?' And if the answer was in the affirmative, a
dicker would immediately be entered into as to the amount of discount to
be allowed."
Independent merchants had gradually ventured into Blossburg. To them
the scrip was a competitive injury. When the operators limited the
miners to credit at the company stores, the independent merchants
protested to the Treasury Department of the United States that the
compulsory circulation of company scrip was an illegal infringement of a
governmental function. The governor of Pennsylvania took alarm at this
appeal over his head and sent the State Secretary of Internal Affairs to
investigate. He made a report condemning the operators' practice. The
attendant publicity scandalized public opinion and turned it to the
miners' side. This time the strike was won.
So by ebb and flow of the consciousness of kind, the elements of a
governing structure, the balance of forces between the operators and the
miners, gradually formed within the industry. But in the main the
balance was determined by public opinion; and public opinion, like the
law, was by inherited tradition upon the side of the owners, the
accepted custodians of property and the national wealth. Episodes like
the use of company scrip tended to even the balance. And more important
still in their effect upon the traditional hostility of public opinion
toward the unions in their infringement upon the vested rights and
privileges of the owners were the great mine disasters.
Some of our coal crops out at the surface in places where through the
ages wind and weather have worn away the overlying clay, stone, and
slate. This can be gathered like wood in the forest without danger. The
amount of such coal is commercially unimportant. Some lies only a few
feet underground so that it is possible to take it by stripping away the
thin overlying material and blast and scoop it out with a steam shovel.
There are some stripping mines in the anthracite field and a
considerable number in the alluvial plains of the West. But the great
bulk of our coal is reached by driving drifts or headings into the veins
through the sides of hills or by sinking shafts scores, or hundreds, or
thousands of feet down through the earth to where the coal lies. From
the mouth of the drift or the foot of the shaft, a tunnel or main
heading or gangway is driven on and on into the coal usually for miles,
with secondary tunnels giving off the main heading into the pitch-black
rooms where the miners work. In the cryptlike terminal rooms, the miner
with his buddy undercuts the "face" of the coal with his pick or with an
undercutting machine, drills shot-holes into the face, sets his charge
of powder and tamps it in, and then shoots the coal down. Sometimes, for
the sake of speed, he shoots it down without undercutting, and in the
anthracite mines where the coal is too hard for undercutting, direct
shooting from the face is the general practice. This blasting of a
friable and inflammable substance fills the cellared air with minute
particles of highly explosive dust. As the mines go deeper and further
away from the opening they accumulate gas and underground water. The
greatest number of injuries and deaths in the mines, and coal mining is
among the most hazardous of all occupations, result from the falling of
overhanging rock and coal; but the catastrophies which have shocked
public opinion into a sympathetic attitude toward the commoners of the
mines do not come from this steady death toll but have resulted from
explosions or fires that have trapped and suffocated or burned their
scores and hundreds.
It seems incredible, in view of the known hazards of underground work,
that there should ever have been opposition to the installation of all
available safeguards. But it must be remembered that we are still very
close to primitive man, that the consciousness of kind and the instinct
of brotherhood are still hard pressed by the primal acquisitive
instinct. In America in spite of potential plenty the community's first
preoccupation was escape from hunger, the winning of individual and
national economic security. The prevailing attitude toward death and
injury in the mines was, and to a great extent still is, much the same
as the prevailing attitude toward death and injury in battle. In
ordinary days of peace we do not glorify the soldier. Similarly, it is
only at time of disaster that our sympathetic understanding goes out to
the shock troops in our war against nature, the men who with pick and
powder win coal underground.
"So numerous and heartrending," says Roy, "had these accidents become
(in the anthracite field) that the miners of Schuylkill county in the
year 1858 appealed to the legislature for the passage of a law to
provide for official supervision of the mines, and a bill for the
purpose was introduced the same year; but it found no countenance, and
never came to a vote. In 1866 it was again introduced, and passed the
lower house, but it was defeated in the Senate. In 1869 it was
reintroduced, passed both houses and received the approval of the
governor of the state. It provided for _one_ mine inspector for
Schuylkill county, _the other counties being left out_. The law had been
in operation only a few months when the Avondale shaft in the adjoining
county of Luzerne took fire and suffocated every soul in the mine
including two daring miners who went down the mine after the fire, in
the hope of rescuing some of the entombed men. The shaft had but one
opening.... The whole underground force of the mine, 109 souls, were
suffocated to death by the gases emanating from the burning woodwork in
the shaft and the breakers on top of it.... No catastrophe ever occurred
in this country which created a greater sensation than this mining
horror. The public press united in demanding the passage of all laws
necessary for the protection of the health and lives of the miners....
When the legislature met in the following January a committee of
representative miners was sent to Harrisburg to have a mining bill
enacted into law for the proper security of the lives, health, and
safety of the anthracite miners of Pennsylvania, which was promptly
done."
Stirred by the Avondale disaster, the miners of the Mahoning Valley in
Ohio had a bill introduced into the Ohio legislature calling for two
separate openings in all mines employing more than ten men underground,
for the forced circulation to the face of the coal of at least one
hundred cubic feet of air per minute for each underground worker, the
daily inspection of all gaseous mines by a fireviewer before the miners
were allowed to enter, the appointment of four state mine inspectors,
and the right of the miners to appoint a check-weighman at their own
expense to see that their coal was fairly weighed at the tipple. As soon
as the bill was printed, a committee of thirteen operators representing
every mining district in the state, supported by legal counsel and the
state geologist, appeared in opposition. Their contention was that the
miners of the state did not want the law, that the bill was the
invention of professional demagogues and labor agitators who sponged a
fat living off the ignorance and cupidity of their misguided followers,
that there was neither gas nor bad air in Ohio mines, that the lives and
fortunes of the miners were safe in the hands of their employers, that
the bill was special legislation and unconstitutional and that if
enacted by the General Assembly of Ohio it would be set aside by the
Supreme Court. The bill was defeated, but a commission of inquiry was
appointed. At the next session of the General Assembly the miners' bill
was reintroduced and passed by a unanimous vote. But before it was sent
to the governor, the operators again sent a committee to defeat it. It
was amended and all provision for state inspection of the mines stricken
out. In the following June a disaster occurred in a mine in Portage
county owned by the member of the legislature who had emasculated the
bill. This mine, too, had but one opening which an accidental fire
converted into a furnace. There were twenty-one men in the mine. Ten
were burned to death and the eleven who managed to escape through the
smoke and flame were terribly injured. The miners' bill was reintroduced
and again opposed. Judge Hoadly, afterwards governor of Ohio, speaking
in opposition very accurately expressed the prevailing state of mind.
"We have tried to make men sober and moral by law," he said, "and now we
are going to try to surround them with protection against carelessness
and danger, and enable them to shut their eyes and walk in darkness,
satisfied with the care and protection of the state. I admit that there
is a line to which the right of the legislature--the duty of the
legislature--may go without infringing on the natural right of the
citizen; but what I want to suggest as the safe side, is to leave the
people free, and to allow mishap and disaster to have its natural effect
as the penalty for and the cure of the evils which result from
negligence which causes mishap and disaster." But in spite of this
persuasive reasoning, the miners' bill, after years of effort, was
finally enacted into law.
Thus slowly the consciousness of kind worked through the public to the
miners, under the influence of such understanding as mining
catastrophies shocked into the public mind. But the main force that made
for the improvement of their conditions of work, for the development of
standards of living among them and of orderly processes of government
within the industry as a whole was the operation of the consciousness of
kind within their own group.
The processes of civilization like all cosmic processes are slow. The
period of recorded history is but a minute in the unnumbered years of
man's life upon earth. It was by slow stages that the blind herd
instinct which sends wolves hunting in packs and leads birds to migrate
in flocks merged into the consciousness of kind and the spirit of
service among men. So in the coal industry, the miners organized slowly,
first in local groups, then by districts, then on a national scale with
the beginnings of international affiliations. They drew together into
unions, broke apart, drew together again. As they acquired strength,
their interests came into conflict with the interests of the coal
owners. There were strikes and lockouts, local joint agreements, then
strikes and lockouts again, then other agreements for arbitration and
conciliation, then more strikes and lockouts. That process still goes on
as in the bitter civil war in West Virginia. But in the main it reached
a culmination so far as the coal industry is concerned when in 1902
President Roosevelt intervened in the interests of the consumers,
asserted a balance of power between and over the two groups, and
established the foundations of orderly government within the industry.
The processes by which representative government has grown up within the
industry run closely parallel with the processes by which the
parliamentary government arose in the European political states, with
property owners performing the very important function of technical
organization and development which in the early stages of national life
the monarch and his executives performed, and the miners playing the
role of the commoners. It is upon this historical structure that the
future of the industry as a public service depends.