Fueling the Gilded Age: Railroads, Miners, and Disorder in Pennsylvania Coal Country 9780814724958

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Fueling the Gilded Age

Culture, Labor, History Series General Editors: Daniel Bender and Kimberley L. Phillips

The Forests Gave Way before Them: The Impact of African Workers on the Anglo-American World, 1650–1850 Frederick C. Knight Unknown Class: Undercover Investigations of American Work and Poverty from the Progressive Era to the Present Mark Pittenger

Steel Barrio: The Great Mexican Migration to South Chicago, 1915–1940 Michael D. Innis–Jiménez Fueling the Gilded Age: Railroads, Miners, and Disorder in Pennsylvania Coal Country Andrew B. Arnold

Fueling the Gilded Age Railroads, Miners, and Disorder in Pennsylvania Coal Country

Andrew B. Arnold

a

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York and London

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London www.nyupress.org © 2014 by New York University All rights reserved References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Arnold, Andrew Bernard. Fueling the Gilded Age : railroads, miners, and disorder in Pennsylvania coal country / Andrew B. Arnold. pages cm. —  (Culture, labor, history series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8147-6498-5 (hardback) 1.  Coal miners—Pennsylvania—History—19th century. 2.  Trade unions—Pennsylvania— History—19th century. 3.  Labor movement—Pennsylvania—History—19th century. 4.  Coal mining—Pennsylvania—History—19th century. 5.  Railroads—Pennsylvania—History— 19th century. 6.  Pennsylvania—Social conditions.  I. Title. HD8039.M62U6132 2014 331.7’6223350974809034—dc23                                                             2013043410 New York University Press books are printed on acid–free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook

Contents

List of Illustrations

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About Lewis Hine’s Photographs

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Introduction: Railroads, Miners, and Disorder in the Gilded Age, 1870–1900

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Part I. Hubris 1. Cultural: Coal Mining and Community, 1872

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2. Formal: The Right to Strike, 1875

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3. Secret: Regional Leadership Networks, 1875–1882

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Part II. Humility 4. Compromise: The Great Upheaval in Coal, 1886

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Part III. Stalemate 5. Origins: New Organizational Forms, 1886–1890

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6. Association: Organization and Industry, 1890–1894

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7. National Scale: A Living Wage for Capital and for Labor, 1895–1902

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Conclusion: Failures of Order in the Gilded Age

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Acknowledgments

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Notes

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Index

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About the Author

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illustrations

“Types of Miners”

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“The Miner”

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Houtzdale, Pennsylvania, 1874

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Daily Graphic illustration of main characters in 1875 strike and court case

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Frugality Mine, 1880s

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“The Fire Boss”

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“The Union Button”

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“The Company Weighman”

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“The Union Checkweighman

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“Coal Cars”

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“A Veteran Miner”

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“A Young Miner”

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about lewis Hine’s Photographs

Scattered throughout this volume are several photographs by Lewis Hine. Hine is probably most famous for his pictures of people at work, especially for children at work. His photographs have been made into posters, and they’re widely available via a simple online search. Most of the photographs in this book, however, have not been so widely distributed. The bulk of them appeared in a book entitled What the Coal Commission Found, largely a summary of a multivolume congressional report. The book appeared in 1925. Hine’s pictures show his exceptional skill as a portraitist, and they’re worthwhile simply for their value in that sense. A few are also valuable because they illustrate key aspects of the work of coal mining that otherwise are difficult to describe in words, and that have largely been lost today. These pictures have not been widely duplicated and the negatives apparently have been lost. The notes and provenance of the pictures are also missing. We know that they were taken in coal mines before 1925, but some were taken far earlier. The photographs that show the miners’ lamps with reflectors are using carbide, and therefore those photos were probably taken in the 1920s, after the period covered by this book. Most of the pictures here are simply portraits of different miners, but a few beg for explanation. Hine took these photos during a time when flash photography was in its infancy, and he probably used magnesium flash powder to have sufficient light. The photograph of the miner on his side, digging away with his back to us shows the basic act of mining. The miner is lying underneath the seam of coal and using a pick to hack away the underlying material so that he can wedge, break, or blast the coal down in big chunks. Note how he is lying on his shovel for leverage and support, and the sprag of wood in the upper right that is holding up the seam. Miners had to crawl underneath the seam in order to prepare it for mining, and then for loading. This is what often killed coal miners: The seam sometimes came down when they were underneath it. >>

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“Types of Miners” —Lewis W. Hine

a people used to moving at the speed of a walk. It wasn’t merely their speed and size. Railroad economics, administration, and finance captured the nation’s imagination. It was easy for anyone to contrast a railroad train to a horse-drawn wagon. Each additional horse-drawn wagon required an additional set of horses and drivers. Railroad economics meant that each additional freight or passenger car added almost nothing to the cost of a train. A horse-drawn wagon could carry as much as six, and possibly up to eight tons. A single railroad car could carry multiples of that amount. At speed. Similarly, the continent-wide scale of railroad enterprise awed observers. It wasn’t merely this incredible new scale but also the ways that managers learned to administer their vast domains. The Gilded Age wasn’t merely the first to fully harness the power of steam; it was also the first to fully harness the power of information. It was an age of clerks as well as engineers. Moreover, the scale of railroad stock and bond issues made Wall Street into the nation’s dominant financial center. The story of the railroads was one of achieving previously unimaginable possibilities and of triumph. The story of the coal industry that fueled the railroad is less triumphant. The coal industry defied order, both in the day-to-day manual labor of getting coal out of the ground and in the ways that it sold and marketed coal. It’s a counterstory to the technological triumph of the railroads and large-scale

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“Types of Miners” —Lewis W. Hine

operators, and for that matter lower-level railroad managers had negative power to thwart the orderly plans of railroad executives. When coal miners struck, they “stopped wheels,” in the language of the time, and gave marginal coal railroads and coalfields an opportunity to expand. When coal operators and freight agents connived, they undermined the strategic initiatives of the railroad masters. As the Interstate Commerce Commission noted in its 1887 report, the memorandum book of the harried railroad freight agent was often the only record of rates, and his interests and his closest relationships did not necessarily match those of his superiors.5 Despite their designated role as saviors of the American economy and despite their best efforts, railroad executives failed to bring order to the coalfields. Coal operators and coal miner unions shaped the options available to railroad managers.

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“Types of Miners” —Lewis W. Hine

them even while they maneuvered to resist it. It shows how upper-level actors came to acknowledge the power of those below them even while they maneuvered to control it. The overall structure of this book demonstrates how people and organizations learned and evolved in dynamic ways over time.8 It tells a story, not so much of how Americans learned to avoid disorder and conflict, but of how they learned to live with it and to turn it to their own ends. It lays out a three-part narrative arc: Hubris, a brief moment of Humility, and a more lasting Stalemate. The three chapters of Hubris describe how railroad managers sought different ways to subordinate and administer the coal industry in service of their larger wars with each other even as coal miners responded by evolving different sorts of organizations (1. Cultural, 2. Formal, and 3. Secret). The single chapter of Humility (4. Compromise) shows how coal operators and coal miners attempted to create a limited set of associations and agreements separate from the railroads. The three chapters of Stalemate show the interaction between three stories of ongoing creation and evolution—those of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), of the coal operators’ Seaboard Coal Association, and of the nationally-scaled railroad system. Because these stories exist in relation to each other in this book, these chapters (5. Origins, 6. Association, 7. National Scale) show the ways

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complicated the nature of the coal mining region shipping to the East Coast. Previously most eastern coal came from Maryland, with a smattering from Virginia and from Pennsylvania’s Huntingdon and Tioga counties. Starting in the 1880s this system gained an additional measure of complexity by expanding to include new railroads and regions. The eastern coal region expanded to include North-Central Pennsylvania through the efforts of the New York Central Railroad and West Virginia through the Norfolk & Western and the Chesapeake & Ohio railroads. This region supplied America’s rapidly expanding steam-powered industry and railroad locomotives all along the Eastern Seaboard, from Norfolk through Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston, as well as ocean-going steamers and naval coal dumps. Up until the turn of the century each regional railroad sought to simplify this system by administering the coal industry within their regions to their own ends. Yet their efforts required coal operators, coal miners, and their own freight agents to subordinate their interests to the plans of top railroad executives. As long as coal miners in an entire railroad region could call an effective strike, railroad managers were unable to use lower labor costs in the mines to put their competitors out of business. As long as coal operators could persuade, lie to, cheat, or bribe freight agents to gain preferential freight rates, railroad executives were unable to carry out their pooling agreements. As long as railroad managers could withhold coal cars or preferential freight rates for coal operators who negotiated with their coal miners there would be no stability from agreements between coal operators and miners. Starting at the turn of the century railroad managers of the newly consolidated eastern railroads would attempt to settle on a new national scale system with which to simplify management of the entire eastern coal/railroad industry. They merged ownership of all the railroads shipping East and recentered the coal trade on large-scale coal mines in West Virginia and Somerset County, Pennsylvania. In part, their plan worked. From roughly 1900, they would make these the dominant coal regions for much of the nation, from the East Coast to the Midwest. Yet their efforts only simplified this one aspect of the coal industry. The rest of the coal and railroad industry that had been built by this time did not disappear. Railroads had built thousands of miles of tracks, stations, and repair facilities in existing coal regions and they retained their obligations to those areas. The newly dominant coal regions could not supply all customers at all times. Organizations of operators and coal miners continued to push for a share of the industry. In this way the battle between railroads for dominance (well-documented),9 and the battle to defeat coal miner unionism (well-documented)10

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The promises of steam power, high finance, and railroads never quite became as stabilizing as their advocates wished to believe. People at the time acted despite the dynamic fog of change that is the hallmark of the modern world. To focus more on the disorder they lived with rather than the order they desired is to respect the challenges that they faced and to acknowledge the limits of their success. As historian Sean Patrick Adams states, “At century’s close, the coal industry defied control.”13 This book explores the history of coal’s defiance.

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1 Cultural Coal Mining and Community, 1872

In November 1872, the coal miners of Central Pennsylvania struck for higher wages.1 Local coal operators did little but fold their hands. The Pennsylvania Railroad shifted its cars elsewhere; the bustle in the streets slowed; snow covered the tracks; ice covered the snow. The area’s sixteen operators did nothing. Six weeks into the strike, however, managers at one coal mining operation decided to reopen. In doing so, they revealed why they had waited so long, why none of the other operators joined them, and why their effort crumbled so quickly: To challenge the strike in this way was to attack the customs and collective relationships with coal miners that made their coal mines possible. It was a risky decision. The legions of foremen and human resources professionals, time and motion studies, and mechanization that would so mark twentieth-century industrialism, had yet to appear. Coal miner culture and unionism were integral to the ways in which operators ran their businesses. Operators did not threaten to leave the area if they lost the strike, nor to bring in outside workers. The striking coal miners planned to return to their old jobs in their old rooms underground at the strike’s end, and the struck operators planned to employ them. This chapter introduces a culture of coal mining and coal miner unionism that was seemingly unorganized, certainly unbureaucratic, and at least ritually violent. Local courts targeted only the violent forms of this sort of unionism in 1872. As a result, over the next few years after this strike, leaders of the coal miners would refine their formal organizing efforts to avoid even ritualized violence and confrontation. Nevertheless, despite the efforts of these leaders, informal, culturally defined efforts to defend values of community and workplace retained their place in miners’ activism. Even the United Mine Workers’ Union at the turn of the century—so massive in scale and scope, so legalistic and formally hierarchical, so durable in the face of >>

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the authority and responsibility to draft all the enterprises along their tracks in their wars with other regional railroad empires. As they sought to manage the coalfields in an increasingly direct way, coal miners and coal miner unionism became more and more of a problem for them too. Soon, railroad management would make full use of their monopoly power to enforce their antiunion efforts. In 1872, however, railroad managers left coal miners and operators alone to manage their relationship as they wished. Even though this story focuses on a short period in 1872 and 1873, it nevertheless helps to explain much about the history of the entire coal/railroad complex. In this strike, informal, ritually violent community traditions of the sort described below were the focus of prosecutors. After the strike, leaders among the coal miners tried to show that they had left this sort of behavior behind. They learned, however, that even the sorts of formal, peaceful collective action that seemed so respectable in 1872–1873 would now be illegal as well. With these forms of collective action lost to them, leaders turned to forms that they hoped would be more acceptable. They turned to politics, joining the short-lived Greenback Labor Party in 1878, and in the longer term, running for less partisan local political offices. They turned to a secret society known as the Noble and Holy Knights of Labor. Similar to the Freemasons, Odd Fellows, or Red Men secret societies so popular at that time, the Knights of Labor in Central Pennsylvania became a way for like-minded men, in this case mostly leaders of the coal miners, to meet in secret and to build bonds of ritual and brotherhood. The importance of the customs of community and workplace action of 1872 is that they never quite disappeared. They never quite lost their informal, almost implicit place in the coal industry. And because the coal miners continued to exert power of various kinds, these customs had an influence on the development of the coal and railroad industries. The formal Clearfield miners’ union of this era has left little trace of its existence. There are no surviving papers or membership logs. The miners had little that we would recognize today as a union. They had little money to put into any central treasury if one existed, no bureaucracy, no formal contracts, no lawyers, and no national presence. Newspaper reports at the time omit the names of leaders. One author later gave the 1873 Clearfield miners’ organization the intriguing, if sinister, name “The Big Wheel.” Whether anyone ever used it at the time or not, the name suggests their mode of organization. Each mine had its own pit committee. They linked together only during crises or strikes (like the spokes of a big wheel?) in order to coordinate regional demands and to pool resources. Their organization consisted of a loose, informal confederation of men in the different mines, governed by delegate meetings and decisions made in mass meetings.2

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with men from outside the region or culture, or if faced with men who chose to ignore them. Even their own majority vote to strike was not really binding on men who had voted for or against it—except, that is, through the pressure of the community. Still, that was enough, until Edward McHugh, regional manager of all R. H. Powell coal mines, alone of all the struck operators, decided to test the limits of the union’s power. He instructed his subordinate, Powelton mine superintendent David Shorthill, to bring any willing strikebreakers to the company’s mine in the small town of Sterling. Shorthill found sixteen relatives, local businessmen, and a few experienced miners willing to defy the strike vote. On 23 December 1872, he took them on the train to Sterling.4 The result was a running battle and gunplay. When word of the riot arrived in the county seat, leaders of the coal miners denied all involvement. The coal miners had peacefully ceased work five weeks earlier as was their right. As evidence, they pointed to the quiet conduct of the strike up to that point, and the peacefulness of a far longer strike in the nearby town of Morrisdale.5 The rioters, union leaders claimed, were “Molly Maguires.” In a few years, the term “Molly Maguires” would take on a specific meaning as a sort of secret Irish terrorist organization. In this earlier case, however, its meaning retained its original ambiguity. It referred not so much to a secret group, but to a tactic, or perhaps to violence itself. It was also a useful myth for leaders, distancing them from illegal acts.6 But it wasn’t the mythical Molly Maguire who was at the center of all this, it was a woman named Sarah McGowan. Wife of miner Henry McGowan, she led the harassment of the strikebreakers that ultimately degenerated into a riot. Mrs. McGowan saw herself not as a lawbreaker, but as a law enforcer and a peacekeeper. To her, it was Shorthill and McHugh who broke the tacit rules that both operators and miners lived by. The two operators attacked the commonly understood relationship between workers and their jobs. To her, these were not merely jobs to be filled by any man who chose to work, but particular jobs owned by particular men—or at the least, a particular set of jobs owned by the men of the community. By virtue of proximity and history, of past low-level conflicts fought, won, lost, and compromised, mine workers believed they had a right to contest the conditions of their employment to the point of walking off the job even while retaining their right to that job. It was at best a traditional right based more in community and the everyday realities of getting the coal out of the ground than in any precise legal doctrine. Operators relied on the self-supervised culture of production in the mines. When Shorthill and McHugh put their men to work clearing five weeks of ice-encrusted snow off the railroad tracks, they did so—as they

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Pennsylvania, State Representative John Lawshe had offered up a key amendment. Lawshe insisted that the law not protect workers who “hinder” men from working if they so chose.9 Lawshe’s amendment mirrored the reasoning of judges in conspiracy cases. In this way it meshed with the common law understandings of appellate judges. Between 1806 and 1842, appellate opinions came increasingly to consider the common law charge of criminal conspiracy to apply where agreements existed to achieve illegal ends or legal ends by illegal means. The scope of criminal conspiracy judicial doctrine was partially settled in Commonwealth v. Hunt, the famous 1842 opinion that drew the first era of criminal conspiracy doctrine in this country to a close. In this case, Judge Lemuel Shaw finessed the main problem with the use of the British common law conspiracy doctrine in this country: the confusing judicial record in the common law made it difficult, if not impossible, to untangle local British statutes (which he argued did not apply in America) from common law precedents (which he argued did apply in America). Shaw reaffirmed the general common law prejudice against all labor combinations. He insisted merely that indictments specify in what way such a combination engaged in illegal means or enabled illegal ends. Instead of long arguments over common law precedents, Shaw directed prosecutors to concentrate on whether people involved in conspiracies intended to achieve illegal ends or legal ends through illegal means. As legal historian Christopher Tomlins points out, this doctrine tended to put the focus on the actual character of the relationship between employers and employed. This focus placed the context of collective action squarely in the individualist traditions of common law. Workers had the right to associate, but not to enforce union strike decisions on those who chose to defy them.10 Nevertheless, the new statute seemed to give union activists a right to collectively make rules that included calling a strike. Yet while the Clearfield County court system would follow precedent in 1872–1873, it bracketed that year with cases that ignored leading judgments. The careful distinctions laid out in the Commonwealth v. Hunt ruling only imperfectly penetrated the minds of local judges and the pages of local docket books. The county court docket books contain several cases that neither followed appellate opinion nor were reported in Pennsylvania state legal reports, nor are mentioned in lists of criminal conspiracy cases. The story of these judgments points to the relevance of local legal history. In March 1869, only a few months after the Pennsylvania Railroad’s tracks joined up to Clearfield County in Central Pennsylvania, the region experienced its first major strike and challenge to civil authority. The previous fall, Darius Ellsworth, editor of the Phillipsburg Journal along the line between

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region, just north along the railroad tracks to the Powelton and Enterprise mines. There they successfully called the men out. There is no mention of exactly how they accomplished this. Although they apparently did not go into the mines and drag the men from their jobs, they may have intimidated them through sheer force of numbers. But the newspaper reports suggest otherwise, stating that they simply “dissuaded” the men from working. That the miners were relatively peaceful in their object and method is only reinforced by reports of their actions the next day. On Saturday, the miners descended in similar fashion a few more miles north and west to the Derby and Nuttal mines, where mining superintendents refused to allow them to assemble the men at work. According to the Phillipsburg Journal, the miners then dispersed. The Journal opined that it would have been “imprudent” for the miners to engage in violent demonstrations, and the miners seem to have agreed.16 The strike soon ended, unsuccessfully. That June, the thirteen Clearfield miners were convicted of criminal conspiracy.17 Leader John Malee received the most severe sentence in 1869, three months in the county jail, and a $25 fine. A few years later in 1872, neither the union nor the strike excused or mitigated any illegal actions of the strikers before the law; indeed, the strike seems to have made them even more reprehensible in the eyes of judges. In the middle of December 1872, four weeks into the strike, editor S. J. Row of the Clearfield Raftsman’s Journal printed “A Warning to Strikers” that offered an interpretation of the legal limits to worker activism. To illustrate his point, Row followed the warning with an article that had appeared in the New York World only a week earlier. During a New York carpenter’s strike in summer 1872, two strikers had confronted a brother carpenter for working below the union price. When he refused to stop working, they threw his tools out into the street and forced him from the shop. In the street, one of them shot him through the cheek. The striker accused of the shooting pleaded innocent to charges of felonious assault. The prosecutor argued that the strike should be an aggravating factor in the jury’s deliberations, not a mitigating factor as the defendant seemed to believe. This assault in the midst of a strike was not just a crime against a single man but “a great offense . . . against . . . the rights of the whole people.” The New York jury retired for half an hour before returning a verdict of guilty but with a recommendation of mercy. The judge agreed more with the prosecutor’s view than with the jury’s. He gave the defendant the maximum sentence allowed, seven years at Sing Sing.18 In reprinting the article, Row clearly meant for Clearfield’s strikers to accept the message intended by the New York district attorney and the judge in the case; strikes should not be seen as the exercise of collective freedoms, but as collective attacks on the rights of all nonstriking workers. When it

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blasted every chunk of that coal down, cleaned off the slate, and broken it into the large pieces that were the mark of a skilled collier. And now Shorthill’s men were loading the coal these other men had mined into mine cars. The coal in those mine cars came from other men’s workplaces. It came, as well, from other men’s labor. Miners were like sharecroppers or skilled tradesmen in that their product was the end result of a multistep process, much of which was unpaid “deadwork.” They did not simply dig coal, but prepared it and their workplace. They propped up the roof for safety, undercut the coal, and took up the worthless floor to make a serviceable room. They took pride in the workplaces that they had created. For another man to then work in the room of a miner who was sick or on strike, to “take down” the coal that had been undercut, or to load already mined coal was like a landlord dispossessing a sharecropper after he’d plowed and seeded, watered and hoed. It was like taking a weaver’s loom after he had set web and selvage, or finishing a machinist’s roughed-out part. This responsible, multistep mining process was part of what made miners craftsmen and preserved their ownership of places in the mine. By making the move from shoveling snow to shoveling coal, Shorthill’s men had now earned the label “blackleg” in what was perhaps the literal source of the term’s metaphorical power. Not only did they suffer the pejorative weight of this epithet and the comparison to diseased cattle or potatoes, but as mere loaders of other men’s coal, they must also have been, for miners, suspiciously nonblack above their legs. None of them had crawled under an overhanging ledge of coal. None of them had lain on his side in the wet floor of the mine, placing elbow on knee and rapidly hacking away until the job was done, his entire body thoroughly blackened. As one Central Pennsylvania union leader wrote several years later, it was “the blackest kind of blackleg . . . who would be immensely gratified to get an opportunity of loading their fellow-miners’ coal.”21 As superintendent of the mine, McHugh gave the cars of coal to the striking miners to heat their homes.22 McHugh and his men had broken the rules that they themselves accepted. They had worked in other men’s places and they had stolen from them. In the same sense that a miner might undercut a seam of coal, they had undercut the peaceful nature of the strike. The weight of those judgments was about to come crashing down upon them. *

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Just after noon, some of the women of Sterling responded to McHugh. They decided to collect the final pay still owed their husbands, and by that act

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times. It was common practice in the coal regions. For if coal mining men were the family breadwinners, patriarchs, and union leaders, women such as Sarah McGowan were its household survival strategists. Miners’ wives generally expected respectable husbands to hand over, or “tip-up,” the bulk of their pay, sometimes on the doorstep, in full view of the neighbors. A visitor to Pennsylvania’s anthracite coalfields observed that after a Welsh miner received his pay and his “fill of beer,” his remaining wages went to his wife, “who acts as treasurer with much discretion, making all the purchases of the house and transacting the business of the family.” One miner who worked in Clearfield coal mines in the mid-1890s credited his family’s success in staying housed and out of debt not to his father’s labor, but to his mother’s financial discipline. As an editor from the Clearfield region wrote after a tour of local coal mines, “The woman of the house is ‘boss’ over this domain, and it is in her that the wages of the month are handed by the husband, he removing only a small pittance to treat himself and ‘buddy’  .  .  .  to a ‘swig’ or two of ‘schnaps.’ . . . [T]o her judgment is left all the business usually attended to by the ‘man of the house.’ That she exercises this in the right manner is proven by the fact that the majority of the miners give their wives this privilege.”24 Of course this last word provides the rub. Similar to a miner’s prerogatives underground, a wife’s control over the finances was a customary arrangement, not a woman’s legal right that men were legally bound to respect. If it is too much to dub this a universal practice in the coalfields, however, it was a recognized aspect of miners’ culture. Miners’ family arrangements were part of a set of cultural practices in which women played a functional, powerful role.25 In this sense, the cultural authority of women to manage the household money may have been an adaptation to the culture of manhood that emphasized drinking and individual daring over financial responsibility. But it also suggests that coal mining as culture and as a way of life was not centered entirely on the job of mining coal. It was an adaptive culture that included gardening, laundering, cooking, taking in boarders, bearing children, and managing scarce and intermittent resources. Mining was, after all, routinely a part-time occupation. It was seasonal and vulnerable to cold snaps that froze railroads in their tracks, floods, sudden shortages of railroad cars, caveins, injuries, strikes, or the whim of the market. Children who worked in or around the mines as mule drivers, door keepers, and in other jobs boosted their family’s income until they set up their own housekeeping and cared for parents in old age. Explaining one coal miner’s particularly high earnings, one operator wrote simply: “[T]his man has boys working.”26 For this reason, operators often preferred to hire married men. In downturns, operators also believed that single men who could more easily scrounge and tramp and

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“The Miner” —Lewis W. Hine

traditional production, after all, were routinely accepted as good practice in the industry. McHugh laid out his conditions for releasing back pay to Mrs. McGowan. The miners had to live in noncompany housing, not owe the company any money, and they had to remove their tools from the mine. This last point was important, since even McHugh accepted that a man’s tools left in the workplace signified his ownership of that room.29 The price of getting paid off, McHugh was saying, was agreeing to give up the right to your job. And there was a penalty: to give up your right to your job was to abandon any coal you had prepped for loading and to abandon the workplace you yourself had built. Sarah McGowan insisted that she and her family had met all of McHugh’s conditions. The McGowans did not have to leave the company boarding house because they owned their own home.30 Henry McGowan had already taken his tools out of the mine, she said, thus relinquishing his claim to his workplace. The strike was no longer a matter of simply withdrawing labor in the region until the miners voted to go back to work. Evidently the McGowans—or Mrs. McGowan at least—had decided their family would no longer associate with R. H. Powell. Perhaps because he knew of his wife’s plans or because he was thoroughly familiar with his wife’s temperament himself, Henry McGowan took his time getting to Sterling that day. He thus

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He was echoed by Michael McGrath: There were about ten (10) women. The men were standing back. When they got to the train the men followed up. The women kept throwing snow and using all kinds of language.

There were no serious casualties in this mock combat. Both sides floundered in deep snow and slippery ice.32 Though unpleasant and suggestive of violence, the rough treatment was more an instrument of humiliation, of “rough music” or “primitive combat” than of decisive battle.33 Just as Shorthill and McHugh were more interested in mining coal in defiance of the rules of coal mining culture than in physical confrontation, so community leaders such as Sarah McGowan were more interested in preventing them from mining the coal and defending the rules of coal mining culture than in a pitched battle. (Both sides carried firearms.) Leaders on the strikers’ side fought an increasingly difficult battle to keep harassment from escalating into real physical conflict. Sarah McGowan dragged Old Mack back from the platform.34 Her husband Henry had by this time walked to the scene and tried to quiet the crowd. Shorthill’s men stood in a row on the platform. They waited silently for several difficult minutes while the men and women of Sterling harassed them with words, snow, ice, and pieces of slate. Finally the train backed to the platform. The coal tender arrived first, then the locomotive, pulling a single passenger car attached to a coupling at the front. Several miners from towns along the route dropped off the train and ran toward the platform. The strikebreakers, in a parody of their blackleg status, stood marked by the white snow that covered their upper bodies. Several leapt for the coal tender and locomotive, the first parts of the train that they could reach. The engine crew refused to let them stay up on the tender or the locomotive, however; they had to jump down on the side away from the platform and run for the open, rear door of the passenger car.35 Confusion took over as the train, the strikebreakers, the strikers, and the women all converged. The once distinct groupings of women at the front, men around the back of the crowd, and strikebreakers at a distance broke down. The strikers caught one blackleg and beat him briefly before letting him on the train. Another clung to the railing of the rear car; striking miners tore his pants off as he climbed aboard. The informal structure of mock battle and harassment broke down. It was replaced with real violence. As the confusion ebbed and all his men struggled aboard, David Shorthill put his cane on his arm, his hand on the rail, and his foot on the step to the locomotive. Unfortunately for him, Michael Mack was now up on

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made further attempts to import outsiders that year. The strike continued for over a month more. Someone burned down the Sterling mine’s main building to stop it completely.38 The strike ended only with the onset of the Panic of 1873. The overwhelming fact of economic cataclysm decided things. District operators made a collective agreement that they would not only refuse a raise, but would reduce wages an additional $.10/ton throughout the Central Pennsylvania region.39 *

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The judge’s stern lecture at trial in June 1873 that the miners too had recourse to the law if wronged must have been cold comfort. The court rejected their implied defense that the decision of area miners to strike held a regionwide legitimacy—that a vote by the miners of a region to strike ought to end only when those same men voted to return to their places in the mine. The miners believed that their vote ought to be recognized by civic authorities, or at the least, that the existence of the strike conferred certain rights and duties on strikers, operators, and all local miners. The miners could defend their perceived rights only outside the courtroom and in the narrow spaces controlled by the community. Ownership of a place underground had no formal legal standing, nor did the decisions of the union. The men and women of Sterling had no effective defense in court. Despite their loss, the 1872–1873 strike and trial conferred a measure of legitimacy on formal and informal unionism in Clearfield. Local leaders proved that they could organize an effective work stoppage without bringing immediate prosecution from civil authorities or operators. They managed to elicit a strategy of mostly peaceful discipline from area miners for three cold months—with the notable exception of the Sterling riot. The trial of the Sterling rioters for riot and criminal conspiracy focused not on eliminating regional unionism, but on punishing violence. In a strike two years later, both sides maintained an almost total public silence about the events of 1872–1873. Neither side mentioned the previous riot and trial. Union leaders would insist that they had accepted the wage concessions of 1873 as part of their role as regional boosters, as a “loan” for the good of the region’s coal industry. The miners’ loan, they argued, had come due with the return of prosperity.40 They continued to claim the right to represent the economic interests of Clearfield miners. Indeed, this claim was not much of a stretch; evidence suggests that at times, nearly all miners in Clearfield participated in the decision to strike.41 In 1875, operators accepted the right of strikers to demand and witness a free vote of men at

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to pay higher wages. But at the same time they also provided evidence that all was not as well as it seemed in the Clearfield coal business. Even in these seemingly good times they accused operators of clipping the miners at the scales and at the company stores. They wrote letters complaining about dishonest or discourteous weighbosses and superintendents.6 The Goss Run Coal Company had discharged all single men in its employ—a common belt-tightening ploy for coal operators. (Married men with large families bought more from the company store.)7 In January 1875, mule drivers at Eureka mines struck to reinstate a man who had been fired. The pit committee at Franklin mines protested that men driving a new tunnel were taking more than their share of work from the rest of the miners. One letter to the National Labor Tribune complained of “dull times,” despite “reports to the contrary.” The letter mentioned hundreds of men who were idle and proving a “drawback to our organization.”8 Somehow higher shipments had failed to bring prosperity to the coal operators or coal miners. In spring 1875, pit by pit and railroad branch by railroad branch, the Clearfield miners assembled in mass meetings, argued, voted, and sent representatives to a central delegate meeting. Committees in each mine wrote to operators, requesting that they come to a meeting and explain why they could not pay an increase. Thursday, 8 April was to be the deadline but only three operators replied by that date. Miners at Eureka mine on the Mapleton branch met with their superintendent, Colonel Rickert. He refused to do other than give them his word that the company could not pay the raise.9 He had good reason to keep his books closed. In Clearfield, to show the books would have been to reveal the company’s particular and secret relationship to the Pennsylvania Railroad. It would have been to reveal the true cost of shipping coal. But at the same time, it would likely have shown why Rickert could not raise wages even in a time of booming coal business and higher retail prices: The Pennsylvania Railroad charged a sliding scale for freight rates. When coal prices went down, freight rates went down. When coal prices went up, freight rates went up. When the coal operators refused again to meet with the mine committees or to grant them a raise, the miners began the process of calling the entire region out on strike. *

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In addition to their local arrangements, the coal miners in Clearfield and elsewhere in the nation looked to a new source of formal organizational strength in 1875. The Miners’ National Association was not only a new miners’ union, but a new approach to miners’ unionism. Unfortunately, the

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were easy to open during boom times but tough to close when booms ended. Long-term lease agreements required minimum levels of production per year. As a result, the anthracite mining industry faced overproduction and overcompetition. Schuylkill coal operators faced demands from both their employees and the Reading Railroad that lower prices not come out of their slices of the pie. At first coal operators tried to limit the supply of coal, and therefore, they hoped, to keep prices high. Similar to their efforts before the Civil War, however, they had no way to enforce their agreements. Now, it seemed that after their failure, the coal miners were going to take on the same function through their union. The coal miners would have a new organization with which to accomplish this goal, based in one of the great founding moments in American labor history. They built their organization on a long-standing network of committees in each mine, wartime battles over wages, and a more formal, functional system of benevolence societies that supported men injured in the mines and paid burial expenses.12 Their immediate spur was a desire to enforce a new Pennsylvania state law limiting the workday to eight hours, a law the region’s operators, ideologically sensitive to the rights of individuals (and to their own bottom lines), refused to accept as binding. Indeed, since the law permitted any employer to “allow” workers to choose to work longer, it was in effect more of a nonbinding resolution than an enforceable act.13 The anthracite miners sought to enforce the spirit of the eight-hour law through collective action. They failed. But in their failure, they created a countywide organization capable of reaching agreements with coal operators. The miners cemented their commitment to collective organization with a mass meeting of twelve thousand men in the small town of St. Clair. The size of the meeting was unprecedented, and the memory served as a longstanding touchstone for men who had been there. Prior mass meetings generally totaled a few hundred people. At most a miners’ parade might include a few thousand men. But this meeting included nearly every one of the several thousand miners in the region—organizers later claimed as many as twenty thousand men attended. The coal operators did not wish to accept the eight-hour day, but they did wish to find a way to raise the price of coal. The miners, led by an experienced trade unionist, bricklayer, and former Irish activist named John Siney, offered to do just that.14 Siney had dedicated his life to the pursuit of a better life for wage workers in America, and before that, in Britain. He’d suffered exile from Britain for his activism. He would go on to expand the organizational insights that he had gained through the WBA into the new national miners’ union in 1875. When it failed, he soon found himself blacklisted, mortally ill, and forgotten.

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much close scrutiny: He got his money, but in buying up nearly the entire Schuylkill coal region and enforcing an expensive, strictly antiunion policy, he also vastly expanded the Reading Railroad’s debt. With high capital costs and the attendant loss of trade to other anthracite regions caused by long strikes in his own, Gowen drove the Reading into bankruptcy in 1880 and 1884, and himself to suicide five years later.17 His obituaries were ambivalent, as for example this one: “He had the credit that attached to any industrial enterprise in the years preceding the panic of 1873.” The editors of the Pennsylvania Grit summed up their view of Gowen’s strengths and weaknesses in a quotation from William H. Vanderbilt, head of the New York Central Railroad. Vanderbilt, they wrote, recognized Gowen’s weaknesses as well as his unalloyed dedication to the Reading. Opposing J. P. Morgan’s wishes, he offered to support Gowen’s renewed bid for the presidency of the bankrupted Reading in 1884, but refused him access to credit, saying “I won’t lend you any money . . . you could bankrupt the New York Central in a year.”18 The New York Times offered a similar assessment: “[H]is visionary disposition caused him to ponder over the development of theories to a degree that carried him beyond the bounds of practical business plans. . . . He was an optimist of the most exaggerated type.” In a second article that day, the Times noted the striking confidence Gowen’s investors had in him even as his ventures lost them money.19 Nevertheless, Gowen’s efforts seemed well-founded at the time. Unlike other railroad executives in the early 1870s, Gowen had a strategy and a plan for achieving a steady revenue stream. He knew that his freight would come from the coal mines in the Schuylkill region and that it would go to Philadelphia. The main problem he faced on assuming the Reading presidency was that the coal operators and coal miners had essentially agreed to collude in order to lower production, raise prices, and keep the bulk of that price increase for themselves. They treated the Reading as the passive public conveyance that it had been, not the aggressively profit-seeking business that Gowen envisioned—and that was demanded by the debt load he soon accumulated. Gowen wished to change things. He wished to make the financial health of the Reading Railroad the primary purpose of the Schuylkill coal industry, not miners’ wages, operator profits, or even the development of other regional industries as envisioned in his original corporate charter. To this end, he forced the fiercely anticorporate coal operators to side with him against the union by manipulating freight rates and car supplies.20 In his first direct attack on the WBA in 1870, he agreed to a contract that put wages on a sliding scale, insisting only that the scale have no bottom and that wages be figured based on the prices of coal as delivered at Port Carbon.21 When coal

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tactics, and relationship to the area’s coal operators—and with the Reading Railroad. The basic building blocks of the union, the traditions that left the organization of production and negotiation of conditions in each mine to pit committees and the loose-knit benevolence societies would likely have refined their ways of association. But in Schuylkill, Gowen turned the Panic of 1873 into a killing field for collective action. As a result, when coal miners sought to import the innovations of the WBA into the other anthracite regions under the new name of the Miners’ and Laborers’ Benevolence Association, and in the bituminous regions, as the Miners’ National Association, they received a set of ideas and practices tempered only by the shortest of peaceful engagements on its home turf. Moreover, the WBA’s defining technique of periodically suspending work in order to raise prices was rooted in a world where railroads acted more like their founding incarnations as common carriers and less like the empire-builders they had become. In fall 1873 leaders of the new national bituminous union, the Miners’ National Association, asked miners in all regions of the country to send delegates to Youngstown, Ohio, in order to attend a founding meeting. No delegates from Central Pennsylvania attended. At the meeting, delegates elected a geographically balanced slate of officers and decided to send organizers into every field. John Siney left his home in Eastern Pennsylvania to become president of the MNA and transplanted his organizational innovations from the concentrated hothouse atmosphere of the anthracite region to the bituminous coalfields.24 Longtime Illinois union leader John James, who had worked with Sandy MacDonald, leader of the British coal miners before emigrating, quit his dry goods store to become secretary. George Archbold of Western Pennsylvania was elected vice president. But there was little to link the new miners’ organization with its supposed membership, nor did they have a concrete strategy. By contrast, the anthracite miners of Schuylkill County had built the WBA from its old benevolence role, and then in the eight-hour day effort, and its founding moment of mass solidarity at that immense meeting in St. Clair—a meeting to which the bulk of the participants had walked or hitched a short train ride. They had a unified purpose, one that many of their employers shared, of using suspensions of production to raise the price of anthracite coal. And they had experienced success, at least early on. They would find the vast bituminous fields to be far different. *

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By the end of 1874, with miners restless throughout the coalfields and with anthracite miners just beginning the Long Strike that would last well into

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This photograph of Houtzdale gives something of the rough flavor of the town during the strikes of the 1870s. —Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Clearfield County Historical Society.

At the start, the miners deliberated openly. On Saturday night, 10 April 1875, miners all along the Moshannon Branch of the railroad met to debate whether to strike. Sterling miners, who had been holding weekly meetings for some months, met in a basement. Going against the advice of Coal and Iron Policeman Captain Clark, their mining superintendent David Shorthill attended. He spoke against the strike resolution. Shorthill may have split hairs, implying that he supported an increase of $.10/ton, but that he opposed a strike. In any case, the Sterling men voted to demand a raise. All ninety-five Franklin mine workers voted for the strike.28 Moshannon mine held back. James McKean, recording secretary for Moshannon mine, met an outraged reception when he reported that his members had voted 39–2 against a strike.29 Nevertheless, the delegate gathering respected the right of the men at that mine to make their own decisions. On Monday, all the mines on the Moshannon Branch were idle except for the Moshannon mine. The strike showed signs of spreading to the seven other railroad branch lines in the region. Still, though the men on the Moshannon Branch had voted to strike, those on the other railroad branches in the region had yet to organize themselves or to devise a way of joining the strike.

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any man in working clothes. The Clearfield strikers sent committees to the smaller Broad Top coal region in Huntington, just south of Clearfield, to warn away the men in those mines and to watch the trains. They arranged to post notices in the anthracite region asking men not to come to Clearfield during the strike. Operators accompanying new workers from Broad Top, Philadelphia, or even New York sought, with little success, to get them through all the many logistical obstacles posed by the strikers and the new miners’ own reluctance to take up a new job in a new place where they could count only on hostility from the community. But no one suggested that any of these actions were at all illegal. For James Fisher of Fisher Brothers coal mines, the strike came at a particularly bad time, and he battled hard to keep his Clearfield mines working. He had been working frantically since October to open for the spring trade. The strike came just as he began to ship coal. Between the start of the strike and the end of April, Fisher Brothers produced no coal but paid a premium of $.15 to $.30/ton to fill their contracts from Cumberland, Maryland, coalfields. Fisher was one of the operators who was making the move from Broad Top in Huntingdon County to Clearfield. In Broad Top, Fisher had been the only mine operator to pay an advance of $.10/ton in lieu of a strike a few weeks earlier. Consequently, his mines in Broad Top were crowded with men, while those in Clearfield stood idle. On 26 April, Fisher went home to Huntingdon to gather a crew of strikebreakers.35 He found thirty-two men, all of whom he later claimed to know personally. But Fisher apparently didn’t know the men well enough. A committee of Clearfield strikers stationed in Huntingdon got wind of his plan and convinced four of Fisher’s men to quit even before the train left Broad Top. Thus when Fisher reached Tyrone, he learned that his party had been reduced to twenty-eight. A strike committee of Clearfield miners boarded north of Tyrone at Powelton and circulated through the train. The coal miners held a strong tactical advantage in the community. As a result, at Osceola Fisher lost more of his crew. In order to get his strikebreakers from their train up to the mine, he had to walk them through a crowd of striking miners who had been alerted to his approach, to a second station, and to wait a full half hour for the branch train. This gave the strikers plenty of time to persuade, intimidate, or otherwise impress their cause on the strikebreakers. As the men alighted from the train, two or three strikers surrounded each of them. The strikers grabbed them by the lapels and spoke and yelled at them from all sides. William Hicks got off the train with a shovel in his hand. Xingo Parks set on him immediately. Parks then turned to all of Fisher’s men. He offered to buy them dinner and pay their return

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of Centre County, and swore out warrants against Xingo Parks and District President John Joyce for “threatening and conspiring to keep miners from work.”39 On 9 May, he took them back over the mountain to jail. District Secretary John J. Maloney was already out of town, collecting funds for the strike from another mining area. When the latest group of strikebreakers arrived, they would face a crowd which had lost its most experienced leaders. Even deprived of their main leaders, however, the miners were not entirely bereft of leadership, and when three-quarters of the men shipped to the area turned out to be English-speaking, they dealt with them as they had before. The special train turned out to consist of 150 English-speaking miners and 43 Italians. The English-speaking strikebreakers had been told there was no strike and that they would be paid $.60/ton. This time, the operators ordered the doors locked to prevent the miners from packing the cars or the strikebreakers from prematurely changing their minds. But even the special train had to stop just below town to switch tracks. When the English-speaking strikebreakers saw the miners coming, they swarmed out of the windows. They agreed to leave if their fares were paid and were soon taken to Parker’s Hall in Phillipsburg, where they were fed. Even with their primary leaders gone, the strikers found the money to hire the special train that had brought the strikebreakers to take them back again.40 The Italians created a more difficult problem. The train dropped off the 43 Italians and their escort, identified as Secretary to the Italian Consul, S. G. Conti, at Sterling. David Shorthill met the men at the train and helped them put their baggage into the mine car house, which he locked. Conti was upset. He had arranged to be met at Osceola by the sheriff, who was not there. Shorthill took the Italians up to new, still unfinished houses built by the company in order to solve part of the problem of keeping the new men at work. The houses were unfinished and without stoves. He had 50 men working at the mine (out of a normal complement of 225), and drivers continued to haul coal out of the mine as the Italians arrived. The Italians arrived without tools, which Shorthill had only just begun to prepare. The drivers were still at work an hour later when striking miners began to arrive. Roughly 200 striking miners assembled at the property line and yelled at the Italians. They slowly edged forward. Shorthill refused their requests to send up a committee. They called him a “black-hearted son of a bitch,” but made no threats against him or the Italians. They said the men would be well-treated if they came with them. After a time, Conti came out and decided his men would not be safe working at Sterling. After a parley, he delivered his men to the strikers. The strikers paid their fares to Tyrone, a cruel joke that stranded them half-way back to Philadelphia.41

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George McGowan now took charge. The crowd, roughly four hundred men and women, moved out of view down the road and over a rise. James Fisher, visibly ill, consulted quietly with Siney off to the side of the road. Moments later, the crowd surged back over the rise toward the mine with George McGowan at its head. They pushed past Fisher, Siney, and the policemen. McGowan climbed up on a nearby stump, and urged the crowd on with a long stick that he wielded like a general’s sword. A plasterer perched high up on the chimneys of Fisher’s new company houses shouted a warning that the miners were coming. The strikebreakers hid up on the second story and refused to come out. Soon, though, the crowd forced its way up, tossed their baggage out of the windows, fetched the men at work in the mines, and forced them all to leave town on foot.43 The riot marks a turning point in the strike because it is the first time that the miners demonstrably forced men at work from their places and from the county. Previous to the arrival of the Italians at Fisher’s, as fast as operators refined their techniques for importing strikebreakers, the miners figured out how to convince the men to leave. They did so in a relatively peaceful manner and within the context of local, community unionism—by arguing that these were their jobs, owned by virtue of living and working there. Any intimidation remained somewhat tacit. But they could not convince men with whom they could not speak. Moreover, the importation of foreigners was seen as a direct attack on the community itself. Importing the Italians without a leader or translator was the first move by the operators that the miners could not counter with discussion. Unlike the Italians at Sterling, the Italians at Fisher’s had no recognized leader who could negotiate on their behalf. Moreover, the union leaders with the most at stake in a peaceful solution, the most experience in peaceful negotiation, and the most experience with the particular personalities involved, were in jail. And after the incendiary rhetoric of a few nights before, controlling the crowd would not have been easy. The miners did not pay return fares this time. They made the strikebreakers walk. The same intense ethnic animosity had not prevented the miners from paying return fares for the Italian miners at Sterling, but Fisher’s men were different. The rioters forced out every man at the mine, not just the Italians. Several of the English-speaking miners at Fisher’s turned out to have accepted a return fare from the strikers one or more times before and had obviously broken their promises not to return till the strike was over. Despite their different ethnic origins, all Fisher’s men had failed to organize themselves. Nor was anyone in the crowd able to bring them together to acknowledge the strike or vote on it. The crowd did not concede the individual right of Fisher’s men to work because they came to the area while it was on strike.

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come out the men at Sterling had also refused to support the strike. Since they had had about five or six weeks of steady work during the strike they could well afford to stay out till they got the raise to $.60/ton. It was his understanding that if the Moshannon men would come out the rest of the Sterling men would too, thus making the strike complete on the Branch. He asked that they send a committee to Sterling to see if that weren’t true. The Moshannon men voted to join the strike and Siney led the crowd up to Sterling. At Sterling, Superintendent David Shorthill allowed one committee to go up to the mine but only four men of those working voted to strike. Shorthill later said that he was afraid of another riot. He ordered his men to quit work.46 At Morrisdale, which was then working with French-speaking miners, Xingo Parks and John Siney brought about another successful vote to join the strike. But mass votes in the mines were losing their effectiveness. About one hundred men and women marched up the railroad tracks to the isolated mining town. They carried small white flags on sticks and brought a French interpreter. Siney made a speech castigating the Morrisdale men for failing to follow through with an earlier vote to strike and support the rest of the men. At first by voice vote, then by raised hands the Morrisdale men tried to make a decision as a group. But they were less than enthusiastic, and too few participated to make the vote meaningful. Perhaps because of the language barrier, Siney’s sort of persuasiveness was less effective. Finally, Xingo Parks showed his ability to organize on the more basic level of forcing men to physically take sides. He climbed up on the roof of a shed and directed those in favor of the strike to step to one side, and those against to another. Slowly, he persuaded the men to make a commitment for or against the strike. Still, though the majority voted in this way to go out, the vote did not hold. Two-thirds of the men went to work the next morning.47 The strikers were running up against their organizational limits, but local strikers stayed out and with constant effort they consistently convinced imported strikebreakers to leave. To maintain the strike meant to turn away new men before they reached the mines. Yet if there was power in the informal legitimacy of the union’s efforts and decisions they had no legal authority. Even with the organizing talents of Xingo Parks, John Siney, and local leaders, it was difficult to enforce the principle of organization at each mine. Even when they were successful the men refused to be bound by their own votes. When the strikebreakers were of different ethnicities, the organizers faced the additional difficulties of language barriers and angry prejudice in their own ranks. Moreover, they were about to find out that these customary ways of enforcing the power of community unionism had become illegal. Captain

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the agreement, not getting in the midst of the discussion, but hanging over the fence. In the midst of this activity, Edward McHugh arrived, found Shannon, and ordered him and the miners to leave the area within twenty minutes. At the stroke of the twentieth minute, Shannon and the striking miners formed up into two lines and marched off up the tracks toward Osceola. After Shannon and his men had left the area, a majority of Powelton men voted to join the strike. The vote was only partially successful, however. The men who voted to strike waved their handkerchiefs, cheered the result, and followed Shannon and the striking miners down the railroad tracks. Those who had voted to remain at work stayed at work.50 Shannon now faced arrest for an activity that had not been illegal earlier in the strike. Clearfield operators had met with Sheriff McPherson to complain about their situation. They demanded that he deputize a large number of men or call in troops to protect their right to manage their property and the right of any man to take any job without any interference. In this, the wishes of the operators clashed with the deep-set aversions of the county’s Democratic Party power structure. The Party’s county organ finally broke its near-total silence on the strike to declare the troops option “problematic.” During the Civil War, federal soldiers had come to Clearfield to enforce the draft, and the memory still rankled.51 Nominally, McPherson refused to interfere in the strike until he was resisted in his duties. But his actions after that date made it impossible for the miners to intercept strikebreakers before they arrived at the mines, or to communicate with them once they had arrived. On the morning of 17 May 1875, some two hundred miners marched through the darkness singing songs and flying flags to meet a rumored group of strikebreakers. Though the anticipated strikebreakers never arrived, the miners remained in town and examined each train car. It was therefore a highly public act when Sheriff McPherson boarded a train at Houtzdale for Tyrone and met a group of seven German workers whom he escorted to the mines. He brought the Germans through a silent crowd to the Moshannon Branch train and up to Franklin mine. The crowd followed the train tracks on foot six miles to the mine, a former MNA stronghold. Sheriff McPherson refused to allow the strikers to meet with the new men, and in so doing effectively announced the new legal limits of unionism in the area. He used the assembled crowd to enforce a just-issued warrant Captain Clark had sworn out against fifty miners. Again, the miners stepped forward as he read their names. Twenty-seven of the men had been arrested the previous week for the same crimes of riot and conspiracy. As a New York Times reporter pointed out, the arrests were “curious” for two reasons. First,

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miners had rioted, prosecutors argued, because they were encouraged to do so by union leaders. The union leaders were therefore criminally liable for the actions of the coal miners as well as for the crime of unionism itself. A scant month after the end of the strike, the trial of the fifty-seven miners for riot, unlawful assembly, and conspiracy began. Local miners were tried in June, with Republican Judge George Barrett of Clearfield and his son as their counsel, and with Democratic Senator William A. Wallace, known locally as a Pennsylvania Railroad lawyer, as the attorney for the prosecution.56 Or as a friend of Wallace’s wrote, he was “counsel for the operators.” John Siney and Xingo Parks were to be tried four months later. As early as the end of May 1875, Wallace confidently predicted that Siney and Parks would receive sentences of four to five years in the penitentiary.57 The prosecutors insisted on holding the two trials separately. The first concentrated on local men who had either been union leaders or who could be shown to have engaged in specific acts of intimidation against the strikebreakers. The second trial was to focus on the outsiders, John Siney and Xingo Parks. The first trial is historically important more for its impact on the second than for the fate of the individuals involved. At the time, though, the sentences created significant hardship for local leaders and pointed to the sacrifices that might now be required of union activists. The sentences were unexpected, meted out for crimes the men did not know they were committing. Years later, coal miner Julius Viebahn remembered his arrest in 1875 with none of the high spirits with which he had at first greeted news of a warrant in his name, but with bitterness.58 Taken together, the trials were an attempt by a judge (who specialized in real estate law and owned coal mines) to broaden the reach of the criminal conspiracy charge. Instead of using it as in the 1873 trial to rein in men who committed violent acts in the course of strikes, or as in 1869 to nip local organization in the bud, Judge Orvis and the prosecutors hoped to use it as a precedent that would outlaw unionism. In the June sentencing, Judge Orvis divided the men into three groups: rioters, local leaders, and union leaders. In an earlier case in 1869, Judge Mayer had ruled simply that combining to raise wages was illegal in Clearfield. In 1873, prosecutors targeted the drunken, violent Michael Mack and they set peacekeepers free. But in 1875 prosecutors sought the most severe sentences for the relatively peaceful leaders—along with two more physically intimidating men. Prosecutors intended to sentence John Siney and Xingo Parks to even longer terms. Judge Orvis limited himself to warning the first group of rank and file men. The second group, which included leaders of local mine committees, he sentenced to a $20 fine and sixty days in the county jail. The third group consisted of district leaders of the MNA and men such as George

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you to one year’s imprisonment.”60 The sentences seemed intended to teach a lesson to activists who would join the national union. Despite having been out of the county during the riot at Fisher’s, Maloney and Joyce received harsh prison terms. George McGowan, who had arguably been the premier rioter in the strike, does not appear to have had his sentence carried out.61 On 17 June Sheriff McPherson let the men say goodbye to their wives, and took them to the penitentiary. In an omission that resonated with the Raftsman’s Journal as “very unusual,” the sheriff let the men travel without shackles. Xingo Parks went with them on the journey to Pittsburgh. As he waited for his trial on charges of conspiracy and intimidation to begin, John Siney was a scared man. On a scouting trip to the Maryland coalfields, he feared his very presence would bring violent attack. A companion’s few hours’ delay on a surveying trip brought him to the verge of panic, and he fully expected a long prison term for himself.62 Though he had matched the prosecution by lining up a well-qualified legal team on his own behalf, he believed that he would soon be serving a long jail sentence. He saw “the doors of the penitentiary . . . standing wide open to receive him.”63 Siney was right to be concerned about the trial. Lawyers for the prosecution argued that “[b]y the testimony, these men . . . did assist in this combination of miners for the purpose of raising wages, and it is your bounden duty under the provisions of the law, to bring in a verdict of guilty.”64 Judge Orvis’s charge to the jury emphasized the porous boundaries of criminal conspiracy. Siney and Parks could be convicted of conspiracy, he said, even if they did not directly order illegal acts. Moreover, Orvis made clear that coal miners and operators were equally prohibited under the law from forming combinations to raise wages or prices. To Orvis, “In all such combinations when the purpose is injurious or unlawful, the gist of the offense is the conspiracy.”65 At bottom, he insisted, was a simple question: not whether or not they actively conspired to break the law, but whether they “enter[ed] into a conspiracy,” or were in any way associated with efforts by more than three people to either commit illegal acts or to pursue illegal ends. Had the jury accepted Orvis’s thinking, both men would have been convicted. Nevertheless, Siney and the prosecutors overestimated the degree of unanimous hostility toward unionism in Clearfield. The jury acquitted him and only convicted Parks reluctantly, after repeated, stern instructions from Judge Orvis.66 Orvis lost his place in legal precedent when Parks refused to appeal. Parks counted the pennies donated to his defense that evening in his hotel room across from the courthouse, and insisted that an appeal would be too costly.67 Accelerating after Parks’s conviction, the Miners’ National Tribune campaigned to win pardons for the men.68 Ultimately, six thousand

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(father of J. P. Morgan) with which to pay a dividend and fend off his shareholders. Morgan argued that it was time for Garrett to acknowledge the battering he was getting from the other roads. “The storm is upon you,” he wrote. Garret instead announced a 10 percent dividend and a 10 percent wage cut and helped to spark the Great Strike of 1877 that included riots in several cities and for a time brought the nation’s railroads to a standstill. Garrett refused to meet with a committee of workers that attempted to discuss the matter because as one historian has written, he “believed in the law of supply and demand.” Nevertheless, his belief in supply and demand didn’t stop him from coordinating 10 percent wage decreases with the other major railroads.73 After the 1875 Clearfield strike and trial, the outcome was clear. Business had won. Labor had lost. Aside from the eventual escape of “Siney the Agitator” from conviction, the very idea that unions could set wages or control access to jobs was dead. The coal/railroad industry had solved its problems of overcompetition and overproduction. From now on, railroad managers would control output levels of coal through their mastery of the transportation network, keep prices for coal reasonably profitable for operators, and keep freight rates reasonably profitable for themselves. In the process, they would take up where the Clearfield operators had left off, to more thoroughly define unions as foreign attackers of the American ideal of individual private property and themselves as its protectors. In this, the railroads seemed to share a common interest with small businessmen in both cities and small towns and against labor organizations of any kind. The liberty of property from labor seemed to coal operators to free them to partner with railroad executives to achieve prosperity and order. A bare four years earlier, John Siney’s labor union had appeared to some operators and coal trade observers to promise a somewhat galling but practical solution to the industry’s problems.74 No more. *

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Union leaders and businessmen across the country heard a clear message in the Clearfield verdicts of 1875. Union leaders were now liable for the actions of any and all of the men who followed them, John Siney’s narrow escape notwithstanding. For if the Long Strike of 1875 was a disaster for Clearfield coal miners, the legal battle with which it ended seemed to bode worse for the men who led them, convicted for the crime of being union leaders and meted out sentences according to the level at which they had served. Corporate efforts to redefine the relationship between capital and labor made the 1870s a dark time for labor activism in general. The unanimity of coal operators in the 1875 strike, enforced by the strong hand of railroad management,

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very makeup of insurgent electoral politics tended to attract fewer, more committed individuals, either opportunists with something to gain or activists attuned to abstract political ideals. Compared to strike marches or mass meetings that could turn out every man who wielded a pick and a phalanx of rowdy women, fewer people turned out for electoral meetings or marches. Compared to strike votes that had to be unanimous to be effective, the results of electoral politics were bound by law, even as the political process itself seemed wide open. Victory required only a plurality of votes. As opposed to the impossible legal demands on labor organizing, in politics nearly anything was permissible, at least in regard to the main two parties. Election Day voters could be, and often expected to be, carted to voting places, plied with alcohol, and to have their taxes paid in return for their vote.4 *

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Lazing outside the Beaver Run coal mine in summer 1878, waiting for the Pennsylvania Railroad to bring coal cars to the mine, Superintendent “Big Joe” Higgins and coal miner John Shannon discussed the basic facts of major party organizing. Big Joe was father of the constable, special policeman, and tax collector “Little Joe” Higgins who had tried to help break the strike of 1872 at Sterling. John Shannon was an experienced coal miner who had left the region in 1868 before the strike of 1872 and became a reluctant union leader in 1875. He had come to the United States from Ireland (perhaps with a stopover in England on the way) in 1854 before his eighteenth birthday (and so was automatically entitled to citizenship under the law of that time), and he would only apply for naturalization papers in 1886.5 Like many of the activists in the region, he was one of the Famine Irish. Roughly a dozen men walked out of the mine that day to take advantage of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s slowness to deliver coal cars, to take a break, take in the sun, and talk. Shannon was a Democratic activist in 1878, despite his informal citizenship status, in a county that was dominated by Democrats. Higgins, who had received his citizenship through a year’s service in the Union Army, was a Republican. As much to entertain as to convince, perhaps, they rehearsed the old fights between their respective parties for their audience in the sunshine.6 Union activists such as Shannon who had lost the strike of 1875 had steadily been building up the local Greenback Labor Party. They soon gained an official Greenback newspaper in Clearfield, the Citizen, published by J. R. Bixler. In 1878, the Democrats had put forward former Republican Andrew Gregg Curtin for Congress, a man personally offensive to many in Central

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least sixteen miners. He claimed to do this as a courtesy without regard to party affiliation, though only one man whose taxes he paid admitted to being a Democrat. McHugh had a rare ability among Greenbackers to bring those sorts of financial resources to bear. The ability to pay poll taxes was a key aspect to politicking at the time. Longtime union activists sought unsuccessfully to balance ideological purity in the Greenbacks against the organizational demands of winning. John J. Maloney, for example, was a hero of the 1875 strike in Clearfield, incarcerated and then pardoned for his role. He was then elected burgess (mayor) of the mining town of Houtzdale, but his former supporters eventually drove him from town. His crime: opening the ranks of the Greenback Party organization to all sympathizers, regardless of their nominal party affiliation or class status. As he found, while the Republican and Democratic parties expected to dispense power and patronage as much as ideology, the Greenback Party demanded a more difficult sort of activism, with neither the easy legitimacy of mainstream politics nor the monetary rewards of serving the two main parties, nor the stable purposefulness of power or patronage. An observation from political scientist Mark Voss-Hubbard applies, “Third party movements, built on the antiparty appeal, lacked a durable culture of discipline and institutional loyalty.”8 *

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The middle ground available to operatives for the Republican and Democratic parties was narrower for Greenbacks such as John J. Maloney, especially in 1878. Until the 1878 election, local officials based citizenship and voting privileges more on informal status in the town than on formal paperwork. As a boy in the mid-1850s, Maloney fled famine times in Ireland and moved to Harrison County, West Virginia. Since at least 1874 he lived in Clearfield. He claimed to have been naturalized but used his discharge papers from the Union Army to vote in his first election in 1868, at twenty-three years of age. By the 1878 election he had mislaid his discharge papers and used his father’s naturalization papers as identification in order to vote—a common enough practice for men who were foreign-born but had come to this country before age eighteen. As town burgess for Houtzdale, he was obviously a well-known resident. No one challenged his right to vote until the Greenback election of 1878 put a new emphasis on formal procedure. In the winter of 1878–1879 Maloney organized a Greenback Party meeting in order to select a slate for the upcoming township elections. Unfortunately, too few people came to the meeting even though handbills had been posted

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had transferred its loyalty to the Democrats and in the returning prosperity of that year some of its stalwarts turned their attention back to union-type organization. Only one Clearfield delegate attended the Greenback convention in Washington, D.C.13 *

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Nevertheless, the case of John Malee, an early labor leader in the area, shows how membership in one of the major parties helped support the coal miners. In spring 1869, John Malee had led the first major strike of coal miners in Central Pennsylvania and later that summer was convicted for the crime of criminal conspiracy. While in jail, Malee decided to move permanently from Ireland to America and Central Pennsylvania. He made his application for citizenship from the Clearfield lockup, and after his release was elected to the post of constable. He held that post for the next twenty years. In his capacity as constable Malee arrested Coal and Iron Policemen for illegal entry into miners’ homes, operators for threatening miners during strikes, and union miners for intimidating strikebreakers. In the strike of 1873, Malee arrested strikebreakers for shooting into the crowd at Sterling. In 1875, he arrested Coal and Iron Policemen for “forcible entry”—for illegally evicting coal miners.14 During the strike of 1882 the County Review magazine also praised him for making 214 arrests of coal miners.15 Malee signed naturalization papers for dozens of his fellow miners. In particular, when John Siney, Xingo Parks, and fifty-five other miners were on trial, he helped his relatives Peter and Patrick Malee, both of whom had been convicted of criminal conspiracy for their part in the strike that year, to become citizens while in jail for labor activities.16 He was a Democrat, and in 1878, the year of the Greenback Labor Party’s ascendance among coal miner activists, he remained loyal to the Democrats at the fall, county, state, and national elections, handing out poll tax receipts to faithful party members. Malee carved out a place for himself within the county’s political party structure and from that stable platform served several constituencies. Although he remained a Democrat, in 1883 he also won election as Houtzdale’s township constable on the Citizen’s Party ticket.17 *

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Through the strike of 1880 the remains of the Clearfield County Greenback Party retained its links to coal miner leaders even as the Knights of Labor began to ascend. The Greenback newspaper supported the miners in their

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“The Fire Boss” —Lewis W. Hine

operators rebates of their own so that they might regain sales lost to the Central Pennsylvania men. As secret low freight rates dragged coal prices lower and shipments increased, the coal miners in both regions sought a share of the apparent prosperity. By February 1880, the miners of Maryland and Clearfield began to coordinate their efforts. By the end of that month, work stopped in nearly all the mines shipping to the East Coast. Coal supply dropped; prices rose. The Maryland operators gave in quickly to take advantage of the temporary rise. They conceded the $.65 mining rate and several demands regarding working conditions. The Maryland operators accepted the higher wages because the Consolidated Coal Company, a subsidiary of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, had done so. Only after the fact did they realize that the Baltimore & Ohio

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He expressed his hope that some day in the future the Clearfield men would “take a good dose” of the Knights of Labor as well.26 In practice, membership in the Knights was more complex than an onoff switch. The Clearfield mining leaders called themselves Knights and saw themselves as Knights, but they also held themselves somewhat aloof from the formal organizational structure of the larger organization. As one Clearfield correspondent wrote in the National Labor Tribune, “[W]e are all the same as if we were in the Knights of Labor.” He continued, “There is great praise due [the Knights] here. Although the name appears hard to some they have made a great change here for the better. I have not witnessed a strike to equal this during my life.”27 When Grand Master Workman Terrence V. Powderly (national leader of the Knights) asked about the Clearfield strike, he was forced to write to a KOL member in a neighboring county. New KOL District Secretary Peter Ward of Clarion County responded that the Houtzdale Knights were not members of his District Assembly (“D.A.”). They had organized themselves as such without telling the national Knights of Labor organization. According to him, the Houtzdale Order was apparently a “D.A. in itself.”28 Unfortunately for the miners, in 1880 Clearfield operators had come to accept the strategic outlook of the railroads more solidly than ever. It was an outlook buttressed by events such as the Great Strike of 1877, when crowds of rioters burned railroad roundhouses and boxcars in Pittsburgh, Reading, and other cities, and the even more recent Molly Maguires trials. They made a similar point; that organized workers represented violent insurrection and business represented order and progress. Central Pennsylvania coal operators in 1880 wielded a new level of selfconfidence in their authority exemplified by the coal miners’ chief antagonist, longtime Coal and Iron Policeman Thomas E. Clark. With the assistance of Clark and fifty special policemen, the operators brought in special trains of Swedish families as strikebreakers. Building on lessons learned in the strike of 1875 they locked the doors and windows to keep strikebreakers in and strikers out, and employed enough guards to keep the miners entirely away from the new men. At the mines, they kept the Swedes in stockades.29 Unlike in previous strikes, Clark used force to prevented any interaction whatsoever with the striking miners. The special policemen acted on the new assumption that the striking coal miners broke the law with any attempt to contact the new men. This new certainty is suggested in the account of Captain Clark’s interaction with a striker at the train: “Capt. Clark, seeing that forbearance was no longer a virtue, ordered the fellow back another time, and when he refused to go, struck him a blow that laid him out on the

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speech, asking that the miners stay firm, as their cause was a just one and financial assistance was arriving steadily from other regions. The meeting voted by show of hands to demand the higher rate.34 Following the meeting, the coal miners marched behind their brass band to a mass meeting, where Richard Lloyd sang “a song appropriate to the occasion.” But resorting, finally, to such old tactics as mass meetings and brass bands proved to mark the death knell of the strike. Within a week it was over. The miners went back to work at the old price of $.50. The strike was broken, claimed one writer, by miners at a single mine who had insisted on holding their own vote as to the question. They did so without the consent of “the committee” and only half the men attended. They voted 27 to 22 to go back to work. This one mine’s return to work breached the thin mud dam of democratic discipline and the rest of the mines held similar votes, one by one, to end the strike. Nevertheless, he claimed, it had been a good strike. The delegates had done their duty. They had lost this time, but would win in the future. Poet J. Hill Thomson wrote a lament to mark their defeat, and to point toward their next effort. It is worth quoting at length for its evocation of time and place and for the mood of the men involved. ’Twas night. The deepening gloom had settled O’er the ragged hills. Within a cabin on the mountain Were gathered scores of men—the old were there, And youth with all his vigor sat about And talked in whispers Darker than the gloom which spread Its mantle o’er the earth, a cloud hung o’er these hearts; For they had fought and lost. For weeks they’d struggled With the giant king Monopoly; and now . . .” [Traitors in their midst had sold them out] But hush! One speaks—a venerable sage, Whose hair is silvered with its weight of years “‘Tis not that I’m blacklisted makes me sad, But thoughts of what they’ll say in Maryland, And all from whom we’ve had such generous aids.

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*

The Knights of Labor activists who had run the Clearfield strike committee concentrated their energies now on paying off their debt. It was a new problem, and one that suggested a new scale and sophistication to their organization. Breaking with previous practice, they had helped to keep men out by paying an unprecedented level of relief. A correspondent to the National Labor Tribune wrote as if the committee was a permanent institution. It would have strikes in future to manage, he wrote, and would want to keep its credit strong.36 The committee’s debt was nearly $2,000. In December, “Justice” announced a raffle to pay it off. The drawing for a gold watch, bedroom set, sewing machine, barrel of flour, history of the world, or cash prizes was to be held at the end of January 1881. Not unsympathetic, their creditors had donated the prizes. But the miners sold too few tickets. They decided to postpone the drawing until June. As late as May, D. H. Thomas, secretary of the committee, wrote to the National Labor Tribune to chastise local miners who were holding back, and to warn those who had received relief that they were expected to participate or have their names published. In June, the results were announced. They had sold over 1,100 tickets, with the bulk going to buyers outside the region.37 Through the strike, the committee developed a fund-raising network and established credit. Although the miners had failed in their strike, it’s hard to imagine a reasonably sustainable level of solidarity or a form of organization that could have succeeded against the disciplined hand of the Pennsylvania Railroad. The miners had nevertheless found a method of organization that thrived even in failure. The Central Pennsylvania Knights of Labor leadership network grew stronger in defeat. After being rebuffed so decisively on the question of wages, the Central Pennsylvania organization shifted its sights. They looked in future toward issues of workplace fairness that could be settled without reference to railroads or regional competition. Though the Raftsman’s Journal opposed the strike and the miners’ wage demands, it supported efforts to ensure fair weight for the miners.38 As the final results of the raffle were being announced, Richard Lloyd was elected chairman of a mass meeting to decide how to check the weight every miner received for his coal. Their plan was to put a man at each mine’s scales to make certain the company weighmaster gave full credit. Unfortunately, too few mines sent representatives to the regional meeting and the effort collapsed. Lloyd angrily denounced the men who had failed to come: “There are more cowardly men on this mountain than ever I saw in my life before—men that used to be good here some time ago, but won’t attend to any meetings now.”39

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If they were blacklegging, Cotter wrote, he would begin the process of demanding an increase to match the men in Maryland. But the leadership of the local Knights of Labor Assembly had already reached a private understanding: If refused the advance they would not strike. To strike would be to lose in a bare month’s time, as well as to ruin the organization’s informal role as the wise heads of the miners. Local leaders of the coal miners had straightened out their structural relationship between the Local Assemblies, their new District Assembly, and the national Knights of Labor organization. But they continued their old role of informal leadership. As Cotter wrote, “though few we are they all look to us for advice & guidance therefore they would attribute a defeat to us also.”41 In public, Cotter argued that a strike in Central Pennsylvania now would be different from previous efforts. The Clearfield strike leaders were no longer merely a secret local group, as in 1880, but in 1882 were supported by the national organization of the KOL. A report by the Pennsylvania Bureau of Industrial Affairs suggests that Cotter, national KOL organizer Myles McPadden, and the rest of the Central Pennsylvania Knights used elaborate offers to arbitrate with the operators as a tactic for uniting the miners. Over 90 percent of area coal miners were then outside the organization.42 But then that was the nature of the Knights of Labor at the time. It was an organization for leaders only. The point of their organizing efforts was to activate old tactics with the new Knights of Labor leadership organization at their head. In short, McPadden and the Knights in Clearfield had decided to stall for time while they sold the notion of interregional cooperation with Maryland. Anticipating that the Clearfield strike would fail to bring the Pennsylvania Railroad district’s wages in line with those in Maryland, they sought to minimize the impact of that failure on the Knights of Labor’s reputation as a new sort of union. As “Old Dan” McLaughlin of Illinois, one of the coal miners’ most respected leaders, warned, coal miners across the country would be watching the Central Pennsylvania men to see if the Order could fight.43 By spring 1882, after a presentation by a leader of the Maryland miners to the KOL’s executive board, the national organization had come to see a strike in Clearfield as essential for the KOL’s national image as it made the transition from secret society to labor organization. Neither Maryland nor Central Pennsylvania union leaders focused on the unfolding logic of railroad competition. They focused instead on the mere fact of their different wage levels. Cornelius Cotter, for example, outlined the cost of mining coal in a letter to Powderly using the final, retail prices of coal to conclude that the operators were making roughly $.50/ton profit. Yet his figures fail to include variables such as royalties to the land owner,

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and then gave up. From the point of view of the national KOL leadership, the point of the Clearfield effort was more to make a show of the Clearfield KOL’s willingness to fight in response to a call from the national organization than to gain a victory. In this sense, and only in this sense did the predictable failure of the Clearfield strike of 1882 have a strategic purpose. *

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Activist leaders in Central Pennsylvania knew they were likely to fail, but they also knew how far they had brought their leadership network since 1875. In 1875, they had dived from illegal unionism to politics and to secret Local Assemblies in the Knights of Labor. But by 1880 their political experiment was largely over. They gradually expanded their efforts under the Knights, however, seeking out alternative, more legally safe means of maintaining and coordinating strikes at the local level. They raised funds and credit to pay the expenses of striking miners and largely ignored strikebreakers, thus allowing them to deemphasize the confrontational tactics of traditional unionism. By 1882, they began to experiment with interregional coordination between Maryland and Pennsylvania, and even created the appearance of coordination with a national organizational structure. Nevertheless, by that time they faced a united front of railroad corporations intent on creating their own sort of interregional cooperation, and of coal operators dependent on favored treatment from railroad managers for freight rates and freight cars. The activists themselves, however, could not quite see what they were up against, nor did they quite give themselves full credit for what they had accomplished. National Knights of Labor organizer McPadden blamed the strike’s failure on the clergy, the cowardice of the miners, the extremism of the region’s employers, and the hostility of its elected officials. He explained his failure in the region in 1882 to Master Workman Terrence Powderly by listing the history of the region’s depredations on union leaders. He was not the first to fail, he pointed out. He was in good company, and he was more resilient and more constant than some who had come before him. McPadden knew of the failed strike of 1872–1873 when the men and women of Sterling had faced similar prosecution for conspiracy. It was in the Central Pennsylvania district that “one of Labor’s noblest sons John Siney was driven to a premature grave” seven years earlier. Indeed, after John Siney’s arrest and harrowing experiences in Clearfield through the strike of 1875 as president of the Miners’ National Association, he was a different man. Even after his acquittal, he did little in the cause of labor, but showed continued signs of stress. When he finally returned home, he did so only to die—a slow,

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more blacklisted men has come from this district than all the coalfields of America combined.”53 Indeed, McPadden’s fellow Knights in Clearfield, longtime activists such as Henry McGowan, James and Dennis White, John Shannon, poet Richard Lloyd, and perennial union secretary D. H. Thomas had all paid dearly for their union principles. Since at least 1873 all these men had taken public stands at the head of the local labor movement. All had at different times been blacklisted, arrested, or denounced from the pulpit. In particular, James White, whose family “was always in Labor Unions,” whose father had been a local union leader, and whose three brothers were also in the Order, had finally announced in fall 1881 that he would have to quit the Knights because of the mounting opposition of the Catholic Church. Although dedicated to the cause of unionism, his family was also strictly Catholic. (While he served as a Brother in the Knights, his sister served as a Sister in the Sisters of Mercy Convent and eventually became Mother Superior.) His priest, Father Maher, had barred him from the church as long as he was a Knight.54 If McPadden were entirely correct about the barren nature of organizing in Central Pennsylvania, there would be little to tell. Utter failure leaves little trace. But in truth, neither the Catholic Church nor Central Pennsylvania businessmen were as unbending or as efficient as he suggested. When Powderly authorized White to change the Knights of Labor oath to omit the “so help me god” clause, Father Maher allowed him to worship again.55 When Bishop Mullen condemned the Order again in 1882, a local priest again found a way to allow Knights to worship and maintain their union. Central Pennsylvania Knight Cornelius Cotter reported that despite the bishop’s condemnation, “we are all right here our pastor Father Lynch of Osceola says we are all right to go ahead he lets us go to our duty at any time he says he was bound to read the Bishops letter but he was not bound to act according.”56 The redoubtable Henry McGowan slyly reported that his membership in the Knights remained a secret to his priest, so he had never had any trouble with the church.57 The clergy’s supposedly angry denunciation of McPadden perhaps had as much to do with his status as an outsider and a competitor for the authority of the clergy as his membership in the Knights of Labor. McPadden felt comfortable contrasting his own constancy with his predecessors, yet he also was about to be brought down by his involvement in Central Pennsylvania. In January 1883, James White wrote to Knights of Labor head Terence V. Powderly asking for an organizer to be sent to Central Pennsylvania. But with a qualifier: “[D]on’t send McPadden,” he wrote, “his Blarney will never have effect here for all men claim that he ruined this region.”58

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behind and temporarily took his father’s post as secretary of District Assembly 40 of the Knights of Labor. (On the official letterhead he crossed out the name “Cornelius” and wrote in “John.”) But they remained dedicated to organizing. After a few years, Cornelius Cotter and James White returned to lead the miners in future efforts.62 The Knights of Labor organizational structure would eventually trap these midlevel Central Pennsylvania leaders between Knightly brotherhood and the need to organize all men in the region—even individuals who may have been cowardly or self-serving, men who accepted monetary relief in a strike one day and then scabbed the next, or men who demanded the right to work on any particular day without fulfilling the vaguely defined obligations of Knights to community, class, or political citizenship. If they were to fight battles and negotiate settlements, the coal miners needed to impose group decisions on all workers. As one trade unionist in coal pointed out, the selectivity of the Knights had become an organizing problem as early as 1880. Local leaders of the Knights refused to include all men, especially the “weak” ones.63 The Knights wished to create an organization of exemplary individuals only. Earlier in his career Terence Powderly confirmed this approach: “[I]t is quality not quantity that goes to make up a labor organization.”64 Powderly repeated this stance in refusing to help organize Clearfield miners a few years later in 1885. He specifically rejected Myles McPadden’s methods. McPadden, he wrote to a Knight in Central Pennsylvania, “could talk strike and organizing better than I can, yet he failed.” Knights should propose and initiate good men only, not organize by the hundreds, he argued. If individuals did not have the manhood to organize themselves, they would leave anyway as soon as there was a struggle. Powderly would do “no fife and drum organizing.”65 *

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In September 1881, poet and Knight Richard Lloyd wrote to express his sense of outrage at the failed public spiritedness of his fellow miners. Published in the National Labor Tribune, it was entitled “A Convention.” It suggested a changing view of unionism from previous years and challenged the idea that all were equally brothers, with no difference between leaders and rank and file. In the poem, he compared miners to mice in the old fable about who should bell the cat (operator). The mice chose their wisest member to lead them, but when the time came to choose someone to place the bell, they noticed the cat looking in the window. The mice fled, but the cat had already spotted their leader, and “Puss grabbed him up between her claws / And bore him off within her jaws.”

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check on activist-busting options available to operators and railroad managers. Ironically, in forcing leaders of the coal miners to find alternative means of support, the blacklist seems to have unexpectedly helped to create a stable regional activist network. Though the advantage was with the partnership between the railroads and operators, even their unbroken string of victories over the coal miners and their unions had failed to end labor activism or to stop the activists from refining their tactics and institutional arrangements. Central Pennsylvania activists did more than merely endure. Operators faced the constant, emotionally wearing minor strikes and battles over issues such as the fair weighing of coal, prices at company stores, discharge of individual miners, and payment for labor in and around the mines. They also faced the certainty of major strikes in the future. Moreover, operators were becoming increasingly frustrated with their treatment under railroad monopoly conditions. In particular, they protested that while they were encouraged to make contracts to supply coal in far-off cities, the railroads frequently failed to distribute enough coal cars to meet those contracts. The car shortage was made worse—thought smallerscale coal operators—by the favoritism shown larger-scale operators. In the next few years, Central Pennsylvania operators, coal miners, and railroads engaged in a complex series of moves to break the grip of the railroads.

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4 Compromise The Great Upheaval in Coal, 1886

Historians remember 1886 as the year of the Great Upheaval, as a breaking wave of violence, class conflict, and transition. The Great Upheaval brings to mind national strikes for the eight-hour day, urban unrest, mass protest, and the bomb in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. In that year the Knights of Labor grew to a million members spread across the United States. As a mass organization, the Knights promised a new way to organize all of society around a brotherhood of workers, the so-called “Commonwealth of Labor.” But for many Americans its promise of a Commonwealth of Labor seemed more like a threat. Thus, the Great Upheaval has seemed to mark the high tide for labor, when the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor crested at its moment of triumph. At the same time, the Interstate Commerce Act signaled a new mediating role for government as it attempted to take back the quest for economic order from railroad executives.1 This year fits into a larger transition from proprietary to corporate capitalism. In the Santa Clara case that year, the Supreme Court bestowed legal personhood on corporations.2 In a word familiar from textbook chapter headings, corporations began to “rise,” as if filled with a substance lighter and purer than the grubby limited partnerships that had preceded them or the agrarian radicals and labor activists who seemed bent on holding them down. In Central Pennsylvania, however, the high water mark for mass labor activism came years earlier. Here, the years from 1883 to 1886 marked the point at which businessmen and workers began to find their first effective organizational responses to railroad power. Local businessmen abandoned earlier illusions that the railroads would effectively manage the economy to their benefit or that unions would ever completely disappear. Coal operators took three major steps between 1883 and 1886. First, they secretly brought a New York Central-sponsored railroad to the region in >>

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more cars or a more equitable distribution of the cars that existed. Roberts called in Vice President Charles E. Pugh in charge of Central Pennsylvania to explain the PARR’s car distribution policy in the region. Of the six hundred cars allotted per day, Pugh told them, they had indeed allotted half to special customers. They gave two hundred of those cars to the private coal business of those special customers, and used the final one hundred cars for the Pennsylvania Railroad’s locomotive fuel needs. They distributed the remaining three hundred cars evenly among all the coal mines of the region (including the special customers who received the initial three hundred cars). Pugh admitted that he had just recently ordered new cars built solely for distribution to the PARR’s special friends in the region, but without Roberts’s knowledge. The problem was not only in the Pennsylvania’s car distribution policy. The high mountain grades forced the Pennsylvania Railroad to often use five locomotives to haul coal trains from Clearfield. (The new Beech Creek railroad would require only one locomotive.)3 Central Pennsylvania had outgrown the Pennsylvania’s ability to supply all operators with the cars they needed when they needed them. Its single branch line to Central Pennsylvania was running at capacity. What was good for the PARR and the large-scale coal operators was not necessarily good for the region. Nor was the railroad’s senior management necessarily aware of the issue.4 *

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On the wide verandas of hotel rooms at Saratoga Springs, a horse racing town in upstate New York, railroad managers met informally every racing season to talk about the future of the trade. In these conversations in the early 1880s, the New York Central Railroad lagged badly. It seemed the weakest of the Trunk Lines. It faced upstart competition from a badly built speculative line in the West Shore Railroad. (The name referred to the West Shore of the Hudson River where the new road ran its tracks.) New York Central executives suspected it had been built solely so they would have to buy it out. In addition to the West Shore’s invasion of its territory, it had no reliable, cheap source of coal for fuel along its lines. It had only a few old feeder lines for high-quality steam coal—both for its own boilers and for coal freight traffic.5 The Pennsylvania Railroad seemed to be pulling ahead in the ancient war for interior trade inaugurated with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825; Philadelphia seemed to be finally gaining on New York City. The Pennsylvania Railroad, as Andrew Carnegie would later remark, had become the great Trunk Line, so great that he jokingly left it out of a list of the major lines—it stood in its own category, he said.6 The Baltimore & Ohio was slowly being

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family’s coal mining and shipping company), and Langdon’s brother-in-law, author Mark Twain. In late 1883, as the new road reached completion, Carnegie wrote confidently to President George B. Roberts of the PARR to request that the railroad make a substantial order from the Edgar Thomson steel works, and to request better transportation rates. He also pushed for lower rates from the PARR for his supply of coal. The railroad, he argued pointedly, had “more at stake just now in our running full than we have ourselves.”8 Meanwhile, Wallace and his supporters continued to build the new railroad, deep in the heart of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s territory. Fall Brook Railroad executive George Magee oversaw the surprise attack from Elmira, New York. The PARR had been too slow to awaken to the threat, he wrote to a fellow railroad executive.9 *

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Soon Wallace would acknowledge an unexpected source of needed support from coal miners as well. Local businessmen, coal miners, and upstart railroad managers joined together in an uneasy alliance against the PARR. For the first time the Beech Creek Railroad would give New York Central managers access to their own source of coal for locomotives and freight. In keeping with the latest competitive practices (as well as Reading Railroad President Franklin Gowen’s long-standing philosophy of controlling both mines and shipping), the New York Central’s new Central Pennsylvania Beech Creek Railroad project included an affiliated large-scale coal mining operation. (The plan also included the never-built South Penn branch connecting Pittsburgh and the Reading Railroad.) The new railroad would aggressively subsidize coal shipments with low freight rates so that the coal mining corporation could immediately compete with other large-scale firms. Similar to the Pennsylvania’s relationship to Berwind, White in Central Pennsylvania, or the B&O’s relationship to Consolidated Coal in Maryland, the New York Central intended to have the Clearfield Bituminous Coal Company as its special “friend” in the Clearfield region.10 But whether they realized it or not, their ultimate target was not the PARR. In effect, Vanderbilt and Carnegie were in secret rebellion against the voice of international finance: J. P. Morgan. In this, they were aided by one of Morgan’s most persistent irritants—Eastern Pennsylvania’s Ruler of the Reading Railroad, Franklin Gowen. Gowen was eager to regain his status as a wunderkind of the railroad industry. Back in the 1870s his strategic efforts seemed the wave of the future. In 1883 a decade had passed since his buyout of all available coal lands along the Reading’s lines; a decade since his initial

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the firm that served the PARR and responsible for the long-term health of the New York Central. By 1885 J. P. Morgan saw himself as the representative of all American railroads and all railroad investors. Vanderbilt’s attack on the PARR was therefore an attack on the system Morgan was creating. To Morgan this was a vestige of the competitive world of the past, not the orderly world of the future. And he acted to hold Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and Central Pennsylvania businessmen back for the greater good as he saw it. At his father Junius’s urging, J. P. Morgan intervened. He arranged to take an ocean trip with the elder Commodore Vanderbilt. Over the course of that long voyage, he persuaded Vanderbilt to offer a truce to the Pennsylvania Railroad in spring 1885. From the bankers’ perspective, the situation was becoming serious. Though foreign capital investment in America increased from $375 million in 1876 to $1.5 billion in 1883, the railroad rate wars helped to drive that capital back out again at the rate of $25 million per year.14 The Morgans were pushing along a conversation begun among railroad executives at the funeral of James Rutter, the combative president of the New York Central in 1884. Although the senior Morgan had attempted to bring Rutter and the head of the PARR together early in 1884, both had refused.15 But all through the spring and summer of 1885, railroad executives from the New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railroad discussed with their bankers and with each other the specific problem of how to bury their long-held competitive stances and their professional and personal animosities. The resort of Long Branch on the Jersey shore proved to be a conducive venue for persuasion. Frank Thomson and George Roberts of the Pennsylvania Railroad met there with New York Central executive Chauncey Depew and Morgan partner Anthony J. Drexel as they summered with their families. As Carnegie later pointed out, the addition of the planned new Southern Pennsylvania east/west line connected to the New York Central and Reading added a disruptive element to regional trade controlled by the existing Trunk Line roads. Indeed, this was why he had joined the effort: He believed his steel business in Pittsburgh would benefit from railroad competition. He was probably right. The PARR had long enjoyed a monopoly on transporting his steel. J. P. Morgan was less interested in boosting regional trade than in bringing order to American big business. Pressed by Morgan, Carnegie came to agree that national economic order represented a greater good than his own prosperity. As a result, he eventually came to treat his own losses in the affair with the equanimity of the well-fixed, expecting that what was good for the country’s business would eventually be good for his own.16 As word leaked out of the coming truce between the New York Central and the PARR in 1885, and the subsequent abandonment of the Beech Creek

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a protector, Wallace’s investment in the coal lands was in serious jeopardy. Charles Langdon, president of CBC, demanded too that the Pennsylvania Railroad be forced to take the coal properties with the Beech Creek. Perhaps, he offered, the coal properties could be sold to the Pennsylvania Railroad’s “friend” in Clearfield, the Berwind, White Coal Company. Instead, the CBC, Berwind, White, the New York Central, and the Pennsylvania Railroad developed a secret, cooperative relationship. Both the major railroads began to put more limits on the rebates they would give to smaller-scale operators, thus allowing the bigger operators to use the smaller operators as subcontractors and extra productive capacity. In 1885, even as J. P. Morgan sought to end competition between the PARR and the New York Central, the Baltimore & Ohio and the Pennsylvania Railroad reached yet another agreement to divide up East Coast coal production between themselves. They slashed their published coal rates to urban centers by $.35 and pledged to do away with secret coal rates. Their published coal rates, they insisted, would for the first time be the real rates. Fifty-five percent of the East Coast coal trade was to go to the Pennsylvania Railroad, and 45 percent to the Baltimore & Ohio. The newer roads they ignored or bullied, promising only that if the Chesapeake & Ohio, Norfolk & Western, or the New York Central’s Beech Creek attempted to undercut their prices they would be undercut in turn and driven out of business. The general freight agents of the Pennsylvania and the Baltimore & Ohio confronted their counterpart at the N&W and summarily informed him of the new arrangements.17 Their curt approach seemed justified by past history. The West Virginia-based N&W had shipped a mere 31,000 tons of coal to seaboard in the first half of 1885 and would ship less than 400,000 tons through the entire year. In comparison, the PARR shipped 3.5 million tons from Clearfield alone. George Magee of the Beech Creek took these threats seriously and ordered operators on his line to maintain prices. He wished to foment no battles he could not win. Charles Langdon of the CBC agreed to follow Magee’s lead but complained that top PARR managers had less control over shipping prices than they thought—that unbeknownst to their ultimate supervisors PARR freight agents were still making secret rates for special customers.18 In the next year, 1886, the two main railroads made more of an effort to include their upstart rivals, but they violated their agreement almost as soon as they made it. The PARR and the B&O continued to split the trade 55 to 45 percent between the two of them and to set the public prices at which coal was to be shipped and sold. They allotted 500,000 tons to the N&W and similar amounts to the Beech Creek and Chesapeake & Ohio. They equalized

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goals that supported the cause of regional boosters and businessmen. The actions of the railroads thus pushed coal miners and local town boosters together. On the morning of 9 March 1886, roughly 2,300 of the 3,000 Central Pennsylvania coal miners came together in three mass meetings to consider the question of a strike for a $.10 increase in the price of their labor, all other workers in and around the mines to be raised in proportion. The Phillipsburg men met at Beaver Meadows, the “old agitation ground,” a place convenient to the different mining villages in the area. Osceola men met at a race track near town and the Houtzdale men met in the town. Several miners got up before the massed assembly at Beaver Meadows to talk about the region’s long and awful history with conflict and strikes. Reasoned, calm argument, they insisted, would be far more effective than strikes. Strikes had only gained them poverty, persecution, and increased tension between labor and capital. The Journal reported few voices in favor of a strike. Although several mines in the Phillipsburg region had already discussed the matter and voted for a strike, the majority of the subdistrict voted as the Journal wished, 474 to 171 for arbitration. The old Houtzdale district voted even more lopsidedly in favor of arbitration, 1,089 to 158. Only Osceola voted a majority of 381 for the strike and 20 against. The total for the Central Pennsylvania district showed a decided preference in favor of arbitration, 1,583 to 710.21 Simultaneously, delegates of the latest incarnation of formal unionism, the Miners & Laborers’ Amalgamated Association, met in Bierly Hall in the town of DuBois, Clearfield County. The delegates passed several motions regarding wages and conditions at different mines, with the intention of gaining a raise and uniformity of pay and conditions for the men at the different district collieries. They too argued for arbitration, for their operators to meet them in convention to either agree to pay reasonable raises in pay or to explain why they could not. Within a week, however, the sentiment for arbitration faded in favor of a strong strike movement. Sentiment for the strike spread for the very reason noted by the Phillipsburg Journal in its initial report on the mass meetings: Operators could not give a raise unless the net price at the mines rose; that is, the price of coal at the mines would have to go up, and therefore the retail price at urban centers would also have to go up, and the price of the shipping would have to remain stable or go down. Again, the miners found themselves trapped underneath the needs of operators, the railroads, and the market. The miners could not increase the net amount they received from the operators unless they increased the net amount the operators received from the final selling price of coal. Operators could not increase the net amount they received from the final selling price of coal unless railroads agreed to

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operators, he argued in a long and angry letter, then “what we ask, and claim as fair, is that you shall make good to us [by lowering freight rates], any advance [in wages] we are compelled to make, owing to your having furnished cars to Wigton and Holt, Chipman & Co., and other[s] who have paid the advance.”25 The Beech Creek and the PARR, he demanded, had to take responsibility for the health of the regional trade, especially for the health of the Clearfield Bituminous Coal Company! It was, after all, on this understanding that his coal company had been founded. Langdon had a point: Other operators were taking by trickery the very trade CBC agents had been urged to take by the Beech Creek and the New York Central. The CBC could not pay higher wages on established contracts unless the railroad lowered freight rates by the amount demanded by the miners. Berwind, White coal mining officials made similar fruitless demands to the PARR. Berwind, White officials refused to give in to the coal miners on wages. They went so far as to purchase coal from Great Britain to fill all-important steamship contracts during the strike.26 As the two leading executives of the Central Pennsylvania coal mining region, C. J. Langdon and Charles Berwind were furious about the refusal of the railroads to either enforce the lower wage on the entire region or pay for the higher one by adjusting freight rates. Charles J. Langdon had a long pedigree in coal. He grew up in his family’s anthracite coal wholesaling business. As a businessman, he was earnest to a fault. His brother-in-law Mark Twain wrote after a conversation with him: “The subject of coal is very thrilling. I listened to it for an hour—till my blood curdled in my veins.”27 Twain invested a substantial sum in Langdon’s new enterprise in Central Pennsylvania, a combined railroad and coal company. Twain knew of some of the problems of coal mining; as he and Charles Dudley had written: “There is no difficulty in digging a hole in the ground, if you have money enough to pay for the digging, but those who try this sort of thing are always surprised at the large amount of money necessary to make a small hole. The earth is never willing to yield a product, hidden in her bosom, without an equivalent for it. And when a person asks of her coal, she is quite apt to require gold in exchange.”28 As Twain was to discover a decade or so after the publication of his book that named the age, the Gilded Age problem in Central Pennsylvania was not only in the mining, it was in the transportation. Langdon never realized until too late that the coal company had become subordinate to the interests of the railroad company, and then to railroads in general. As he wrote plaintively as early as 1883, “I am conscious of running the risk of your remark that ‘Langdon is mixed again.’ Langdon admits that

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Furthermore, as a new road newly abandoned by the New York Central, the BCRR had an urgent need to build traffic, in part to generate revenue, but in part too to establish a track record that it could point to when negotiating its allotment in future pools with the larger railroads. In the absence of railroad discipline, solidarity between the small-scale and large-scale operators was in short supply. Smaller shippers and wholesale dealers made whatever contracts they could at the higher prices—Beech Creek dealer R. H. Chipman took particular pleasure in tying up old spot market customers of Berwind, White and other PARR operators in longer-term contracts.32 As the Engineering and Mining Journal commented, they “would be called, if laborers, ‘scabs.’”33 *

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The strike of 1886 lasted until the end of May, when larger-scale operators and union leaders reached a settlement. The larger operators held the line on wages, and soon, as predicted, smaller operators lowered their wages back to prestrike levels. The miners gained a substantial victory, however; the operators conceded the right of the miners to elect a man to stand at the scales and to make sure each miner received full credit for all the coal that he sent up. Operators collected a fee from every miner to pay to the “checkweighman fund.” The agreement soon spread throughout the Central Pennsylvania area, even to the Beech Creek region that had never officially joined the strike. In January 1887, railroad man George Magee sent out a survey to Central Pennsylvania operators, asking if they had checkweighmen. After receiving a number of positive responses, he authorized them for those mines controlled by his company, including the Clearfield Bituminous Coal Company.34 Magee’s decision to accept checkweighmen reflected a sense that in the wake of the strike of 1886 large-scale operators would have to organize to protect themselves and to rein in their rowdy smaller-scale rivals. And they would have to do so without the heavy hand of the railroads behind them. In March 1887, the miners and operators in the Clearfield region signed a formal agreement that conceded the checkweighman on the tipple, his pay to be collected at the office “as at present.”35 Operators turned these funds over to a miners’ association founded for the purpose. Each mine elected its own checkweighman. This concession enabled major changes in the region’s coal industry. First, it solved the miners’ ancient problem of how to hold binding votes. In accepting a checkweighman, operators pledged to accept worker committees and the results of their decisions. Second, it allowed blacklisted

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“The Union Checkweighman” —Lewis W. Hine

To understand the miners’ unwillingness to fully trust company weighmasters requires a little understanding of the way that coal mining worked at this time. To work in a mine, a man had to receive a set of small brass “checks” with his number on it. Each had a small hole so that it could be hung on a peg on a board at the entry to the mine (to keep track of who was in the mine). Men worked in pairs, as buddies. (The term “buddies” probably originated from the old British term “butties” for pairs of coal miners.) Buddies each had their own checks and alternated credit for the cars. Teenage mule drivers knew that they had to distribute cars evenly, and mine committees carefully monitored their work to make sure each set of buddies received the same number of cars, the so-called “square turn.” When a man sent out a car of coal, he hung his round brass check on the car. In Central Pennsylvania, the miner and his buddy would then push the car out of their room to a junction. There the car awaited a mule driver who hitched it to his team and hauled it far off to the surface. Coal miners rarely saw their coal weighed. They sent off their car and went back to work. The weighmaster weighed the car on a scale near the mouth of the mine. He deducted the weight of the car (the “tare”), estimated the impurities in the coal, and then recorded the remaining figure next to the check number.

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“Coal Cars” —Ewing Galloway

Tribune. It was the miners’ right in Ohio, Roy wrote, a bit too hopefully, and he need not ask any operator for permission—he had simply to notify him.37 *

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By 1880, Andrew Roy was being echoed by David R. Jones, a new sort of union leader in Western Pennsylvania. Through Jones, Western Pennsylvania coal miners had found a way around the law’s presumption against collective labor organizations and the sticky problems of organizing stable unions. Jones was Irish, a former coal miner, a former schoolteacher, a former checkweighman, and a newly minted lawyer of Pittsburgh who had provided key legal advice to the miners in a strike in 1879. (He informed them that they could not be evicted from company housing as long as they held their particular leases and paid their rent. Furthermore, he advised them, it was his opinion that the operators were close to giving in.) Jones soon became a no-nonsense representative for the miners along the rivers and railroads of Western Pennsylvania. He saw the miners as his collective clients, and he treated them as such. He consulted no executive board, and as one contemporary observer noted, he “was as much of an autocrat as the Czar of Russia.” Enough of the miners organized themselves to pay him 5 cents per man

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argued that they couldn’t compete with those that didn’t.40 For the sake of “uniformity,” and to force all coal operators to pay fair weight, even those miners who were convinced that their operators treated them fairly had to maintain a checkweighman. But there was no provision for paying the checkweighman. Jones asked the miners therefore to insist that the majority rule in the matter. If one of their member refused to accept the majority decision to pay the checkweighman, the rest should refuse to work with him, not—he was lawyer enough to steer clear of the common law’s prohibitions on this point—in order to raise wages, but so as to pay the checkweighman. As he wrote, “[F]or the sake of uniformity and the robbed, those miners that need no checkweighman should put one on.”41 Only at this time, in the early 1880s in Western Pennsylvania, did the checkweighman first show potential as the center to organization. No longer simply a galling declaration of operator dishonesty, the position of checkweighman took on a new color and a new importance to unionism and the coal industry. But the Western Pennsylvania state checkweighman law, like the previous state laws permitting unions and strikes, had no power when ignored by employers and for the same reason: Judges refused to accept even the most customary, long-established practices regarding collective decisions by workers. They recognized no legitimacy to workplace elections or collective decision making. They had never given any legal weight to a miner’s customary ownership of his place underground, or to the coal he had undercut and prepped for loading. The courts saw no difference between quitting and striking. Workers’ organizations certainly had no official legal power to impose decisions on either employers or on any individual workers who chose to disobey the majority. Checkweighman associations in Western Pennsylvania never served the stable organizational function envisioned by Jones. In 1881, in the first case to test Jones’s gambit, Judge Kirkpatrick of Allegheny County described the law to a jury in his courtroom as “a practical absurdity.” The coal miners employed at a mine, he ruled, had a right to elect a checkweighman, and that checkweighman had a legal right to be on the tipple, free from interference. But in the case before him, operator Robert Hogg’s immediate response to seeing the checkweighman had been to yell at his mine boss to put up the mules and close the mine. Once he had closed the mine, effectively firing all the miners who had voted, those particular miners were no longer employed there and no longer had a right to elect a checkweighman at that particular mine, and the checkweighman was equivalent to a common trespasser. Once an employer closed his mine or fired the men who had hired

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floor under wages, and the revolutionary menace of the Knights of Labor. Elliott reported the supposed slogan of the new organization, “An injury to one district, locality or state, is the concern of all.” (This was a muddled version of the Knights of Labor’s slogan: “An injury to one is the concern of all.”) Elliott sounded a note of hysteria, but his version of this rallying cry pointed to one of the operators’ greatest fears: that the coal miners would organize across competitive regions. It meant trouble, he warned. The miners chose their sharpest man for the task, and the operator could be imprisoned if he interfered. Your best hope, he advised, was to head off all efforts at organization and so avoid the issue. But Elliott’s previous work history had been in North-Central Pennsylvania; his panic perhaps came from unfamiliarity with the history of this sort of law in Western Pennsylvania and Ohio. Judges in Western Pennsylvania routinely dismissed the old checkweighman law as ridiculous. The new checkweighman law would have little impact in Central Pennsylvania until coal operators themselves embraced the notion of checkweighmen following the strike of 1886. But in 1883 Elliott did not dismiss it as unconstitutional or easily avoidable through the courts. He saw it much as the miners did, as a law that would have to be obeyed. When the checkweighman law became applicable to Central Pennsylvania in 1883, longtime Knights of Labor leaders sought to act on it. They had fought sporadic battles for checkweighmen many times in the past, but never with a sense that the law was behind them—nor had they acted before on the notion that these associations could serve as the backbone to a larger organization. In 1884 miners from five Clearfield mines filed formal cases against their employers under the checkweighman law. They agreed to let one test case go to trial first. The test case brought by Henry McGowan, a Knight, husband of firebrand Sarah McGowan, and longtime miners’ leader (now a peddler), constable John Malee, and several miners of Franklin Colliery demanded recognition of their right to hire and elect a checkweighman of their choosing.44 District Attorney Joseph McKenrick, a former carpenter and schoolteacher who had trained for the Bar under William A. Wallace, filed an elaborate indictment, covering nine pages and including three separate charges. He charged the defendants, who worked for the Kitanning Coal Company, with interfering with the checkweighman, using 2,240 pounds for a ton instead of 2,000, and “weighing coal with false and incorrect scales.” As his authority in each case he pointed to the 1883 law. “The miners are confident of success,” wrote the Raftsman’s Journal, “while their opponents look anything but happy.”45

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successes, if scattered. They put checkweighmen on the tipples of many individual Central Pennsylvania mines. Only through the strike of 1886, however, did checkweighman associations become an instrument both for securing industrial stability for coal operators and for securing fair treatment for coal miners.47 Within a few years, a court case in 1889 established the legal right of Clearfield miners (as opposed to Western Pennsylvania coal miners of Westmoreland and Allegheny counties) to elect a checkweighman, to keep him on the tipple, and to insist that operators collect the fee for the checkweighman association. It suggested that the limited court decision in 1884, when combined with the strike settlement of 1886, amounted to a regional legal precedent and workplace practice. Thus, checkweighman associations gained a legal basis for a compromise form of unionism that operators could accept. It was strictly limited in its ambitions, but nevertheless came to link Knights of Labor activists, customary rights in the workplace, and market unionism. In the 1889 case, the weighboss at the Kittanning Company’s Coaldale No. 3 mine, the appropriately named Grant Way, forced from the tipple a duly elected, competent, and also appropriately named checkweighman James Delves. He did so without first closing the mine, thus failing to perform the legally important act of ending employment for the group of miners who had elected Grant Way as checkweighman. The miners called for the checkweighman association’s salaried Miners’ Agent John H. Brown. Brown had Delves charge Way with the misdemeanor crime of “obstructing a checkweighman” and paid the initial court costs from the checkweighman fund. The Kittanning Coal Company settled the case, compensated the checkweighman association for its legal expenses, accepted Delves back on the tipple, went back to producing coal with the same men, and agreed in future to deduct the checkweighman’s dues from their wages. Nevertheless, the key moment for Central Pennsylvania checkweighman associations had occurred in the wake of the strike of 1886. *

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At the conclusion of the 1886 strike all three sides declared victory. The railroads held the line on prices at the mines. They kept coal miner wages and operator profits steady as a proportion of the final cost of coal, as delivered. They began to take steps toward creating more order in their industry. At the same time, coal operators asserted organized power outside the railroads. Coal operators and coal miner activists took their first steps toward an open, institutionalized relationship that included all area coal mines and miners.

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established checkweighman associations, required a never-ending stream of funds. *

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National leaders from both the Knights of Labor coal miners’ organization and the trade union organization came to Columbus in January 1890 with firm instructions that only one organization survive the encounter. Tensions had been rising between the two groups for five years. In 1885, for the first time in ten years the miners had begun to lose their status as the dominant occupational group in the Knights of Labor. The very nature of the Knights of Labor was changing. Now, telegraphers, railroaders, and other crafts surged in to the Knights in great waves of enthusiasm and surged as quickly out in great ebbs of business-as-usual. The KOL national leadership saw real hope for the first time in achieving their own holy grail of a working-class brotherhood on a national scale, to be led perhaps by the railroad workers so central to the new economy and by the masses of urban workers who had the potential to comprise a major political force. KOL officers such as Terence Powderly increasingly saw their organization’s future as the home of all the nation’s workers and therefore the new coal miners’ organization now came to seem less like an adjunct than a competitor. Powderly reluctantly accepted the shift from a leadership organization of only the very best, most committed men in any given community, to a mass organization. As the 1880s progressed, KOL leaders began to translate that exhilarating potential of representing every worker in the country into a sense that the Knights could be successful only as the sole representative of all workers, and that all workers could and should be Knights. Therefore, the new miners’ trade union organization now posed a very real and frustrating threat. Just as triumph seemed imminent, the coal miners, long the backbone of the Knights, seemed to be abandoning them. At the same time, while the broad aspirations and comforting brotherhood of the Knights still held promise for many coal miners, they also saw its limitations. Leaders in the coalfields craved stronger administrative links between large-scale organization and local solidarities. They believed that they needed a separate administrative apparatus from the Knights. They insisted that a membership made up of all men in and around the coal mines, a separate treasury, separate local and district assemblies, and separate leadership were all necessary to achieving contractual goals short of the commonwealth of labor. They began to demand this sort of organizational flexibility and resources from the national leadership of the Knights.3

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activists began battling in earnest, refusing to accept agreements made by the other organization either to strike, to cease striking, or to share resources. They battled as well with their fists, with the deep-seated anger of men who saw their hopes for short-term successes dashed and their expansive visions of the future challenged. In 1888, a faction of the Knights’ coal miners’ organization joined with the trade unionists, a move denounced by the KOL leadership. The KOL insisted that activists make a choice. They began to forbid men who had joined the miners’ trade union from retaining membership in the Knights—an emotionally devastating fate akin to excommunication for men who had grown up in the Order. With this, leaders on both sides decided for a time that reconciliation had become impossible. The confusing complexity of organizational names and divisions at this time suggests that the problem of organizing remained an area of deep disagreement. In 1888, Central Pennsylvania KOL leaders made their move from their regional District Assembly 40 (containing all area workers in all trades) to an exclusive coal miners’ District Assembly 27 (Officially: “National Trade Assembly Number 135, District Assembly 27”). Coal union leaders, in a move designed perhaps to signify their union’s new status as a fully independent, comprehensive organization in its own right, one no longer subordinate to the KOL, changed its name from the National Federation of Miners to the National Progressive Union.7 Nevertheless, another year of fruitless combat convinced both sides to come back to the table again in January 1890. At the founding meeting of the United Mine Workers of America in Columbus, William B. Wilson addressed the Knights and former Knights on the subject of reconciliation and national organization, but he did so in the specific context of the Punxsutawney strike. In doing so, he helped to cut through the accumulated grievances of years; the stubborn anger of deeply committed men; the bitterness of leaders who had sacrificed their homes, livelihoods, and families for their commitment and their loyalty to the cause of labor. The evictions of the Punxsy miners hit Wilson hard in a way that was familiar to this audience. They knew the horror of seeing strikers and their families forcibly turned out of their homes, their possessions, painfully earned, carefully hoarded, and preserved, quickly destroyed in the cold, mud, and damp. Wilson had presumed to give the Punsxy strikers advice. He asked them to look to him for leadership. He held them back from violent resistance when it seemed to them to be fully justified. And now they suffered. If the choice to strike and to organize was a mass decision made by the show of many hands and with the force of many individual decisions, nevertheless leaders could not avoid the emotional burdens of successful persuasion.

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of solidarity a national union could provide. Each personal contribution, after all, came from an individual who represented hundreds of men, and hundreds of potential such contributions.10 This was the kind of action for which the miners were famous.11 It was a calculation that each of the men had experienced in their capacity as union leaders: the tale of real suffering, the plea for assistance, and the choice to dig deep in the pocket or to ease awkwardly back into the crowd. UMWA leaders hoped to make Wilson’s effective plea a vestige of a previous age, when men would be sent out on tramp to neighboring regions, to call meetings, and to ask mine committees to round up strike contributions. If the total of $100 collected represented a significant contribution from the over two hundred men there assembled, it was also a relatively paltry sum. It was more important as a palpable reinforcement for the cause of an established national union and dedicated defense fund that could contribute the many thousands of dollars needed to battle corporate coffers as in Punxsy. Now, with their large memberships and ability to effectively vote for and enforce assessments, state unions, regional checkweighman associations, and hopefully the national union began to suggest a new institutional capacity to concentrate resources comparable to those of corporations. When national leaders of the coal miners met in Columbus, Ohio, in January 1890 their job was to reconcile differences between the Knights of Labor miners and the trade union miners, and to form a single organization. At first the task seemed impossible, and even after much effort they only partially succeeded. Nevertheless, to the men involved even that seemed like a miracle. With the final vote to form the United Mine Workers of America, longtime union leaders wept tears of joy. Hats flew in the air. The hall filled with celebration. Gray-haired men shouted themselves hoarse. The new organization seemed like the culmination of the dream of a lifetime. They listened to a song written to commemorate the event. Two former rivals moved by the moment sealed their future harmony with a public embrace and a hairy kiss, full on the mouth. Samuel Gompers, president of the new American Federation of Labor, strode out on the stage with the former heads of the two previously opposed but now “United” coal miners’ organizations. Together, arm in arm, they chanted the motto of the new organization to the cheering crowd: “United we stand, divided we fall. United we stand, divided we fall.”12 The term “United” in the “United Mine Workers of America” did not refer to a vague concept of solidarity. Nor did it refer solely to the goal of uniting all individual miners and miners’ organizations in each town and state into a single, comprehensive national institution. It referred to a specific problem:

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know which features should survive or dominate. The merger sacrificed the strengths of neither. As one Central Pennsylvania miner wrote later that year, “[W]e have had the M. and L., the K. of L., the Federation, the N.P.U., and now we have one grand organization, the U.M.W. of America.”14 In Central Pennsylvania, the first results of the UMWA experiment only made themselves known in the chaotic process of organizing, arguing, and agreeing over the next several years. *

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Only in the first years of the 1890s did the strands of a settlement between union leaders and coal operators begin to come together in Central Pennsylvania. Instead of fighting to eliminate all unionism, coal operators had already begun to work with so-called “checkweighman associations.” These were essentially formalized versions of pit committees enabled by a new law in 1883 and the strike settlement of 1886. Rather than blacklisting Knights of Labor leaders, operators now often worked with them as miners’ agents for the checkweighman associations. Checkweighman associations in Central Pennsylvania were a new sort of organization with roots in customary pit committees and regional leadership networks in the Knights of Labor. They only achieved success after long battles in county courts as well as strikes. They owed their success also to the desire of operators for a more formal system of employee relations and weighing standards for the region. Because operators paid the associations a set amount for every ton of coal that passed over the tipple, and because the associations paid an elected man to stand next to the company weighmaster, double-checking his work, the checkweighman associations and operators developed day-to-day administrative, working relationships. Checkweighman association managers built strike funds and hired miners’ agents to mediate between checkweighmen, operators, and coal miners. They staffed central offices and developed administrative and leadership skills. They even retained lawyers. Yet even taken together, the Knights of Labor and checkweighman associations left out many coal mines and coal miners. The Knights organized leaders, not most coal miners. The checkweighman associations only signed up members mine by mine. Each mine that joined had to have a cooperative operator and it had to employ at least nine men. Because operators in Central Pennsylvania had agreed to deduct checkweighman dues from miner paychecks following the strike of 1886, they allowed coal miner activists to create checkweighman associations and

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years. Upon his return from Latrobe, Dennis White supported himself not by mining or organizing, but by managing a tavern. He quit the Knights because of its prohibition on tavern owners being members. James White had experienced the same pressures himself. To his deep shame, he admitted that the pressures of managing an 1886 strike had driven him to drink. He had even organized Local Assemblies while drunk.16 Knights of Labor Grand Master Workman Terrence Powderly revoked his organizing commission for a short time for just this reason. He found work mining coal on the condition that he give up organizing. Briefly and unsuccessfully, White turned to peddling books but soon went back to his favored vocation of labor organizing in his old Local Assembly 134.17 Eventually he rose to the National Executive Board of the UMWA. Still, he remained suspicious of the trade union movement. He saw little future, little promise in arbitration, joint conferences, and mass membership being open to any coal miner who wished to join. In 1893, he would attempt to lead Central Pennsylvania coal miners out of the combined UMWA organization and back to the Knights of Labor. *

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In early spring 1890 the Punxsutawney strike began to shift to a different sort of unionism. It began to turn on a financial axis—on the resources of formally organized associations. It went beyond merely a manifestation of local community unionism; it went beyond a strike called by upraised hands in the local opera house, and it began to put pressure on the traditional modes of calling and organizing strikes. In the middle of March, the Houtzdale Checkweighman Association executive board demanded that miners in the Beechtree and Eleanora mines, mines owned by the R&P Company but located in the eastern part of the region, cease work even though they had been left out of the original strike call. The union executive board had calculated that the working mines had increased production and were now filling contracts for the struck mines. At first, the R&P miners at Beechtree and Eleanora mines refused to obey the strike order. They made their argument in the tradition of mine-by-mine decision making. The Punxsy men had failed to fully include them in their initial deliberations, they pointed out, nor were they parties to the original contract. They did not agree with all the demands made and therefore, they insisted, they were not bound to support the strike. When William B. Wilson led a line of Punxsy men on a march to Beechtree on the Sunday following the start of the strike, the Beechtree men agreed to hold a vote, but a majority decided to go to work on Monday. With this, the Beechtree miners fulfilled the traditional democratic obligations of community unionism.

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Labor was the only organization in the area? The answer is simple: Brown was not ignoring his checkweighman association employer but rather was making a distinction that has since faded from memory. To Brown, the checkweighman associations were lower in status than more ambitious entities such as the Knights. The coalfield Knights of Labor was not the mass organization that it had become elsewhere. Even as the Knights exploded in membership and ambition in the mid-1880s, it remained a leadership-oriented organization in the Central Pennsylvania coalfields. The Pennsylvania Grit made a similar distinction, referring to “the unorganized men represented in the Checkweigh Boards.”20 To Brown, the united nature of the new national union solved a problem he did not have.21 Nor did the UMWA offer any new resources. Any links to national unionism, especially links that went anywhere but through the old Knights of Labor leadership networks, remained purely theoretical. Nevertheless, R. A. Kinsloe did his work as the soft coal correspondent for the Grit. As a reporter, he gathered what information he could on the new organization; as a columnist he gave his opinion as to what the local miners should do about it. The Pennsylvania Grit was a new sort of communications medium, one of the nation’s first attempts to translate the growing regional network of railroads into a mass regional audience of railroad customers. Based in Williamsport, a Central Pennsylvania railroad hub, it operated on a new scale and translated that scale into a new sort of sensational journalism. It sold newspapers not with partisan appeals or a focus on strictly local happenings, but with exciting investigative reporting, graphics, and frequent reports from correspondents in all the small towns all through the region. Kinsloe was more than just an observer. His weekly columns commented on the Central Pennsylvania coal industry, its leading figures, debates, and events. He was an active Knight who often served as secretary in meetings, and made available a “miners’ telephone” in the office of his own newspaper, the Osceola Mills Wage Earners’ Journal. Sponsorship from the Grit and from Kinsloe helped to link Local Assemblies of Knights and the loose associations around local leaders and mines into a district union organization under the sponsorship of the UMWA. Though at first glance Kinsloe had considered the new organization only a renewed drain on the pocketbook, he was now convinced otherwise. Still, he betrayed little sense that this would be a new beginning for the labor movement. His first article on the subject misidentified the UMWA as the “United Miners’ Association” and referred to it in the headline as “The Latest Organization.” He might as well have said, “The Latest Attempt at Organization.” Kinsloe, perhaps revealing his own Knightly loyalties, suggested that men of

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serve merely as a national strike fund, and would have an additional decision-making or strategic function in case of a general strike over multiple districts. Its chief virtue was to be in the efficient collection and disbursement of strike funds. Kinsloe admitted he could be in error in some of the details of the new plan. Indeed Kinsloe was in error. Several of his readers did the math and soon he corrected his errors regarding dues payments. His larger misconceptions regarding the UMWA’s organizational structure took longer to fix. The checkweighman associations could not afford to simply pay for the new national organization’s dues and defense fund and still meet their established local obligations. Furthermore, as he found later, the new national organization had no intention of paying for local strikes that it did not see as strategically supportive of its goals—it certainly would not pay the standard $3.50/ week benefit for those men, as in Punxsy, who had not paid the minimum of $.15/month for five months into the defense fund. Kinsloe was correct in only one of his assertions: The new organization did not contemplate nor require doing away with any of the local institutions and resources developed by local miners. But his conception of the newly united union as a federated layer on top of the sovereign regional associations and bound to do as they demanded was a fiction not dispelled for several months.24 Kinsloe and the miners and activists in the area awaited a visit from one of the national officers. Presumably the man from headquarters would explain the well-hidden benefits of national organization and how it would achieve all that its predecessors had failed to accomplish. In February 1890, the coal miners of Central Pennsylvania saw few reasons to join up. Debate over the wisdom of joining the UMWA dragged on through the spring. Kinsloe wrote to prepare the men of the region for a visit from UMWA president or Master Workman J. B. Rae, or Secretary Treasurer Robert Watchorn, both longtime Knights.25 In the first few months of 1890 the value of the UMWA to Central Pennsylvania was limited to the monetary support and leadership it could offer the Punxsy men still out on strike. The promise of large-scale organization remained vague. Checkweighman associations gave more money. Talented leadership came from well-established local figures. The strike in Punxsutawney dragged on, gaining attention from reporters from as far away as New York City and subtly pulling the region’s mining organizations toward a more strategic view of their responsibilities. R. A. Kinsloe toured the area with fellow Knight W. B. Wilson, and sent back a series of articles on the situation. Miners’ agent John H. Brown visited from Phillipsburg. James White left his parents and two sisters to offer his leadership for several cold weeks.

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uncertain as to its details, which seemed to require a substantial increase in cost to local miners. They were uneasy about provisions that seemed to challenge their control over local decisions. They were unable to articulate the potential benefits of membership—or perhaps they were just uninterested in doing so. Furthermore, immediately after the Columbus meeting, UMWA officers had promised to come quickly and clarify everything to the men of the region. As a result, leaders of established Local Assemblies and checkweighman associations held back from calling the mass meetings necessary to make the decision to affiliate with the new national organization, awaiting the arrival of official national spokesmen. All mines but one voted to suspend operations for the day planned for McBride’s appearance. However, on 11 April, it was not John McBride, a representative of the trade union side of the UMWA, but Robert Watchorn, considered a partisan of the Knights (though he was also secretary of the UMWA), who came to speak. The miners arranged for three meetings, the first to be held in Phillipsburg, the second in Houtzdale, and the third in the outlying area of Snow Shoe. A local merchant offered the use of an old storeroom for the Phillipsburg meeting, but the room soon overflowed. Though undoubtedly some men took advantage of the extra idle day to tend to matters other than union organizing, more than expected came to investigate the potential of the UMWA. Some had been hostile to the idea and were suspicious of a KOL plot when they found out that Watchorn had been sent instead of McBride. Many of the men of the Beech Creek, Phillipsburg, and Osceola Checkweighman’s Association were eager to gain independence from the region’s center of organization among Houtzdale Knights such as James White. Within twenty minutes, Watchorn found himself not in a crowded hall, but in an equally familiar position for a union leader of the time. Out in the public square of Phillipsburg he perched on an empty crate to address the assembled miners. He spoke for roughly one hour, allaying many of their fears. After his speech, a motion was proposed that they vote as a mass meeting to affiliate the Phillipsburg, Osceola, and Beech Creek Checkweighman Association with the UMWA. The motion was quickly amended to allow for more deliberate consideration. The meeting asked Miners’ Agent Brown to send a circular to the mines that explained the UMWA, each mine to discuss the question, to vote, and to send its vote to the secretary of the Phillipsburg, Osceola, and Beech Creek Checkweighman Association. Nevertheless, the miners immediately assumed that the vote on the question would be “yes,” for they also voted as a meeting to transfer responsibility for a new wage scale to the UMWA district organization that would be formed.

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keep digging deep into their own pockets. Nor did the founding meeting in Punxsy include the entire geographical district. The Phillipsburg, Osceola, and Beech Creek Checkweighman Association held itself aloof. It voted in a separate convention to join the UMWA provided that it would be allowed to constitute its own district organization, and as long as its treasury and checkweighman association also remained separate.30 For the region’s miners to organize themselves into the UMWA meant that they would have to comprehensively link each isolated mine to the district and to the national union. For the moment, though, they chose a simpler route. The Houtzdale Checkweighman Association joined as UMWA District 2. The Phillipsburg, Osceola, and Beech Creek Checkweighman Association joined as UMWA District 2A. James White published brief bookkeeping instructions for all mine collectors and checkweighmen and advised them to come to his office and buy a UMWA constitution so that they could answer any questions put to them. But the miners still had to form and reform their Local Assemblies and local unions within those districts. In particular, the men who remained outside the Knights (or who were kept out) or who worked in mines too small for the checkweighman associations (those “country banks” with less than nine miners) had to “organize” themselves, to elect a set of officers, sign a roll, write and accept bylaws in harmony with the national constitution, and collect the $16 to $20 needed for ordering UMWA seals, constitution, and other supplies.31 This hefty fee was a matter of some contention for Kinsloe, who still suspected that the UMWA added little to current arrangements, and who expected it would prevent the formation of smaller local unions. Men who had seen other attempts to extend unbroken links from each mine mouth to some ephemeral national union remembered all too keenly their earlier, wasted investments in such ceremonial supplies, he argued.32 But in summer 1890, the Central Pennsylvania district was alive with enthusiasm for the new union, the initial skepticism having faded both from those Knights who saw the UMWA as a dilution of their larger organizational mission, and among those unorganized men who saw it as a plot by the Knights. Coal miners took advantage of the UMWA’s broad organizing policy to form unions outside the region’s established Knights of Labor Local Assemblies and checkweighman associations even before all its rules and goals were quite clear. Typically they organized by mine, but Kinsloe also reported independent groups of men calling for John R. Paisley, who served simultaneously as the Phillipsburg, Osceola, and Beech Creek Checkweighman Association miners’ agent, KOL master workman, and UMWA president of District 2A to organize them into UMWA local unions. Kinsloe

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brotherhood of the Knights of Labor, the businesslike arrangements of the checkweighman associations, and the older cultures and loyalties of community unionism—all within the ambitious structure of a new national organization. Knights of Labor leaders who had maintained their allegiances through blacklists, prosecution, poverty, the personal risks and suffering of strikes, and long-standing conversations about labor and coal could maintain them in the UMWA. Men who wished only for protection in their dayto-day work could do the same. In its current form, the UMWA attacked no old loyalties. Kinloe’s catechism focused on the complexities of open and secret organization and the details of how dues would work. He finally made it plain that the secret Local Assemblies and the open local unions maintained their privileges of independence and exclusiveness. No member from one local had the right to be present in another except by invitation. Only at the district and national levels did the organizations merge into one single governance system. Dues were to be from $.25 to $.35/month per man. Fifteen cents went to the defense fund, with members to become eligible for benefits after five months (three months if they paid under the accelerated plan of paying $.25/ month). Members of a local union, for instance, paid $.15 to the defense fund, $.05 to the national organization, $.02 to the district, and on top of those set dues of $.22/month per man, an additional charge set by their local checkweighman funds, unions, and assemblies. Obviously, this last amount changed according to the size of the local organization and its current needs and goals—maintaining checkweighmen, building a hall, or paying officers. KOL Local Assemblies would have to pay an additional $.06 per quarter per man to the General Assembly.37 *

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In June 1890 newspaperman and Knight R. A. Kinsloe began to visit coal operators and the main freight agent of the Beech Creek Railroad to gather information and offer his opinion on how to resolve the current unrest. He was, it appears, fishing for a sense of what sorts of arrangements might be possible in the future. In particular, he suggested that he might be able to persuade the miners’ association to put off making any demands until later in the year, but that he expected that on 1 January 1891 they would demand that wages be raised by March. With this sort of notice, the operators would hopefully be able to incorporate the higher price for mining into their negotiations with customers and railroads. F. E. Herriman, general freight and passenger agent of the Beech Creek Railroad, told Kinsloe that the market

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When R&P first concluded a formal wage agreement with their miners in fall 1889, R&P’s top management all too quickly took advantage of the formal narrowness of the new contract to insist that it supersede, instead of build upon, previous informal agreements and workplace customs. In the past, they had negotiated with customary committees of coal miners in each pit. Now they forbade it. They began to order adjustments in the ways the company paid for the details of production, refusing to pay for the “deadwork” that miners had to do in addition to mining coal. Suddenly the coal miners learned that they no longer would be paid for laying track, taking up the floor of the tunnels so that the mules could get through, cleaning up rock falls, or any of the many other jobs required to keep a mine running but which were tangential to the act of mining coal. Why? Because these previous informal sets of understandings by which they had always mined coal had not been formally acknowledged and laid out in the contract. Still, the coal miners kept their word and obeyed the letter of the contract. Within a few months, the miners gave the company notice that they wished to reopen negotiations in two weeks, as provided for in the contract. That fall they made some forty demands concerning working conditions.44 Company strategists, led by President George Merchant, dug in their heels. They refused “on principle” to meet with any KOL committee. The Knights, after all, were something of a revolutionary organization. Nevertheless, Superintendent S. B. Elliott consented to meet with a non-KOL miners’ committee, even though it just happened to include William B. Wilson and Robert Watchorn (both of whom were publicly known to be Knights), and agreed to ask company headquarters for a point-by-point reply to the miners’ demands. The reply came in the form of notices posted without warning that refused all demands and listed the names of four hundred men—all of whom were union sympathizers and who made up two-fifths of all the men employed in the mines—who would no longer be permitted to work. Company stores announced that they would no longer accept any orders on credit. All goods would now have to be paid for in cash. At the same time, the company refused to pay the money it still owed for the last two weeks of work. The company brought in armed private detectives from the Pinkerton agency, and imported workers, largely inexperienced miners from Hungary, Poland, and Italy, and African Americans from the South. To the company’s surprise, all but a few of their old miners joined the men on the blacklist by striking and sticking to the strike through winter 1889–1890.45 The Punxsy strike hit R&P harder than its strategists had expected. The company had run into trouble shortly before this in paying its dividends and debt. Its managers had calculated that if they could quickly rid themselves of

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business. According to the Engineering and Mining Journal, the merger made Bell, Lewis & Yates the single largest coal mining company in the world.48 Still, Yates had taken a risk. In order to be successful, BLY would now have to settle the strike that had driven the Buffalo, Rochester, and Pittsburgh railroad/coal company to the wall. In particular, they had to convince a major customer, the New York Central, to cease demanding cruelly low prices for its supply of coal.49 Their plan was to push the price for coal higher by secretly colluding on the bidding to supply the NYC. Since the railroad’s need for coal was so large and its access to high-quality coal along its route so small, the three main companies felt certain that they could practically dictate the price if they agreed upon quotas and prices ahead of time.50 Though the management of the NYC soon came to suspect such a plan, Yates, Magee, and Berwind denied any collusion.51 Bell, Lewis & Yates lost the most. Since the old management of R&P had agreed to particularly low prices—under the stress of its debt—the New York Central’s C. C. Clarke insisted that the old prices guide any new contracts. Yates argued in vain to Clarke that it would be in the interests generally of the NYC to accept reasonable prices, and in any case it was the responsibility of such a large corporation not to use its power to cut down coal prices. He remained confident that the NYC would eventually turn to them for coal, and at higher prices.52 They worked as well to hold the line on labor expenses. In May the three men exchanged information and encouragement regarding the possibility that the Punxsy strike would spread. According to Yates, there was nothing in the business situation nor in the men’s condition to justify an advance, and the men were “spoiled” by wages that were too high.53 When Magee appeared to waver on giving the men a demanded wage increase, Yates argued that though they might have to raise wages, indeed that there was a good chance they would have to do so, they gained nothing by conceding such an advance without a fight. Along with Charles Berwind, he suggested that they adopt a stated policy of absolute refusal to the men, even of implying that a strike would result in a reduction in wages. Yates urged his partners to stick together on their price demands and to maintain their hard line on wages. The miners in the region and in the nation were uniting, he argued, and the main operators had to do the same.54 The coal business in Central Pennsylvania was in disarray in spring 1890, with the larger operators maneuvering to boost prices and insisting that wages must not rise, while railroad executives suggested that freight rates go up and coal prices at the mines and wages go down. It was a three-cornered battle between the railroads, operators, and coal miners. Most miners

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local grievances. Union leaders in Punxsy took the hint from Elliott that they would not be hired back and agreed to stand aside and allow the settlement to take place. Only then did Elliott expand his blacklist from a “few” to one hundred and fifty. The strike committee used its remaining funds, aided by $500 from the UMWA national organization, to help blacklisted men leave the area.59 *

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July 1890 saw restless, sporadic efforts by the Central Pennsylvania miners to gain a raise throughout the district and to establish a role for the UMWA in negotiations.60 Berwind, White ignored a demand for a raise of $.10/ton from some of its miners. Beech Creek Railroad miners were reminded of an informal agreement not to strike as long as operators matched wages in Maryland.61 The Tioga men fought and accepted defeat. Finally, in August the UMWA National Executive Board sent a terse note to all Central Pennsylvania operators with the request that they come to a meeting in Altoona at the end of the month to discuss the matter. The meeting was at best a partial success. Several operators made appearances. Berwind, White, the chief company in the region, was represented by a polite letter which stated that its managers refused to pay more in any aspect of their operations but would agree to pay a district scale, should it be established. After a full day’s discussion, the joint convention passed a motion to adjourn until 10 September 1890, at which time it was hoped a sufficient number of coal operators would be present. The next week, smaller-scale operators held conferences on Tuesday and Thursday, and indications suggested a large turnout for the joint meeting in Altoona. This time the operators chose delegates to meet with a committee of miners, and at a joint meeting the two sides drafted a scale intended to accept wages at their status quo level but also setting a detailed list of prices for all the elements of work in and around the mines. It was the kind of attention to detail that had been missing from the original Punxsy contract. The operators insisted that the agreement simply codify the current costs of mining and that it not increase costs. At the committee meeting, Judge Dean, a coal operator from Cambria County, stood and read the scale out loud. Two copies were written out. Dean kept one copy and James White kept the other. It was to go into effect on 1 October 1890. After the scale was published, however, disagreements continued and different versions of it appeared. Precise wording became an issue. For example, while the miners wished operators to collect “all” assessments ordered by the checkweighman associations, the

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Integrating local forms of organization into the UMWA was proving to be complicated and difficult. Previous hard-fought strikes had been waged with only a tiny minority formally enrolled in unions. But the UMWA had seemed to promise, and to require, comprehensive organization. Despite the hopes of some UMWA partisans, the new union would not be able to simply replace local organizational customs with financial resources. The comparison of the UMWA to a large insurance company or beneficial fund begged older questions of how to collectively mobilize, recruit, and retain members in the face of real sacrifice and threats of violence from the Coal and Iron Police. The UMWA offered them the opportunity for great gains, but unless all area coal miners joined, leaders argued, they would never be able to benefit from the national organization.64 James White and Master Workman/President of the UMWA Rae had visited the Berwind, White headquarters the previous week and learned about the Berwind’s conception of labor organization in the coal industry. They booked rooms in a hotel in downtown Philadelphia and left word at the Berwind, White offices that they would like to meet with the company president at his convenience. Later that day, Henry Berwind arrived at their rooms accompanied by the Reverend William H. Dill, and they talked over the situation. The two union men stated their position regarding deadwork and wages, and the coal baron made his somewhat less than haughty reply. Berwind said that it was the union’s responsibility to keep wages and conditions uniform throughout the district. He considered it to be unfair treatment if his company had to pay higher costs than other operators in the same region. He expressed surprise that his company had not been paying the deadwork scale of 1886, as it had been his belief that they were. He had heard no complaints from his men on the subject. In any case, it was too late for that year as most of his contracts had been made for a full twelve months, at current costs of mining, between January and March. Finally, as the man controlling the major coal company of Clearfield, he acknowledged his power to force the other operators to adopt a new scale. He refused to do so on principle. But if the union could do so, he would accept the result.65 Although the Berwinds resolutely rejected any official contact with the union in their private correspondence, they nonetheless carried out a slightly different policy in reality at this time. Here, like S. B. Elliott, Henry Berwind indicated a narrow role for unionism, in the vague sense that the coal miners should enforce uniformity of wages and conditions. But at the same time he seemed also to be arguing that they should enforce that uniformity completely or not at all. Unlike the smaller-scale operators, Berwind made no mention of competitive districts or the iron impossibility of raising wages

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Through the fall of 1890, the very idea of the UMWA languished in ambiguity and uncertainty, and in the evident inability of the Central Pennsylvania miners’ organization to move either the operators or the national organization from observation to action. In a further bid to gain some advantage from their organization, the District 2 executive board called an early convention for the middle of December 1890 to consider an advance in wages as of the first of the year. The Executive Board received only qualified support in its focus on wages from R. A. Kinsloe. Kinsloe agreed with the smallerscale operators that wages must be raised everywhere on the East Coast, including Maryland and West Virginia, if they were to be raised anywhere. He endorsed such a long-term quest, adding that if the national organization of the UMWA could not accomplish such a goal, it should be considered a “a delusion, a snare, and a fraud—an expense for which no equivalent is received by the miners.”68 James White and other District 2 officials also tried to commit the UMWA to a more ambitious set of goals. On 17 December in Altoona, the District 2 meeting, chaired by national UMWA President John B. Rae, announced that the union had decided to reopen the discussion on work conditions. As required in the call, the District 2 delegates arrived with sealed instructions from each local and mine as to whether or not to support a fight for a raise in wages. The sealed votes were a calculated move by James White and the rest of the district leadership. By keeping the deliberations secret and by putting the vote of each local into this form, the convention was faced with no choice but to act not merely on the deadwork scale, but on what proved to be an overwhelming demand for a raise in pay. The original point of the convention, the purpose for which UMWA President Rae believed it had been called, had been to discuss a deadwork scale. The UMWA leadership had hoped to avoid a showdown on wages even as James White and his compatriots maneuvered to force their hand. Rae presided for the first day. The meeting formulated several demands in addition to the raise, most of which related to laborers and mule drivers rather than to coal miners. For coal miners, they included an old and patently unwinnable cause: a change from the 2,240 pound definition of a ton (“gross ton”) to the state legislature’s legally defined 2,000 pound ton (the “net ton”), thus adding roughly $.05/ton to the miners’ wages. They also renewed their demand that all operators collect dues for whatever purpose the coal miners demanded. They followed with twelve detailed demands for changes in the working conditions of mule drivers and laborers.69 All demands were to go into effect on 1 January 1891. The smaller-scale operators of the Beech Creek region met and responded as a body. They upped the ante. They would recognize no demands because

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men present feared that the power of the mass meeting would be forfeited if they delegated this task to the committee. These were men with long experience in the art of running meetings and their suspicions were roused by recent events. Only after deciding that resolutions would have to be approved by the whole, that resolutions from the floor would also be considered, and that every man would have the right to speak his mind did the meeting agree to assign the committee. In the end Paisley’s motion was granted. The committee met for forty-five minutes while the meeting continued in angry debate in their absence. They accepted Dill’s offer.71 On 22 January, leading coal operators, including Henry Berwind, met with the officers of Districts 2 and A, with the executive officers of the UMWA, and with a representative of KOL Grand Master Workman Terence V. Powderly. Reverend Dill had delivered as promised. In a full day’s conference, the operators endeavored to explain why they could not pay any advance at that time but promised to do their best to organize a meeting of all operators shipping to the Eastern Seaboard for 1 March 1891. In response, the UMWA Executive Board distributed a circular declaring their uneasiness over the district’s December strike call and overruled it.72 The March meeting between all the operators and coal miners shipping to the East Coast never quite happened. Miners in Maryland refused to attend. Miners in West Virginia still had no regional organization, nor were coal operators there sufficiently interested in coming to the table. Miners and operators in Clearfield met in secret, perhaps to disguise low attendance.73 The UMWA’s talking cure built relationships between its leaders and coal operators, but it also reinforced a sense that as of 1890–1891 the national union institution had added little to Central Pennsylvania’s regional union institutions. Coal operators too failed in their efforts to establish reasonable district prices for wages and coal. Nevertheless, coal miner activists took steps toward a regional district organization by integrating the new UMWA with established checkweighman associations, longtime leadership networks, and relationships with coal operators into a single sprawling organizational complex. At the same time coal operators sought to develop a middle ground in which they could establish district prices for coal and for wages and push back against the railroads. If both operators and union activists fell short of their goals, they nevertheless made durable gains.

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6 Association Organization and Industry, 1890–1894

Between 1890 and 1894 operators, coal miners, and railroads sought to achieve a national scale through simple, consistent approaches. Operators sought a single price for coal, simpler, more stable freight costs, and a single sales agent. Coal miners experimented with a call for the eight-hour day. Railroads attempted to create a single total freight rate for all coal shipped to the East Coast, no matter its point of origin in the region. All of them insisted at different times that their right to make a decent living by their wages, prices, or freight rates be paramount over the needs of the other two. Their efforts failed. None of them could impose simple solutions on the others. These individual efforts soon gave way to ad hoc piecemeal improvisations. Eventually, these efforts paved the way for future large-scale institutions. At the time, however, each of the parties groped their way toward a new scale of operations and made implicit concessions through a welter of private deals and secret exceptions. Coal miners, operators, and railroad managers increasingly responded to each other’s gambits with the wary sense that total victory would remain elusive. Even as railroad managers and the new financial and administrative masters of corporate trusts and interlocking directorates sought to raise themselves above competition through the 1890s, local businessmen and activists resisted their efforts. In this period, Central Pennsylvania miners’ unionism first began to approach its promise as a unified set of institutions and customary loyalties, firmly cemented from deep in the mines to mining communities and regional leaders. To many local leaders in 1890, however, the national organization seemed like a failure. To Central Pennsylvania’s mining leaders the national UMWA added little of value in its first years. They had no need for a national organization in order to call or support strikes over entire regions as well as individual workplaces. Miners’ unionism already linked votes in >>

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Operators chafed at the business downturn, but hoped that a month of low pay and dull work would deprive the miners of the surplus they would need to call any strikes. Arthur Yates wrote to George Magee in early April that their buyers seemed determined not to pay the higher coal prices required by higher railroad freight rates.3 Over the next few weeks, the major operators scrambled to quash rumors, to stop the smaller operators who normally sold coal through them from slipping on to the market, and to gather intelligence as to whether the other railroads were secretly going back to their old ways. Edward Berwind announced a meeting of all Clearfield coal operators in the near future and suggested that in the unlikely event of their having to pay a wage increase, he would fight to have the railroads absorb it through lower freight rates.4 But by July 1891 Berwind had to admit defeat. The operators had failed to get higher prices for their coal. They had made their sales in the old way, through secret deals with freight agents and by shaving prices to the bone. Magee, Yates, and Berwind agreed that an appropriate minimum price for Central Pennsylvania coal should be $.90/ton at the mines for all orders, including those for the coal railroads purchased for their own use. For all New York trade outside New York City and all New England trade, the minimum price at the mines, they thought, should be an even dollar. They wanted railroads to add freight rates to these minimum levels at the mines to arrive at the final price as delivered.5 The failure of the operators and coal miners of Central Pennsylvania to raise prices in 1891 was also a failure for J. P. Morgan’s latest vision of railroad order in the coalfields. The slightly higher quality and cheaper production costs of the massive West Virginia coal seams meant that once the costs of transportation were equalized, once the geographical advantage of Central Pennsylvania and Maryland were erased, the Beech Creek Railroad and the Clearfield division of the Pennsylvania Railroad had no choice but to secretly evade Morgan’s scheme if they were to stay in business. This quiet rebellion of middle managers prevented J. P. Morgan from imposing the order he envisioned on the trade. By February 1892, the other railroads shipping east, in consultation with the J. P. Morgan interests, offered to allow the Central Pennsylvania region a concession in freight rates sufficient to allow it to stay in business and sell coal in harmony with the rest of the coal regions.6 There would be no easily consistent solutions to the problem in the coalfields in the early 1890s—not from the operators, nor from the railroads, nor the coal miners. What follows is an account of the partial confusion that followed as the railroads’ plans slowly fell apart, and of the slightly greater level of formal organization in the complex of railroads and coal that resulted. It seems

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over the entire country. Each district reported its readiness according to a variety of calculations, including their level of organization and preoccupation with other issues. New Straitsville, Ohio, miners had made an agreement with their operators to stay at work, thus making a complete strike in the important Midwestern region impossible. West Virginia miners were not ready to come out. Northern Central Pennsylvania miners preferred to work on a list of alternative issues before working on the eight-hour question.8 The individual districts and local unions had begun to insist that their own local demands and redress for old grievances be added to the initial, simple demand to limit the workday to eight hours. The strike movement was widening into a muddy, cluttered flood. In an organization slowly building consensus toward careful planning in every field before action and joint negotiations as its cardinal principle, a unilateral strike for the eight-hour day looked less and less like a winning strategy.9 The UMWA’s National Executive Board rescinded the strike order. In the wake of the failed strike call for the eight-hour day, a strike Central Pennsylvania leader James White had been eager to fight, loyalty to the UMWA in Central Pennsylvania fell to a low ebb—though White blamed the ebb tide more on local disgust with the national leadership that had begun with the national convention. White wrote in secret to Terence Powderly to explain the situation and to ask if Local Assemblies could withdraw from the UMWA and attach themselves directly to the KOL’s General Assembly. The men simply refused to pay their dues to the UMWA, he claimed. By January 1891 the premier Local Assembly in Central Pennsylvania, LA 134, had ballooned to 407 members. As of April 1891 White had suspended 283 men for nonpayment of dues to the UMWA. By July he had suspended an additional 54 men for the same reason. Of the 70 remaining members, only 9 paid their dues to the UMWA. The 61 Knights paid their dues to their Local Assembly and to the General Assembly of the KOL, but not to the UMWA or to the coal miners’ organization of the Knights. The regional KOL was slipping back into its old role as a leadership organization; the UMWA was simply slipping away. James White claimed that he didn’t know what to do. Since the ritual password and all authority came through the UMWA, their refusal to pay dues to the national union was killing the local Knights of Labor organization as well. Was he to shut the door on the 61 loyal Knights simply because they had refused to pay dues to another organization (the UMWA)?10 Powderly, now facing his own problems in the decline of the Knights and in poor financial and physical health after many years of service, replied that the miners should pay their dues and remain loyal to the choices they had made. The General Assembly had pledged to send a list of protesting locals

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split up as larger mines that could afford to do so voted to pay only their own checkweighman, and ceased subsidizing checkweighmen for smaller mines. James White’s UMWA local union voted to return its charter to the national organization, only reconsidering after their decision was published in the Grit. In July 1891 operators and miners held a meeting in the Beech Creek region. It ended again with no agreement, the operators pointing to the state of the trade and their struggles with the railroads.14 In the wake of the abortive eight-hour strike, focus returned to the district. The checkweighman board battled over and settled various differences between different operators and men.15 For a local organizer like White, the reasons to maintain his faith in the national promise and immediate relevance of the UMWA had faded through 1891. The national union had rejected District 2’s votes to strike, hence it had failed as a source of funds. With the failure of the movement toward an eight-hour day it had failed to create a national strategy. It seemed, as Kinsloe described it at the very beginning, a “positive drain.” Some activists supported the UMWA in its restraint. Kinsloe, for example, came to reject White’s focus on local matters. William B. Wilson successfully retained all his commitments: to the UMWA national organization, to the Knights, and to his local unions. Wilson had apparently mastered the balancing act at which White had failed. According to one Knights of Labor member who successfully switched his Local Assembly from the UMWA to direct membership in the Knights of Labor General Assembly, Wilson was with them when working as a leader of their District Assembly, and not when he was working as a member of the National Executive Board.16 It was a tough balancing act and Wilson was an exception. In the following year, 1892, as wage cuts spread, James White apparently changed his mind on the virtues of trade unionism. He made an attempt to get all the miners in the region into the UMWA. Back from the UMWA annual convention in Columbus, he called a joint meeting of local secret Knights of Labor Local Assemblies and local unions, and pressed for all miners and checkweighman associations to link up with the national organization of the UMWA. He held a series of meetings with miners in non–English speaking mines, aided by Emial Seickinger, a UMWA organizer who spoke German, Hungarian, and Polish. Led by White, the Houtzdale Checkweighman Association voted to merge its leadership with the UMWA’s District 2 leadership. Bylaws were to be printed in every language needed, and distributed as appropriate.17 Nevertheless, in summer 1893, just a year later, White began agitating to pull the local Knights of Labor miners’ Assemblies out of the UMWA and to

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Knights of Labor national organization. After the vote, the meeting passed a motion by acclamation to make the vote unanimous.21 There was still much work to be done to make this vote meaningful to the coal miners, however. Those who voted for the minority position needed to be kept in the fold. T. A. Bradley immediately announced the unanimity of the Central Pennsylvania delegates to newspapers, and called mass meetings for UMWA Secretary Patrick McBryde to speak about the national union. Louis Goaziou, writing under the pseudonym “Illiterate,” put his own construction on the event. He pressed now for an end to local strikes and argued that the next move for the national union ought to be the “national action meant by national organization.”22 Local Central Pennsylvania leaders renewed their efforts to initiate men into their local assemblies, unions, lodges, and checkweighman associations; men committed to national unionism worked to convert those efforts into formal membership in the UMWA. Miners in the Central Pennsylvania town of Hastings decided that their Local Assembly would henceforth have an initiation fee so as to urge members to come in at once. (The initiation fee started out low, and rose over time.) They also hoped that the hefty fee would help to raise members’ long-term commitment to their local group.23 They left aside membership in both the UMWA or the KOL General Assembly. In DuBois, 500 men joined a local union in early March. Of this number, 300 also joined the UMWA.24 Early in April, they claimed 720 men “in the organization.” But did this mean all 720 men had also joined the national UMWA? The record is unclear.25 *

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In fall and winter 1893–1894, coal operators responded to these events not by expressing a need to lower miners’ wages but by aggrieved helplessness for themselves. They faced the ongoing Panic of 1893 and the squeeze between coal miners, customers, and railroad managers. Nevertheless, they clung to the idea that they could bring order to the trade. They revived the idea of the “Seaboard Soft Coal Association” and met to discuss organized solutions to their competitive problems. The operators noted an ominous new trend: As coal prices dropped, railroads maintained their freight rates, and miners’ wages remained the same. The market pushed prices down, and unlike in the past the railroads refused to lower freight rates to protect the balance of profits and wages in the coalfields.26 Many operators put off an open wage reduction in favor of less obvious belt-tightening. A movement toward monthly paydays was the first step.

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make the standard rate $.45/ton throughout the region.32 Superintendents in the North-Central Pennsylvania mines of Tioga coordinated a wage reduction in their region soon after the start of 1894, exhorting each other to “stay firm” as a group against their coal miners.33 Central Pennsylvania operators held a full meeting in Philadelphia of all coal operators in their region and decided to make wages uniform. But even before the end of the year, the railroads absorbed the $.05 wage reduction by raising their freight rates. Rembrandt Peale wrote, “[W]hile the reduction in wages saves something in the cost of coal, yet, the new rates issued on steamship business, are, as you know, advanced, so that it more than absorbs the saving in coal at the mines.”34 Coal customers also demanded that the new lower wages translate into lower coal prices. The operators had been correct: a $.05 wage decrease in wages gained them little except angry coal miners, angry customers, and smug self-dealing from the railroads. Coal mining superintendent W. C. Lingle was frustrated: the railroads said “that they did not want more than ½ the reduction [but] . . . they want it all.”35 The operators were not entirely uniform in their actions. They still feared strikes and a few made minor concessions in order to keep the miners from walking out. R. B. Wigton & Sons made certain the miners knew that all employees had been reduced by the same proportion, from the superintendent on down. In another coal company, superintendent Lingle (who had his own personal money troubles) asked that the reduction apply only to coal miners. He claimed that office men had to be treated differently. The office men had to be kept loyal, he argued, in order to prevent them from using their inside knowledge to advise the coal miners on strike strategy.36 A few operators accepted checkweighmen to improve relations with their miners.37 Some groups of miners answered the reductions with immediate strikes that lingered for several weeks. But no general movement coalesced toward any coordinated efforts, either to call a general strike, or to break the strikes in progress. At the end of March 1894, large-scale operators in Maryland and Central Pennsylvania made a concerted effort to coordinate another set of wage reductions. Maryland operators made the first move, successfully demanding a decrease of $.05 to a flat $.40/ton for their miners.38 Central Pennsylvania’s Berwind, White posted a notice, mysterious to other operators and miners alike, that announced an unspecified change in wages. The firm’s workers held a mass meeting. At first the meeting leaned toward an immediate strike, but instead elected delegates to go to Philadelphia to find out the precise meaning of the notice. Did it mean a decrease or an increase? The

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reasoning of coal operators, he argued that Central Pennsylvania miners could do nothing until the miners of Maryland and West Virginia were ready to join them in a large-scale, marketwide strike of all coal mines shipping to eastern markets. Until that moment, miners should concentrate on refining links between their local unions, checkweighman associations, and the national organization. He listed the tasks of organization. Every man should support a checkweighman on every tipple; every pit committee should vote itself back into the UMWA, and every checkweighman should be a member of the UMWA. In this last point, Bradley harkened back to the most stable aspects of Knightly brotherhood: the commitment of leaders and the importance of using the position of the checkweighman to shield them from the blacklist.43 Through the early spring of 1894, the people of Central Pennsylvania went through familiar strike preparations, but with an added sense that this strike would be of a new type and a new scale. Miners would not be striking for a share of prosperity this time or to defend themselves from aggressive wage cuts by individual operators. No one challenged the poor state of the country’s economy or the plummeting price for coal. They would be striking for a radical cause, namely, to alter the relationship of workers to the economy and to alter the economy itself. In spring 1894, despite the depression, despite the armies of unemployed that roamed the country, coal miners and their families prepared for a strike. They expanded their gardens and held meetings to discuss tactics, to build solidarity, and to organize themselves. They held votes to reappoint old community leaders to new organizations and strengthened their connection with the national UMWA. Assembled in their annual spring convention in 1894, UMWA leaders outlined the situation as they saw it. The current situation, President John McBride argued, was unsustainable for operators as well as coal miners. McBride pointed out the changed situation from their previous meeting in early 1893. Then they had been eager to join in the prosperity of the coal industry but believed that their success depended as much on absolutely united action as on the market’s health. The failure, he argued, was not in the efforts of the national officers but in the indiscipline of coal miners in Pittsburgh and West Virginia. Now the vaunted prosperity of the previous years was gone, and with it their justification for asking for a share of the wealth. The opportunity was lost. They were forced to look at the market and at economics in a new way. Economic depression was now a reason to organize, not a reason to postpone organization: “There is a limit to human endurance,” he said, “and you have reached that limit. The price paid for mining must go no lower, but it is absolutely necessary for both life and comfort, and

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joked that he’d been told there was a strike of coal miners and felt it his duty to so inform the delegates. But to him the strike was better termed a suspension—a strategic cessation of production.49 He answered all questions of compromise or partial settlement with a refusal. Given their current strategy, for one set of miners to accept an end to the strike would be to ruin the chances for the rest. In early May 1894, the future outcome of the strike looked good to the coal miners. Even in the absence of substantial financial support from the national union, the fields that were out stayed out. One union leader explained how coal miners were spending their time, naming as well the reasons why they could afford to stay out: “They spend their time in planting their gardens, fishing, reading, or any other recreation. . . . We can taste victory in the corn; drink victory in the water; and breathe victory in the air.” They held no meetings, but in contrast to previous strikes attempted to put full authority in the hands of national officers. The national organization had ordered a course of action, said local leaders, and they were powerless to go beyond those orders—there was nothing to communicate and no need for mass meetings.50 It was wishful thinking. In the last weeks of May 1894, a few tiny mines attempted to break ranks—mines that in past struggles might have been ignored or allowed to determine their own courses of action. But this was a suspension to raise the price of coal. This was a strike in which a national union had ordered production of coal to cease. One-mule mines would not be allowed to continue as they might have in the past. A month into the effort, strike leaders asked the men in one tiny mine in the township of Woodland to stop. The men refused, perhaps thinking that this struggle between companies and employees ought not to affect places so small as to blur such lines, and where they had in any case not chosen to join the strike. The next afternoon, 600 men and two brass bands marched twelve miles to the mine, all through the afternoon and evening. They arrived at the mine at 4:00 in the morning, playing the mournful air “After the Ball,” familiar to the miners as “After the Strike,” in which a man tells his daughter why he has no friends or job, and why he is called a scab. The song ends: Many years have passed, pet, since I won that name, And in song and story they have told my shame, I have tried to tell them, tried to explain, But they will not listen, pleading is in vain; Everywhere I wander, everywhere I roam,

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the national union was radical in its institutional goals. It based its demands not on what the operators could pay but on what miners needed to live. It backed its demands by affecting the market for coal. The suspension of production in 1894 worked to an extent. Retail coal prices rose. Railroad managers planned to raise freight rates to absorb the increase.56 At the very end of May 1894, as Governor Pattison prepared to reiterate his argument for an end to the strike in front of a crowd at the Houtzdale Opera House and operators demanded again that the men return to work, Local Union 538 of Phillipsburg led a march of 3,000 miners three miles through rain and mud to Osceola, with two brass bands playing and signs and flags flying. The Osceola men marched out to meet them and fell in line. They convened a mass meeting in the shelter of a large mill in Osceola, where UMWA District 2 President T. A. Bradley addressed the group. Merchants and saloon keepers of Osceola fed the marchers, who then hired a special train to take themselves and T. A. Bradley back to Phillipsburg, where they held another parade and assembled to hear Bradley speak again.57 The UMWA could offer little in the way of resources in 1894. It offered leadership and the new conception of a national, unifying purpose to national organization. It was a bold act: a national strike call and insistence on national settlement. It attempted to solve a national problem—the overdeveloped coal industry—but relied on local resources and local activism for the battle. In Central Pennsylvania, local union leaders granted the national organization a new level of power, allowing the national strike call to overrule local pit committees that in the past might have voted to remain at work. Their national purpose now encompassed even the tiniest mines. In the battle between organized labor and organized capital, such mines had long seemed irrelevant. Now, however, as the claim of formal unionism became a claim to represent all coal mines everywhere, every mine and its miner(s) were subject to its decisions. It was a key transmission of authority. It was a transmission missing from earlier strikes which had been regional, and ultimately decided upon by mass meetings and delegate assemblies in each mine. Yet it was made possible not by legal authority but by a cultural shift in the understanding of coal miners as to what scale of organization was necessary and desirable in this corporate age. Moreover, it had its limits. The connections between local and national remained weak and most resources came from the local community. While the miners’ suspension had an impact on operators, operators needed to have concessions from the railroads to make agreements. Operators wrote to the railroads demanding protection. In case they had to pay higher wages they expected the raise to be covered by lower freight rates. U.S.

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UMWA officials refused, arguing that because the offer did not include Berwind, White or the other major operators in the region, it would be temporary as in the past (for example, as in the 1886 strike).63 In the middle of June all operators great and small appointed a committee to meet with the coal miners at Altoona, but with little hope of achieving a settlement. The operators went in agreeing that they would not agree to a raise. As demanded by the larger, railroad-associated coal companies, the operators avoided official recognition of the union and stood firm on wages at $.40/gross ton of 2,240 pounds or $.35/net ton of 2,000 pounds. Details were to be negotiated between the men of each mine and each operator. The smaller-scale coal operators demanded that the operators promise to raise wages to $.50/gross ton as of 1 May 1895 if the union provided evidence that all operators along the Eastern Seaboard would be raised to that same standard. After much discussion, the operators rejected even that concession. Operator W. C. Lingle telegraphed George Magee a succinct assessment: “Nothing accomplished.”64 In the next month the region’s coal operators met and corresponded to coordinate their responses to the coal miners. They sent reassuring letters and set up a system to share expenses regarding deputies. They pooled funds to bring in new workers and strategized as to how they might best be distributed throughout the area. Although they disagreed on the details they ultimately held the line regarding the price that they would pay the coal miners. Reporter R. A. Kinsloe reported that Clearfield public opinion was unanimously against importation of new men. In particular, he declared them against “cheap southern Negroes run into our midst.” The region already had plenty of men willing and anxious to work at “fair living wages.” The danger was not from the smaller-scale operators, for whom bringing in new men and armed protection for them would be too expensive, he thought, but from the larger operators. He closed with a warning: If the operators tried to bring in Negroes to the Clearfield region, there would be “more terrible scenes than Homestead.” (At Carnegie’s Homestead steel mill in 1892, Pinkerton detectives and local workers had traded gunfire with substantial casualties.)65 The operators apparently took heed of this advice and brought in mostly Italians, limiting them to more remote regions outside Clearfield.66 The new men were imported to the newer mining region of Punxsutawney in neighboring Jefferson County. The mines in Jefferson County were larger and farther from established mining communities. Nevertheless, coal miners in the region protested against their importation, if keeping their violence largely in check. Coal and Iron Police, led by the redoubtable Captain Thomas E. Clark, protected the imported workers. The very presence of the guards was offensive to the Punxsy coal miners, who had already pledged

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as they could. On Monday, 25 June 1894 the coal miners met in Altoona and agreed to a compromise rate of $.45/gross ton. UMWA President John McBride and UMWA District 2 President Thomas A. Bradley recommended acceptance of the rate. After several miners spoke out against the compromise, a delegate made the motion that any man who so chose be allowed to resume mining at the compromise. But as passed, his resolution contained a crucial amendment that “all operators who were willing to pay the compromise rate be permitted to resume.” The settlement, in other words, was to be negotiated not only district by district, but employer by employer. Nevertheless, if they had abandoned their original goals of a simple, uniform national solution, the bar had been raised. They would not return miner by miner. If they had to retreat, they would do so mine by mine, pit committee by pit committee.70 The operators, meeting in Philadelphia a few days later, refused to budge. Nevertheless, suggested one operator, their “determined front” was more facade than foundation. The operators most in favor of remaining firm at the lower rate had hoped the Altoona meeting would result in a more open declaration of war from the coal miners and a fight to the finish. The operators now found it harder to stay unified. Indeed, the operators got word of their biggest defection as soon as they met and reiterated their position to the coal miners on 1 July 1894. As soon as the resolution was passed, the largest independent (non–railroad affiliated) coal operators in the region, R. B. Wigton & Sons, decided they could resist no longer. Robert Wigton was a maverick coal operator. Blessed with access to both New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroad tracks, he was able to ship on either of the main transportation lines in the area and thus to keep his prices low despite his lack of a close association with either. Wigton immediately offered to accept the compromise price of $.45/gross ton to his miners. By 1 July, six small-scale operators were back at work at the compromise rate in Houtzdale. The union was willing to allow mines that paid the compromise rate to resume work as long as it was not a contractor or subsidiary of Berwind, White or of one of the other operators still holding out.71 According to reports from rival coal operators, Wigton went further. He paid the expenses of a miners’ delegate meeting called to prevent the men from returning to work at the wage demanded by the coal operators, assessed his miners $1 per man per week, the money to be sent to the UMWA, and donated $500 himself. By the end of July, however, he had ceased work for lack of railroad cars. (There is little evidence to show whether some railroad employees had decided to deliberately punish Wigton’s defection, or if coal cars had been removed to more productive regions during the strike.)72

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officials T. A. Bradley and William B. Wilson worked to keep the men out at least long enough to call the strike off in an organized manner. Operator W. C. Lingle wrote in frustration that his men had been ready to return to work until Bradley and Wilson had arrived in town.74 On 16 July, Lingle wrote to Sheriff Condon to request deputies, but asked that they not come from the area: “I do not think that it would be good policy to have deputies from around the mines even if you could find men willing to serve. Strangers would do better.”75 On 31 July, Lingle finally tried to get his mine started. He found thirty-one of his old miners and persuaded them to load five cars for a glass factory. They were protected by twenty-five deputies. Lingle’s actions met with precisely the reaction he had anticipated. A crowd of men and women assembled upon hearing that the mine was to open and engaged in the usual harassment and name-calling. This time, however, one of the men at work felt threatened enough by the mixed crowd of men and women to take lethal action. He shot one of the women and immediately fled into the mine. After his arrest, Lingle bailed him out and snuck him home by a back road. But when he was arrested again amid threats of a lynching, Lingle decided jail would be the safest place for him. Lingle insisted that the man had acted in self-defense against a threatening mob. He identified the woman as the wife of a blacklisted miner from George Magee’s Tioga mines.76 After this incident, both sides attempted to forestall further violence. The next day Lingle ran the mine again, this time with fifty men or so, but without the provocation of armed deputies. Both sides were apparently sobered by the confrontation of the day before. Lingle quickly agreed to a “peaceable meeting” with the assembled crowd of about two hundred. After a long talk, he agreed to the miners’ wishes for a series of minor concessions, including collection of checkweighman dues. According to Lingle, the miners’ aim was to use agreement with his company to pressure Berwind, White on the same points—in particular to take back his old employees. Lingle conceded the demands and agreed to put off opening the mines until the following Monday. It would be better to wait the four days and “go to work quiet than to fight it through.” A committee of merchants representing another group of miners came to Lingle and reiterated the request that he give them until Sunday to convince union leaders to call off the strike.77 By the end of the strike, the local unions had become more integrated with the larger structure of the UMWA. Local men and women participated as foot soldiers by virtue of their membership in the community, but without the sense that they had the power to decide to strike or to cease striking independently of the national organization. While in the past a local vote by

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the details of a series of more private, even implicit concessions to themselves. The public concession was that Berwind, White would find places for all its old employees, a promise in which few had full faith. The private concessions were that Berwind, White would accept the settlement with smaller operators over working conditions and that mine committees would be recognized in settlement of future grievances. Furthermore, Berwind, White evidently agreed to remove a persistent bone of contention by paying coal miners a higher rate for more difficult-to-mine low coal. Wilson and Henderson telegraphed the national and district offices of the UMWA with the news before boarding an overnight train back to Central Pennsylvania. Upon their return, union officials made a series of arrangements to bring an end to the strike, to fulfill their bargain with Berwind, and to extend the settlement to the rest of the region’s operators. They issued notices announcing a delegate meeting on Saturday, called for mass meetings on Friday night, and made ready to meet with small-scale operators on Saturday morning. The small-scale operators pledged themselves to collect for the checkweighman, to pay semimonthly, to take back all old employees, and to pay the same for low coal as Berwind, White. At the same time, the companies refused to lower prices for rent and supplies, arguing that they had already done so, and they left the ever-present issue of deadwork to be negotiated by each individual mine with committees in each mine. Union leaders hoped to reestablish the formal organization’s links to all places where coal was mined in the region and to end the strike. The Saturday afternoon meeting of delegates selected at the Friday mass meetings was intended to generalize all their delicate negotiations with different operators into a single settlement. In the event, however, local leaders attempted to wrest control over the settlement from UMWA officers. As part of their negotiations with Berwind, Wilson and Henderson had developed a telegraphic code that helped operators avoid opening additional areas for negotiation and sticky issues of union recognition. On Saturday afternoon, if the delegate meeting agreed to the terms Wilson was to telegraph Berwind with the single word: “Yes.” Berwind was to gather the operators with headquarters in Philadelphia, and if they accepted the terms he was to telegraph Wilson with an identical reply. The delegates amended the motion, however, to include an additional meeting with coal operators on the coming Tuesday with a committee of delegates and union officials at Tyrone. That Monday, however, as William B. Wilson stayed in communication with Henry Berwind over the long-distance telephone, the coal miners came to realize that the Central Pennsylvania coal operators were not going to meet their local leaders—that

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arbitration and joint negotiations with friendly operators. Starting in 1885, UMWA leaders had begun to develop long-standing relationships with coal operators and to negotiate the outlines of an acceptable role for the union. These discussions took their most fruitful form in the Midwestern Central Competitive Field. Yet these discussions had also revealed the ultimate futility of polite discussion on its own. Except during extraordinary circumstances, operators relished the opportunity to show that they would only pay prevailing prices. Again and again, Midwestern joint conferences had been venues for coal operators to communicate the discouraging lesson of the status quo. After 1893 operators insisted that the status quo pointed inevitably downward, to the lowest prevailing price. Some coal operators participated in the joint conferences simply in order to make that single point.82 In 1894 the coal miners came to the realization yet again that arbitration merely allowed both sides to explain the situation to each other; the point was to change it. In past strikes, union men had been aided by the opportunism of smaller-scale coal operators who wished to take advantage of strike-inflated prices. After the strikes were over, they lowered wages to match lower prices. In times of relative peace, those operators benefited from experienced miners’ agents who often prevented minor walkouts and negotiated everyday problems. Yet as men such as James White and Louis Goaziou pointed out, these organizational virtues required little in the way of a national union institution. In the Panic of 1893, as wages descended even further, local strikes in coal were inevitable. The question was whether they would destroy the national union by illustrating its irrelevance and forcing it to drain its resources in never-ending battles. In 1894 UMWA leaders played a difficult position well. They offered a daring opening gambit in their initial insistence on a single solution or none at all, and the ultimate goal of raised wages and the floor of a “living wage.” In the end, they salvaged a draw from the poles of absolute defeat or victory. First, their opening gambit tended to push coal operators closer together.83 This was what UMWA leaders desired. According to the logic of their previous joint conferences, successful negotiations had to include every single coal operator. UMWA officials believed they could only negotiate comprehensive contracts with comprehensive operator organizations. Second, the UMWA’s plan kept its radicalism within narrow bounds. Its challenge to the status quo remained at all times within the sturdy post and beam construction of classical supply and demand precepts: They proposed to decrease supply, increase prices, and take their increased wages from those prices. Third, it was simple. The UMWA had only the barest administrative or financial capacity in

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leaders from criminal charges and the existence of the national union, but also the idea that unions might serve as a source of order and progress.86 The national organization took its draw overall and helped to negotiate settlements in individual regions. In Central Pennsylvania, McBride’s defense of the national union did little for local organization. District 2 sent no delegates to the national convention. In Central Pennsylvania the strike had no visible silver lining. That winter violence flared in the wake of the strike. Operators maintained their insistence that wages be pegged to the lowest scale paid to any miner. A few coal operators in Central Pennsylvania lowered wages yet again from $.40 to $.35. Large-scale operators such as Bell, Lewis & Yates and Berwind, White followed suit, explaining that they were bound to pay prevailing rates in the region. Unless the union made all operators maintain the district rate, they would keep lowering their wages to match.87 Organization in Central Pennsylvania rested in the resources of local unionism and in long-standing leaders who remained in the area. As in previous strikes, local institutions maintained their structural centers in communities, in pit committees, and in checkweighman associations, but preserved mostly nominal links to the national union. Some correspondents to the Pennsylvania Grit and the UMWJ were more precise in their assessments. From one of Berwind, White’s mines, one writer stated that in his experience unionism had been more devastated after this strike than in any of the previous efforts in 1880, 1882, and 1886. Now there was nothing left to build on. But his assessment reflected a higher bar for unionism. No longer could it repose only in loose, semisecret groups of established leaders and informal community sanction. Now miners such as this writer demanded a real institutional capacity for unionism. Now, unlike a decade previous, the southern mines in West Virginia could supply the entire market while Central Pennsylvania struck. Now the Pennsylvania Railroad reinforced Berwind, White’s efforts to block a compromise wage. In future, the writer argued (echoing Henry Berwind), there would be no point in acting unless they did so with the southern mines.88 Abandoning the goal of formal, comprehensive settlements, Louis Goaziou reasserted his old idea of a regional federation of checkweighman associations, an idea approvingly noted by the soft coal editor of Pennsylvania Grit but answered within a few weeks by another correspondent who argued that Mr. Goaziou had named a goal that would drive him to “wit’s end.” What was the point of organizing in Pennsylvania without organizing in Maryland and West Virginia?89 After holding their annual convention (in close-by Phillipsburg, not Altoona or Punxsutawney this time) the two-man

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to the extent that it supported their efforts. The UMWA’s success at the level of national-scale contracts and conventions would require more than working-class solidarity. It awaited the withdrawal of financiers and railroad magnates to other fields. It awaited recognition among its own leadership that its successes would never be more than partial, that its fighting days would never end.

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7 National Scale A Living Wage for Capital and for Labor, 1895–1902

In 1894 national unionism in coal had seemed to union leaders to require uniform wages and conditions throughout the industry.1 The nation was becoming a single market, they believed. Therefore, in order for wages to rise in one place they had to rise in all places. No operator could pay any more or less for labor than any other. The success of their union depended on agreements with every single coal miner and every single coal operator in the nation, or none at all. As they learned toward the end of the century, however, their assumptions about a national market for wages turned out to be not quite correct. The rise of railroads had not annihilated geography but had changed it in specific ways. Railroad executives had spent decades subsidizing development in their monopoly regions. As historian James A. Ward has pointed out, they saw themselves as empire builders.2 Each eastern railroad empire included its own source of coal for fuel and freight. Thus, the decades of regional railroad wars created a vast oversupply of trackage, coal, and coal operators. As the major railroads consolidated into a single ownership structure, they sought to extricate themselves from their old regional empires. Yet they could not easily abandon those regions with their extensive investments in tracks, spurs, sources of coal, freight, customers, and infrastructure. Starting in 1900, railroad managers published freight rates that kept all their old coal mining regions in business. They began shifting the bulk of the coal business to West Virginia and to Somerset County, Pennsylvania, but they maintained Central Pennsylvania as an increasingly but never totally marginalized coalfield. In this period, from roughly 1895 to 1900, the UMWA’s joint conferences with coal operators would help match wages to production and transportation costs and put a damper on competition. In this sense, the shift to West Virginia and Somerset County created less of an existential threat to the UMWA and Central Pennsylvania and >>

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to pressure holdout companies, crowned by the creative leadership of Mary Harris “Mother” Jones and the conservative stewardship of new UMWA President John Mitchell. At the same time, coal operators began to solidify their organization in the Seaboard Coal Association, to consider preemptive raises in order to forestall strikes, and to limit such increases to the bare minimum. In 1899 the coal miners made agreements with an association made up of most coal operators serving the East Coast. *

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In June 1895 old hopes of cementing a single district—from Virginia to Central Pennsylvania—of all mines shipping soft coal to the Eastern Seaboard were tempered by an investigative trip that R. A. Kinsloe, the Pennsylvania Grit’s soft coal columnist, took to West Virginia. In that trip he gained a sense of what direct corporate control of a coalfield truly meant. In late spring 1895, thirty-two of the thirty-eight West Virginia coal operators pushed their miners out on strike. Nevertheless, the operators supported the miners they had just encouraged to drop their tools, allowed them to suspend rent payments for company houses, and even welcomed Kinsloe and the UMWA activists who accompanied him. In an extended visit of several weeks, Kinsloe interviewed coal operators as well as railroad men and coal miners. The coal miners of these thirty-two operators were pawns in a larger battle, he reported. The larger battle was that between the receivers of the now-bankrupt Norfolk & Western Railroad Company and the thirty-two so-called “independent” coal operators along its lines. The problem of railroad power was more pronounced in West Virginia than in the Midwest or Central Pennsylvania. In West Virginia the railroad owned the coal lands and it owned six of the thirty-eight area coal companies outright. All coal operators in the region sold their product through a single entity, the Flat Top Land Association, also controlled by the N&W, which charged $.01/ton for inspection of all coal so as to build West Virginia’s reputation for coal quality.4 Independent operators paid an additional $.10/ton royalty to the land company. The N&W had caused the current troubles when it raised the proportion of the final selling price for coal that went to its freight rates. It thus lowered the net price received by operators for coal at the mine. The selling price of coal was out of the N&W’s control. It was defined by interregional competition between West Virginia, Maryland, and Central Pennsylvania. The price of coal in eastern markets served by those regions stayed the same, but the price of transportation on the N&W went up. Therefore, the portion of the price of coal that went to the coal operators at the mine went down. The coal

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significantly longer haul to market. Toward the end of the strike that July, the thirty-two independent coal operators reached an agreement with the Norfolk & Western to accept the lower prices for coal and to pay for the decrease by making lower wages for coal miners uniform throughout the district. They also agreed to continue such practices as paying coal miners by the ever-expanding “two-ton” wagon instead of by the actual weight, docking pay for supposed impurities in the coal at the boss’s discretion, and use of company store expenditures to determine levels of individual production. The alliance between the coal miners and the independent coal operators had been a short one.10 The N&W’s role in the region created additional problems for the coal miners. Unlike older railroads, with at least an original purpose of serving their regions buried somewhere in their organizational DNA, the Norfolk & Western’s revenue since the beginning of its corporate life had come from extracting the region’s natural resources from lands that it owned—by transporting, selling, and brokering lumber and coal.11 The miners’ situation was made all the more dire by the Chesapeake & Ohio’s decision to respond to the N&W’s move by further lowering its freight rates for coal, thus lowering the prices for coal mined along its lines. The Engineering and Mining Journal wondered at the folly of the railroad managers in failing to heed the lesson of the Norfolk & Western’s recent bankruptcy and speculated that the C&O had need of short-term tonnage figures or ready money to show its investors.12 At the end of September 1895, Kinsloe returned his attention to Central Pennsylvania. While in the past Kinsloe had taken similar opportunities to argue that the coal miners deserved a wage increase, to call for organization, or to warn of the need for a coordinated effort to raise coal prices throughout the Eastern Seaboard, now he reported only current facts: the coal miners of Central Pennsylvania were destitute. The onset of cold weather would only make things worse. Bell, Lewis & Yates sparked a strike nevertheless when it lowered its wages by an additional $.05/ton. The tireless William B. Wilson came to speak to the men, and in a series of mass meetings they voted to send a circular to all area mines to gauge sentiment toward demanding an increase.13 Kinsloe’s column reporting Wilson’s actions gave little comfort to activists, however; Kinsloe argued not for renewed organization but focused instead on the utter poverty of the coal miners and the coming end of local townspeople’s ability to help them. Local businessmen and coal miner activists set up a commissary to provide food to the miners and their families. Individual coal miners reached the end of the credit they could get and individual businessmen reached the end of the credit they could give. Those coal miners

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Central Pennsylvania operators, that it did not contemplate any strikes or suspension, and finally that it would benefit the railroads and business of the region. In sum, “It is intensely practical, and contemplates putting the coal business in all the eastern districts in such shape that railways will earn more, operators get better prices and miners earn greater wages.”15 *

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The only plan to raise wages or coal prices in fall and winter 1895–1896 emerged from the region’s coal operators. It seems likely that this was what Kinsloe had in mind when making his earlier prediction. Through the fall of 1895, operators in Central Pennsylvania had also been engaged in a running battle over how best to address labor relations. William D. Kelly, president of the Clearfield Bituminous Coal Company, initially wrote to fellow operator Rembrandt Peale in August 1895 to ask his opinion on the subject and to suggest that the Central Pennsylvania operators offer their miners a $.05 increase. He thought that he was writing in confidence to a sympathetic party. Peale initially disagreed in a circumspect letter on the subject. But as Peale began to spread news of Kelly’s efforts to other operators and railroad executives, these efforts began to take on implications that seemed more dangerous than speculative. The same men who had built the Beech Creek Railroad owned Kelly’s Clearfield Bituminous Coal Company, and it remained the largest coal mining company on the lines of that road. The CBC Company had prospered through its close relationship to the Beech Creek Railroad. It now supplied much of the coal for the New York Central’s locomotives and benefited from preferential freight rates and access to coal cars from the Vanderbilt railroad. Kelly’s reasoning was straightforward: The miners believed that “they should receive an increase” and that therefore the operators should preempt any labor conflict with a voluntary offer of a $.05 raise by some definite date, either 1 October 1895 or 1 January 1896 with the promise of another increase the following year. If they failed to do so and the coal miners went out on strike it didn’t matter if the miners lost or won—they could still stop all shipments from the region and wreak great damage on coal operators and the railroad alike.16 In disagreeing, Rembrandt Peale translated Kelly’s argument into the old formula in which coal miner wage increases depended entirely upon and followed coal prices. He had put the question to coal miners along the Beech Creek railroad, he said, and though all of them followed the issue with keen interest, “They seem to be aware that the price of coal is not advancing, and

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New York Central, and Cornelius Vanderbilt, chairman of the board of the New York Central, and grandson and namesake of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt—citing John Magee as his source of information. In the absence of a rise in retail coal prices, any wage increase for the coal miners would have to come out of the railroad freight rates. Kelly’s plan seemed therefore to target the railroads. When Vanderbilt confronted Kelly about the story a few days later, Kelly denied it. As well he might! By this time his suggestions on the subject had been exaggerated by the sense of anxiety among coal operators and large-scale businessmen such as Vanderbilt. C. C. Clarke himself, after later examining the original letters, concluded that Kelly’s actual suggestions were far more innocuous than they had been represented to be. At that point, John Magee wrote Clarke and backed off from his earlier claims of Kelly’s malfeasance.19 Taken together, this set of correspondence also suggests another reason why Peale had been so willing to let Kelly feel the heat from John Magee and from Vanderbilt himself, a reason that should underline skepticism that East Coast coal operators were just one big unhappy family. Kelly, he wrote to John Magee, had gone outside the Beech Creek community of interests to inquire of the smaller-scale Pennsylvania Railroad coal operators (excluding Berwind, White) if they would be interested in raising wages as well. Peale advised the younger Magee not to make the same mistake. He was not to speak freely with interests (including Berwind, White) outside the Beech Creek region.20 Kelly was furious with Peale’s “false” statements and “malicious” choice to share the contents of his letters. Peale wrote back that he was justified in sharing the letters. Kelly, he knew, had already begun to discuss the matter with operators along the lines of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Beech Creek Railroad’s primary competitor. Given that, he wrote, “I cannot see that you have against me any ground for complaint, or that there is palliation or excuse for your ill-bred attack.”21 But Kelly’s efforts turned out to be merely premature. Before many months had passed, in early 1896 coal operators all along the East Coast would offer precisely the increase that he had so tentatively suggested. As early as 5 October 1895, John Magee’s primary coal agent in New York, David Duncan, informed him that the demand for coal was matching supply, and that if miners’ wages were raised most consumers would pay the advance (except the Navy). Railroad officials on the New York Central had come to a similar conclusion and announced a freight rate increase to take place as of 1 April 1896. Magee instructed Duncan to begin bidding on spring contracts that took into account a $.05 raise for coal miners and a $.10 increase in total freight rates per ton.22

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a scale of prices. In order to eliminate the special deals with railroad freight agents that had so often destroyed such efforts at coordination, the Association decided that all prices for coal sales were now to be made not as delivered at their final destination and not at the tipple, but as delivered at major transshipment points. Customers were to make their own arrangements for shipping from those points.27 The key issue was to make the freight rates, profits, and wages transparent. They wished to limit the endless secret jiggering of final prices based on individual rates to individual destinations. The smaller-scale operators who shipped along the PARR (in Berwind’s region) agreed, with some armtwisting, to pool all their sales under a single corporate entity (much as the West Virginia operators had been forced to do through the N&W Railroad). In less than a month the operators’ organization signaled their awareness of a key constituency in the success of their organization: the coal miners. They voluntarily agreed to raise all wages by 12 percent, from $.40 to $.45/gross ton, thus by their formula also increasing the price received by each operator from $.69 to $.75/ton.28 But the wage increase was not merely voluntary. Even in the midst of this general depression, activists all through the East Coast coal regions had continued to agitate on a range of issues from abolition of the company store and deadwork, to increased wages, to uniformity for the minority of miners who used the relatively new undercutting machines rather than picks. Mine superintendent S. B. Elliott reported correspondence intercepted from UMWA officer and now Independent Order of the Knights of Labor organizer William B. Wilson. Elliott warned of the consequences of any increase that came after intervention by the IOKOL: Any seeming success would lead to revival of the Knights and all that they implied. Like Kelly, he recommended a preemptive raise.29 Operators such as Elliott were tired of strikes, of the expense and nasty confrontational nature of labor relations. Only recently Elliott had been forced by a garbled telephone conversation to fight a draining battle over a single penny in the mining rates. After his firm had increased the rate paid to the miners who worked with mining machines to $.23/ton, he had spoken to Lucius W. Robinson, superintendent of the R&P mines, about making the wage uniform through the district. Unfortunately, Robinson had misheard him and had raised wages to twenty-two cents. When the miners discovered the discrepancy and demanded that Robinson pay the higher rate, Robinson instead insisted that Elliott’s company, dependent on his R&P for railroad transportation, lower its rate instead. The coal miners didn’t call him Lucius W. “Low Wage” Robinson for nothing!30 Rather than battle the miners

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this reason the New England railroads insisted to their Central Pennsylvania suppliers on receiving the same price for locomotive fuel coal as the New York Central. Therefore, Yates suggested, the New York Central would actually benefit from paying higher fuel prices, since doing so would allow Central Pennsylvania operators to charge New England railroads more for coal, and higher prices to the New England railroads would translate into higher coal freight rates for the New York Central.36 His suggestion fell on deaf ears. In February 1897 the Bituminous Coal Association dissolved.37 *

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Even as operator-driven pooling failed in Central Pennsylvania, Midwestern coal miners began to use the UMWA as a means of regulation. They offered to share any gains with the deeply frustrated ranks of small-scale operators and—a key concession—to adjust wages as railroad managers had formerly adjusted freight rates, so as to make certain all operators could remain in business. UMWA leaders and coal operators were learning to work within the world the merging railroads had made. Coal operators had long been dependent on special freight rate “differentials” that allowed them to ship despite a longer distance to market, thinner seams, or any number of circumstances.38 While the term “differential” originally referred to special railroad freight rates for mines that had higher costs, in the 1890s it also referred to lower wages granted by the UMWA, and for the same reason. In the great Midwestern strike of 1897, coal miners and operators created a “basis” system that adjusted wage differentials to fit within the freight rate system. In this important sense, the UMWA succeeded by partially taking over a function of railroad freight agents. The union signed contracts in which the coal miners absorbed many of the risks of doing business, and in which they absorbed some of the competitive disadvantages into wages. At the same time, they promised to at least harass any operator who failed to pay the agreed-upon scale. In their rhetoric, they demanded for miners only what coal operators themselves (and railroad executives) demanded: a limit on commerce such that they could gain at least a bare subsistence—a living wage.39 In the Midwest, these concessions were decisive. In 1897–1898, the coal miners offered a solution to operators sorely in need of one. Leading Midwestern coal operators exhausted by decades of economic depression, stubborn strikes, and overcompetition supported the miners in the strike and negotiated a settlement with UMWA officers that included yearly joint conferences between operators and union officials. Leading operators and union leaders in the region had fought for such an outcome since the early 1880s but had failed,

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Granger laws had regulated the regional railroads during the crucial years between 1877 when their constitutionality was upheld in Munn v. Illinois, and October 1886 when they were invalidated by the Wabash case (and soon after were superseded by the Interstate Commerce Act) held Midwestern coal roads back from building their corporate strategies around manipulation of the coal industry, as in the East.40 Despite its failure to organize every coal mine in the country, the UMWA still acted as a regional force for order in the Midwest. It dampened intraregional competition, stabilizing, for example, the ruinous battle between northern and southern Illinois coal operators for the Chicago market. It blunted local coal miner radicalism, negotiated complex wage bases that would allow all coal mines then in business to remain in business, and opened a front against corporate competitors to the East. This last point is important. The old notion of the coal industry as a national entity in which the union had to organize all coal mines or none at all retained a vestigial hold on the imagination of coal operators. Furthermore, eastern competition was not entirely imaginary. Western Pennsylvania coalfields shipped to the Midwest, and it was just at this time that West Virginian coal was beginning to come west in quantity. Coal operators controlled by larger corporations such as those that supplied gas works or steel mills still refused to join joint conferences except to explain why wages ought to go lower. Corporate-dominated coalfields such as West Virginia remained largely impervious to organization. The national UMWA organization at this time had little presence outside the Midwestern freight district. In the Midwest in 1897, a critical mass of coal operators made a separate peace with coal miners and unionism. *

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By that time at least one issue was settled in favor of the operators: Republican William McKinley had won the presidency. Just as important, he soundly defeated William Jennings Bryan and his Populist (“Fusion”) Party. The prospect of a Bryan victory had united operators and other businessmen previously divided between the two parties. By mid-summer 1896, even loyal Democrat George Magee wrote to Republican Marcus Hanna to offer his support.41 He ordered two thousand copies of a sound money pamphlet to be distributed to railroad employees and sent it to other railroad men so that they might do the same. Longtime Magee lieutenant Anton Hardt ordered five hundred similar pamphlets in Swedish for distribution to coal miners who spoke that language—carefully obscuring the role the company had played in making them available.42 Attorney George Baer, soon to

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claimed fraud. After a lunch break, longtime Central Pennsylvania leader Thomas A. Bradley was elected to the chair by acclamation.47 Still, Patrick Dolan of District 5 announced to his home convention in Pittsburgh that the new Central Pennsylvania organization was only “temporary” and soon would be attached to the national organization through the Western Pennsylvania district. Nevertheless, Central Pennsylvania leader George Harris was elected president of District 2 and put on the national union’s payroll. He began to tramp the district, speaking to mass meetings, and signing up UMWA members.48 A few months later, in February 1898 the Central Pennsylvania men held another convention and made their independence clear. Altoona businessmen welcomed the convention with special sales, assurances of strictly union-made goods, and a ten-page promotional pamphlet with a map and lists of hotels, stores, and churches.49 The delegates reelected Harris president and made the old Central Pennsylvania activist James Killduff secretary. Killduff, in his mid-forties, was a longtime resident who had begun mining at age twelve.50 He announced a joint meeting for 22 March with area operators. Whether or not the operators chose to meet with them, there was to be a district convention of miners in any case. On the appointed day, fifty-one delegates met for two days. Only one operator came to meet them. The miners adjourned after calling again for the operators to meet with them as of 5 April, with all men to prepare to cease work as of 9 April 1898 unless otherwise notified by their officers.51 The UMWA national organization secretary reported that the Pennsylvania Railroad was actively pressuring operators along its tracks to meet with the coal miners and thus avoid a strike costly for itself as well as the coal operators. But only two operators came to the meeting. The convention passed a resolution authorizing the District Executive Board to meet with area operators when satisfied that a majority was willing to negotiate and in the meantime to continue organizing. When they judged the time to be right, they were authorized to call a strike over the entire Eastern Seaboard bituminous coal region, from Tazwell County in Virginia to Tioga County in Northern Pennsylvania. This resolution was not intended to prevent miners from striking over local issues, however; in fact, the convention specifically urged the men at one mine, in Patton, Pennsylvania, to continue their ongoing battle over working conditions.52 UMWA victories at the national level and the local achievements of the men in places such as Patton, Barnesboro, and Spangler sparked a brief resurgence of organization in Central Pennsylvania, even as Central Pennsylvania leaders abandoned efforts to spread their district down to Virginia.53 James Killduff reported several mass meetings in mining towns throughout

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Evans arrived in Central Pennsylvania to help organize.57 The UMWA also sent national organizer Ed McKay. In March 1899, George Harris announced the District 2 state convention and urged Central Pennsylvania men to elect delegates and pay their dues.58 In sending national support and organizers with national-level experience, UMWA leaders did not argue that Central Pennsylvania lacked native ability or motivation but that they were up against a problem that required a formal connection with the national union. As shown in their earlier conventions at Altoona and invigorating recent local battles, the miners in Central Pennsylvania knew well how to organize themselves and to make their wishes known. As Evans acknowledged after a few weeks in the region, Central Pennsylvania boasted many gifted activists and good spirit, and the mine committees in the region looked as if they would send a strong set of delegates to the upcoming District 2 convention. But he also made an argument that had become an article of faith among the Midwestern UMWA leaders: Local activists could all too easily sap organizational strength, bring legal persecution, erode public support, and prevent formal union leaders from making lasting agreements with operators. He warned that in newly organized places the urge to right old wrongs was often too strong and that the coal miners in Central Pennsylvania ought to be cautious and careful when considering battles over small-scale grievances. Lasting agreements were his main priority.59 Unfortunately, Central Pennsylvania’s organizational spirit as shown in the UMWA’s District 2 convention held in March 1899 was a disappointment. Only fifteen delegates came. Eight were sent by local committees. Three of the total were union officers supported by the national UMWA: George Harris, James Killduff, and Chris Evans. One was Ed McKay, the national organizer. Thomas Haggerty came from the R&P’s mines in Central Pennsylvania. Finally, there were two men from Tioga County in Northern Central Pennsylvania: William B. Wilson and Richard Gilbert, secretary of Wilson’s local union. The delegates’ first act was to shift the meeting from the Freeman’s Hall to the dining room of the Tyrone Hotel for “tea.” There they debated their next moves. Wilson was drafted by a vote of eight to seven to become the new president of the district. Despite their small numbers, those fifteen activists took bold steps. Most significantly, they declared that any miner not receiving the district scale of $.45/gross ton by 1 April 1899 should strike.60 They focused on narrow goals that lay just barely beyond purely local grievances. They wished to equalize working conditions throughout the Central Pennsylvania district, to create a stable organizational link between

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The operators needed to coordinate their response to the miners so as to give enough to avoid a strike and no more, he argued. Just as the coal miners had fought to stop the rolling decreases to the lowest common denominator in the Panic of 1893, so Kerr wanted to avoid rolling increases as the price of coal rose. In other words, he wished to make an agreement with coal miners in a boom time in order to keep wages down. The Beech Creek operators ought to meet in secret to coordinate strategy, he argued, so as to make their response uniform and avoid a strike by area miners, and to avoid any additional demands for further wage increases should the price of coal continue to rise. He anticipated another demand for an increase to $.50/ton as of 1 June.64 With the rise in prices and demand for soft coal, coal operators had every reason to avoid losing productive capacity to strikes, but at the same time an equal motivation to defeat union demands that workers share any more than the bare minimum of their shaky new prosperity. For by spring 1899, operators finally had begun to receive their long-hoped-for increase in coal prices and as the year wore on, to encounter unprecedented restraint from the railroads. As opposed to previous years, when customers had successfully insisted on prices ranging down below the cost of production (roughly $.60/ton, or in cases of supply coal for railroads, even lower at times), operators began to quote prices as high as $.80 at the mines.65 No operator wished to endanger the newly steady flow of coal to market nor the surge of cash back to their coffers. Kerr’s efforts to steady his relationship to his miners in coordination with his fellow operators were undermined at the end of May 1899 by Berwind, White’s surprise announcement of another wage increase for its workers. He lamented the timing of the announcement: Just when he had managed to convince his miners that the small-scale Beech Creek operators could not possibly raise wages until the Maryland miners had been brought up to the same level; just when he had persuaded them that in any case, their demands should be postponed until the end of the year; just when he had convinced them that any strike should in all fairness include at least the Central Pennsylvania miners along the PARR; just when he had done all this, Berwind, White announced its preemptive “voluntary” increase in wages to $.50/ton, the same amount demanded by the union, to take effect as of 1 June, the same date demanded by the union. Kerr expected to avoid a strike, but in order to do so he would undoubtedly have to match the Berwinds: “[T]here is a good bit of agitation,” he wrote, “and lack of cohesion among the operators has made it worse.”66 In a meeting held on 30 May 1899 almost all Central Pennsylvania operators conceded the advance to $.50/ton.67 A copy of the agreement circulated

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when local activists sponsored a dance, they were unable to stop the revelry for speeches. Said one bold dancer: “Ladies and Gentlemen: The speaking is going to start at once. The old people can go and hear the speaker and the young people can keep on dancing.” And they did.72 *

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The next major shift in coal miner unionism took place in Northern Central Pennsylvania. There, in Tioga County, organizers such as Thomas Haggerty and William B. Wilson refined old tactics of community unionism such as marches and mass meetings into tools to support the UMWA’s strategic objectives. Mother Jones found a needed new source of strength for the UMWA by reinventing old forms of women’s activism. As of June, the only operator holding itself aloof from the UMWA’s demands in the Central Pennsylvania region (other than R&P) was the Erie Railroad, owner of two mines in Tioga County. At the Erie’s Arnot and Blossburg mines, wages remained at $.40/ton and managers refused to meet with union representatives. The stakes were high at the Erie’s mines. Just as R&P’s mines were physically in Central Pennsylvania but pointed west toward the Midwestern operators who had already signed contracts with the UMWA, so the Erie’s mines were physically located in Central Pennsylvania but pointed east, toward the anthracite region and the companies that had destroyed all formal unionism in their region in the 1870s. Far from being chaotic, the anthracite railroad companies, of which the Erie was one, had established a comfortable cartel. Had the Erie recognized the UMWA in Central Pennsylvania, it would have undermined its absolute refusal to do so in Eastern Pennsylvania anthracite. On 12 June, only two days after the R&P men called their strike, the Erie men in Blossburg struck. Erie miners a few miles away at the older Morris Run mine refused to come out. They remained at work through July and into August. In August, newly minted UMWA National Organizer Thomas Haggerty came to Tioga and added a level of intensity and persistence to an old tactic of community unionism in order to get the Morris Run men to strike. For four days in a row he led a group of marchers with a band on the two-hour walk from Blossburg to the Morris Run mine in the town of Arnot. Each day, at 3:00 a.m. they woke the village up with patriotic songs. For three days the men refused to join. On the fourth day, the four hundred miners agreed to come out and fell in behind the marchers for the walk back to Blossburg. But by September 1899 the strikers had begun to waver in their commitment to the strike. In terms of local goals and local resources, they had

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an activist in 1894, in Coxey’s Army, doing what was recognizably “women’s work.” She foraged for food and scouted ahead for resting places.74 In the great Midwestern coal miners’ strike of 1897, she did similar work, this time for the UMWA. She proved talented at persuading farmers to donate food and supplies to the men in “Camp Determination” as they besieged the Western Pennsylvania mines of William A. DeArmitt’s New York Gas Works. DeArmitt had long been the most notable holdout of all the operators, and some longtime observers blamed him for the earlier collapse of the joint convention system.75 In her many battles, Jones honed a talent for oratory and for motivating workers and their families.76 But on her arrival in Tioga, Mother Jones must be credited with radically refining an old source of strength for the union. There she showed the depths of her tactical brilliance and the extent of her value as an organizer. After learning that Wilson and Jones were on their way to join him, Haggerty had prepared a reception. He called for a mass meeting on the coming Sunday, 1 October. However, whereas company managers were willing to allow use of the Blossburg Opera House for meetings to call off the strike, they were not willing to allow its use to keep the strike going. Denied a meeting place in town, the group assembled in a park on the outskirts. At the meeting, the women stood in the back with their children while the men stood in front in a group. Jones addressed them as a whole and separately. Rhetorically, she put her case in the form of a temperance rally: They had taken the “pledge” to carry the strike through to victory, she insisted. They should keep their word and they should welcome back any sinners who wished to return to the ranks of the righteous. In delivering this first message to the entire assembly, Jones was effective but unable to change any minds. She was a talented, passionate, and persuasive speaker, and as a woman she was freer to use inflammatory rhetoric. Male leaders such as Wilson were subject to arrest for conspiracy and intimidation for such talk. Despite her best efforts, however, the men merely “shuffled their feet.” It was a few of the women to the rear of the crowd, babies in their arms, who offered a first, meager response to Mary Harris Jones’s challenge. It cost them little. What, after all, were they going to do about it? The women had no vote in the meeting.77 In delivering a second message, one now directed solely to the women, Jones boldly built on their tepid response: She asked them to act on their own. Up to this point women’s activism had seemed the antithesis of responsible unionism. Women had always been marginal battlers, picketers who operated around the edges of male confrontation. Jones saw the women as a decisive tactical force in their own right. In Tioga, the women now engaged in direct action that would have brought arrests

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Pennsylvania devised an assault on the Tioga County operators from a new angle. They insisted to the operators that all mines in the region, from Tioga in the northern part of the region to Johnstown in the south—including the Erie—be paid—as most already were—at the uniform price of $.50/gross ton. The coal miners, in other words, decided to hold the operators responsible for enforcing unanimity in their own ranks. If not conceded this by the end of the year, the Clearfield men would consider their contract with the rest of the district operators to be void and would strike. In this prosperous time of long-awaited good prices and strong demand, a strike was the last thing the Central Pennsylvania operators wished to see. Central Pennsylvania operators sent a committee to wait upon the Erie, the one company in North Central Pennsylvania continuing to hold out for a lower rate, even as the price of coal had increased by over a dollar and freight rates remained steady. In mid-January 1900, the Berwind, White Company announced its third raise in less than a year, to take place as of 1st April that year.81 Berwind, White led the way because it wished to avoid any expensive cessation in production, but also to avoid recognizing the union. Although its announcement coincided with the demands of the union, Edward Berwind wrote in a confidential letter, “[W]e never have accepted any of the invitations” to be part of joint conventions with the miners’ union.82 On 15 February the miners reached an agreement with the Erie Company, and the towns of Blossburg and Arnot held a huge party with bands, fireworks, and (eventually) beer taken from a boxcar. Businessmen gave out food and drink. Women and children were given rides home in the evening. The men drank and partied the entire night. They styled it a farewell party for Mother Jones. This time they were granted use of the Blossburg Opera House. (Part of the final agreement was that they be allowed to use the Opera House as a meeting hall.) Two thousand men, women, and children assembled in Arnot and re-created in the cold the long march from one town to the other, led again by bands, but this time with rockets flying overhead and in full triumph. The parade stretched more than half a mile down the road. In March 1900, a month after the settlement with the Tioga men, in joint convention with all Central Pennsylvania coal operators (save Berwind, White), the UMWA negotiated a raise, effective 1st April, to the same level as that offered by Berwind, White, namely, $.60/ton. The Pennsylvania Grit editors agreed that Berwind, White had offered the advance voluntarily, but argued that although their men were unorganized, the raise was still a result of the UMWA’s success with other operators in the region.83 Prior to Arnot, Mother Jones’s virtues were that she had become a talented, reliable organizer and that she was cheap. There is no record that she was on

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Consolidation was possible because so many railroads had gone bankrupt in the previous few years. The very fact that they were available for sale seemed evidence to Pennsylvania Railroad manager John B. Thayer that freight prices had been too low. “It seems to me,” he said, “to be an admirable illustration that these rates were below the cost of living.”85 The railroads had done more than merely consolidate. Within a year after making their new ownership arrangements, they made a major change in the eastern bituminous railroad/coal system. They were aided by key bankruptcies that allowed the New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroad to take over management of competitors. New bankruptcy rules allowed railroads to replace debt with nonvoting stock, thus lowering fixed costs by an average of roughly 27 percent and giving investment bankers a more significant say in their operations.86 When the Norfolk & Western went bankrupt following the coal miners’ strike of 1895, for example, it lowered its fixed costs from roughly $3.2 million per year to roughly $2.2 million per year.87 Coordinating their efforts, railroad managers and investment bankers established a system of eastern bituminous coal transportation rates.88 In 1899, Central Pennsylvania coal operators had a $.15/ton advantage over West Virginia on the total cost to ship via railroad to ports in, respectively, Philadelphia and Hampton Roads, Virginia. As of 1900, railroad managers began to raise freight rates, preserving the $.15 differential, and finally doing away with special rates for individual contracts. Freight rates rose by roughly 25 percent over the next few years. In 1900 it cost a flat $1.00/ton to ship coal from Central Pennsylvania mines to Philadelphia ports, and $1.15 from West Virginia mines to Virginia ports. In 1901 it rose by $.10 to $1.10 and $1.25, in 1903 to $1.20 and $1.35, and in 1907 to $1.25 and $1.40. This new policy of standardized rates balanced out the various advantages of each coal-producing region to keep each of them in business. When coal operators in Central Pennsylvania demanded lower rates for their far shorter haul to market, railroad managers simply insisted that they were committed to the $.15 differential, and if forced to lower rates in the North they would lower them in the South to match. Railroad and Interstate Commerce Commission policy froze these differentials in place through the Great Depression of the 1930s.89 The differentials in freight costs had little or nothing to do with the actual costs of transportation. Railroad managers set freight costs according to the need to keep each coal region in business. The Interstate Commerce Commission refused, even after its major coal freight rate investigations in 1907 and 1928, to make any significant changes to the system as it had evolved up through the turn of the century. To do so, it argued, would be to disrupt the entire system of coal production and distribution.90

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to get a “carload of wood” (in reality a few sticks of firewood) delivered to their mine, toss the wood by the side of the track, and fill the now-empty railroad car with coal. Because operators for once felt confident that they could sell every ton that they could get to market at a premium, they shipped whenever possible without contracts, and tried to sell on the now-lucrative spot market. They tied up coal cars, using them to store coal on side tracks for the highest bidder.92 Since the Interstate Commerce Act prohibited discrimination by shippers in the same region, the railroad was required to divide its cars equally. Railroad managers and coal operators testified before the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1906 that as demand for coal increased, it became simply impossible to send sufficient railroad cars over the mountain to Central Pennsylvania to distribute according to the levels demanded by coal operators. As one railroad manager testified, the railroads lacked the capacity to anticipate precisely how many cars it would have on hand on any given day: “We do not know every day until we have it.” How, asked the Commission, did he arrive at the proper number of cars to have available? “It arrives itself,” he replied.93 Berwind, White could never get enough cars to service its expanding business. The problem had nothing to do with its relationship with the Pennsylvania Railroad. There were too many coal mines in the area with whom it shared a limited car supply. The Pennsylvania Railroad had recently begun to ration its cars according to secret ratings for each mine. Yet this new standard operating procedure assumed stable levels of demand in the region. In 1902, however, the problems inherent in this policy overwhelmed the capacity of the railroad and the men who ran it. “Perhaps,” said PARR executive Thayer, “we are suffering now for some of our sins.”94 In particular, the Berwind, White Coal Company benefited more from steady business than from boom and bust. The bulk of its revenues came from the hard-to-service trade of ocean-going steamers. Through good coal, good salesmanship at key moments, and shrewd investments in port facilities, Berwind, White had become the dominant supplier of such customers. With their tight schedules and need for speed, ocean-going steamers demanded immediate delivery of consistently high-quality coal, without fail. Of the eastern bituminous coal operators, only Berwind, White had such a long-standing capacity to make long-term contracts, at set prices, and at precisely set times of delivery. In order to maintain this trade, Berwind, White enforced a company policy of always fulfilling its contracts even if it had to buy coal at high prices during strikes, even from as far off as Great Britain. The other coal companies in the region sold to a somewhat different market.

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Because the railroad managers did not count such “private” cars against a company’s total share of regional cars, Berwind, White now had a substantial advantage on the market. In addition, senior managers regularly telegraphed car masters to hold back hundreds of cars in case of further demand from Berwind, White. The crisis of 1902 made more noticeable an issue that had long been a problem. The PARR didn’t have enough cars to service the trade. The major coal companies needed private cars to fill big orders and to make deadlines, admitted W. W. Atterbury, general manager of Pennsylvania Railroad. And during the crisis, coal cars were unavailable at any price.98 Consolidation of the East Coast railroad industry confirmed the system of massively capitalized coal companies in West Virginia and Somerset County, Pennsylvania, with privileged access to transportation rates and facilities, and smaller coal companies that caught cars and short-term sales contracts only as they could. At the turn of the century, the smaller-scale operators of Central Pennsylvania became the reserve army of coal. They served more marginal customers, all-rail traffic to points north and east, and those who owned their own railroad cars. They maintained skeletal operations most of the time and increased production when demand spiked. In contrast to the days when its development had been a major strategic goal of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Central Pennsylvania became more of an outlying coal-producing region. West Virginia and Somerset County, Pennsylvania, as the new home of most of the Berwind, White Company’s mines, had taken its place as the special favorite of the railroads. *

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After the boom in the first years of the century, West Virginia’s price advantage of cheaper production costs and cheaper transportation began to bite. Coal operators in Central Pennsylvania became more and more radical in their efforts to break the UMWA’s organization. They hired private guards, established de facto martial law, and engaged in violent battles that rivaled anything in West Virginia. By then, however, the UMWA was part of the culture and history of Central Pennsylvania.99 Central Pennsylvania, so precariously balanced between the New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroad, was the relatively noncorporate entering wedge to the Eastern Seaboard bituminous region, and in the event it also turned out to contain the key to anthracite and a truly national presence for the UMWA in the first few years of the 1900s. In Central Pennsylvania, UMWA leaders learned to finesse those corporations such as the Erie and Berwind, White that they could not directly conquer. They pressured groups of businessmen to bring their fellows to the table.

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the operators to grant a single, national wage and the inability of the market or the coal miners’ union to force operators out of business. They brought little order to the coal industry. To the contrary, their settlements recognized the essentially chaotic nature of the industry the railroads had created in battle with one another. Operators learned that unionism was an indelible part of running coal. Those few who thought otherwise came to recognize they could hardly opt out of the fight. The UMWA continued to engage in harassing, never definitive efforts to organize Berwind, White in its isolated Somerset County stronghold, in the increasingly marginal Maryland mines, and in the West Virginia railroad-controlled mines. These large operators began to invest in efficiencies of operation such as large-scale repression of civil liberties related to labor organizing and exclusive railroad facilities. By the end of the 1890s, as miners and operators refined their organizing efforts, railroad managers sought to elevate their enterprises above the fray. In 1897 the UMWA signed contracts with Midwestern operators. In 1899 it reached agreement with the Central Pennsylvania operators. In 1902 the coal miners took their case to the nation in a strike against corporate coal mines in the anthracite region. The unique context of the anthracite strike effectively provided answers to conservative arguments against unionism. (For example, because the anthracite industry was controlled by a loose cartel of railroad companies, it became difficult to claim that the miners’ union was an illegal conspiracy in restraint of competition.)103 The strike of 1902 brought the nascent Progressive Movement, and even President Theodore Roosevelt, into the fray.104 At the same moment, the Trunk Line railroads achieved a unified ownership structure and recentered the bituminous coal industry in West Virginia and Somerset County, Pennsylvania. The major railroads subsidized the West Virginia coalfields with lower freight rates, and made it into a low-wage, antiunion, anti-independent producer bastion. Nevertheless, this successful effort to shape the coal industry to the benefit of the railroads required the ongoing expenses of repression, the bribery of state officials, and fighting armed battles with union activists. It didn’t achieve order as much as it froze a disorderly system in place. That system included the overbuilding and subsidized long hauls that made sense for each individual regional railroad empire attempting to stretch to the Midwest. What made sense for budding regional empires, however, did not necessarily make sense for a national system. The regional railroad strategies so seemingly necessary in the Gilded Age would prove less and less sustainable over the next few decades. The federal government took over the railroads during World War I to solve problems of car distribution and wartime production schedules.

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the stories of work culture, coal operations, law, finance, and railroad management. Imagine Venn diagram circles of social, labor, legal, business, and institutional history. This book would occupy the oddly shaped shaded area where they all overlap. As social history it looks at small communities and everyday facts of life, but it does so in order to explore the relationships of these phenomena to economic roles and institutional impact rather than to explore ethnicity or kinship ties. As labor history, it explores the actions of miners and their families in mining communities, but its focus is on the continuum between cultural practices in communities and workplaces and formal institutions. As legal history, it explains the evolution of labor law, but it focuses on local precedents rather than appellate courts. Similarly, its political viewpoint is mostly local. It examines a period when the American bureaucratic state was just beginning to form and it touches only as relevant on issues such as electoral politics, regulation through the Interstate Commerce Act, national judicial precedent, and an activist president in Theodore Roosevelt. As business history, it examines the actions of business institutions and businessmen, but it is more centered on the creation, innovations, and agency of workers’ institutions than on private firms. It looks at the ways that workers’ institutions intersected with the actions and collective institutions of coal operators and railroads. It tells the history of the eastern bituminous coal region as it grew, of the ways that miners, operators, and railroad managers tried to organize it, and of the ways that they all fell short of their goals.4 In doing so it shows how they created their respective institutions in historical tension with each other. *

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This is a story of how the institutional search for order and simplicity created disorder and complexity. It’s as much a story of perseverance and muddling through as it is of triumph and order. The efforts of railroad managers to manage the coal industry mostly in service of their own interests created a backlash. Operators and coal miners organized themselves to limit the power of the railroads as well as to battle each other. There developed a three-way tug-of-war in which coal operators worked at times with railroad managers against coal miners, and at times with coal miners against railroads. Therefore, this is also a story of institutional invention and evolution. Coal miners created formal legalistic institutions in tension with cultural practices in the mines and mining towns. Operators banded together at times to push back against the railroads. Railroads created institutional innovations in order to control their own operations and employees, as well as to limit the power of entrepreneurs and workers along their lines.

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historians have noted these efforts of railroads and other businesses to free themselves from local constraints. But they have failed to fully credit the impact of the countervailing battles of unions, local boosters, and even lower-level railroad officials. Coal operator associations and coal miner unions combined at times to represent rural island communities against the tides of international finance as represented by railroad management. The eastern railroads sought to rise above regional competition with each other because of the need to find administrative order and efficiency within the railroad industry itself. But they also sought to do so in order to withdraw from the chaotic local systems of customers, freight, and fuel that they had helped to create, and that helped to create them.7 Yet the rise of the railroads above their original regional empires and obligations took decades, and their success was only partial. To put the Gilded Age stories of railroads and coal together is to explain the surprising resilience of local business’s claims on the day-to-day attention of railroad managers. The tether of local obligations changed the options available to railroad executives even as they sought to free themselves from its pull. Of course, local businesses would have had little access to markets without the railroads. Yet railroads both enabled local industry by providing transportation and limited the profitability of local industry by adjusting freight rates according to the market value of what they shipped. Local businessmen moved heaven and earth to bring railroads to their hometowns for good reasons. But they were also legitimately frustrated when railroad executives exercised their economic power. Railroads exercised monopoly power as the sole suppliers of transportation for many companies and communities. They also exercised their power as the sole or dominant customer and/ or de facto sales agent for coal. (Economists refer to the power of a single customer as “monopsony power.”) As a West Virginia State Tax Commission complained in 1884, townspeople in isolated areas battled their way through a predictable cycle in their relationship with the railroads. It began with fervent hope for the future, with local people and even local governments going into debt to finance local railroads. Few local railroads could survive without favorable long-term freight rates with the main lines. These spurs tended to go into bankruptcy and to be purchased for pennies on the dollar by the major railroads. Railroads set freight rates according to what the market would bear. They charged lower freight for low-value items and higher freights for higher-value items. But this put them in a position ripe for abuse. In this process, the main railroad company often adjusted its freight rates both to encourage shipments from favored producers and to absorb much of the profit of companies along their tracks. Or as an economist might say,

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negotiating separate secret freight rates for each delivery contract.15 Industrial consumers often purchased specific carloads of specific kinds of coal, at times from specific mines or even areas of a mine. Buyers took legal possession of the coal as soon as it left the mine. If it failed to arrive, they looked to the railroad for damages.16 Because purchasers so often bought specific cars rather than standardized grades and quantities, the coal supply never became as abstract or predictable as other commodities. On a day-to-day basis, the coal industry was often unreliable. Floods washed out train lines or burst canal banks. Snowfall stopped individual trains in their tracks. Coal cars snarled into “blockades” that clogged rail yards in Buffalo, New York, and Philadelphia.17 Industrial customers who attempted to stockpile their coal could find it frozen into massive blocks, susceptible only to crowbars and explosives. Conversely, coal stockpiles were known to spontaneously catch fire and smolder for long periods.18 During coal strikes or other supply crises, railroads reserved the right to use all coal then in transit for customers on their lines rather than deliver it. Railroad freight rate wars and intermittent truces caused freight rates, and therefore coal prices, to drop and leap unpredictably. Such wars continually caused problems for industries dependent on coal for continued production and early attempts at cost accounting. Railroad executives never solved their problems with freight car distribution in this era—a problem made worse in the coalfields, where the specialized cars used for this trade had to be shipped long distances empty. By the time railroad executives began to successfully extricate themselves from this situation in roughly 1900, they had created a coal industry addled by an overcapacity of 20 to 40 percent and most commonly described as “sick.”19 *

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Between the Civil War and the financial panic of 1873, railroad executives paid little attention to labor activism in the coal regions and scarcely bothered about profit levels. It was “harvest time all the year round” in this expansionary era.20 After 1873, a serious economic depression forced the railroad executives to examine more carefully the precise line between the prerogatives of local business and labor and their own prerogatives as a new class of large-scale capital. They sought to shape the strategic relationship between the widespread regions that produced their freight and the more concentrated urban areas that consumed it. They sought to subordinate local business needs and labor needs to railroad needs. Local boosters and labor activists lost battle after battle in strikes, court cases, and the very logic of the law as understood by local legal precedents and the U.S. Supreme Court. By 1875,

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“A Young Miner” —Lewis W. Hine

organize their own business associations to set prices and to bring order to the trade. They put aside absolute antiunionism in favor of a more practical, limited level of cooperation with coal miner associations. But by this time their goal was to exert an essentially negative power against the power of the railroads. Through the 1890s, coal miners and operators refined their efforts to create from informal practices, institutions that could give them a measure of predictability and power. Most important, they adjusted to the major economic fact of the age, as they saw it: All coal operators throughout the nation had to pay equal wages. Once any single coal operator gained a lower wage from his miners, all operators in the nation had to lower their wages to follow

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The history of what took place between the act of pulling coal from a dark hole in the ground and the act of tossing it into a white hot furnace helps to bring back the creative contributions of coal miners and coal operators in the story of America’s Gilded Age economy. The story of the Gilded Age and Progressive Eras was not only in the new, massive scale and pace enabled by coal as fuel. As business historians have shown, it was also in the capacity of railroad managers to create new administrative forms. But it was also in the durable new institutions and productive practices that coal miners and coal operators created in the shadow of these triumphs. It was in the day-to-day hustle to limit the power of the railroads. It was in the accumulated impact of past practices, accreted institutions, and sunk costs. To study the relationship of eastern coal mining and railroading is to study the relationship between two different but related industrial complexes. It is to understand the impact of coal miners and local businessmen (as well as railroad executives) in creating modern America. Mining unionism and the mining industry in the eastern coal regions developed alongside the developing railroads. This interindustry approach brings together two central industries that span the long Gilded Age, from the post–Civil War era to Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era. It shows the impact of evolving labor unionism and the limitations of managerial capitalism. To tell this story is also to examine the still-unresolved nature of America’s national conundrum: how to reconcile free markets with corporate power, and with the persistent demands of middling economic actors such as subordinate local businesses and labor unions. The old idea that markets and prices should be controlled by politics or moral considerations may have lost its formal place in economic theory in post–Civil War America, but it retained its informal persuasive power. Despite the wagging fingers of economists, Americans continued—and continue—to see wages and prices as problems of politics and fairness as well as the result of economic theory.21 Coal miners never quite abandoned labor unionism; they maintained work cultures and defended community norms; when the courts declared unionism illegal, they took their activism underground in the Knights of Labor and informal community and workplace groups. Slowly, they learned to build durable cultural practices and institutionalized resources. While local businessmen lost almost all market power to the railroads and labor unionism lost almost all its legal status, neither ever quite disappeared. As so often happens, in losing the battles, labor activists and local business also lost the war—mostly. Through the Gilded Age straight through to the Progressive Era, each lost battle left less to the question of whether largescale capital would rule over local business and labor—it would. But—and

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so penurious and precarious. (It would also eventually mean a lot to see friends Sarah Russell and Chuck Alley, and Mike and Chris Trotti live and thrive with babies in graduate school.) Graduate school can take a terrible toll on family life, in part because evidence suggests that one will spend years gathering debt without really showing progress toward any clearly definable goal. This is stressful. Nevertheless, Arabel and I married a month before I began graduate school. She experienced its ups and downs far more closely than is really fair. She listened on the days when it felt as if my research was going great, and on the days when it felt hopeless. Midway through the process she gave birth to our son Sam during a final exam period. (The professor for whom I was a teaching assistant delivered the exams for me to grade at our house at almost the same moment that the doctor delivered Sam at the hospital.) Arabel rightly contrasts the gestation period and the final product for baby and writing this book. Only a few years into the tenure evaluation process, our daughter Sophie joined us as well. Chapel Hill novelist Lee Smith once wrote: “Everybody I have ever known has lived on Stinson Street at one time or another. Stinson Street has constant parties, constant yard sales. . . . Oh no, I think. This is really my life, and I am really living it. Oh no. I remember thinking that then, on Stinson Street.” So did I. About halfway through graduate school we moved to Stinson Street and a wonderful, cheap, crooked, crumbly, dirt-brown, one-story duplex. It was a student neighborhood of small ranch-style houses on the last gravel road in Chapel Hill, just a few blocks from UNC’s campus. After a few months on Stinson Street Arabel and I got to know the landlords who owned the houses around us, and we convinced graduate school friends to move into the neighborhood. Mariola Espinosa, Fred Solt, Pam Lach, Ann Kaplan, Thomas Pegelew, and Brad Barker lived there. S. Parker Doig, Amanda McMillan and Stephen Pemberton were seldom far away. Gary Frost lived a block away. Sharon Kowalsky held Sam when he was only a few hours old, and many times thereafter. David Anderson wrote all night in the house across the street. Sam was the only baby on Stinson Street. We shared him. We had endless dinners and cookouts and yard sales, and pushed each other to finish our degrees. Through Uncle Steve and Aunt Cecile Arnold, Aunt Annie and Uncle Nick Saperstein passed on a dining room table that shrank for family, but opened up to fill our entire kitchen. We could seat twelve at a time, and more around the edges. We started a tradition of hosting potluck dinners attended by whoever we bumped into on any given Friday, and knowing that as long as we had a few loaves of Arabel’s challah we could feed just about any crowd. It’s a tradition from graduate school that we’ve kept here in Kutztown.

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recommendation. Cathleen Brown or Eric Johnson, Kevin or Patt McCloskey, Derek or Karise Mace, Andy Vogel or Kat Taylor, Amy or Matt Lynch Biniek, Jen or Jason Lanter, Kristin Bremer, Steve or Lisa Schnell, Mara Rockliff or Doug Souloff, Jakob Sewell or Erin Kraal, Kevin Kjos or Shelley Clausen. Molly MacDonald, Mayor Sandy Green, Brendan Strasser, Craig Koller, Brian or Nancy Koller, Peg Devlin, Di or Joe Piscitelli, and all the precocious children. Evan Summer took digital photographs of the Lewis Hine photos. In particular, I appreciate Derek Mace’s willingness to walk with me for the many miles it often took to talk through what I was trying to write, and for his friendship. Others will doubtless point out to me that I’ve forgotten to mention them, and I’m sorry to have left anyone out. But the point isn’t to mention everyone (it would be impossible). It’s to list enough people to show what a vibrant experience it is to live and work in Kutztown, and to argue that this book has benefited from being written here in this community. This book has also benefited from major institutions and from people who stay true to the goal of keeping history alive. The UNC Library system is a wonder of dedicated librarians. Every major library ought to have a school of information science attached to it, if only so that budding librarians can see how it’s done. I well remember watching a half a dozen library students getting a workout up and down the steps to the government document room, and the finale, with the grizzled documents chief holding up a massive volume, showing the key reference to the students behind him, and then in a practiced gesture letting it fall down on the counter and spinning it around in one smooth move, his finger resting in just the right spot: “I believe that this is what you’re looking for. National Archives should have it.” And the National Archives did, with a little digging. The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission gave me a Scholar in Residence grant (curated by the redoubtable Linda Shopes, since retired) that allowed me to page through the Fall Brook Railroad and Coal Company archives, one of the great, largely unused, untouched railroad collections in America. It has every fluttering receipt and telegram, and it’s largely uncatalogued except for the heroic efforts of John Stayer and Brett Reigh, two librarians who seem to have internalized the mission of preserving Pennsylvania’s past and making it available to those who care to delve. KU’s librarians, too see themselves as guardians of information systems, and pushers as well. Peg Devlin saw it as her job to get books off the shelves and into student hands. She’s since retired, but left a legacy. Bob Flatley, Ruth Perkins, Sue Czerny and Joanne Bucks helped me to find what I needed.

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of whom worked with Leon Fink and Jacquelyn Hall at UNC Chapel Hill, and both of whom fought for the health insurance for graduate students that allowed me to have a family when I attended school there. Dave Witwer organizes the Pennsylvania Labor History seminar that has also been of tremendous assistance to me as I worked through the final versions of the manuscript. Deborah Gershenowitz at NYU Press read this book with care, offered key suggestions, and presented it to the editors of the Culture, Labor, History series. The general editors, Dan Bender and Kim Phillips, read it and supported it. The two anonymous reviewers for the Press made innumerable suggestions that improved the book. I was sorry to see Deb move on to another job, but Clara Platter fortunately chose to pick up the project at NYU Press and has been unfailingly supportive in shepherding the book through to completion. Constance Grady has been a professional, constant presence throughout the process. As a finished product, this book makes sense, I think. I hope that its current form appears almost inevitable, almost as if it came together naturally. It didn’t. Its current form is the product of much labor, many supportive communities, and the need at some point to stop. Motivation to complete this book came from a series of family conversations around the dinner table about what it meant to be part of our extended clan, what we valued, and what we meant by persistence and finishing what we had started. Sam and Sophie are now old enough to be part of such conversations. My old friend Dan Shapiro has given me crucial advice many times over the past three decades. My siblings and parents, cousins, aunts and uncles, and in-laws all assumed that I would eventually close this deal, and this expectation exerted its own effective pressures. In-laws James, Jakob, and Judith Elliott did not live to see its completion, but they were there for its start. In particular, I’m grateful to my brother Tom and my sisters Liz and Kat for their support, and their respective spouses, Shoshana, Erik, and Zeke. The faith of my parents Dan and Jane Arnold is a wonder to me, and I can only hope to do for my family what they have done for me and for mine. Like the book itself, this brief note of acknowledgment is an attempt to appreciate the impact of culture, community, and effort in the process of creation. It’s important. Without it, I fear that this book might simply seem natural, as if it wrote itself, or as if I wrote it entirely on my own. I wrote much of it in isolation, inside on beautiful spring days, or at 4:00 in the morning, in the attic, or in the tiny, nearly windowless cinderblock offices that seem inevitable for history departments of my experience.

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4. At least two of the men were direct relations of Shorthill’s. Three of the men, the Zimmermans, consisted of a father and his two sons. They were probably owners of the J. Zimmerman & Company sawmill. Phillipsburg Journal, 3 August 1872. 5. Phillipsburg Journal, 11 January 1873. 6. If there were clandestine groups of semiorganized Irish miners in Clearfield who used threats, violence, or arson in service of class or ethnic warfare, they do not seem to have been a dominant presence, either in practice or in the public imagination. Nevertheless, threats were issued at times in Clearfield, violence and arson committed, and “Molly Maguirism” charged by the press. See in particular the George Evans murder case. Raftsman’s Journal, “Murder,” 23 June 1880. In this sense, Molly Maguirism in Clearfield parallels Harold Aurand’s skeptical assessment of this phenomenon. If “Schuylkill was not the Harlan County of the 1870s,” neither was Clearfield. Harold Aurand and William Gudelunas, “The Mythical Qualities of Molly Maguire,” Pennsylvania History 49, 2 (April 1982): 98. For a recent account of the Molly Maguire trials in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania, see Kevin Kenney, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 7. Notes of Evidence, “Abstract of Evidence from Phonographic Notes,” and the “True Bill,” Commonwealth vs. Mack, and Others. Clearfield County Courts Quarter Sessions, June 1873. See also Docket Book, “Quarter Sessions, 1863–1873,” No. 36, p. 642. 8. Notes of Evidence, Prosecution 17. Testimony of John J. Leigh, “Some of the men were getting a little excited and Shorthill sent them further up the track.” 9. Pennsylvania General Assembly, Regular Session, 1872, No. 1195, “An Act to relieve laborers, working men and journeymen from certain prosecutions and indictments for conspiracy under the criminal laws of this Commonwealth.” 10. Between 1806 and 1842, American judges came increasingly to consider conspiracy only applicable where agreements existed to achieve illegal ends or legal ends by illegal means. Victoria Hattam, Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 67–69. Christopher Tomlins discusses the case at length, but substantially agrees with Hattam. Their differences are on focus. To Hattam, Hunt is an example of a judge attempting to preserve the rule of common law in an atmosphere hostile to the idea. Tomlins considers the battle over acceptance of common law doctrine to be largely won by this time. He is more interested in pointing out that the decision was not a “Magna Charta” for labor, and the more subtle point, that Shaw had shifted the point of battle regarding the legal scope of unions. It was no longer in the courts but in the actual relationship between individual employers and groups of employees. Here, the individualist structure of common law favored employers. Christopher Tomlins, Law, Labor and Ideology in the Early American Republic (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 209–216. 11. Phillipsburg Journal, 16 November 1868. 12. Phillipsburg Journal, 26 July 1869. 13. Daily Legislative Journal (Pennsylvania), 12 April 1869, 144: 1146. 14. Daily Legislative Journal (Pennsylvania), 12 April 1869, 144: 1146; Tyrone Herald, 13 November 1868; Tyrone Herald, 26 February 1869. The Ku Klux Klan had just been formed. 15. Phillipsburg Journal, “Our Position,” 3 April 1869. 16. Raftsman’s Journal, “The Miners’ Strike,” 21 April 1869.

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Magee (President, Fall Brook Coal Company and Fall Brook Railway, Corning, New York), 30 January 1873, “Fall Brook Coal and Railway Company Records,” Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Collection, Box 7–3919. The standard sources for production practice in coal are Keith Dix, Work Relations in the Coal Industry: The Hand-Loading Era, 1880–1930 (West Virginia University: Institute for Labor Studies Division of Social and Economic Development Center for Extension and Continuing Education, 1977); Carter Goodrich, The Miners’ Freedom: A Study of the Working Life in a Changing Industry (Boston: Marshall Jones Company, 1925). In a similar case, a company in Springhill, Pennsylvania, also refused to pay striking miners unless they removed their tools. National Labor Tribune, 13 March 1875. In 1875, an anonymous Clearfield superintendent on the railroad branch that included Sterling, one suspects Shorthill, took the bold step of going through the mine with a coal car, collecting all the tools he could find, and placing them above the coal chute. Phillipsburg Journal, 24 April 1875. Henry McGowan listed real estate property of $450 and personal wealth of $100 in the 1870 Census. Notes of Evidence, Prosecution 17. Testimony of John J. Leigh. At the very edge of this subject matter, John Keegan’s Face of Battle demonstrates how to incorporate practical details of terrain and human and technological frailties into the ebb and flow of opposed groups. Though his focus is on armies, his insights have also been useful in understanding labor activism when its main manifestation comes in the form of marches and crowds. Lawrence Goodwyn and his student Paul Krause have also shown ways to usefully draw lessons about organization from the makeup and direction of crowds and riots as well as the surprisingly purposive targets noted by historians plumbing crowd behavior. E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the Crowd,” Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: New Press, 1993), 184–258; John Keegan, Face of Battle (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1978); Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead, 1880–1892: Politics, Culture and Steel (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992); Lawrence Goodwyn, Breaking the Barrier: The Rise of Solidarity in Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). For a discussion of primitive warfare, see John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 94–114. The harassment of strikebreakers would seem to fall into the broad category of “rough music” defined by E. P. Thompson. Even if outside the specific cultural context of eighteenth-century England, it certainly served a similar purpose of imposing community norms. E. P. Thompson, “Rough Music,” Customs in Common, 466–533. See Archie Green for a similarly broad application of the term. Archie Green, Wobblies, Pile Butts, and Other Heroes: Laborlore Explorations (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993). Notes of Evidence, Defense 7. Testimony of Sarah McGowan. Notes of Evidence, Prosecution 21. Testimony of John J. Solomon. Notes of Evidence, Prosecution 5. Testimony of David Shorthill, 23. Testimony of Joseph Higgins. Official Charge, “In the Court of Quarter Sessions of the Peace on and for the County of Clearfield in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” Clearfield County Courthouse. Phillipsburg Journal, 11 January 1873. Phillipsburg Journal, 14 June 1873.

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14. Long, Where the Sun Never Shines, 99; Andrew Roy, A History of the Coal Miners of the United States from the Development of the Mines to the Close of the Anthracite Strike of 1902 (Columbus, Ohio: J. L. Trauger Printing Company, 1906), 72–80. See also Edward Pinkowski, John Siney: The Miners’ Martyr (Philadelphia: Sunshine Press, 1963). 15. For the role of Chartism in America, see Rowland Berthoff, British Immigrants in Industrial America, 1790–1950 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), 98; L. A. O’Donnell, Irish Voice and Organized Labor in America: A Biographical Study (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997), 27; Ray Boston, British Chartists in America, 1839–1900 (Manchester, England: Rowman & Littlefield, 1971), 45–46. 16. Julius Grodinsky, Transcontinental Railroad Strategy, 1869–1893 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press ,1962), 15; Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 26. 17. Yearley, Enterprise in Anthracite, 212–213. 18. Pennsylvania Grit, “Franklin B. Gowen,” 22 December 1889. 19. New York Times, “Gowen’s Tragic Death,” 15 December 1889. Ibid., “Making His Own Career.” 20. Marvin W. Schlegel, Ruler of the Reading: The Life of Franklin B. Gowen, 1836–1889 (Philadelphia: Archive Publishing Co. of Pennsylvania, 1947), 74. 21. Engineering and Mining Journal, “Market Review,” 9 August 1870. 22. Priscilla Long uses this line as the title of her chapter on this strike: “Beaten All to Smash: The Rise and Fall of the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association.” See Long, Where the Sun Never Shines, 97. 23. See Yearley, Enterprise in Anthracite, 185. Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires; Nancy Cohen, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 126. Cohen argues that the idea of the Molly Maguires campaign was part of a campaign to associate American unions with the violence of the Paris Commune. 24. Pinkowski, John Siney. 25. Physical descriptions of Xingo Parks can be found in Daily Graphic, May 21, 1875; “Records of the Department of Justice, Western Penitentiary Population Records, Description and Receiving Dockets,” RG–15, PHMC; and National Labor Tribune, 2 January 1880. 26. National Labor Tribune, “Houtzdale, PA,” 4 July 1874; National Miners’ Record, “Reports of Officers,” December 1875, 30; “Personals,” April 1875, 100. 27. National Labor Tribune, “The Old Miners’ Association,” 7 August 1880. 28. “Parks Testimony,” 360–362. 29. Ibid., 174. 30. Phillipsburg Journal, 24 April 1875; Raftsman’s Journal, 28 April 1875. 31. Phillipsburg Journal, 17 April 1875. 32. Engineering and Mining Journal, “Review of the Coal Trade of the United States,” 1 January 1876, 7. 33. Phillipsburg Journal, 24 April 1875. 34. Phillipsburg Journal, 24 April 1875, 1 May 1875; New York Times, 15 May 1875. 35. “Parks Testimony,” 19, 20; National Labor Tribune, “Clearfield County, PA,” 17 April 1875. 36. “Parks Testimony,” 138, 238, 239, 259.

248 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

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59. According to the Raftsman’s Journal, Burchdoll’s large size made him particularly prominent, and the penitentiary at first could not find a prison shirt to fit him. He was listed as 6 ft. 1 in. tall and weighing 178 pounds in the Western Penitentiary records. 60. Quoted in Industrial Advocate, “Mining Items,” 1 July 1875. See also Pinkowski, John Siney, 162. Miners’ National Record, June 1875, 147: 1. A similar account appears in the recollections of T. T. O’Malley, who knew the principals, and was a longtime activist in the coal regions. UMWJ, “A Little History,” 25 April 1895. 61. “Western Penitentiary Population Records, Description and Receiving Dockets,” PHMC (RG–15). McGowan’s name does not appear in the records of the Western Penitentiary, nor is there any record in the docket of his having been transferred west, or jailed in Clearfield. Nevertheless, the 1880 census shows him still living in Clearfield. 62. Pinkowski, John Siney, 180. Roy, A History of the Coal Miners, 161, 170, 185. 63. Roy, A History of the Coal Miners, 173. 64. Quotation in Roy, A History of the Coal Miners, 178. (Roy reprinted closing arguments of both sides.) 65. “Charge of the Court,” Commonwealth vs. John Siney and Xingo Parks (Court of Quarter Sessions, Clearfield County, No. 34, June Sessions 1875), 6 October 1875, 8. 66. For a discussion of the case and its implications for organization and labor law in Pennsylvania, see Hyman Kuritz, “The Pennsylvania State Government and Labor Controls from 1865–1922,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1953, 52–59; Hyman Kuritz, “Criminal Conspiracy Cases in Post-Bellum Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania History 17 (October 1950): 3–11. 67. Pinkowski, John Siney. 68. The Bellefonte Industrial Advocate caused a flurry of invective among labor papers when it accused John Siney’s “friends” of delaying the pardons process so that if he was convicted, he could benefit from putting his name in with theirs. Miners’ National Record, “The Imprisoned Miners,” September 1875, 185–186. The Industrial Advocate article appeared on 16 August. The petition for pardon was filed on 26 August. It is more likely that the Board of Pardons itself delayed consideration till after Siney’s portion of the trial was over. The original petition was filed on 26 August 1875. On 5 October, before the Siney verdict was reached, the Board considered the petition but held it over till their November session. “Pardon Books,” Pennsylvania Archives, Department of Justice, Board of Pardons, RG–15. 69. Miners’ National Record, “Correspondence,” January 1876. 70. “(Confidential) Circular Letter in Reference to Balto & Ohio RR. and Pennsylvania RR. Competition,” “Pennsylvania Railroad Papers,” 16 June 1875, Board Files “BF” Series No. 1 Box 1, PHMC. 71. Stuart Daggett, Railroad Reorganization (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1908), 4. 72. Engineering and Mining Journal (New York), “Coal Trade Review,” 20 September 1876, 222; Engineering and Mining Journal (New York), “Coal Trade Review,” 7 October 1876, 238; John F. Stover, History of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1987), 123. According to Stover, the five main Trunk Line wars occurred in the year 1867, from 1874 to 1875, from March 1876 to March 1877, from June 1881 to January 1882, and from March 1884 to November 1885. 73. Stover, History of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad,135–136. (The quote regarding “supply and demand” appears on page 134.) The Pennsylvania Railroad faced

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11. Lewis Cass Aldrich, History of Clearfield County with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Some of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers (Syracuse, N.Y.: D. Mason & Co., 1887), reprinted by Clearfield County Historical Society, 1995, 316–320. The term “Modocs” was also a name used by gangs in the anthracite region. It’s unclear whether there are any connections between the different usages, or if each independently decided to take on the name. It was also the name of a western Indian tribe that had been involved in violent encounters in the early 1870s. See Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, 70, 164, 191. 12. Clearfield County Courthouse, Special Sessions Docket Books. 13. Citizen, 7 January 1880. 14. See Quarter Sessions Docket books for 1869. 15. County Review (Clearfield), May 1, 1882. 16. Clearfield Naturalization Records (Alphabetical). 17. Phillipsburg Journal, “Houtzdale Election,” 23 February 1883. 18. County Citizen (Clearfield), “Houtzdale Happenings,” 4 March 1880, 11 March 1880. The Citizen covered the strike through that spring. 19. Engineering and Mining Journal (New York), “Coal Trade Review,” 29 March 1879. 20. Engineering and Mining Journal (New York), “Coal Trade Review,” 6 March 1880, 174. This was not a new problem. See “The Consolidated Coal Co. and Its ‘Freezing Out’ Policy.” Ibid., 77. 21. Engineering and Mining Journal (New York), “Coal Trade Review,” 6 March 1880, 174. 22. Raftsman’s Journal, 17 March 1880. 23. National Labor Tribune, “Observer,” 13 March 1880. 24. Raftsman’s Journal, “The Strikers Yielding,” 24 March 1880. 25. Harvey, Best-Dressed Miners, 187. 26. National Labor Tribune, “From the Maryland Miners,” 20 March 1880. 27. National Labor Tribune, “The Clearfield Miners Still on Strike,” 27 March 1880. Emphasis added. 28. Peter Ward to Terence V. Powderly (hereafter TVP), 12 April 1880, Terence Vincent Powderly Papers (Glen Rock, N.J.: Microfilming Corporation of America 1974). (Hereafter TVP Papers.) 29. National Labor Tribune, “The Situation at Houtzdale, Pa.,” 8 May 1880. 30. Raftsman’s Journal, “More about the Strike,” 17 May 1880. 31. Peter J. Ward to TVP, TVP Papers, 12 April 1880. 32. W. S. Edwards to TVP, 12 April 1880; TVP to W. S. Edwards, 1 May 1880, TVP Papers. 33. National Labor Tribune, “Postal Correspondence,” 3 April 1880. 34. Henry McGowan, “The Clearfield Strike,” National Labor Tribune, 22 May 1880. 35. For discussion of slavery in Scotland, see National Labor Tribune, “Not Ready for Restriction,” 31 January 1880; and Roy, A History of the Coal Miners of the United States,12. 36. National Labor Tribune, “In Clearfield,” 23 October 1880. 37. National Labor Tribune, “Letter from Houtzdale, Pa.,” 18 December 1880; “Mine Postals,” 5 February 1881; “The Houtzdale Prize Drawing,” 21 May 1881; “The Houtzdale Drawing,” 25 June 1881. 38. Raftsman’s Journal, “The Strike,” 24 May 1880. 39. National Labor Tribune, “Houtzdale Items,” 30 July 1881.

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Notes to Chapter 4 1. Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 121–162, passim, especially 127–129. 2. Andrew B. Arnold, A Pocket Guide to the U.S. Constitution (Boston: Pearson, 2011),113. 3. Testimony of William A. Wallace in Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Pennsylvania Railroad et al. (1887), 284. 4. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Pennsylvania Railroad et al. (1887), 438–443. 5. Alvin F. Harlow, The Road of the Century: The Story of the New York Central (New York: Creative Age Press, 1947), 339. 6. Carnegie Testimony, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Pennsylvania Railroad et al. (1887), 388, 393, 394. 7. Ibid., 389. 8. Andrew Carnegie to George B. Roberts, Carnegie Steel Company Records (Box 3, Folder 5), 28 November 1883. As regards supply coal, see Andrew Carnegie to William A. McIntosh, President, N.Y. & Co. Gas Coal Co., Box 2, Folder 1, 27 September 1874. 9. George Magee to George DeKeim, 24 August 1882, “Fall Brook Coal and Railway Company Records,” Box 7–3814, PHMC. 10. For a similar arrangement as regards the Union Pacific, see David A. Wolff, Industrializing the Rockies, Growth, Competition, and Turmoil in the Coalfields of Colorado and Wyoming, 1868–1914 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003), 6. 11. Testimony of Andrew Carnegie, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Pennsylvania Railroad Railroad et al. (1887), 387. 12. Ron Chernow, The Death of the Banker: The Decline and Fall of the Great Financial Dynasties and the Triumph of the Small Investor (New York: Vintage Books, 1997). 13. See, for example, Jean Strouse, Morgan: American Financier (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 197–198. 14. Jean Strouse, Morgan, American Financier (New York: Random House, 1999), 243. 15. Ibid., 246. 16. In the end Carnegie was right: His losses would be made good in 1901 when the sacrifices of 1885 finally made possible consolidation of national-scale capital. He promptly sold out to J. P. Morgan and abandoned the increasingly distasteful business of making steel for the far more peaceful industry of philanthropy. 17. Joseph Lambie, From Mine to Market: The History of Coal Transportation on the Norfolk and Western Railway (New York: NYU Press,1954), 85. See also Engineering and Mining Journal, 30 January 1886, 81. 18. Charles Langdon to George Magee, 6 February 1885, “Fall Brook Coal and Railway Company Records,” Box 7–3816, PHMC. 19. Lambie, From Mine to Market, 88–91. 20. Ibid., 85. 21. Phillipsburg Journal, 12 May 1886. 22. Pennsylvania Grit, “John R. Paisley. Interesting Sketch of Late Miners’ Agent of District A,” 2 July 1891. 23. Phillipsburg Journal, “Mining Troubles!” 12 March 1886; Raftsman’s Journal, “Labor Convention,” 17 March 1886. 24. Charles Langdon to George Magee, 20 March 1886, “Fall Brook Coal and Railway Company Records,” Box 7–3816, PHMC.

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change from NFM to NPU was the result of the widening split between NFM and KOL. It was a defiant move intended to signal the NFM’s wider aspirations—it would no longer see itself as subordinate to the KOL. Pennsylvania Grit, “Fifth Annual Convention,” 25 January 1891. William B. Wilson to Terence V. Powderly, 27 February 1890, Secretary of Labor Wilson’s Personal Files (5–260), National Archives. Paul W. Pritchard, “William B. Wilson: The Evolution of a Central Pennsylvania Mine Union Leader,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1943, 142. Chris Evans, History of the United Mine Workers of America from the Year 1890 to 1900. Vol. II (Indianapolis: United Mine Workers of America, 1918), 15. For example, a New York Sun article reprinted in coalfield newspapers lampooned the miners’ readiness to translate sentiment into hard cash. An inexperienced preacher offered the hope that a sinner, a coal miner killed in the mines might now enjoy the blessings of heaven but found his services brusquely brushed aside in favor of a collection for the man’s widow. National Labor Tribune, “A Miners’ Eulogy,” 17 April 1886. Roy, A History of the Coal Miners of the United States, 263; Pritchard, “William B. Wilson,” 142; George Korson, “History of the United Mine Workers of America,” 15 January 1940, UMWJ, 8. Miners in Shawnee, Ohio, for example, refused to join the UMWA. “We instructed our delegate . . . that if one organization could not be established that we would not join any other form of organization.” The merger was insufficient, they believed. Massilon (Ohio) Miners’ Independent, “Shawnee Miners,” 27 February 1890. Pennsylvania Grit, “Walston and Adrian,” 30 March 1890. Pennsylvania Grit, “A Question of Interest to the Clearfield and Beech Creek Region— The Latest Organization—Known as the United Miners’ Association—Features of the Movement Discussed to Prepare the Miner for Action—Almost a Strike,” 9 February 1890. James White to TVP, TVP Papers,19 August 1886. James White to TVP, TVP Papers, 14 September 1886. Pennsylvania Grit, “Beechtree’s Defense,” 23 March 1890; “The Beechtree Question,” 30 March 1890; “Soft Coal,” 9 March 1890. Pennsylvania Grit, “Soft Coal District,” 2 February 1890. Pennsylvania Grit, “Who Gets Credit for Winning the Strike?” 1 September 1889. Pennsylvania Grit, “Convention,” 2 February 1890. Pennsylvania Grit, “Soft Coal District,” 9 February 1890. Ibid. Pennsylvania Grit, “Argument over Worth of UMW,” 16 February 1890. Pennsylvania Grit, “A Question of Interest to the Clearfield and Beech Creek Region” 9 February 1890. Pennsylvania Grit, “Upper Coal Region,” 23 March 1890. Pennsylvania Grit, “National Gathering—The Financial Statement,” 11 February 1891. Pennsylvania Grit, “In Punxsutawney,” 26 January 1890. Pennsylvania Grit, “Soft Coal Diggers,” 11 May 1890. Pennsylvania Grit, “Soft Coal Miners,” 25 May 1890. Pennsylvania Grit, “Founding of UMW,” 1 February 1890. See also Pennsylvania Grit, “Soft Coal Miners,” 25 May 1890, for vote establishing ten miners as the threshold for having a checkweighman on the tipple.

256 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

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58. Edward Berwind to George Magee, 17 June 1890, “Fall Brook Coal and Railway Company Records,” Box 7–3930, PHMC. 59. Pennsylvania Grit, “Upper Coal Regions,” 20 July 1890. Elliott’s definition of “abusive” perhaps puts a slight twist on the prosecution of strikers for attempting to bring workers at other places out on strike. Elliott apparently regarded the very attempt to do so as illegitimate, whether by intimidation, brass bands, or any form of even the gentlest persuasion. The method by which it was done was irrelevant. He cared only that the miners had linked their fortunes with men outside their home mine. 60. Pennsylvania Grit, “Soft Coal,” 20 April 1890. While the different strikes dragged on, and while the large-scale coal operators struggled with the latest railroad maneuvers, Central Pennsylvania union activists pushed forward with efforts to negotiate a separate scale with smaller-scale operators. In March they presented a deliberately low scale of wages to the smaller operators. In mass meetings, however, they voted to put negotiations in the hands of UMWA national officials. 61. Pennsylvania Grit, “Soft Coal,” 1 July 1890; ibid., 5 July 1890. 62. Pennsylvania Grit, “Still Badly Mixed,” 21 September 1890. 63. Pennsylvania Grit, “Operators and Men,” 28 September 1890. 64. Pennsylvania Grit, “The Soft Coal Miners,” 20 October 1890. 65. Pennsylvania Grit, “The Soft Coal Miners,” 9 October 1890. 66. Pennsylvania Grit, “The Soft Coal Miners,” 13 July 1890. 67. Pennsylvania Grit, “The Eastern Coalfields,” 2 November 1890. 68. Pennsylvania Grit, “Our Mining Letter,” 14 December 1890. 69. Pennsylvania Grit, “Will They Strike?” 28 December 1890. 70. William H. Dill to George Magee, 12 December 1890, 17 December 1890, and 23 December 1890, “Fall Brook Coal and Railway Company Records,” Box 7–3930, PHMC. 71. Pennsylvania Grit, “The Strike Postponed,” 4 January 1891. 72. Pennsylvania Grit, “The Mining Muddle,” 1 February 1891. 73. Engineering and Mining Journal, “Coal Trade Review,” 18 March 1891, 338; and 28 March 1891, 390.

Notes to Chapter 6 1. Long, Where the Sun Never Shines, 154; Maier B. Fox, United We Stand: The United Mine Workers of America, 1890–1990 (Washington, D.C.: International Union, United Mine Workers of America, 1990), 45. 2. On consensus between the big operators, see Arthur Yates to George Magee, 23 March 1891, “Fall Brook Coal and Railway Company Records,” Box 7–3931, PHMC. 3. Arthur Yates to George Magee, 8 April 1891, “Fall Brook Coal and Railway Company Records,” Box 7–3931, PHMC. 4. Edward Berwind to George Magee, 22 April 1891, “Fall Brook Coal and Railway Company Records,” Box 7–3931, PHMC. 5. Edward Berwind to George Magee, 18 April 1891, “Fall Brook Coal and Railway Company Records,” Box 7–3931, PHMC. 6. For an account of this problem, see John C. Bullitt to George Magee, 23 February 1892, “Fall Brook Coal and Railway Company Records,” Box 7–3931, PHMC. 7. John McBride, “A Pointed Reply,” UMWJ, 14 May 1891.

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35. Rembrandt Peale to John Magee, 11 December 1893, and W. C. Lingle to John Magee, 20 December 1893, “Fall Brook Coal and Railway Company Records,” Box 7–3823, PHMC. 36. W. C. Lingle to John Magee, 4 December 1893, “Fall Brook Coal and Railway Company Records,” Box 7–3823, PHMC. 37. Ibid. 38. W.C. Lingle to George Magee, 15 March 1894, “Fall Brook Coal and Railway Company Records,” Box 7–3825, PHMC. 39. “An Explanation of the Circumstances Leading Up to the Stoppage at Houtzdale, Pennsylvania,” UMWH, 19 April 1894; W. C. Lingle to George Magee, 27 March 1894, “Fall Brook Coal and Railway Company Records,” Box 7–3825, PHMC. 40. Engineering and Mining Journal, “Coal Trade Review,” 24 March 1894, 253. 41. James Kerr to George Magee, 25 March 1894, “Fall Brook Coal and Railway Company Records,” Box 7–3825, PHMC. 42. UMWJ, “Unusual Is the Activity Shown in the Philipsburgh, Pa District—Report of Mass Meeting,” 29 March 1894. 43. Ibid. 44. Chris Evans, History of the United Mine Workers of America from the Year 1890 to 1900, Vol. II (Indianapolis: J. L. Trauger Printing Company, 1918), 320. 45. Ibid., 333. 46. Anton Hardt to George Magee, 13 April 1894, “Fall Brook Coal and Railway Company Records,” Box 7–3825, PHMC. 47. For a history of this term, see Lawrence Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), 131–135. 48. UMWJ, “The Situation at Glen Campbell and in District 2 Generally—Brave and Inspiring Words,” 26 April 1894. 49. This language (“suspension” rather than “strike”) and market logic matched the thinking of John Siney from the 1870s. 50. UMWJ, “Courage[,] Confidence, Hope and Perseverance Will Surely Win the Day—A Noble Letter,” 10 May 1894. 51. “After the Strike,” Joseph A. Hemer, “After the Ball” from www.mudcat.org. 52. UMWJ, “The Dead March,” 17 May 1894. 53. Pennsylvania Grit, “Parade of Miners at Woodland,” 3 June 1894. 54. Engineering and Mining Journal, “General Mining News,” 2 June 1894, 519. 55. UMWJ, “Cleveland Convention,” 24 May 1894. 56. Herriman Correspondence, 21 May 1894, “Fall Brook Coal and Railway Company Records,” Box 7–3825, PHMC. 57. UMWJ, “Jock Proves Himself a Good Hand at Reporting—How the Central Pennsylvania Men Responded,” 7 June 1894. 58. James Kerr to George Magee, 25 May 1894, “Fall Brook Coal and Railway Company Records,” Box 7–3825, PHMC. 59. Rembrandt Peale to George Magee, 18 June 1894, “Fall Brook Coal and Railway Company Records,” Box 7–3825, PHMC. The PARR was successfully sued in 1904 for discrimination in car distribution. See Frank Parsons, The Heart of the Railroad Problem: The History of Railway Discrimination in the United States, the Chief Efforts at Control

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61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

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85. UMWJ, “An Interview with President McBride by the Columbus Dispatch—Further Reasons for Settlement,” 21 June 1894. 86. UMWJ, “Secretary McBryde,” 21 June 1894. (Interview with UMWA Secretary Patrick McBryde, reprinted from the Columbus Dispatch.) 87. Engineering and Mining Journal, “General Mining News,” 17 November 1894, 471. Decision accepted by miners, under protest. Engineering and Mining Journal, “General Mining News,” 24 November 1894, 495. Berwind, White followed suit. Pennsylvania Grit, “The Dubois Cut. Miners in a Deplorable State—Nothing Ahead—Where the Fault Rests,” 18 November 1894. 88. UMWJ, “Remember. A Sad Outlook in Central Pennsylvania––Conditions Compared with Other Years,” 20 December 1894. 89. Pennsylvania Grit, “In the Bituminous Region It Is a Hard Fact That Laws Don’t Execute Themselves,” 9 December 1894; Pennsylvania Grit, “In the Clearfield Region,” 16 December 1894. 90. UMWJ, 16 January 1895. 91. UMWJ, “District 2,” 17 January 1895.

Notes to Chapter 7 1. A portion of this chapter appeared in Andrew B. Arnold, “Mother Jones and the Panics of 1873 and 1893,” Pennsylvania Legacies 11, 1 (May 2011). 2. James A. Ward, Railroads and the Character of America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986). 3. David Brody, “Market Unionism in America: The Case of Coal,” in In Labor’s Cause: Main Themes on the History of the American Worker (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 4. For details regarding the relationship between the Flat Top Land Association, the N&W, and the operators, see Lambie, From Mine to Market, 47–52, 83–91, 160. 5. Pennsylvania Grit, “Pocahontas: The First Chapter in a History of Greed, Infamy and Despotism,” 27 June 1895. See also UMWJ, Editorial, 20 June 1895. 6. Joe William Trotter, Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–32 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990). 7. Pennsylvania Grit, “Pocahontas: The Third Chapter in a History of Greed and Despotism,” 11 July 1895. 8. For analysis of Travis’s song, see Archie Green, Only a Miner: Studies in Recorded Coal–Mining Songs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972). See also Dix, What’s a Coal Miner to Do? 8. Dix interviewed a miner who claimed he’d once loaded 26 tons in one day. 9. Pennsylvania Grit, “Pocahontas: The Fourth Chapter in a History of Greed and Despotism,” 18 July 1895. 10. Pennsylvania Grit, “Pocahontas and Flat Top,” 30 July 1895. 11. Pennsylvania Grit, “No Rift in the Clouds for Miners,” 21 July 1895. For information on the lumber industry in West Virginia, see Ronald L. Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside: Railroads, Deforestation, and Social Change in West Virginia, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 12. Engineering and Mining Journal, “Coal Trade Review,” 20 July 1895, 65. 13. UMWJ, “The Men Aroused in Central Pennsylvania––Some Are Already Out,” 3 October 1895.

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39. This point adds to Glickman’s argument that middle-class Progressives took over the living wage argument from the labor movement. As he points out, some Progressives attempted to change the meaning of the living wage from the amount needed to support a family at a reasonable standard of living to the minimum amount needed to survive. Glickman, Living Wage, 132. 40. Skowronek, Building a New American State, 139–147; George H. Miller, Railroads and the Granger Laws (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 58, 80. 41. M. A. Hanna to George Magee, 30 July 1896, “Fall Brook Coal and Railway Company Records,” Box 7–3942, PHMC. 42. Anton Hardt to George Magee, 26 September 1896 and 3 October 1896, “Fall Brook Coal and Railway Company Records,” Box 7–3942, PHMC. 43. George F. Baer to George Magee, 28 August 1896, “Fall Brook Coal and Railway Company Records,” Box 7–3942. 44. See Warren M. Persons and Eunice S. Coyle, “A Commodity Price Index of Business Cycles,” Review of Economic Statistics 3, 11 (November 1921): 354. The authors do not draw a close causal relationship between the outcome of the election and the ensuing sense of recovery and calm among businessmen, but do note that the improvement dated from “after the election.” 45. Blossburg Advertiser, “Mining Gossip,” 6 October 1899. 46. Pennsylvania Grit, “Call for State Convention,” 14 November 1897. 47. Pennsylvania Grit, “Proceedings of the Convention Held at Altoona, Pennsylvania,” 2 December 1897. 48. Pennsylvania Grit, “George Harris Reports Progress Made among the Miners Working on the Pennsylvania Central Railroad,” 16 December 1897. 49. Harry Donald Fox, Jr., “Thomas T. Haggerty and the Formative Years of the United Mine Workers of America,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of West Virginia, 1975, 123. 50. National Labor Tribune, “Are Trade Unions Injurious?” 17 January 1880. 51. UMWJ, “Proceedings of the Convention of District No.2, of the United Mine Workers of America,” 7 April 1898. 52. Ibid. See also UMWJ, “Organizer Chris Evans Reviews Conditions in Central Pennsylvania Field,” 7 April 1898. 53. UMWJ, “The Trouble at Patton, Pa.,” 5 May 1898; UMWJ, “Sec’ty Killduff of District 2 (Central Pennsylvania) Reports on the Strike,” 12 May 1898. Fox, “Thomas T. Haggerty,” 131. 54. Thomas C. Heims to Mitchell Coal & Coke Co., Pennsylvania State University Labor Archives, Thomas C. Heims Papers (Uncatalogued), 27 May 1898. 55. UMWJ, “A Strike of the Central Pennsylvania Coalfields Will Be Inaugurated on July 30,” 21 July 1898. 56. UMWJ, “Conditions in District 2,” 11 August 1898. 57. Pennsylvania Grit, “Chris Evans Writes from Central Pennsylvania,” 16 February 1897. 58. Pennsylvania Grit, “Official Call,” 9 March 1899. 59. Pennsylvania Grit, “Chris Evans Reports the Work of Organization Progressing in the Central Pa. Field,” 20 April 1899. 60. Pennsylvania Grit, “Proceedings District 2,” 6 April 1899. 61. Pennsylvania Grit, “Little Chris Offers Some Valuable Suggestions to the Miners of the Central Pa. Field,” 30 March 1899.

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one-third. Yet rates remained low for roughly the first year in order to allow customers with long-term contracts, especially coal shippers, to adjust their businesses to the changes. Burgess and Kennedy, Centennial History, 388. ICC RG134 Docket 869, “In The Matter of the Relation of Common Carriers Subject to the Act to Regulate Commerce to Coal and Oil and the Transportation Thereof,” 1846. Albert J. Churella, The Pennsylvania Railroad: Volume I, Building an Empire, 1846–1917 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 647, 648. Lambie, From Mine to Market, 150–151. Ibid., 1909. Because West Virginia and Somerset, Pennsylvania, were considered to be different freight regions from Central Pennsylvania and Western Pennsylvania, the ICC allowed them to make freight rates and policies that differed from other regions. Lambie, From Mine to Market, 190–193. Thomas C. Campbell, “The Bituminous Coal Freight-Rate Structure—An Economic Appraisal,” West Virginia University Business and Economic Studies, 3, 3 (June 1954): 21. See also Interstate Commerce Commission, Reports, “No. 4298 Association of Bituminous Coal Operators of Central Pennsylvania v. Pennsylvania Railroad Company,” 6 May 1912, 387. Interstate Commerce Commission, “Eastern Bituminous Coal Investigation of 1928.” ICC RG134 Docket 869, “In the Matter of the Relation of Common Carriers Subject to the Act to Regulate Commerce to Coal and Oil and the Transportation Thereof,” 3472, 3578. See also Wigton’s letter to the Commission, 6119–6124. Ibid., 750–754, 845. For examples of men taking leaves of absence to recover their health after the stress of the strike of 1902, see 4122, 4127. Ibid., 91. Ibid. Information regarding rating system appears on pages 235 and 3166, 3344. Quote appears on page 852. Beik, The Miners of Windber, 9. Testimony of John B. Thayer, 755. This point only came out slowly in the course of testimony. At first, railroad officials admitted to only a few hundred cars “transferred” to Berwind, White, possibly sold in “1901 or 1902.” Ibid., 145–149, 256. Ibid., 256. Ibid., 194. This era of blacklists, free speech fights, and battles to preserve District 2 has been best captured by scholars at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. IUP is also the repository for the District 2 papers. Elizabeth Ricketts, Irwin Marcus, and Eileen Cooper, “The Coal Strike of 1919,” Pennsylvania History 56, 3 (July 1989): 177–195; Elizabeth Ricketts, “The Struggle for Civil Liberties and Unionization in the Coalfields: The Free Speech Case of Vintondale, Pennsylania, 1922,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 122, 4 (October 1998): 319–352. Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Series 2 Letterbooks, Vol. 35, “6/16/1902–7/29/1902.” Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 237. Hofstadter sees irony in the role of these two men, so firmly ensconced as scions of the moneyed class, as “midwives at the birth of the neutral state.” Theodore Roosevelt to W. S. Cowles, 16 October 1902, Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Series 2, Letterbooks, Vol. 35, 16 June 1902–29 July 1902. R. G. Healey, The Pennsylvania Anthracite Coal Industry, 1860–1902 (Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2007), 251–252.

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Chicago Press, 1999), 15, 150. See also Robert Porter, U.S. House of Representatives, Department of the Interior, Census Office, Report on Valuation, Taxation, and Public Indebtedness in the U.S. as Returned at the 10th Census, June 1, 1880 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1881), 11. Between 1870 and 1880, municipal indebtedness rose by 70 percent in New England, and by 203 percent in the Mid-Atlantic states. The percentage of this debt taken on in order to help build railroads is not broken down. Railroad managers and shippers had many creative ways of arranging special rates or special treatment. Railroads could underbill, underweigh, hire a shipper and pay his rebates in the form of salary, make extra cars available, or pay damages for the “loss” of items that were never shipped. Frank Parsons, The Heart of the Railroad Problem: The History of Railway Discrimination in the United States, the Chief Efforts at Control and the Remedies Proposed, with Hints from Other Countries (Boston: Little, Brown, 1906), 60–62. Engineering and Mining Journal, “Review of the Coal Trade of the United States,” January 1876, 17 July 1880, 28 January 1880; Harvey, Best-Dressed Miners. Maryland miners received pay of $.65/ton for much of this era, while Clearfield men received $.50/ton. According to these reports, the Baltimore & Ohio also benefited from giving special rates to the Consolidated Coal Company, in which it held an ownership interest. John R. Bowman, Capitalist Collective Action: Competition, Cooperation, and Conflict in the Coal Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 112. Dix, What’s a Coal Miner to Do? 1. For a discussion of this issue in regard to anthracite coal and the feasibility of centralized processing and sorting machinery (more important in anthracite), see Wallace, St. Clair, 27–28. Coal cars had to be assigned to a specific customer at a specific price. Beech Creek Railroad executives often asked who the recipient of a coal shipment was before they would quote a freight rate. See, for example, John Magee to David Duncan & Sons, 31 October 1894, Collection MG–48, “Fall Brook Coal and Railway Company Records,” PHMC. On the problem of consigning coal cars to New England to get a lower perton-mile freight rate, but then stopping them in New York, see C. J. Langdon to George Magee, ibid., 20 March 1886. These situations were common. ICC RG134, Docket 869, “In The Matter of the Relation of Common Carriers Subject to the Act to Regulate Commerce to Coal and Oil and the Transportation Thereof,” 6170. See also Lambie, From Mine to Market, 79. “The coal companies or their agents would often make bids, get contracts at a certain figure, and then appeal to the freight traffic manager of their railroad for a freight rate that would let them fill the contract.” The first reliable freight rates for eastern coal were published in 1900. “The Bituminous Coal Freight-Rate Structure—An Economic Appraisal,” West Virginia University Business and Economic Studies 3, 3 (June 1954): 21. C. E. Lesher, “Coal,” in J. E. Spurr and F. E. Wormser, eds., The Marketing of Metals and Minerals (New York, 1925), 287. Quoted in Lambie, From Mine to Market, 79. On snow blocking tracks, see Engineering and Mining Journal, “Coal Trade Review,” 20 December 1890, 728. On snarls of coal traffic, see Engineering and Mining Journal, “Coal Trade Review,” 29 July 1893, 126. For a particularly severe snarl that lasted several weeks on the Pennsylvania Railroad, see ibid., 5 August 1899, 153. These “blockades” were often caused by coal operators trying to ship coal to a city without having found a buyer. By 1890 the Pennsylvania Railroad tried to levy a $1.00 fee for all coal cars remaining in its yards for more than a day without a consignee. Engineering and

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fishing, 167 fixed costs, 213 Flat Top Land Association, 187 forcible entry, 69 foreign investment in railroads, 96, 97 Franklin Mine, 37 Freeman’s Hall (Tyrone, PA), 203 Freemasons, 17 freight agent, 5, 9, 99, 195 freight rates, secret, 37, 154, 195, 227; discrimination, 215 freight rates, sliding scale for coal, 36, 37, 72, 101–102; “differentials,” 197, 213; freight rates v. wages, 140, 143, 161–163, 169, 170, 187–188, 193, 194, 226 freight rates wars (and truces), 36, 46, 60, 70, 80; impact on foreign investment, 97, 99; Trunk Line Wars 164 French miners, 53 Frick, Henry Clay, 156 Frugality Mine, 62 gardens, 165, 167 Garlock, Jonathan, 122 Garrett, John Work, 60 geography, 185 Gilbert, Richard, 203 Gilded Age, 221, 222 The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, 1, 103 glassblower, 112 Goaziou, Louis (anarchist), 160, 181, 204 Gold Democrats, 200 Gompers, Samuel, 125 Goodrich, Carter, Viii Gorn, Elliott J., 208 Goss Run, PA, 36, 37 Gowen, Franklin, 40, 94, 95 Grange, 126 Granger laws, 199 Great Depression, 213 Great Lakes, 96 Great Strike of 1877, 61, 73 Great Upheaval of 1886, 91 Greenback Labor Party, 17, 18, 64 gross ton, 114, 149, 171 Groundhog Day, 119

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Mitchell, John, 218 modernity, 10 “Modocs,” 68 Molly Maguires, 19, 34, 42, 96, 106, 192 Molly Maguires trials, 73 Molly Maguirism, 210 monopoly power, 17 monopoly profits, 40 “Monopoly, giant king,” 75 monopsony, 225 Morgan, J. P., 41, 61, 95; and New York Central, 96, 212; and Strike of 1902, 218 Morgan, Junius, 60 Morrisdale branch, 18 Morrisdale Local Union, 206 Morrisdale, PA, 19, 26 Moshannon branch, 18, 44, 45 motion studies, 15 mule drivers, 149 mules, 210 Munn v. Illinois 1877, 199 National Federation of Miners, 122 National Progressive Union, 123 naturalization papers, 69 Negroes, 171 net ton, 114, 149, 171 New Deal, 221 New Straitsville, OH, 157 New York Central Railroad, 9, 41, 192 New York City, NY, 9 New York Daily Graphic, 58 New York World, 23 Newport, RI, 192 Noble and Holy Knights of Labor, 17, 35, 36; brotherhood, 165; craft distinction, 122; first national convention (1875), 63; hostile clergy, 82–83; mass membership, 121; organizational structure, 85, 157–161; secrecy, 64; slogan, 113. See also Local Assemblies Noble and Holy Knights of Labor, Central Pennsylvania Organization, 74 Noble and Holy Knights of Labor, District Assembly 40 , 123 Noble and Holy Knights of Labor, General Assembly, 122

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single men v. married men, 37 “Sixteen Tons,” 188 slavery, 76 sliding scale (wages), 38, 41, 162, 194 Snow Shoe, PA, 135 snowballs, 20 Soft Coal District Column, 132 solidarities, 224 Somerset County, PA, 9, 10, 185, 206, 216 southern industry, 100 Southern Pennsylvania Railroad, 95, 97 Spangler, PA, 162 spot market for coal, 102, 104 “square turn,” 28, 107, 188 St. Clair, PA, 39 St. Louis, MO, 84 starvation wage, 166, 168, 186 Steam Age, 4 steamship coal supply, 36, 103 Sterling, PA, 19, 22 stockades, 70 stopped wheels, 170 strike (carpenters), 24 strike benefits, 44 strike collections, 125 strike finances, 74 Strike of 1869, 22, 69 Strike of 1872, 15–34, 81 Strike of 1875, 35–65 Strike of 1877. See Great Strike of 1877 Strike of 1880, 63, 69–77, 80 Strike of 1882, 63, 78–81 Strike of 1886, 101, 166 Strike of 1894, 154–157, 198 Strike of 1897, 197–199 Strike of 1902, 214, 218 strike song, 167 strike votes, 74, 75 subsistence wage, 188 supply and demand, 60–62 Susquehanna River, PA, 8 Swedes, 70, 73 Swedish language, 199 tare, 107–108, 162 telephone, 177 Tennessee, 166

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