An Overview
The anthracite industry staggered under the burden of overinvestment. Dependent on the domestic fuel market, the industry overbuilt its plant to meet sporadically heavy demands. Heavy capitalization charges and high fixed operating costs prompted the mine owners to outstrip their market. The entrepreneurial order collapsed under the combined weight of increasing capital demands and falling prices.
Motivated by fear of losing their coal tonnage, the carrying companies took advantage of their strategic position and greater capital resources to supplant the individual mine owner. Controlling the mines, the carrying companies restored prices by regulating production through a pool. The coal pool, however, accentuated the real problem of the industry by assigning quotas according to productive capacity. Each company strived for a larger share of the total allotment by increasing its plant.
Both social pressure and outmoded economic conceptions contributed to management’s failure to grasp the real problem of the hard coal industry. To retain their position and social esteem managers had to demonstrate competence and prove that they were successful. Yet the public measured success in terms of growth. Management therefore had to strive continuously for a larger share of the total allotment and (even if the coal pool had not existed) increase productive capacity.
Following a socially dictated requirement for growth, management was intellectually incapable of perceiving that expansion for expansion’s sake could lead to overinvestment. Management operated on the premise that the economy was a self-regulating mechanism governed by the laws of supply and demand.1 Given this premise, overinvestment became impossible.
The inability of management to define the basic problem of overinvestment created many difficulties for the mine workers. Wages had to be depressed for the operator to earn a return on the high capital charges with a decreasing percentage of capacity. The system of three-fourth, one-half, or one-fourth time and, whenever necessary, the total suspension of work by the coal pool, decreased already low wages. Some independent operators recovered the wages they paid out by charging for a complete system of paternalism. Either unable or unwilling to assume extra expense, management ignored safety precautions; the anthracite mines were thus among the most dangerous mines in the world.
The mine workers could not hope to solve their occupational problems until they overcame their social environment. They lived in a society atomized by geo-economic and ethnic forces. Divided geographically into four basins and regrouped by transportation lines into three economic regions, each district resented the prosperity of the others. Successive waves of immigrant groups produced pressures which caused the disintegration of the social structure within each region. Yet the collective productive system of mining anthracite negated any attempt to solve the problems of the industry on an individual, regional, or ethnic basis, and necessitated a collective response from the mine workers as an occupational class. The need to respond as a group of workers rather than as members of an ethnic or regional group created a crisis of identification for the miners.
The first two attempts to reach a collective solution to the occupational problems failed because the miners did not successfully meet the identification crisis. Regional and ethnic forces, not the power of Franklin B. Gowen, smashed the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association. Both the Knights of Labor and the Miners’ and Laborers’ Amalgamated Association succumbed during the 1887-88 strikes because of regionalism.
The two organizations achieved some noteworthy improvements in the miners’ prospects, however. While unionized, the mine workers enjoyed relatively higher wages. Aware of the correlation between their organizational drives and legislative action, the mine workers credited their unions with the passage of advantageous laws. Even company-sponsored welfare plans could be considered a reaction by management to unionism.
The success of unified response and the demonstrated futility of direct and violent action compelled the mine workers to endeavor continually to reconcile their various identifications. When bloodshed in Lattimer abruptly dissolved the identification crisis, the miners proclaimed their new identity by enrolling in the United Mine Workers of America.
The anthracite mine workers realized that they worked in an ailing industry. Incorrectly diagnosing the sickness as overproduction and falling prices, the workers at first sought to strengthen prices by regulating production with strikes, although their inability to identify themselves primarily as members of an occupational class prevented their success. Even if successful in uniting as a working class, however, their policy would not have cured the real sickness of the anthracite industry, over-investment. Indeed, the policy of the mine workers may have added to the burden; by tying wages to coal prices through the basis system, labor encouraged the existence of marginal capital by automatically reducing labor costs as prices fell. Yet it must be remembered that labor leaders developed their program from the same economic premise from which management operated. In a very real sense the anthracite mine workers sought their economic salvation in a strong capitalistic system.
But the union became more than an economic institution in the anthracite coal regions. By accommodating the disruptive forces in the area the U.M.W. instilled a spirit of unity among the mine workers. On the eve of the 1902 strike Con Carbon, a coal region minstrel, caught the spirit in a ballad:
Now you know Mike Sokolosky—
Dat man my brudder.
Last night him come to my shanty,
Un me tellin’: “Vat you cummin’ fer?”
Him tellin’ ‘bout tomorra dark night,
Every miner all, beeg un schmall
Goin’ fer on shtrike.
Un him say t’ me: “joe, me tellin’ you
Dunt be ‘fraid or sheared fer nottink, nevair, nevair do.”
“Dunt be shcabby fella,” him tellin’ me again.
I’m say, “No sir! Mike, me out o’ sight—
Me Johnny Mitchell man.”
Chorus
Me no ‘fraid fer nottink,
Me dey nevair shcare,
Sure me shtrike tomorra night,
Dat’s de biziness, I dunt care.
Me no shcabby fella,
Good union citizen—
Johnny Mitchell man.
Now me belong t’ union, me good citizen.
Fer seven year me livin’ here
In dis beeg America.
Me vorkin’ in de Prospect,
Vorkin’ Dorrance shaft, Conyngham, Nottingham—
Every place like dat.
Vorkin’ in de gangway, vorkin’ in de breast,
Labor every day, me nevair gettin’ rest.
Me got plenty money, nine hoondred, maybe ten,
So shtrike kin come, like son-of-a-gun—
Me Johnny Mitchell Man.2
Union membership transformed Joe Sokolosky from a Pole who happened to be a miner in the Wyoming region into a mine worker who happened to be Polish and working in the northern basin. Seen in this light the labor union was an instrument of social integration and the creator of a laboring class identity among the anthracite mine workers.
But the integrative power of the union was not limited to the working class. The middle class in the anthracite regions experienced the same problem of identification as the mine workers. Restricted in outlook to their own business and community, the middle class developed a parochialism which in its most sophisticated stage rarely extended beyond the county line. Only an outside force could break down the parochialism of the middle class and bring it within a larger community.
Industry could have provided the necessary cohesive force. The mines were the largest employers in the area. Coal companies collected taxes, maintained roads, and provided police protection. Churches and charities looked to management for aid.
The takeover by the large companies placed the industry in an even better position to become the integrative force in the anthracite regions. The operations of the corporations were usually regional and therefore provided a larger view for the middle class whose fortunes rose or fell with the operators. Furthermore, the coal pool transcended regionalism.
But the middle class refused to identify with the coal industry. Public-spirited businessmen resented the exploitation by mine operators, both large and small, of the wealth of the area for the benefit of other regions. And the merchants feared the great economic, social, and political power of the industry. Their fear becomes more understandable when it is remembered that bureaucrats, who managed but did not own property, wielded the power of the industry, and that some bureaucrats such as Gomer Jones were considered arrogant in their exercise of power. Suspicious of those in mining industry management, the middle class was more willing to support organized labor.
Several factors encouraged friendly relations between business and labor. Many merchants were former miners and others had family connections with mine workers. On several key issues such as the company store and hospitals, the interests of the middle class paralleled those of labor. “The interest of the merchants in the mining towns of the State,” the Daily Republican announced, “are identical with those of the mine workers.”3
The Daily Republican overstated the case; businessmen did not join the U.M.W. nor did they support all of its policies. Rather they saw in the union a symbol of a larger community bound together by the problems of work. By identifying with that community the middle class naturally adopted some of labor’s values and norms and thus gave the anthracite regions a distinctive character. The social structure of the anthracite regions was unique because it received its direction and inspiration from its laboring class rather than its upper class; it was, in short, a society standing on its head.4
The effect of corporate enterprise remains to be measured. Contrary to popular opinion, the corporation was not a soulless exploiter of labor. It is true that the large companies kept wages low, but it must be remembered that the internal logic of the anthracite industry permitted few alternatives. Whenever possible the corporation, unlike the independent operator, provided for the welfare of its employees. The large operators voluntarily discontinued the company store and the company doctor, but the independent mine owner did not. Even Eckley B. Coxe, the most enlightened individual operator, kept a company store. The corporations exerted their influence against legislation proposed by the mine workers, but when the legislation became law they complied. On the other hand, state mine inspectors experienced great difficulty with the independent owners. Finally, most corporations and very few small operators sponsored welfare plans for their employees. Given such evidence, it seems reasonable to conclude that the large corporations with their wider profit margins could afford to be more sympathetic to the needs of the mine workers than the individual entrepreneurs could.
Yet the corporations bitterly opposed labor unions. The large corporations fought every organizational drive among the anthracite mine workers and, superficially, smashed their unions. Such opposition appears inexplicable; both management and labor explained their problems in terms of the market and both agreed that they could achieve their different goals by restricting production. It is possible to explain capital’s opposition to its own policy in terms of greed or a desire to preserve managerial prerogatives. While both arguments carry considerable weight, they overlook the vital ingredient of the hostile attitude of management.
Ideology was the crucial ingredient. Gowen’s insistence that the Molly Maguires were agents for the W.B.A. in the face of overwhelming facts to the contrary; the popular acceptance of his implications; the Weekly Miners’ Journal’s reassessment of its opinion of the Knights of Labor after the charges relating to the “McNulty gang”; and the violence that attended strikes showed that industrial strife in the anthracite regions reflected an ideological clash. Managers, like most Americans, worshipped individualism. Their hero was the “self-made man” who got ahead by individual initiative; they believed in the Horatio Alger myth.
The collective production system, however, submerged the individual. “The anthracite miner is a peculiar creature,” observed George Korson. “As an individual he is unknown. Only collectively does he make his presence felt.”5 Acting collectively, through his union, the anthracite mine worker denied the established American faith. Subscribers to a creed that emphasized the individual could not understand that the mine worker could achieve nothing except as a member of a group. In many respects the posse in Lattimer was shooting at aliens. But the ethnic background of the victims did not make aliens; their presence as a group, in a parade, made them foreigners threatening the established ideology. Native mine workers understood the issue and rallied around their fellow aliens in the union. Ironically, in fighting labor unions big business fought for the values of a society which it had done much to destroy, while the anthracite mine workers spoke, collectively, for industrial man by placing the group above the individual.