Anthracite Coal Strike

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Anthracite Coal Strike

United States 1902

Synopsis

When the United Mine Workers in Pennsylvania went on strike in 1902, the crisis became serious enough that President Theodore Roosevelt stepped in to arbitrate a settlement. By arranging for labor and management to meet face-to-face, Roosevelt unofficially recognized the union for the first time. He achieved a settlement that satisfied both labor and management. The settlement also increased Roosevelt's popularity and strengthened the presidency.

Timeline

1882: Agitation against English rule spreads throughout Ireland, culminating with the assassination of chief secretary for Ireland Lord Frederick Cavendish and permanent undersecretary Thomas Burke in Dublin's Phoenix Park. The leader of the nationalist movement is Charles Stewart Parnell, but the use of assassination and terrorism—which Parnell himself has disavowed—makes clear the fact that he does not control all nationalist groups.
1887: John Emerich Edward Dalbert-Acton, a leader of the opposition to the papal dogma of infallibility, observes, in a letter to Cambridge University professor Mandell Creighton, that "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
1891: Construction of Trans-Siberian Railway begins. Mean-while, crop failures across Russia lead to widespread starvation.
1895: Guglielmo Marconi pioneers wireless telegraphy, which in the next three decades will make possible the use of radio waves for commercial broadcasts and other applications.
1898: United States defeats Spain in the three-month Spanish American War. As a result, Cuba gains it independence, and the United States purchases Puerto Rico and the Philippines from Spain for $20 million.
1902: The Times Literary Supplement, a weekly review of literature and scholarship, begins publication in London.
1902: Second Anglo-Boer War ends in victory for Great Britain. It is a costly victory, however, resulting in the loss of more British lives (5,774) than any conflict between 1815 and 1914. The war also sees the introduction of concentration camps, used by the British to incarcerate Boer civilians.
1902: English geneticist William Bateson translates Austrian botanist Gregor Mendel's long-forgotten writings, which are destined to have an enormous impact on the study of heredity.
1904: Russo-Japanese War, which lasts into 1905 and results in a resounding Japanese victory, begins. In Russia the war is followed by the Revolution of 1905, which marks the beginning of the end of czarist rule; meanwhile, Japan is poised to become the first major non-Western power of modern times.
1908: Ford Motor Company introduces the Model T.
1912: Titanic sinks on its maiden voyage, from Southampton to New York, on 14 April. More than 1,500 people are killed.

Event and Its Context

On Strike

On 12 May 1902, 147,000 anthracite coal miners of the United Mine Workers (UMW) walked off the job in central and northeastern Pennsylvania to force the coal mine owners to meet their demands. The walkout left the Northeast and Midwest regions without the anthracite coal used to heat nearly every home, hospital, and business in the winter months. The owners, who also owned the railroads that shipped the coal, and thereby operated the largest industrial monopoly in the United States, refused to meet with John Mitchell, the UMW president. President Theodore Roosevelt believed that allowing the strike to go into autumn might cause wide-scale social unrest and violence and that breaking the strike might trigger the same response. Roosevelt's direct involvement in the arbitration talks—a first in United States history—ended the standoff.

In 1900 the mine owners, under political pressure from Republican leaders fearful of losing the White House, had made concessions that they had opposed to end an earlier strike. They vowed not to do that again. George F. Baer of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, and spokesman for the mine owners, took a hard line. "We will not surrender," he publicly declared. "The coal presidents are going to settle this strike, and they will settle it in their own way." In other words, they hoped to break the union.

Attempts at arbitration failed in June. Appeals came into the White House asking for the president to appoint a commission to investigate the issues of the strike. The owners advised against any presidential action. On 8 June, Roosevelt asked the commissioner of labor, Carroll D. Wright, to report to him about the circumstances of the strike. Two weeks later, Wright reported that a great deal of distrust existed between management and labor and made some suggestions about settlement. When Roosevelt asked whether he should release the report to the public, Attorney General Philander Knox responded that he should not on the grounds that the president had no right to interfere with the strike.

UMW Makes Concessions

During the first three months of the strike, Mitchell made as many concessions as he dared without losing leverage. His initial demands included union recognition, a reduction in the workday from 10 to 8 hours, an equitable system of assessing each miner's output, and an overall wage increase of 10 percent. Mitchell offered to go to arbitration to settle the dispute and was willing to forgo union recognition by the owners in return for his demands. When the bituminous coal miners walked out in sympathy, Mitchell persuaded them to go back to work and pay extra union dues to support their fellow miners. He temporarily kept pump men, engineers, and firemen on the job to prevent the mines from flooding or burning. The owners remained intransigent.

The miners' appeal for public sympathy worked as long as the weather remained warm and there was no violence in the coal fields. Mitchell knew that if Baer tried to break the strike with nonunion labor, there would be bloodshed. An attempt to do so at one mine triggered an outbreak of violence on 30 July. Governor William Stone sent troops to surround the area but informed President Roosevelt that federal assistance was neither necessary nor wanted. Public support for the miners soon began to erode. Mitchell implored the miners to obey the law and retain their determination. Violence subsided for the next two weeks.

In August 18,000 bituminous miners went out on a sympathy strike, joined by 50,000 coal-road workers (workers involved in the railroad transport of coal from the mines) who had nothing to move. The total number of idle workers approached a quarter of a million. At the end of August, Roosevelt inquired of Attorney General Knox if he could proceed against the mine owners for being engaged in a trust. Knox again replied that there were no grounds on which he could act. The Sherman Antitrust Act, he informed Roosevelt, was too narrowly drawn to support such a move. Meanwhile, reports of potential coal shortages in major cities began to surface.

Roosevelt Steps in

By September seven counties in northeastern Pennsylvania were under military surveillance, but the governor had not yet sent in state troops to seize the mines. Republican Party officials began to fret that the issue would hurt them in the upcoming congressional elections. Governor Winthrop Murray Crane of Massachusetts suggested to the president that he invite mine operators and miners to confer with him. Roosevelt, aware that he had no constitutional authority in the matter but believing that the situation called for some type of action, sent telegrams on 1 October to the presidents of the railroads that owned the coals mines and to Mitchell, asking them to come to Washington two days later. Mitchell received permission to bring three UMW district presidents.

On the morning of 3 October, Roosevelt informed the group at the beginning of the conference that he had no "right or duty to intervene in this way upon legal grounds or upon any official relation that I bear to the situation." Because of the situation, Roosevelt stated, he hoped to exert whatever influence he could to end the strike. He asked for an immediate resumption of operations in the mines to avert the potential widespread disaster of a shortage over the coming winter. Mitchell expressed the miners' willingness to have the president name a tribunal to settle the issues. If the owners accepted the tribunal's decision, so would the union. In the afternoon meeting, the owners made clear their refusal to deal with Mitchell and his men because they had provoked violence. They asked the president to dissolve the union as a trust (or illegal monopoly) and urged him to use the military to end the strike. When asked directly, they conceded that they would be willing to leave the strike to the courts of Pennsylvania, a concession that implied their willingness to submit to the authority of a third power. The conference ended with no settlement.

Though the conference itself was a failure, it had great significance. As historian Lewis L. Gould noted, "The president had placed a labor union and the workers it represented on something approaching the same political level as management and capital." Roosevelt established the precedent of presidential involvement in domestic economic crisis. Roosevelt's initiative at this stage of the coal strike proved to be an important contribution to enhancing the power of the presidency.

On 8 October, Mitchell rejected Roosevelt's offer to name an investigating commission if the miners would return to work. With no resolution in hand, Roosevelt ignored Mitchell and began assembling a commission to look into the strike on his behalf. At the same time, he decided that if no solution could be reached through negotiation, he would send in the U.S. Army and have the government operate the mines until the commission reported to him. It was a step he was loathe to take because he thought it "would form an evil precedent," but believed it was his only option in such an emergency.

Before taking such a drastic step, though, Roosevelt agreed to allow Secretary of War Elihu Root to meet with J. P. Morgan. Root, who came to government service from Wall Street, believed that Morgan's banking interests and position on the boards of many of the railroad companies gave him leverage with the mine owners. They returned to Washington together on 13 October with a proposal in which the owners aired their grievances and called for immediate resumption of mining, and for the appointment of a commission whose findings would be effective throughout the anthracite industry for three years. They did not acknowledge the union. They also stated their preferences for how the commission should be comprised: a military officer, a mining engineer, a federal judge from Pennsylvania, a man who was active in the anthracite coal business, and "a man of prominence eminent as a sociologist." They made no accommodation for any representative of organized labor.

Mitchell responded that he would agree to the proposal if the president added two more members of Roosevelt's choosing—a high Catholic official and a member of a union. Morgan's representatives agreed to Bishop John L. Spalding, who was also an industrial scholar, but rejected Edgar E. Clark, chief of the Railway Conductors Union, because he was "a labor man." If Clark were placed in the sociologist's slot, however, they had no objection. They simply did not want a union man appointed as labor's representative so they could claim they avoided any recognition of the union movement. Through this twist of semantics, both sides agreed on the membership of the commission. The miners returned to work on 23 October while the commission conducted its investigation.

On 18 March 1903 the commission submitted its findings to Roosevelt. It offered something for both workers and owners. The miners received a 10 percent increase in pay, a 9-hour working day, and a system of arbitration for job-related disputes. The commission did not offer recognition of the union because to do so, it argued, lay outside its mandate. Other coal-industry practices opposed by the UMW remained in place. The report also issued a strong denunciation of violence and of the boycotting tactics of the UMW. As for Roosevelt, who had been in office only a year when he first intervened in October 1902, his role in ending the strike raised his personal popularity to new heights and helped the Republicans at the polls a few weeks after the workers returned to work.

Key Players

Baer, George Frederick (1842-1914): A lawyer and railroad executive, Baer served as legal counsel for the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, and later was president of the organization that managed all the Reading holdings.

Knox, Philander Chase (1853-1921): As attorney general (1901-1904), Knox proved important in the implementation of Roosevelt's antitrust policy. He served one term as a U.S. senator (1904-1909), and then became secretary of state (1909-1913). He later returned to the Senate (1917-1921).

Mitchell, John (1870-1919): A founding member of the United Mine Workers (1890), Mitchell helped in its first successful national strike (1897) and served as its president (1899-1908), a period in which the union expanded its membership tenfold.

Morgan, J. P. (1837-1913): Morgan built his father's financial firm into the most powerful private banking house in America. Morgan financed the Federal Reserve system in the depression of 1895, developed the railroad system, and formed the U.S. Steel Corporation (1901).

Roosevelt, Theodore (1858-1919): A lifelong civil servant, a war hero, and author, Roosevelt became the youngest president ever upon William McKinley's assassination in 1901. He strengthened the executive branch through his progressive agenda during his two terms. He ran for a third term in office in 1912 on the Progressive Party ticket but lost.

Root, Elihu (1845-1937): A lawyer by training, Root served as U.S. secretary of war (1899-1904) and secretary of state (1905-1909), and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912 for his promotion of international arbitration.

Bibliography

Books

Cornell, Robert J. The Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902.Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1957.

Gould, Lewis L. The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt.Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 1991.

Morris, Edmund. Theodore Rex. New York: Random House,2001.

Other

Grossman, Jonathan. "The Coal Strike of 1902—Turning Point in U.S. Policy." Monthly Labor Review (October 1975). Reprinted on U.S. Department of Labor Web site, history page [cited 30 August 2002]. <http://www.dol.gov/asp/programs/history/coalstrike.htm>.