Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [79]
John Mitchell, the thirty-two-year-old president of United Mine Workers, encouraged this evangelical treatment by wearing his white collar very high, and buttoning his long black coat to the neck. At every stop on his journey he allowed breaker boys to sit at his feet while he preached the gospel of labor organization. A former coal miner himself, he knew that the credulous masses that looked to him for deliverance needed faith to sustain them. Faith, and food: these “anthracite people” would be starving already, had he not persuaded their brethren in the bituminous fields to go back to work and pay extra dues to support them.
Swarthy, silent, introspective, and worn, Mitchell calculated the coefficients of patience and time. The strike was now thirteen weeks old, and Mitchell had risked as many concessions as he dared. He had temporarily held pump men, engineers, and firemen to their jobs, so that mines would not flood or explode; he had offered to arbitrate; he had even hinted to Carroll D. Wright, Roosevelt’s Commissioner of Labor, that he would not push union recognition if management agreed to a reduction in the contract workday from ten to eight hours, an equitable system of assessing each miner’s output, and an overall wage increase of 10 percent.
Mitchell’s concessions had been taken as weakness by the financiers who, through mutual ownership of mines and coal-bearing railroads, operated the greatest industrial monopoly in the United States. Their spokesman, George F. Baer of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, declined private communications with Mitchell and addressed him, tauntingly, through the press. “Anthracite mining,” he said, “is a business and not a religious, sentimental, or academic proposition.”
When the miners responded by calling out their remaining brethren in the pump rooms and firehouses, Baer became truculent. They could stay out “six months, or six years,” he blustered. “Cripple industry, stagnate business or tie up the commerce of the world, and we will not surrender.”
So the first seepages began underground, and the culm fires flickered freely. Mitchell, accepting voluntary relief contributions from other labor organizations, gave notice that the conciliatory phase of his strike was over.
Roaming the anthracite valleys, he discounted rumors of nonunion labor being hired out of state. Both he and Mark Hanna (worriedly monitoring the situation from Cleveland) agreed that if the operators did try to break the strike, the result would be such violence as to obliterate all memories of previous bloodshed in mining disputes.
George Baer assumed a pose of haughty indifference. “The coal presidents are going to settle this strike, and they will settle it in their own way,” he announced on 29 July.
SHENANDOAH WAS QUIET most of the day following his remarks. Blackened willows bent over the stream oozing between colliery and town; gray-black breakers loomed against the sky, silent and smokeless. Spires and domes of Polish and Greek churches caught the afternoon sun. For all its influx of new immigrants, Shenandoah remained a deeply traditional coal town, haunted by memories of the “Molly Maguire” labor terrorists of a generation before. Here, in 1862, America’s first coal strike had occurred.
Centre Street was dominated by the Philadelphia & Reading station. This depot represented just one node in the ivylike spread of George Baer’s railroad through Schuylkill County. Its steel tendrils linked mineheads and ironworks and slag heaps. Its runner roots carved so deeply into coal seams that the landscape sagged. Every year, it transported some ten million tons of black satiny crystals. Eight other “coal roads” contributed to the anthracite country’s annual production of fifty-five million tons, which heated virtually every house, school, and hospital in the northeastern United