Union Renegades

Miners, Capitalism, and Organizing in the Gilded Age

Dana M. Caldemeyer

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780252085406
  9780252043505
• eBook ISBN:
  9780252052385
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

In the late nineteenth century, Midwestern miners often had to decide if joining a union was in their interest. Arguing that these workers were neither pro-union nor anti-union, Dana M. Caldemeyer shows that they acted according to what they believed would benefit them and their families. As corporations moved to control coal markets and unions sought to centralize their organizations to check corporate control, workers were often caught between these institutions and sided with whichever one offered the best advantage in the moment. Workers chased profits while paying union dues, rejected national unions while forming local orders, and broke strikes while claiming to be union members. This pragmatic form of unionism differed from what union leaders expected of rank-and-file members, but for many workers the choice to follow or reject union orders was a path to better pay, stability, and independence in an otherwise unstable age.

Nuanced and eye-opening, Union Renegades challenges popular notions of workers attitudes during the Gilded Age.

CHAPTER ONE

Deceived

Producers in a Dishonest World

Of the dozens of buildings in Ottumwa, Iowa, one in particular stood out, and it was both a source and a symbol of the city’s pride. The enormous two-story “coal palace” was over 325 feet tall and gilded with polished Iowa coal, an ornamented castle that stood in contrast to the otherwise drab Iowa countryside. Inside the palace were dozens of displays exhibiting the region’s farm surplus and manufactured products. It was “marvelously attractive,” President Benjamin Harrison declared to a crowd of forty thousand at the palace’s opening, not only because it found beauty in common materials but also because it symbolized the wealth in Ottumwa. “You are favored here in having not only a surface soil that yields richly to the labor of the farmer, but in also having hidden beneath that surface rich mines of coal which are to be converted into power to propel the mills that will supply the wants of your people,” he proclaimed.1 The Coal Palace was more than an example of the lavish architecture of the period, it was a demonstration of a region’s ease of access to the raw material that fueled the Gilded Age.

Like many raw materials, the value of coal relied on the fact that it had little monetary worth. “Cheap coal” made cheap steel that allowed the railroads to stretch farther and more affordably than it had on iron rails.2 It connected local markets to larger, more competitive ones via railways and steamship lines that stretched across the nation and world.3 Ornamental coal, then, like hundreds of other raw materials arranged and presented as art became a way to flaunt wealth and modernity, to boast of abundance so great it could be displayed rather than consumed. “Sioux City [Iowa] will have a corn palace at the World’s fair; Yankton, Dak., a cement palace; Hutchinson [Kansas] a salt palace, and Newton [Kansas] when she gets her four sorghum mills to running will doubtless build one of molasses candy,” the Topeka (KS) State Journal quipped, prompting newspapers throughout eastern Kansas to joke that their cities would also build a palace of coal. Such a claim was only partially in jest. In addition to Ottumwa, Streator (IL), East St. Louis (IL), and Brazil (IN) erected their own palaces celebrating the abundant “black diamonds” that came from their soil.4

The cheapness of coal was not a reflection of its quality, but rather a devaluation of production costs. As a result, the phrase “cheap coal” had an entirely different meaning to those who mined it. To them, it meant devaluation of their life and labor. No one knew this more than the miner who dug a five-ton lump of coal to be displayed in the Pittsburg Hotel in Pittsburg, Kansas. Due to his mine’s conditions and the size of the piece, no machine could be used to mine the coal, so the miner extracted it by hand. Such a technique had remained unchanged for decades, but the wages the miner received for the work continually declined. The miner had agreed to extract the block in exchange for eleven dollars, which he would split with his assistant, and a keg of beer to be given to the extra men needed to hoist the massive block to the surface intact. But after the miner spent days carefully extracting the piece, he received only five dollars for his toil. Keeping his word when his employer did not, the miner split the five dollars with his assistant and purchased the promised beer out of his own earnings.5

The company and town could afford to proudly display the coal instead of burning it, but they would not pay the miner his promised wage. Such disregard for producers ran rampant in the Gilded Age when employers sought to keep profits high and production costs low. The frequency of such instances of employer dishonesty prompted the Christian Advocate to call for “Christianizing the upper masses” rather than focus solely on converting the lower classes to Christianity. “If religion is a good thing to make a servant submissive, why is it not a good thing to make an employer human?” the editors asked. They pressed: “if the Christian religion will … prevent miners from deeds of violence, why will it not also cause mine owners to treat their men as men?”6

But it was difficult to treat “men as men” when coal was sold competitively. If producers wanted work, they needed to perform the labor for less and less. “Cheap coal” needed to become cheaper, and with that came the shared understanding among many producers that farmers and laborers were expected to produce the wealth, but they could never hold onto it. Producers “plant all the water melons and live on the rind,” miner “A Thinker” declared. They “build all the mine mansions” but were “sheltered in the desert.” The “Thinker” was not alone in these sentiments. “Where would the late J. Gould have got his sixty millions had it not been for the miner,” one Illinois miner wife asked. The nation depended on the miners “and yet,” she grumbled, “the miner today is thought very little above the brute.”7 As market competition drove down crop and coal prices, producers and their families saw and understood that their own value to society was tied to this decrease.

Producer devaluation, then, became the moral grounds that mobilized many producers in the Gilded Age. Employers and much of upper- and middle-class society regarded the poorer classes as immoral and untrustworthy, but producers saw themselves as honorable and upright. Historians have been careful to highlight the common moral rhetoric that mobilized producers and earned sympathy and support from middle-class constituents.8 But to the workers, this problem was more than rhetorical. The dishonesty workers experienced, such as not being paid as agreed upon for extracting a five-ton lump of coal, demonstrated not only the devaluation such producers endured in the late nineteenth century, but also how this deception influenced workers’ understanding of the world around them. To them, the exploitive relationship between those who produced the nation’s wealth and those who benefited from it was morally wrong. They couched their grievances in moral and political terms that continually reaffirmed their identities as moral citizens and human beings entitled to kindness and fair treatment.

In many producers’ minds, employers and the rest of society were truly heartless beings who gambled, lied, and stole. Their desires for profit created the working conditions that endangered industrial laborers’ lives. Farmers looked in dismay at the increasingly popular futures market that seemed to steal their profits before they could even harvest them. To many producers, it seemed that the only ones who looked closely at the laborer did so to make money off them.

In fact, when the families of the miners killed in the 1888 Frontenac, Kansas, explosion sued the Cherokee and Pittsburg Mining Company several years later, the case ended with the families’ lawyer settling with the company without the families’ consent. Instead of giving them the settlement money, however, the lawyer ran off with the cash, leaving the victims’ families in more debt than when they began the lawsuit. Even the lawyers on the producers’ side, it seemed, only deceived.9

This mistrust extended to the miners’ own organizations. Workers frequently debated whether labor organizations truly worked on the producers’ behalf. Indeed, as the miners in Frontenac worked to identify bodies incinerated in the 1888 explosion, the Knights of Labor and the National Federation of Miners and Mine Laborers (NFM) were locked in a battle to be the sole miners’ union. To the rank and file, the competition indicated that leaders cared for their union’s prominence over the workers’ interests. Consequently, when leaders of the two organizations finally decided to merge the following year, thousands of union miners refused to acknowledge the merger. Although many held memberships in both orders, they believed it was a ploy to grant union leadership power and profit at the rank and file’s expense. This false start did not come from workers’ apathy toward unionism. Rather, it came from workers’ fears that, like deceitful businessmen, corrupt politicians, and selfish employers, labor leaders benefitted from Gilded Age fraud and acknowledged the nation’s producers only in order to exploit them.

Deceptive Markets

To many rural producers, deceit and immorality were integral to Gilded Age business and were epitomized by men like Charles J. Devlin. Born around 1853 to Irish immigrants in northern Illinois, Devlin grew up in poverty. His mother, Bridget, worked as a washerwoman and raised her son and his younger sister alone. Devlin was arrested for larceny as a teenager and spent the early years of adulthood in the Illinois State Penitentiary. On his release, he began working as a clerk for a coal company.10 He climbed the ladder to manager, and, in 1884, with the financial support of his father-in-law, Devlin founded the Spring Valley Coal Company, the start to a vast coal-powered empire that eventually made him millions of dollars.11

But Devlin’s rise from criminal to coal baron was not due solely to hard work or savvy investing. Rather, it came from the railroads, eastern businessmen, and government financiers who needed a manager to look after their companies and investments in rural and western lands. His success reflected a broader trend within Gilded Age business in which false fronts, false markets, and false products generated millions of real dollars. In addition to his father-in-law’s funds, Devlin received subsidies from local businessmen and railroad operators seeking to develop Spring Valley. Journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd claimed that several local railroads worked with Devlin’s Spring Valley Coal Company to control the city’s development and ensure their businesses received the greatest profits. This growth, Lloyd asserted, only came with hushed agreements for “special freight rates needed to enable the ‘enterprise’ to steal the business of its competitors.”12

More importantly, although he was one of its founders, Devlin was not the primary shareholder of the Spring Valley Coal Company. He managed the mines but answered to eastern stockholders such as Democratic Pennsylvania Congressman William L. Scott, who was more than an investor and politician. His interests tied him to multiple regions and industries, making him a shipping magnate, New York Stock Exchange operator, railroader, and bank president. To miners, however, Scott was a “coal king,” with mines in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Illinois, including the Spring Valley Coal Company.13 Devlin served as Scott’s manager and continued this relationship with other investors, pushing westward with the railroad. By 1894, Devlin had amassed a fortune running the Devlin Coal Company, the Marquette Third Vein Coal Company, and other companies used to manage the holdings for the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad (ATSF).14

Managers like Devlin were integral to Gilded Age investment and often served as the first line of defense against corporate financial ruin. In cases like the mines Devlin managed for Scott and the ATSF, individual mines or mining companies were small parts of a larger whole that often teetered on the edge of bankruptcy.15 Usually, they were small companies used to shuffle property back and forth to avoid expenses and bankruptcies.16 When bankruptcies occurred, which frequently happened in the Gilded Age, managers like Devlin were left holding the bag.17 This happened to Devlin in 1905, leaving him responsible for several indebted companies, nearly $4 million of missing government and corporate money, and at least four bank closings in three states. After filing for bankruptcy, Devlin was placed under investigation and died of a stroke before his case was settled.18 Despite his close relationship with the railroad, the ATSF was not implicated and seldom even mentioned in the news stories regarding the scandal. Even by 1907, two years after Devlin’s death, the investigation had not untangled Devlin’s web of business connections. A 1910 article in Fuel remembered Devlin as a coal magnate who singlehandedly developed the western coalfields, not as a high-level railroad employee whose coal interests depended on corporations like the ATSF.19

The market instability that brought Devlin both fortune and failure was common in the Gilded Age coal industry. On one hand, the opportunity for success was promising for those who kept their costs low enough, but the low cost of production also made the market open to cutthroat competition. Unlike other industries where a handful of corporations dominated the trade, many rural industries remained largely decentralized in the late nineteenth century. Coal mining, logging, and turpentining required little industrial equipment and low up-front cost. For coal mining, this meant that landowners with the means to reach the coal and hoist it out could produce coal as cheaply as the largest mine enterprises. The low overhead cost prevented major corporations from dominating the industry.20 As railroads stretched into the countryside, these mines began shipping their coal to urban markets, causing Indiana and Illinois mines to compete with those in Ohio and western Pennsylvania. The sheer number of mine owners and operators made it impossible for the nation’s coal operators to organize like other industries that could control prices. Even if William Scott and other big coal barons had attempted to set a high coal price, other companies underbid them, rendering any operator organization unable to raise profits.21

Still, if they could not corner the coal market, large operators could undersell it. By underpricing coal, companies landed more contracts with urban coal dealers and consumers so that the increased volume of sales absorbed the cut in profit.22 In doing so, they forced other mine owners to lower their costs as well. The result created a competitive and overstocked national coal market as companies battled for the lowest prices.23

Making a fortune off financial decline, however, was not limited to the coal industry. Historian Steve Fraser observes that Gilded Age corporations often took advantage of depressions to buy up bankrupt companies. “Rockefeller’s oil combine, Armour’s meatpacking supremacy, Carnegie’s steel dominion, Frick’s coke and coal mine empire, among others,” he writes, “all emerged first out of the ruins of the catastrophic depression that lasted through...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Deceived: Producers in a Dishonest World
• 2 Undermined: Winter Diggers, Union Strikebreakers
• 3 “Judases”: Union “Betrayal” and the Aborted 1891 Strike
• 4 Outsiders: Race and the Exclusive Politics of an Inclusive Union, 1892–1894
• 5 Unsettled: Nonunion Mobilization and the 1894 Strike
• 6 Wolves: Fractured Unions in the Gilded Age, 1894–1896
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover