Fueling the Gilded Age
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Fueling the Gilded Age

Railroads, Miners, and Disorder in Pennsylvania Coal Country

Andrew B. Arnold

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Fueling the Gilded Age

Railroads, Miners, and Disorder in Pennsylvania Coal Country

Andrew B. Arnold

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If the railroads won the Gilded Age, the coal industry lost it. Railroads epitomized modern management, high technology, and vast economies of scale. By comparison, the coal industry was embarrassingly primitive. Miners and operators dug coal, bought it, and sold it in 1900 in the same ways that they had for generations. In the popular imagination, coal miners epitomized anti-modern forces as the so-called “Molly Maguire” terrorists. Yet the sleekly modern railroads were utterly dependent upon the disorderly coal industry. Railroad managers demanded that coal operators and miners accept the purely subordinate role implied by their status. They refused. Fueling the Gilded Age shows how disorder in the coal industry disrupted the strategic plans of the railroads. It does so by expertly intertwining the history of two industries — railroads and coal mining — that historians have generally examined from separate vantage points. It shows the surprising connections between railroad management and miner organizing; railroad freight rate structure and coal mine operations; railroad strategy and strictly local legal precedents. It combines social, economic, and institutional approaches to explain the Gilded Age from the perspective of the relative losers of history rather than the winners. It beckons readers to examine the still-unresolved nature of America’s national conundrum: how to reconcile the competing demands of national corporations, local businesses, and employees.

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Information

Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2014
ISBN
9780814764565

PART I

Hubris

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 prosecution and even violent attack—can trace a strain of its character to the kind of miners’ cultural activism described in this chapter.
To understand this story is also to gain insight into the changing nature of two deeply intertwined industries at a particular time. The coal and railroad industries faced a change in scale as American industrialism began to shift its weight from limited partnerships to the corporate form. It is to understand what coal operators thought they were rebelling against when they attacked their own customary relationships with the coal miners, and why they fought with such determination. It is to understand why railroad managers thought they had a right and an obligation to subordinate the businesses along their lines to their larger battles with each other. It is to understand why the railroads never quite succeeded in doing so. It describes a form of unionism deeply rooted in established workplace and community practice and culture.
Businessmen in this era were fighting for a return, or so they saw it, to an era of simpler, purer economic rights. Theirs was the so-called Liberal movement centered on the Republican Party and looking back to the rights of property of the pre–Civil War era. They fought for liberty to compete or to avoid competition as best suited them, and against interference from local, state, or national governments and associations of their workers. In the period between the Civil War and the Panic of 1873, the men who would eventually become best known as philanthropic benefactors, robber barons, and captains of industry had yet to comfortably fill out their waistcoats, nor had they yet gilded their age. In 1872, they still had reason to see themselves as high-tech rebels against an older fashion of small-minded workplace traditions and of local businessmen. They saw themselves as the lean, embattled builders of the modern world.
In the next few years of the mid-1870s, strikes in coal would become broad ideological battles fought out on a national stage. In the near future, railroads would use their control over transportation to prevent coal operators from even negotiating with coal miners. They would argue for the strictest individualism in the workplace. Collective action in the workplace, they insisted, was a wrongful, violent, and fruitless conspiracy against the market. They would raise the right of all individual workers anywhere to compete for all individual jobs anywhere to sacred status. This winter’s strike was far narrower in scope, however, and few outside the area knew about it. In 1872, railroad executives apparently saw the strike as a matter for coal miners and coal operators to decide for themselves. In 1872, the railroad still saw itself more as a common carrier, its various corporate charters and privileges granted in order to serve the public interest as well as its investors. Starting in 1873, railroad managers began to see themselves more as private empire builders with 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
In the fall of 1872, the executive committee of the Clearfield miners met to decide whether to call a strike. Mines along each of the four railroad branch lines voted, and then each railroad branch sent two delegates for a total of eight men. Two came from the Morrisdale branch, two from the Moshannon branch, two from the Coaldale branch, and two from the Mapleton branch.
Within this informal structure, some individuals and their families took on a leadership role. Dennis White presided over the central delegate meeting. White was a devout Catholic who bequeathed his faith in his church and his commitment to organizing to his son James. (His daughter entered a convent and eventually became its Mother Superior.) He came to the United States from Ireland in 1856, and lived in Clearfield County since at least September 1869.3 He came to Clearfield with the coal trade. White argued against the 1872 strike at his own branch line meeting, and as a result found himself accused of cowardice. Nevertheless, he prevailed. His branch committee voted against the strike. He argued against it once more as the executive committee deliberated. But the vast majority of the region’s miners had voted for the strike. When the regional executive committee deadlocked, Dennis White reluctantly voted with the majority. When the strike ended in failure he left town, probably to escape the blacklist, and mined coal in Latrobe in Western Pennsylvania for several years. He returned to Clearfield in the late 1870s as a Greenback Labor Party activist and opened a tavern. His son James succeeded him as a union leader in Clearfield unions, in the Knights of Labor, and as Secretary of the United Mine Workers of America.
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Notice the ephemeral but durable nature of Dennis White’s kind of unionism. The pit committees that managed production in each mine became strike committees and came together in the larger delegate committees. Then they dispersed. What were the strengths of this sort of organization? Including as it did almost all the miners of the region, the informal mix of pit committees, mass gatherings, and delegate meetings created little distance between leaders and followers. Its leaders could engage in negotiations with regional operators with a powerful claim to represent their followers, and with some expectation of success. But they would find, when challenged, that they were also limited by the informal, extralegal nature of their group. They had few sources of funding. Local shopkeepers granted them some credit. Miners in Maryland and other mining regions gave sparse donations. They had no legally defensible authority. They had recourse only to the informal power of tradition, argument, and culture. They had no recourse whatsoever if faced 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 expected—under a mild hail of snowballs and insults from the men and women of Sterling. Shorthill’s men dodged snowballs from small groups of women and the taunt of “blackleg” from strikers.7 Occasionally, individual strikers came closer and demanded that they fight “if they were men.” Shorthill moved any of his workers who seemed likely to fight closer to the mine mouth and farther from the strikers.8 He kept his men a safe distance from the strikers and interposed himself in the breach—not necessarily because his men were in danger but because he feared they might accept a challenge. He wanted to mine coal in defiance of the old rules of coal mining culture—to challenge the sense that miners had the property right to their jobs implied by the strike. Fistfights gained him nothing. He held his men back from fights with the strikers.
But even without resort to real violence, the striking miners reminded Shorthill and his men of the power of community unionism. The insults cut through Shorthill’s agenda to reach the strikebreakers as individuals and as men. If you consider the blackleg label to be wrong, the strikers were saying, you should be willing to fight to defend your actions. The strikebreakers had ties to the miners’ community as well. The argument and the epithet hit home for them. They had something at stake here. The label “blackleg” offended them. But more, it had implications for their permanent status within the wider coal miner community. Blacklegs and their progeny could carry such labels and ostracism for generations. The term “blackleg” and other insults carried their full potency during this confrontation, undiluted by time or the strike’s ultimate failure. As long as men intended to remain in the area, the insulting label stuck, and it stung. It was an effective sanction of traditional miners’ unionism.
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Shorthill and McHugh were correct: Within the legal parameters of the law there was little union leaders could do about men who defied the strike vote. The power of miners’ unionism at this time was more in the work culture of mining than in its legal status. Though a new 1872 state law permitted unions to call their members out on strike, it did not, it turned out, prevent R. H. Powell from importing strikebreakers. In this law, workers in Pennsylvania gained the right to form associations to raise wages and to cease work as a body. Union members were specifically freed to cease work if failing to do so would put them afoul of union rules. In 1872, the Pennsylvania state law on labor unions more closely protecte...

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