Fueling the Gilded Age: Railroads, Miners, and Disorder in Pennsylvania Coal Country

Notes

>> 241 Notes Notes to the Introduction 1. Stephen Crane, “In the Depths of a Coal Mine,” McClure’s Magazine 3, 2 (August 1894). 2. Keith Dix, What’s a Coal Miner to Do? The Mechanization of Coal Mining, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988), 1. David Brody, “Market Unionism in America: The Case of Coal,” in In Labor’s Cause: Main Themes on the History of the American Worker (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 131–132. For related approaches that also look to recapture the chaotic “shock of the old” on which high technology so often depends, see, for example, David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (Great Britain: Profile Books, 2006); Clay McShane and Joel Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). 3. Albert J. Churella, The Pennsylvania Railroad: Volume I, Building an Empire, 1846–1917 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 629–630. 4. What the Coal Commission Found: An Authoritative Summary by the Staff (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins Company, 1925), 37, 69. Quoted in Joseph Lambie, From Mine to Market: The History of Coal Transportation on the Norfolk and Western Railway (New York: NYU Press, 1954), 70–71. A further breakdown of usage for 1920: Industrial plants other than steel and coal, 25%, steel plants used roughly 21.4% (6.4% directly, plus 15% that went into making coke, generally used in steel production), 10% for domestic heating, 6.6% for electricity, 4.5% exported, 2% burned at mines, just under 2% for steamships. 5. Report of the Interstate Commerce Commission. 1 December 1887 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1887), 6. 6. The emphasis on the power of disorder and disruption owes much to the work of James C. Scott. See, for example, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985); Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990). For a brief, accessible introduction to his thinking, see Two Cheers for Anarchism : Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012), passim. 7. This quotation is the closing line to the preface of Thomas K. McCraw, ed., Creating Modern Capitalism: How Entrepreneurs, Companies, and Countries Triumphed in the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), vii. “Fundamentally , the book is about ideas and systems that worked in the creation of modern capitalism.” Emphasis in the original. 242 > 243 4. At least two of the men were direct relations of Shorthill’s. Three of the men, the Zimmermans , consisted of a father and his two sons. They were probably owners of the J. Zimmerman & Company sawmill. Phillipsburg Journal, 3 August 1872. 5. Phillipsburg Journal, 11 January 1873. 6. If there were clandestine groups of semiorganized Irish miners in Clearfield who used threats, violence, or arson in service of class or ethnic warfare, they do not seem to have been a dominant presence, either in practice or in the public imagination. Nevertheless, threats were issued at times in Clearfield, violence and arson committed , and “Molly Maguirism” charged by the press. See in particular the George Evans murder case. Raftsman’s Journal, “Murder,” 23 June 1880. In this sense, Molly Maguirism in Clearfield parallels Harold Aurand’s skeptical assessment of this phenomenon. If “Schuylkill was not the Harlan County of the 1870s,” neither was Clearfield. Harold Aurand and William Gudelunas, “The Mythical Qualities of Molly Maguire,” Pennsylvania History 49, 2 (April 1982): 98. For a recent account of the Molly Maguire trials in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania, see Kevin Kenney, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 7. Notes of Evidence, “Abstract of Evidence from Phonographic Notes,” and the “True Bill,” Commonwealth vs. Mack, and Others. Clearfield County Courts Quarter Sessions, June 1873. See also Docket Book, “Quarter Sessions, 1863–1873,” No. 36, p. 642. 8. Notes of Evidence, Prosecution 17. Testimony of John J. Leigh, “Some of the men were getting a little excited and Shorthill sent them further up the track.” 9. Pennsylvania General Assembly, Regular Session, 1872, No. 1195, “An Act to relieve laborers, working men and journeymen from certain prosecutions and indictments for conspiracy under the criminal laws of this Commonwealth.” 10. Between 1806 and 1842, American judges came increasingly to consider conspiracy only applicable where agreements existed to achieve illegal ends or legal...