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

Introduction: Railroads, Miners, and Disorder in the Gilded Age, 1870–1900

>> 1 Introduction Railroads, Miners, and Disorder in the Gilded Age, 1870–1900 To call the age “Gilded” was to joke that it offered promises of gold backed by realities of base metal. The Gilded Age took its name from the title of a satirical 1873 novel. To the book’s coauthors it was the false promise of effortless riches that seemed to best describe its time. In The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley conveyed the idea of an era that truly appeared to be golden—but falsely. To gild was to merely coat with gold or with gold-colored paint. Gold was far too valuable, soft, and heavy to be part of actual construction. The exciting new world of steam power, railroads, electricity, and telegraphs was indeed shiny with promise, and it looked at times as if it must be gold, pure gold all the way through. This was an age, it seemed, in which the technological and financial limitations of the past were all falling away. Unimaginable riches and magical new technologies tantalized observers. Visitors to Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition in 1876, or (even more so) the Columbian Exposition of 1893 saw incredible new technologies on display. Visitors could hardly miss the promise of the world that would be made possible by new technology and a national-scale economy. They came to these fairs from smaller, or at least dimmer, towns and cities to a bright new world of speed and change. By 1893 the Columbian Exposition promised electric lights, unlimited steam power, and instantaneous communication. But what of the unshiny underpinning of the Gilded Age? In Twain and Dudley’s metaphor, after all, it’s the base metal that gives the age its shape, though not its shine. The second part of their title, A Tale of Today may feel a bit like a sly warning to future readers. Perhaps we too might consider if the technological and financial promises of our age are not more blindingly reflective of our desires than they are magical. In 1962, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke wrote: 2 > 3 a people used to moving at the speed of a walk. It wasn’t merely their speed and size. Railroad economics, administration, and finance captured the nation’s imagination. It was easy for anyone to contrast a railroad train to a horse-drawn wagon. Each additional horse-drawn wagon required an additional set of horses and drivers. Railroad economics meant that each additional freight or passenger car added almost nothing to the cost of a train. A horse-drawn wagon could carry as much as six, and possibly up to eight tons. A single railroad car could carry multiples of that amount. At speed. Similarly, the continent-wide scale of railroad enterprise awed observers. It wasn’t merely this incredible new scale but also the ways that managers learned to administer their vast domains. The Gilded Age wasn’t merely the first to fully harness the power of steam; it was also the first to fully harness the power of information. It was an age of clerks as well as engineers. Moreover, the scale of railroad stock and bond issues made Wall Street into the nation’s dominant financial center. The story of the railroads was one of achieving previously unimaginable possibilities and of triumph. The story of the coal industry that fueled the railroad is less triumphant. The coal industry defied order, both in the day-to-day manual labor of getting coal out of the ground and in the ways that it sold and marketed coal. It’s a counterstory to the technological triumph of the railroads and large-scale “Types of Miners” —Lewis W. Hine 4 > 5 operators, and for that matter lower-level railroad managers had negative power to thwart the orderly plans of railroad executives. When coal miners struck, they “stopped wheels,” in the language of the time, and gave marginal coal railroads and coalfields an opportunity to expand. When coal operators and freight agents connived, they undermined the strategic initiatives of the railroad masters. As the Interstate Commerce Commission noted in its 1887 report, the memorandum book of the harried railroad freight agent was often the only record of rates, and his interests and his closest relationships did not necessarily match those of his superiors.5 Despite their designated role as saviors of the American economy and despite their best efforts, railroad executives failed to bring order to the coalfields...