Fueling the Gilded Age: Railroads, Miners, and Disorder in Pennsylvania Coal Country by Andrew B. Arnold (review)

Andrew Arnold’s Fueling the Gilded Age explores the struggles for managerial control and economic power that erupted among coal miners, coal operators, and railroad executives in central Pennsylvania between 1872 and 1902. Rather than presenting an unassailable triumph of the railroads’ interests over labor, Arnold argues that the “coal industry defied order” (p. 3) and laborers exhibited “unexpected agency” (p. 4, emphasis in original) by thwarting the plans of railroad executives to impose managerial capitalism from the top down. Instead, wage earners “refused to accept their designated fate as commodities” (p. 222) and thereby exerted influence on the institutional order of the Gilded Age. Ultimately, Arnold argues that this disorderly process of improvisation and compromise demonstrates the “impact of evolving labor unionism and the limitations of managerial capitalism” (p. 231).

The narrative arch of Fueling the Gilded Age explores the coal miners’ evolving political and organizational strategies—from community unionism toward nationally oriented unions—as well as the countermovement by railroad executives to circumvent those organizations. Although Arnold explains the railroad executives’ goals and tactics, his focus is on central Pennsylvanian coal miners’ daily lives, challenges, successes, and failures. The book is divided into three sections: Hubris, Humility, and Stalemate. The first three chapters, which compose the first section, chronicle the decay of customary rights in coal mining workplace culture and law through a case study on Clearfield, Pennsylvania. Arnold argues that coal miners had once exercised a customary right of ownership over the coal they mined; however, in 1872 coal operators began employing immigrant strikebreakers, which undermined those traditional workplace rules. The resulting outbreak of violence in the winter of 1872–1873 culminated in prosecutions against labor leaders that dissuaded many laborers from seeking leadership positions and forced miners to pursue alternative forms of organization, namely political parties and secret societies. Nevertheless, unionism persisted.

The following two sections explain how, despite this erosion of local autonomy and customs, coal miners continued to exercise formidable resistance to railroad executives’ attempts to control coal production, prices, and distribution for their sole benefit. Through the 1880s, the more formalized and nationally oriented Knights of Labor, and later the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), absorbed local unions. Although this further diminished community-based workplace norms, it also coordinated workers’ demands on a larger scale. Miners shifted their efforts toward attaining living wages, guaranteeing union checkweighmen to weigh coal, and achieving formal recognition of their labor union. In 1894, the UMWA achieved a substantial victory by forging an agreement with coal operators to establish a compromise wage rate despite widespread falling prices and wages. That agreement showed how the coal mining industry eluded railroad executives’ control. Thus, these coal miners, whose daily work underground remained artisanal and labor intensive, altered the structure of modern American capitalism by persistently exerting their evolving demands for workers’ rights.

Arnold’s emphasis on local culture and activism both revives and revises the older “organizational synthesis” literature, which began with Robert Weibe’s A Search for Order (1967), informed Louis Galambos’s “Emerging Organizational Synthesis” (1970), and animated Alfred Chandler’s The Visible Hand (1977). Arnold, however, adds agency and contingency to the Gilded Age struggle between labor and capital, explaining how neither group fully realized its vision for modern industrial capitalism. In the late nineteenth century, laborers’ groups shifted from community trade unionism to national organization, just as the railroads reorganized from regional carriers to consolidated networks serving a national market. Ultimately, both labor and capital followed similar organizational logics; nonetheless, Arnold provides a necessary corrective to the organizational school’s structural functionalism by demonstrating the importance of local coal miners, who were driven not by technological innovation but by a resistance to changing workplace culture and law. They participated in large-scale, increasingly professionalized associations that defied orderly control by railroad executives. This narrative thus punctures the...