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>> 185 7 National Scale A Living Wage for Capital and for Labor, 1895–1902 In 1894 national unionism in coal had seemed to union leaders to require uniform wages and conditions throughout the industry.1 The nation was becoming a single market, they believed. Therefore, in order for wages to rise in one place they had to rise in all places. No operator could pay any more or less for labor than any other. The success of their union depended on agreements with every single coal miner and every single coal operator in the nation, or none at all. As they learned toward the end of the century, however, their assumptions about a national market for wages turned out to be not quite correct. The rise of railroads had not annihilated geography but had changed it in specific ways. Railroad executives had spent decades subsidizing development in their monopoly regions. As historian James A. Ward has pointed out, they saw themselves as empire builders.2 Each eastern railroad empire included its own source of coal for fuel and freight. Thus, the decades of regional railroad wars created a vast oversupply of trackage, coal, and coal operators. As the major railroads consolidated into a single ownership structure, they sought to extricate themselves from their old regional empires. Yet they could not easily abandon those regions with their extensive investments in tracks, spurs, sources of coal, freight, customers , and infrastructure. Starting in 1900, railroad managers published freight rates that kept all their old coal mining regions in business. They began shifting the bulk of the coal business to West Virginia and to Somerset County, Pennsylvania, but they maintained Central Pennsylvania as an increasingly but never totally marginalized coalfield. In this period, from roughly 1895 to 1900, the UMWA’s joint conferences with coal operators would help match wages to production and transportation costs and put a damper on competition . In this sense, the shift to West Virginia and Somerset County created less of an existential threat to the UMWA and Central Pennsylvania and 186 > 187 to pressure holdout companies, crowned by the creative leadership of Mary Harris “Mother” Jones and the conservative stewardship of new UMWA President John Mitchell. At the same time, coal operators began to solidify their organization in the Seaboard Coal Association, to consider preemptive raises in order to forestall strikes, and to limit such increases to the bare minimum . In 1899 the coal miners made agreements with an association made up of most coal operators serving the East Coast. * * * In June 1895 old hopes of cementing a single district—from Virginia to Central Pennsylvania—of all mines shipping soft coal to the Eastern Seaboard were tempered by an investigative trip that R. A. Kinsloe, the Pennsylvania Grit’s soft coal columnist, took to West Virginia. In that trip he gained a sense of what direct corporate control of a coalfield truly meant. In late spring 1895, thirty-two of the thirty-eight West Virginia coal operators pushed their miners out on strike. Nevertheless, the operators supported the miners they had just encouraged to drop their tools, allowed them to suspend rent payments for company houses, and even welcomed Kinsloe and the UMWA activists who accompanied him. In an extended visit of several weeks, Kinsloe interviewed coal operators as well as railroad men and coal miners. The coal miners of these thirty-two operators were pawns in a larger battle, he reported. The larger battle was that between the receivers of the now-bankrupt Norfolk & Western Railroad Company and the thirty-two so-called “independent ” coal operators along its lines. The problem of railroad power was more pronounced in West Virginia than in the Midwest or Central Pennsylvania. In West Virginia the railroad owned the coal lands and it owned six of the thirty-eight area coal companies outright. All coal operators in the region sold their product through a single entity, the Flat Top Land Association, also controlled by the N&W, which charged $.01/ton for inspection of all coal so as to build West Virginia’s reputation for coal quality.4 Independent operators paid an additional $.10/ton royalty to the land company. The N&W had caused the current troubles when it raised the proportion of the final selling price for coal that went to its freight rates. It thus lowered the net price received by operators for coal at the mine. The selling price of coal was out of the N&W’s control. It was defined by interregional competition between West...

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