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>> 15 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 16 > 17 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...

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