Book Description

Excerpt from Anthracite Coal Communities When the strike of 1900 was settled, all who knew the situation at first hand felt that the settlement was only an armistice, that the real conflict between capital and labor in the anthracite regions was yet to come. The great strike of 1902 came and with it a harvest of misery, privation and crime. It cost us over $100,000,000 and wrought moral ruin the extent of which none can estimate. The outcome of the conflict - the interference of the President and the appointment of a commission - was not dreamt of by the most sanguine advocates of the rights of labor. For over four months, the Coal Strike Commission inquired into the "economic, domestic, scholastic and religious phases" of the mine workers' lives. It examined 558 witnesses and most of the testimony was eagerly read by an interested public. During the conflict fundamental questions relative to industrial and social relations were raised. Men of national fame, discussing the issues involved, astonished their most intimate friends by proposing solutions so radical as to be little short of a complete subversion of our industrial system. In the sessions of the Commission, all attempts to limit the scope of the inquiry to the industrial questions which precipitated the conflict were vain. To 80 per cent, of mine workers the question of wages meant their whole living and the Commission was forced to listen to the story of these people's life in all its phases. Never before, in any industrial dispute, was it more clearly seen that the students of the industrial and social problems are laboring for identical ends, and that the reformers of the industrial and social world are fighting under the same banner. The anthracite employees, since the close of the great strike, have had a year of unparalleled prosperity. From November 1, 1902, to November 1, 1903, over 62,000,000 tons of coal were mined. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.