The mining industry involves the excavation, extraction, and refining of minerals and ores from below ground, including coal, copper, iron, silver, gold, and materials such as asbestos. The mining of minerals and ores has been a significant factor in America’s economic growth, particularly in the early 20th century. It continues to play a major role in supplying fuel and raw materials for industry and energy for consumers.
The coal industry was by far the most prominent sector of the mining industry. It consisted of two distinct ores— bituminous coal and anthracite coal. Anthracite, a hard-rock coal, was confined to a small region in Pennsylvania, while softer bituminous coal was present in the Appalachian mountain region and expansive parts of the Midwest and South. Miners first excavated bituminous coal in Virginia in 1750; the exact date of the discovery of anthracite coal is unclear. A blacksmith found that anthracite coal, although more difficult to ignite, was cleaner, burned more slowly, and generated more heat than bituminous coal. By the early years of the 19th century, anthracite was widely used to heat homes.
Anthracite coal also played a major role in iron production. Iron forgers had been unable to smelt cheap iron using bituminous coal as it contained too much sulfur, both for the smelting process and for conversion into coke. Instead, they produced small quantities of high-quality iron using charcoal. From the mid-19th century, however, anthracite coal facilitated the production of cheap low-grade iron. In the years after the Civil War, as a result of rapid industrialization and significant urban growth, demand for bituminous coal soared. It found favor over anthracite coal because it was cheaper and burned more quickly. In 1900, the nation’s soft-coal fields produced 212,316,112 tons of coal and provided more than half of its energy. In contrast, the anthracite mines produced 57,363,396 tons of coal and generated just over 14 percent of America’s energy.
In 1900, there were 143,824 miners working in the anthracite region, while 204,757 miners worked in the bituminous coal fields. A small number of powerful railroad companies controlled the anthracite fields. Through a series of mergers, these companies had been able to establish control over prices and edge out small independent operators from the market. The most powerful company was the Philadelphia and Reading Company, a railroad network that carried two-thirds of the state’s coal supply. The growing power of the railroad companies, combined with their refusal to meet miners’ demands, caused labor unrest in the region.
The Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902 was one of America’s largest industrial strikes and resulted from miners’ dissatisfaction with the outcome of an earlier strike. While the coal operators had agreed to pay higher wages to end that strike, they had not offered formal recognition to the United Mine Workers Of America, the largest mining union in the United States. A number of miners had responded by holding a series of unofficial strikes in the summer of 1901. By early 1902, operators were threatening to abolish the new wage increase.
John Mitchell, the president of the UMWA, met with railroad executives in April 1902, but he was unable to persuade them to accede to the miners’ demands. The miners sought the renewal of the wage agreement, recognition of the union, and the implementation of the eight-hour workday. Against the wishes of Mitchell, union delegates voted in mid-May to go on strike. There were periodic episodes of violence in the strike that followed, including one incident where union members beat to death someone escorting strikebreakers. The incident prompted the intervention of President Theodore Roosevelt. On
The Treadwell gold mine at 500 feet beneath the ocean, 1916 (Library of Congress)
October 3, 1902, he chaired a meeting between railroad executives, headed by Philadelphia and Reading chairman George Baer, and union representatives, led by Mitchell. The failure of the two sides to reach an agreement meant that Roosevelt had to search for an alternative way of ending the strike. Eight days later, Elihu Root, the secretary of war, met financier John Pierpont Morgan, one of the mining industry’s largest investors, in New York City. Morgan agreed to pressure the operators to reach a settlement with the miners. The operators responded to Morgan’s pleas by calling on the president to establish a strike commission. Mitchell agreed to the idea of a strike commission, but he believed the mine union needed to be represented.
The commission that Roosevelt subsequently created, the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission, consisted of seven members, including representatives from the coal industry and the union. Its purpose was to assess the conflicting claims of each party and establish a settlement through binding arbitration. On October 23, UMWA representatives instructed the miners to return to work, bringing an end to the strike after 165 days. The commission began its lengthy investigation and publicly announced its settlement the following year. Most significantly, it increased wages by 10 percent and reduced the working day from 10 hours to nine. While it ruled against union recognition and collective bargaining, the ruling stipulated that mine operators had to recognize a six-man arbitration board to mediate future disputes. Mitchell and his colleagues regarded the settlement as a victory for the union.
In contrast to the anthracite sector, the bituminous sector consisted of many small-to-medium-size companies. The more competitive nature of that sector, combined with the much wider geographical spread of bituminous coal, hindered miners’ ability to form a strong nationwide labor movement. Miners in southern Colorado participated in a major strike for 14 months from 1913 to 1914, establishing tent colonies in a number of mining towns, but they were ultimately unsuccessful in achieving their demands. The strike also gained notoriety for the infamous LuDLOW Massacre, which took place on April 20, 1914.
As World War I began in Europe, American production of bituminous coal continued to increase, while anthracite production fluctuated. In 1917, the year the United States entered the war, bituminous production exceeded half a billion tons for the first time, reaching a total of 551,790,563 tons. The Pennsylvania mines produced 100,445,299 tons of coal, a marked increase from the 1910 figure of 84,485,236 tons. After the war, the anthracite sector went into permanent decline. Total production in 1920 was 89,636,036 tons, and 10 years later that amount had fallen to 68,776,559 tons. A number of factors accounted for this decline, including industry’s increasing reliance on bituminous coal, the introduction of electricity to the nation’s homes, lack of government intervention, and the failures of the mine owners to operate in a cost-effective manner.
The employment rate among mines dropped in both anthracite and bituminous mining, although the industry’s decline in the 1920s was not the only factor that caused job losses. Increasingly, companies were mechanizing their mining operations and installing modern equipment to do the work traditionally carried out by miners, such as the loading of coal onto carts. In 1923, there were 704,793 miners employed in the bituminous sector, and by 1930 this number had dropped to 493,202.
The coal industry posed a number of hazards, both to the miners who toiled in the underground mines and to the environment. A series of fatal mine disasters in the early years of the century, including an explosion at the Monon-gah coal mine in West Virginia that killed 362 miners, and an increase in the number of miners with debilitating lung diseases such as pneumoconiosis emphasized the dangerous nature of mine work and brought the issue of occupational health and safety to the forefront of the industry. Mine owners frequently tried to evade responsibility for improving health and safety, and the federal government’s efforts to regulate the industry—for example, by creating the Bureau of Mines, an Interior Department agency that was responsible for making safety recommen-dations—were limited. Coal-burning factories in major cities across the Northeast and the Midwest, such as New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, damaged the environment and jeopardized the health of local residents. A heavy smog that reduced visibility and affected people’s breathing frequently lingered in the air of those cities, and buildings gradually turned black from the soot that poured from chimneys and smokestacks.
Copper was not as important as coal to America’s economic and industrial development, but it was still a vital sector of the mining industry. It was used in the construction of buildings, underground pipes, machinery and—particularly during World War I—munitions and weapons. The discovery of copper, which was prevalent in the Lake Superior region, Montana, and Arizona, predated that of coal. A French author named Lagarde published a book in Paris in 1636 that referred to the existence of copper in the Lake Superior region, and Jesuit missionaries in that region referred to the Indians’ use of copper in the letters they sent home in the mid-17th century.
Copper mining began on a large scale in the Lake Superior region in 1864, after a land surveyor by the name of Edwin J. Hulbert discovered a copper supply that became known as the Calumet Conglomerate Lode. He distributed half of it to the Calumet Mining Company and the rest of it to the Hecla Mining Company. Hulbert spent a brief but unsuccessful period as superintendent of the Calumet mine before he sold his shares to Quincy A. Shaw, one of the company’s key investors. Shaw appointed his brother, Alexander Agassiz, to the position of superintendent. Under Agassiz’s guidance, the mine quickly began to turn a profit. The two companies merged in March 1871 to form the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company, which quickly became the dominant force in the region’s copper industry.
The Lake Superior copper mines increased their output almost threefold between 1890 and 1916, from 51,000 tons to 135,000 tons. Aside from Calumet and Hecla, only a handful of major companies, including the Quincy Mining Company, contributed to that growth. The Calumet and Hecla Mining Company further expanded in 1923 when it merged with the Osceola Consolidated Mining Company, the Allouez Mining Company, the Centennial Copper Company, and the Ahmeek Mining Company to form the Calumet and Hecla Consolidated Copper Company.
The copper industry in the Lake Superior region experienced its share of labor unrest. The Western Federation Of Miners (WFM), founded in Montana in 1893, was the most dominant union in the copper fields. For a number of years, however, it failed to capitalize on miners’ discontent, and most strikes were of a localized nature. The WFM established a significant membership in Michigan after it started to employ immigrant organizers in 1913, a measure that enabled it to appeal to the diverse array of ethnic groups working in the state’s copper mines. In July of that year, miners in the state’s Upper Peninsula embarked on a major strike that lasted until April the following year. The strike was unsuccessful in achieving the miners’ demands, which included the eight-hour working day and replacement of the one-man drill with the two-man drill.
Western states, particularly Montana, which produced 42 percent of the country’s copper in 1900, played a significant role in the growth of the copper industry. As in the Lake Superior region, a few large companies dominated copper production in the West. In Montana, the Anaconda Mining Company was the most prominent. It grew from its beginning as a small company engaged in silver mining to one of America’s largest corporations. In 1900, it produced 55,400 tons of copper, 13,800 tons more than its nearest competitor. It expanded its operations to Latin America in 1916 when it created the Andes Copper Mining Company at Potrerillos in Chile to capitalize on the vast copper reserves in the Andes mine. Anaconda waited some years before it commenced production on a large scale, as copper prices plummeted immediately after World War I; but by 1929 it had transformed the Andes mine into one of the largest and most profitable mining operations in the world.
As a whole, the U. S. copper industry grew steadily during the Progressive Era. It produced 30,200 tons of copper in 1900 and 955,000 tons in 1918. Despite the increase in production, the U. S. share of global production remained largely unchanged, increasing from 56 percent to 61 percent during the same period. The reduced demand for copper after World War I, combined with a slump in global copper prices, caused production to drop in 1920 to 612,000 tons. The early 1920s marked the beginning of the copper mining industry’s decline in the United States, despite the fact that burgeoning industries such as radio, electricity, and communication utilized the metal for the construction of wires, masts, and other devices.
In the early 20th century, the U. S. mining industry also extended to metals, such as iron ore, silver, and gold, and fibers, such as asbestos. Iron, derived from iron ore, played an important role in the development of the nation’s transportation network, at first directly and then as an ingredient of steel, a far more durable metal. It was a key component of steam locomotives, railroads, ships, and early models of the automobile. Gold was at the center of the American monetary system, but it was no longer the focus of large-scale mining efforts, as it had been in California in the 19th century.
The mining industry was crucial to the United States’s economic and industrial development in the Progressive Era, but significant labor unrest and the visible impact of mining on people’s health and the environment demonstrated that the industry exacted costs that almost neutralized its benefits.
See also ECONOMY; investments, eoreign; labor and labor movement.
Further reading: Keith Dix, What’s a Coal Miner to Do? The Mechanization of Coal Mining (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988); Barbara Freese, Coal: A Human History (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Publishing, 2004); Charles K. Hyde, Copper for America: The United States Copper Industry from Colonial Times to the 1990s (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998); John H. M. Laslett, ed. The United Mine Workers of America: A Model of Industrial Solidarity? (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); Dan Rottenberg, In the Kingdom of Coal: An American Family and the Rock That Changed the World (New York: Routledge, 2003).
—Richard Fry
Mitchell, John (1870-1919) labor leader John Mitchell was one of the first presidents of the United Mine Workers oe America (UMWA) and helped establish the organization as one of the most effective and progressive unions in the country. Born in Braidwood, Illinois, on February 4, 1870, Mitchell was orphaned at the age of six. He attended school only irregularly and began working in the mines at the age of 12. When not toiling underground, Mitchell spent his time reading and taught himself history, economics, and the law. In 1885, at the age of 15, he joined the Knights of Labor. Frustrated by the decline of the Knights and its inability to conduct successful strikes, Mitchell joined the UMWA shortly after the union was formed in 1890. Between 1890 and 1900, the union had considerable success at organizing the nation’s bituminous miners. As the union grew, Mitchell moved up the ranks, becoming vice president in 1898 and president in 1899.
For a variety of reasons, the UMWA had not been able to organize anthracite miners. Anthracite mines had a greater variety of job categories, operated on a larger scale, and had greater ethnic diversity among their workers. The union had, without success, tried to organize anthracite miners on several occasions. In 1897, the UMWA initiated another organizing effort and quickly had widespread success. Employer opposition, however, remained intense and the organizing drive came to a head in 1902. In April and May of 1902, Mitchell met with mine operators and railroad executives in an attempt to avoid an industry-wide walkout. When the companies refused to grant any concessions, the miners voted 57 percent to 43 percent to go out on strike. The Anthracite Coal Strike idled over 140,000 miners and lasted five months. As the strike lingered on and the nation’s supply of coal dwindled, President Theodore Roosevelt intervened and appointed an Anthracite Coal Strike Committee to resolve the differences between the workers and the mine operators.
Roosevelt, who was attempting to establish a reputation as a critic of business monopolies, and Senator Mark Hanna of Ohio who sought organized labor’s support of the Republican Party, saw the 1902 strike as an opportunity to rebuke coal and railroad operators. Roosevelt ordered striking workers back into the mines while the Anthracite Coal Strike Committee gathered information about the dispute. After five months of deliberation, it called for a 10 percent pay increase and a reduction in the workday from 10 hours to nine. The successful conclusion of the strike made Mitchell a national hero for many workers.
The strike and negotiations, however, had left Mitchell exhausted. He had a nervous breakdown in 1906 and resigned as head of the UMWA in 1908. Mitchell remained active in the labor movement, serving on commissions and giving public lectures, until his death from pneumonia in 1919. As head of the UMWA, Mitchell navigated a path between the more conservative American Federation of Labor and the more radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He was not hesitant to resort to strikes and direct confrontations when employers proved reluctant to negotiate. Yet, he also cooperated with business and political leaders in such joint efforts as the National Civic Federation in order to settle disputes. As a result,
Mitchell was able to build the UMWA into one of the strongest unions in the country.
Further reading: Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, eds., Labor Leaders in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); John H. M. Laslett, ed., The United Mine Workers of America: A Model of Industrial Solidarity? (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).
—Robert Gordon
Mitchell, William (Billy) (1879-1936) general and airpower advocate
If, in the annals of American military history, men such as John Ericsson and George Patton are viewed as visionaries, then the name of Billy Mitchell should be a part of that class. His visionary adroitness and crusader zeal made possible not only the creation of the U. S. Air Force but also set the strategic underpinnings of airpower’s role in future wars. Billy Mitchell, son of a future U. S. senator from Wisconsin, was born in Nice, France, in 1879. Raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he was educated at both Racine College and George Washington University. Upon the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, Mitchell enlisted in the U. S. Army as a private in 1898. Within six weeks, he received a commission as a Signal Corps officer. In addition to service in Cuba, he saw action during the Philippine insurrection and the Mexican expedition against Pancho Villa.
As early as 1906, Mitchell prophesied that “conflicts, no doubt, will be carried out in the future in the air.” After the army purchased its first aircraft, he wrote several articles stressing the importance of aircraft in war. He argued that airplanes would be useful for reconnaissance, for preventing enemy forces from conducting reconnaissance, and for offensive action against enemy submarines and ships. Due to the advances being made in aeronautical technology, Mitchell argued, the United States was being drawn ever closer to its enemies, and that distance would soon be measured in time not miles. These facts underlined the importance of developing air power. He was assigned to the Army General Staff in Washington in 1912 as a captain.
After being promoted to major, Mitchell was too high ranking and too old for flight training. Firmly believing that the future lay in aviation, however, he paid for his own flight training at a civilian flight school. When the United States entered World War I, Mitchell quickly rose to the rank of colonel. He was appointed to General John Pershing’s staff as an aviation officer. His actions in France culminated with his command of a 1,481-plane air attack, the largest of the war, during the St. Mihiel offensive of September 1918. In 1919, Mitchell returned to the United States a much-decorated officer and was appointed assistant chief of the U. S. Army Air Service. By 1920, he was promoted to the rank of brigadier general.
The postwar years, however, saw the parochial interests of army generals and navy admirals supersede Mitchell’s dream of a prepared and well-equipped Air Service. In June and July 1921, Mitchell took on the Department of the Navy and demonstrated his theory of air power by sinking several battleships, including the German battleship Ostfriesland, off the Virginia coast. Never at a loss for words, Mitchell pronounced that “no surface vessels can exist wherever air forces acting from land bases are able to attack them.” This and other declarations concerning the preeminence of air power earned him the undying enmity of generals and admirals alike.
In 1924 Mitchell continued his crusade by attacking his superiors and the foes of airpower in both print and speech. It is little wonder that he was not reappointed to the Air Service when his term expired in 1925. Reduced to the rank of colonel and exiled to Fort Sam Houston in Texas, it was hoped that the last had been heard about and from Billy Mitchell.
Fortunately for his country and unfortunately for Mitchell, this was not to be the case. In September, two aviation accidents occurred. The first was the loss of a naval seaplane on a nonstop flight from San Francisco to Hawaii. The second was the crash of the dirigible Shenandoah. Mitchell’s acerbic pen struck a scathing attack upon both the U. S. Navy and the War Department, accusing them of incompetence and criminal negligence.
Secretary of War Dwight F. Davis was outraged at Mitchell’s attack. A court-martial board was convened in Washington on October 28, 1925. After seven weeks, the board found Mitchell guilty of the charge of insubordination. Mitchell resigned from the army on February 1, 1926. After many tireless years of sounding the alarm from the wilderness, Mitchell died in New York on February 19, 1936, at the age of 56. He was laid to rest in Milwaukee. The events of World War II vindicated Mitchell’s vision and even though his conviction was never overturned, he did receive a special Congressional Medal of Honor “in recognition of his outstanding pioneer service and foresight in the field of American military aviation.”
Further reading: Alfred F. Hurley, Crusader for Air Power (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975); Isaac Don Levine, Mitchell: Pioneer of Air Power (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1958).
—Paul Edelen
World History
