Arthur James: From Breaker Boy to Governor

Arthur Horace James was born in Plymouth, Pennsylvania, in eighteen eighty-three, the son of Welsh immigrants. As a boy he worked as a breaker boy in the anthracite coal mines, hand-sorting slate from coal in clouds of black dust, the job that occupied thousands of children in the Wyoming Valley at the turn of the century. James climbed from those conditions to a legal career, then to Luzerne County District Attorney, then Lieutenant Governor, then a judgeship on the Pennsylvania Superior Court.

In nineteen thirty-eight he was elected Governor, taking office in nineteen thirty-nine and serving until nineteen forty-three. He also mounted a run for the Republican presidential nomination in nineteen forty. His trajectory from coal breaker to the state's highest office captured something about the anthracite region's social mobility in that era, even as the mines themselves were beginning their long decline.