The 1902 Anthracite Strike: The President Who Didn't Break the Strike

By the summer of nineteen oh two, one hundred forty-seven thousand coal miners in northeastern Pennsylvania had been off the job since May. The anthracite coal they refused to dig heated homes, offices, and factories across the eastern seaboard. Winter was four months away.

Previous presidents had dealt with major strikes by sending in federal troops to break them. Grover Cleveland had done it during the Pullman Strike of eighteen ninety-four. The logic was simple: labor disputes threatened order, and order was the government's first obligation. Owners and managers expected Theodore Roosevelt to follow the same script.

Roosevelt did not follow the script.

The mine owners, led by George Baer of the Reading Railroad, gave him an opening by being unusually arrogant about it. Baer wrote in a letter that became public, arguing that the rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for, not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country. The letter was reprinted in newspapers across the country. Even people who opposed the strike found Baer's framing difficult to defend.

In October, with coal reserves dwindling, Roosevelt summoned both parties to Washington. He did not send troops. He told the mine owners they would participate in arbitration or he would nationalize the mines under wartime powers. The owners capitulated. An arbitration commission was convened. When it issued its ruling in March of nineteen oh three, the miners received a ten percent wage increase and a nine-hour workday.

The settlement was not union recognition. The mine owners refused to formally acknowledge the United Mine Workers as a bargaining party. But the federal government had, for the first time, treated organized labor as a legitimate party to a dispute rather than a threat to public order. The principle, once established, proved difficult to retract.