This Day in Labor History: December 23, 1872. Coal miners near Clearfield, Pennsylvania got into a fight with strikebreakers trying to mine coal during a strike. This minor moment in American labor history tells us a great deal about how miners defined their jobs and their rights in 1872!!
Railroads found alternative coal sources. In this still early period of American industrialization, companies attacking their own workers violated a lot of customary relationships that defined early American work. But times were changing fast.
Historians know almost nothing about this union, even its name. It has almost no written records. What we do know is that in the fall of 1872, a group of them working for different railroad coal mine operations agreed to strike. We don’t even know why.
This was not a unanimous decision. But community pressure moved recalcitrant miners to respect the strike and stay out. This was a proto-union really. Moreover, the railroads were proto-corporations.
The Gilded Age had barely begun and railroad executives did not yet see themselves as a national interest. The ideology of the Gilded Age had not quite developed. To them, this was a strictly local matter and they didn’t worry too much about it.
Eventually, the mine owners and the workers would come to an agreement. A few years later, now imbued with a Social Darwinist ideology, they would see any worker resistance or combination as a violation of a law of evolution and seek government aid in having it destroyed.
