On July 17, 1902, on the embossed letterhead of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, George F. Baer answered a stranger’s letter. A photographer in Wilkes-Barre, PA named W.F. Clark – who kept a studio in the Weltzenkorn building on Public Square, not a minister, as some later accounts claimed – had written to him about the 1902 coal strike.
It was one of thousands of such letters reaching the coal operators that summer. Baer’s reply opened with a chilly introduction: “I do not know who you are.” Then came the sentence that would brand him forever. The laboring man, Baer wrote, would be 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 meant to be private, but it did not stay that way. Within weeks it had been telegraphed across the country, reprinted under scathing editorials, and fixed a nickname to its author that no amount of philanthropy could ever scrub off: “Divine Right” Baer. The United Mine Workers of America could not have written a better advertisement for their cause if they had tried.
From the operators’ own pen came the argument the strikers had been making all along – that a handful of railroad barons believed they answered to God and the market, and to no one else on earth.
The 1902 Coal Strike had begun on May 12, when some 147,000 miners walked out for a wage increase, a nine-hour day, and recognition of their union. The operators – a tight ring of railroad corporations that controlled roughly four-fifths of hard-coal production in Eastern Pennsylvania – refused negotiation. John Mitchell, the UMWA’s young president, proposed mediation throughout outside entities and organizations. Baer waved both away: “Anthracite mining is a business, and not a religious, sentimental, or academic proposition.”
That was the posture Clark wrote into with his letter to Baer. His appeal ran to a thousand words of plain Christian conscience – the son of a Scottish miner pleading for the men who still toiled underground.
His letter and Baer’s response were published first in the August 20, 1902 edition of the Wilkes-Barre Record:
Mr. Baer, President of Philadelphia Reading R. R. Co.
Dear Sir:
With all respect to address you with reference to the present coal strike. I note again your absolute refusal to do anything further to bring about a satisfactory adjustment of the great labor difficulty.
From the beginning I have followed it up with interest and noted the refusal to consider the interest of miner or public at large. I believe you to be a man of good judgment and that you no doubt have given this matter great consideration in your own way, but, as you remarked, it was not a religious matter. I believe it possible for man to err unless we do things at all times in God’s way. While it is true it is not a religious matter, yet it is possible to take Christ in all our business affairs and by doing we have nothing to lose but all gain.
Man in himself, in his weakness and frailty, is not always capable of using the best judgment. There is no doubt that both sides feel oppressed, but if operators would take Christ in their business and labor unions would take Christ in their unions this oppression would soon disappear and each would consider the other a brother, for indeed such we are in Christ Jesus; I pray God will hasten the day when this may be, when we shall be willing to listen to each other, if not individually, then through organizations of God-fearing, God-loving men.
We all know the horrors of the mine, the dangers seen and unseen, and may see the ambulance going from mine to hospital daily. We go back only a few days to recall the awful horror at Johnstown, and it makes our hearts ring with pain and pity for widows and fatherless children, who mourn and cannot be comforted, only in the hope that lies in Christ Jesus.
Can we altogether ignore their appeal? Is there not a way to appease all sides? Must all be crushed because a few are unreasonable? Can we not recall the mercy God was willing to show Sodom and Gomorrah if ten righteous persons could be found and deal with these men accordingly? Will you not reason again what would Christ do in my stead, or will you hold in your hand the lever of Industry and persistently say, I will not relax, notwithstanding that mighty empires have fallen which cared not for man and neither regarded God?
Is it not possible to bring about an adjustment of peace and good will in some way by granting an increase, however small, on condition of a three or five-year contract, with the idea that all petty strikes shall be averted and that the union notify its men through Mr. Mitchell that the organization will not stand by any man who disregards orders or attempts to precipitate trouble not justifiable to a board of arbitration, that all bosses be notified not to be partial or receive money for best places?
Under these conditions I believe all would gladly return to work and you would have the respect of the nation and the blessing of God. I believe it worth giving another trial, as the men feel that the last increase was easily gotten back through increase in the price of coal. With the operator lies the power without consulting the consumer.
Thus why should thousands be crushed and go down to satisfy one desire? I pray God to send the Holy Spirit to reason in your heart and to act accordingly and be the means of lifting thousands to a better way of living and finally to purer, nobler lives.
My father came from Scotland when a boy and early in manhood entered the mines, where he spent the best part of his life. It was a great struggle for him and my dear mother, now gone to her eternal reward, to provide for their family, which by the grace of God they did with the determination that the boys should not face the dangers of the mine, which when a boy I often heard him speak about, and recall my anxious mother until his safe return home again.
Those were anxious days for all, but sunshine came at last and my father was able to better his position outside of the mines, never to return again.
It is with these recollections my heart goes out in pity for the toilers of the mine and I do not pass one with his blackened face and tired tread but that I say, God pity him, and I again appeal — consider them once more for the sake of Him who suffered and died on Calvary to save us all.
Yours sincerely,
Wm. F. Clark.
Baer answered in three paragraphs:
Philadelphia & Reading Railway Company,
President’s Office, Reading Terminal, Philadelphia,
17th July, 1902.
Mr. W. F. Clark, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
My Dear Mr. Clark:
I have your letter of the 16th instant. I do not know who you are.
I see that you are a religious man; but you are evidently biased in favor of the right of the workingman to control a business in which he has no other interest than to secure fair wages for the work he does.
I beg of you not to be discouraged. 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, and upon the successful management of which so much depends.
Do not be discouraged. Pray earnestly that right may triumph, always remembering that the Lord God Omnipotent still reigns, and that His reign is one of law and order, and not of violence and crime.
Yours truly,
Geo. F. Baer, President.
The reply reached print in mid-August, by way of an exclusive in the Wilkes-Barre Record, and the letter caused a national firestorm, particularly because of its religious overtones.
The New York World canvassed clergymen across the country, and none rose to Baer’s defense. Reverend Frank Crane of the People’s Church in Chicago wrote: “The Son of God had neither property nor property interests. The starving miners appear to be closer to the condition of Christ than the men who are controlling property and property interests.” From Buffalo, NY, Reverend Byron H. Stauffer warned that “such declarations breed Socialists.” A Trenton, NJ pastor, Reverend Charles H. Elder, marveled that “a coal baron should turn preacher and a monopolist should claim a monopoly of the divine interference in his interests.” He continued, bluntly: “Industrial slavery is not in harmony with 20th century civilization.”
The most pointed response came from the miners’ own union president. Before a crowd reported at more than 40,000 at a Labor Day demonstration near Philadelphia on September 1, 1902, John Mitchell picked up Baer’s own words and turned them against him.
If the country’s leading capitalists truly felt as Baer did, Mitchell said, “then we must take it for granted that they believe that God in his infinite wisdom has given into their control all the resources of our country.” He had been raised to believe otherwise: “I was taught to believe when a boy that He conferred no more power or favors upon one than upon another.” What Baer called stewardship, Mitchell called “government by injunction and ownership by divine right in their most accentuated form.”
By October the ridicule continued in the editorial pages of the country’s largest papers as the coal strike deepened. Writing to the New York Times on October 1, a Hackensack, NJ reader named Joseph Eldridge Esray took apart Baer’s confidence that there would be “plenty of Winter coal at fair prices.” A rich mine owner, Esray wrote, “upon whom, according to his own theory, wealth has been conferred by God, can pay almost any price for coal. But how about the millions who are not especially favored by heaven?” He closed with a scene from the ferry across the North River, where a fellow passenger had wished the mine owners an eternity “in a place where the question of heat supply is purely academic.”
What makes the Clark-Baer exchange worth reading in full, more than a 120 years later, is how nakedly it states the operators’ theory of themselves. This was the Gilded Age’s governing assumption stripped of its manners and high-minded talk: that the men who held the property held it by something close to divine appointment, and owed no accounting to the mineworkers who cut the coal or the public who burned it to keep their families warm.
Baer had been set at the head of the Reading by J.P. Morgan’s hand, and the banking ring he spoke for owned the rails, the collieries, and the price of anthracite all at once. The letter mattered because it landed at the exact moment the country was learning to take back power from the industrialist elite.
The muckraking magazines were already turning toward conditions in these same coal counties, and a rising Progressive public had begun to ask whether private wealth on this scale could be left to answer only to itself. Baer’s sentence handed that argument its perfect villain. Within months Theodore Roosevelt would do what no president had done before – step into a labor dispute as a neutral arbiter and force the operators to the table. The strike ended on October 23, 1902, after 163 days. The miners won a 10% raise and an hour off the workday.
The 1902 strike did not end the Gilded Age on its own, but it marked a moment when its governing assumption stopped going unanswered. For the first time the federal government had treated organized labor as a legitimate party rather than a disorder to be put down, and the Progressive years that followed pressed that advantage – regulating the railroads, prosecuting the trusts, and writing into law the principle that concentrated wealth was accountable to the public and not only to itself.
Baer’s letter stands as an illustration of the arrogance of the coal barons as the Gilded Age was being forced to its conclusion: the conviction that the men who held the country’s property held it by right, and that no miner, customer, or government had standing to question them. Within a generation, that conviction had lost its authority.
Read more about the 1902 Coal Strike
A different kind of labor leader | A profile of John Mitchell during the 1902 Coal Strike
“Among the Pennsylvania coal-strikers” – A dispatch from the 1902 Coal Strike
“Children of the Coal Shadow” – A haunting report about the children of the Coal Region from 1903
End of the 1902 Coal Strike | October 23, 1902
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