When the Coal Strike Reached the Lights

A restriction in the middle of the day

A coal strike could reach people who never entered a mine. On October 11, 1900, coverage described a coal shortage affecting electric service in Shamokin. Daytime incandescent service from nine until four was suspended. Nighttime service faced a further risk if the shortage continued.

The Republican and Herald printed the daytime restriction in its strike notes. The Miners Journal carried the same basic wording and added that the plant might have to curtail some night lights. That warning was conditional. Neither account reported a complete townwide blackout or said that the threatened night restriction had occurred.

The hours made the interruption part of an ordinary day rather than only an evening inconvenience. The accounts did not identify every circuit or customer affected. What they did make plain was the dependence of electric lighting on a fuel supply disrupted by the dispute at the mines.

Waiting for a conference

Several weeks earlier, a Philadelphia Inquirer correspondent had described the mood in Shamokin as waiting and hoping for operators to meet the mine workers in conference. Its September 13 dispatch, published the next day, identified John Fahy as president of the Ninth District of the United Mine Workers.

The correspondent portrayed men who did not want a strike but intended to obey the union’s call if no settlement came. That was the newspaper’s account of the people it encountered, not a recorded vote of every miner. It captures the uncertainty before the stoppage more clearly than a simple claim that everyone welcomed or opposed it.

Work underground, railway employment and lighting in town were not separate worlds. The same report described tensions involving mine operations and railroad workers. By October, the electric-service notice showed another consequence of the shortage: fuel unavailable at a generating plant could interrupt a service used beyond the collieries.

Mitchell’s reported Shamokin address

The Public, in its October 13 issue, reported that United Mine Workers president John Mitchell had addressed a large meeting of strikers in Shamokin on the ninth. The timing is strengthened by an October 10 newspaper dispatch saying that Mitchell and his party arrived in Scranton that morning from Shamokin.

The passage printed in The Public concerned who would decide when the strike ended. Mitchell told the gathering that miners, acting through delegates in convention, should judge the operators’ offer for themselves. He offered his support if they rejected it and continued the strike, while warning that one stoppage would not remedy every accumulated grievance.

The surrounding report described a delegate convention called for Scranton on the twelfth, with one delegate for each hundred strikers as its proposed basis of representation. It was an argument for a decision by the men’s representatives, not simply an announcement from a union executive.

The next-day travel report carried a misleading headline about a parade at Shamokin. Its body was datelined Scranton and located that afternoon’s parade and mass meeting there. Its estimate of fifteen thousand people belongs to the Scranton parade, not to the Shamokin gathering.

Another strike, another set of immediate needs

The labor reports of 1902 belong to a separate dispute. In March, a Shamokin dispatch described District Nine secretary George Hartlein as finding miners divided over the prospect of a strike. It reported his view that the companies had refused a joint conference and that the situation remained unsettled.

By July, immediate assistance was part of the district’s work. Hartlein told the Wilkes-Barre Times that an assessment expected from miners in the bituminous fields would take about three weeks to be collected. In the meantime, the local unions would continue issuing orders to people in need.

That brief follows the practical work of maintaining households during a stoppage: aid already being issued locally while further support was awaited. It gives no recipient list or total value, and it does not establish that every anticipated contribution arrived.

A federal appeal and local payment arrangements

On October 2, the Mount Carmel Daily News reported President Theodore Roosevelt’s invitation to coal-road presidents, operators and John Mitchell for a conference in Washington the next morning. Its continuation said Mitchell had accepted and intended to be there, and it reported responses from several operators. The account was news of an invitation and planned attendance, not a presidential visit to Shamokin.

The following March, the Mount Carmel Item brought the aftermath back to a local meeting. It reported that individual operators and coal-company officials had met in Shamokin and agreed to pay the ten-percent amount due from November to April in three installments. The first was scheduled for March 30, followed by the next two paydays.

The Item said the Union Coal Company was expected to adopt the same plan. It was describing an agreement and proposed payment schedule; it was not a payroll receipt for every worker or proof of payment by every company.

These reports carry the history from negotiation and public meetings to disrupted lighting, relief and arrangements for money owed. The electric-service restriction is one entry into that wider history. Behind it were mine workers and families whose income, fuel and daily routines were bound together by coal.