ebuff from
the operators, but shortly afterward, with the aid of friendly pressure
from New York financiers, the operators consented to accept the award of
a commission to be appointed by himself. This was the well-known
Anthracite Coal Strike Commission. Its appointment terminated the
strike. Not until more than a half year later, however, was the award of
the Commission made. It conceded the miners a 10 percent increase in
wages, the eight and nine-hour day, and the privilege of having a union
check-weighman at the scale where the coal sent up in cars by the miners
is weighed. Recognition was not accorded the union, except that it was
required to bear one-half of the expense connected with the maintenance
of a joint arbitration board created by the Commission. When this award
was announced there was much dissatisfaction with it among the miners.
President Mitchell, however, put forth every effort to have the union
accept the award. Upon a referendum vote the miners accepted his view.

The anthracite coal strike of 1902 was doubtless the most important
single event in the history of American trade unionism until that time
and has since scarcely been surpassed. To be sure, events like the great
railway strike of 1877 and the Chicago Anarchist bomb and trial in
1886-1887 had equally forced the labor question into public attention.
What distinguished the anthracite coal strike, however, was that for the
first time a labor organization tied up for months a strategic industry
and caused wide suffering and discomfort to the public without being
condemned as a revolutionary menace to the existing social order calling
for suppression by the government; it was, on the contrary, adjudged a
force within the preserves of orderly society and entitled to public
sympathy. The public identified the anthracite employers with the trust
movement, which was then new and seemingly bent upon uprooting the
traditional free American social order; by contrast, the striking miners
appeared almost as champions of Old America. A strong contributory
factor was the clumsy tactics of the employers who played into the hands
of the leaders of the miners. The latter, especially John Mitchell,
conducted their case with great skill.

Yet the award of the Commission fell considerably short of what the
union and its sympathizers outside the ranks of labor hoped for. For by
refusing to grant formal recognition, the Commission failed to
constitute unionism