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.
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