"Below Animal Standards"

As the summer wore on, on wore the sorrow of the Eastern soft coal industry.

P: In West Virginia last week two renegade strikers, about to enter a mine in Putnam County, were killed by rifle fire.

P: In Ohio a boy of 16 was fatally shot in a fight between workers and strikebreakers.

P: Acute suffering in Pennsylvania moved sad-eyed Governor Gifford Pinchot to appeal for Red Cross aid three weeks ago. American Red Cross Chairman John Barton Payne refused, regretted he could help only in disasters due to "act of God." Governor Pinchot sighed and went off fishing. The Press was full of horrid details of hungry Pennsylvania families awaiting eviction from squalid shacks; of small children, denied milk, eating dandelions.

P: At Scranton last week met the biennial convention of District 1, United Mine Workers of America. It was more a dogfight than a convention. Shouts and fists broke up the first meeting. A gas bomb thrown by the police to restore order brought tears and temporary blindness to the chief speaker at the second meeting, U. S. Senator James John ("Puddler Jim") Davis. The issue between conservative and insurgent United Miners: whether to strike generally or just locally. The conservatives won. Victory was hollow, however, for 15,000 Pittston miners involved then decided not to strike at all.

P: From Washington came announcement that a conference would be called to bring together miners and operators. President John Llewellyn Lewis of United Mine Workers had suggested such a meeting to President Hoover in a message saying that the plight of miners was "below animal standards." Secretary of Commerce Robert Patterson Lamont emerged from a meeting with the President, announced that some 125 invitations had been sent to bituminous operators asking if they would attend a discussion with workers in the near future. Three weeks prior Secretary Lamont had summoned a dozen of the big bituminous operators to a conference in the Department of Commerce. For four hours representatives of such coal concerns as Clinchfield, Consolidation, Union Pacific and Pittsburgh sat in what was described as "a free and frank interchange of opinion and data." They decided nothing except that they would not yield to the miners, that they were opposed to summoning a national conference for airing the industry's ailments.*

Secretary of Labor William Nuckles Doak called delegates of the miners to a second fact-finding conference, put before them the discouraging result of the operators' meeting. The workers insisted that only by such a national conference could any progress be made toward curing the industry, that it should be given strength by government sponsorship as suggested by their President Lewis.

Inquired Secretary Lament in his letters to 125 operators: ". . . Will you be willing to attend a joint conference? In your judgment would such a conference bring about the results outlined by Mr. Lewis?''

President William Green of the American Federation of Labor, with which the United Mine Workers are affiliated, has suggested revision of the anti-trust laws, recognition of the right of collective bargaining to cure the bituminous disease. President Lewis of U. M. W. hopes for controlled production of coal with government aid.

P: The Russell Sage Foundation issued a 500-page code of successful practices in 10,000 controversies between miners and operators in Illinois, urged that it be used in the East's bituminous troubles.

* While these operators were conferring two truck loads of shabby National Miners' Union (Communist) strikers, their gaunt wives and skinny-children, arrived in Washington to protest. They parked behind the White House. Police were ready for them, confiscated tin cans for collecting money, banners emblazoned "Down With Hoover's Strike-Breaking Conference."

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