Debate between protection of markets and open markets rages on
So let’s go back, say, to the late ’20s and early ’30s. The issue was then a worsening recession rapidly sliding into depression. As it turned out, this was the Great Depression, the recession on steroids that refused to die.
Few people sensed, in 1929-30, just how bad things were. The president of the United States said the fundamentals of the economy were just fine; hold on a while longer and we’ll be out of this, really we will.
As the calendar turned to 1931, there were those — many millions, no doubt — who could not grasp what was happening; however, the plunge to the bottom was not a mirage; it was the real thing. By the summer of that year, the blinders were off for just about everyone. Fall and winter loomed, cold and menacing.
Coal country — our corner of the world — was reeling. The wild and prosperous ’20s had bypassed the coal industry and the thousands of coal miners who lived in western Pennsylvania. Fayette County miners, docile as the ’20s passed into history, were about to explode.
The search for answers was on. The collapse was the fault of Wall Street, many said. The speculative bubble had burst. Others pointed to the decades-long malaise that had gripped the nation’s farms. Mining and agriculture were like two cheerless islands: sectors of the economy that had stubbornly resisted the tide of prosperity that washed over the businessman-friendly Republican economy of the 1920s.
One man gave the impression he had the answer, at least for the mining industry. That man was gruff and eloquent John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers of America.
It had been a tough nine years or so for the union chief and his union. The nationwide coal strike of 1922 had taken its toll — union membership plunged from some 600,000 to less than 200,000. Coal companies, led by Pittsburgh Coal, the largest producer of bituminous coal in the world, had effectively broken the union’s back.
Still in all, Lewis was a man to be reckoned with. A former miner himself from Iowa, Lewis outflanked rivals on his way to the union presidency, then battled to remain there: critics claimed he was way too understanding of the problems of coal-mine executives and only too happy to dismiss union foes as communists.
But Lewis was smart and a tough negotiator; he knew how to wield power. He stood up to presidents and Congresses; he spoke the language of accommodation when he had to; frequently, he breathed fire and brimstone. He was both an actor and a scholar; he was mesmerizing.
And when he wanted, he could sound like a policy wonk. This was one such time.
In a letter to President Hoover in the summer of 1931, Lewis lamented that recently 431 million tons of mostly Mexican and South American oil had displaced in the nation’s fuel mix 110 million tons of U.S. coal, “approximately 20 percent of the normal output of American coal mines.”
The result, Lewis said, was the closing of “vast numbers of coal mines” and “coal miners thrown out of work.” The continued duty-free importation of foreign oil threatened to wreck further havoc on domestic coal, he added.
Lewis insisted that the whole fabric of the U.S. economy was at stake. Miners needed employment to put cash in their pockets to pay for the goods and services that fueled America’s economic engine.
Business renewal depended on it. “Especially is this true,” Lewis told the president, “in those communities, once prosperous, but now practically bankrupt, where coal mines are wholly idle or open just a few days a week, where the earnings of coal workers have shrunk almost entirely …”
Lewis had in mind places like western Pennsylvania.
If the president and Congress were to close the foreign oil spigot, Lewis foresaw a grand comeback for coal. It would result in work for miners and “the revival of the coal industry now so near the industrial graveyard.”
Voices were raised in opposition to Lewis — voices railing against the high tariffs championed by Republicans and some Democrats. It was believed these had choked off trade between the U.S. and the rest of the world, especially Europe, speeding the economic disaster that, ironically enough, helped ignite the UMW’s improbable comeback.
The world is very different now. Yet the same debate between protection of markets and open markets rages on. Many of the arguments Lewis advanced, we hear today, including his assertion that “pauper wages” paid to workers overseas undermines American worker paychecks.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.