Ohio History Journal

K. AUSTIN KERR

The Movement for Coal Mine Safety

in Nineteenth-Century Ohio

 

 

In the nineteenth century Ohioans, as other Americans, faced a host

of new situations arising from the industrial revolution. As the level of

industrial production increased, unique forms of occupational

organization emerged which often confronted workers or the public with

unaccustomed hazards, creating demands that government begin

regulating the affairs of private industry. By the 1860s state government

began addressing the special dangers in the railroad and coal mining

businesses, two industries which were essential in the burgeoning

economy. The growth of coal mining brought peculiar dangers new to

miners in America.

During the winter of 1869-1870 miners began agitating for state

enactment and enforcement of mining regulations. Their initiatives

questioned prevailing ideologies concerning the proper relationship

between the government and the governed. The legislature in 1871

designated a Mining Commission to investigate the working condi-

tions of the state's mines, and enacted a statute in 1872 defining

health and safety standards in the growing industry. In 1874 it

provided the first bureaucratic and professional means of enforcing

the mining code by creating the post of State Inspector of Mines. In

1882 it designed a means of insuring that the Inspector and his

assistants were qualified persons, and subsequently in the decade,

along with the Board of Trustees of what was to become The Ohio

State University, funded an active Department of Mines to provide

the educational basis for achieving mine safety. Behind this

century-old legislative outline lay a controversy which revealed the

origins of government "welfare" policies, the beginnings of a struggle

which lasted at least through the 1930s to have the state and federal

government assume responsibility for improving the conditions of

work in the industrial age.

The story of the beginnings of coal mine health and safety

 

Dr. Kerr, Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University, received

research assistance for this article from Susan Busey, Michael J. Fitsko, Gerald Huss,

Michael R. McCormick, and Daniel Schneider.

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4                                                    OHIO HISTORY

 

regulation extended from the anthracite fields of northeastern

Pennsylvania across the bituminous centers of Illinois, and in the

early 1870s the subject caused political controversy in three states:

Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois.¹ It involved several significant

themes in the unfolding of American history. The movement stemmed

in part from the flow of men and ideas across the Atlantic from Great

Britain, and the struggles for union organization, political reform, and

mine regulation on that island. It resulted from the growing

importance of coal in fueling the nation's emerging industrial

economy. It concerned a growing ideological clash prompted by

men's perceptions of the differences of economic interest between

employer and employee, of capital and labor, and efforts to seek

public policies to ease, if not eliminate, industrial conflict. The

miners' movement for state regulation of working conditions revealed

that the political system of the Gilded Age was capable of responding

in a positive and sympathetic way to the perceived interests of

industrial workers.

Americans discovered in the nineteenth century that their land was

rich in coal resources. As did other states, Ohio commissioned a

geological survey which began to report in 1838 on the state's mineral

resources.² But the ability of entrepreneurs to mine coal profitably

was dependent on the development of inexpensive transportation

systems and, once coal outcroppings on the earth's surface were

exploited, to find men with the technical skills that deep underground

mining required. Coal was mined commercially before the Civil War

along water routes; and by the 1860s men were digging substantial

tonnages in the Mahoning and Tuscarawas valleys. The full opening

of the rich Hocking Valley reserves awaited the building of rail lines

into the region, a task nearing completion in 1870.3 As for the skills

needed for underground mining, Ohio businessmen, as their

counterparts elsewhere in the United States, looked to the experience

of British miners. British miners were recruited as early as the 1820s

 

 

 

1. Alexander Trachtenberg, The History of Legislation for the Protection of Coal

Miners in Pennsylvania, 1814-1915 (New York, 1942), 23-76; Earl R. Beckner, A History

of Labor Legislation in Illinois (Chicago, 1929), 283-345.

2. Ohio, Geological Survey,First Annual Report of The Geological Survey of the

State of Ohio (Columbus, 1838).

3. David G. Taylor, "Hocking Valley Railroad Promotion in the 1870's: The Atlantic

and Lake Erie Railway," Ohio History, LXXXI (Autumn 1972), 263-64. Statistics o

coal production before the census of 1880 were at best estimates. Ohio, Inspector o

Mines, Sixth Annual Report (Columbus, 1881), 8-10.

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Coal Mine Safety                                               5

 

to develop anthracite seams in eastern Pennsylvania, and by the 1860s

midwestern coal fields were dotted with British migrants.⁴

The recruitment of British miners proved a mixed blessing for coal

operators, however. The colliers were schooled in the traditions of

their homeland's Chartist agitation and the emerging British union

movement which, operating from a perceptual basis of

class-consciousness, expressed a growing determination to reform the

political system in order to ameliorate the welfare of workers.

American miners lived in relatively isolated coal camps; not only did

they maintain their cultural identity thereby, but a constant flow of

men back and forth across the Atlantic seeking economic opportunity

insured a continuing contact with the British union movement. The

ramifications were important in America, and in Ohio, as events

proved in the 1870s. Miners began to express attitudes of class-

consciousness, consequent initiatives at early trade union

organization, and the first mass movement to direct government

action in the distinct interests of workers.⁵

British miners at mid-century focused their political attention upon

the improvement of underground working conditions. Mining was an

inherently dangerous occupation. It posed special problems of

cave-ins, flooding, and ventilation. Shafts had to be supported

properly, pumps provided to remove water, and steady air currents

supplied to carry off the wastes of human and animal toil, smoke from

blasting powders, and the deadly explosive methane gas (called "fire

damp" in the jargon of the day). In response to miners' agitation

Parliament began in 1850 to devise safety codes and an inspection

system.⁶

British miners migrating to America brought these safety concerns

with them and by the 1860s were asking their state governments to

emulate the British example. Traditions of class-consciousness

combined with economic frustrations and observations of dangerous

working conditions, prompted miners in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and

Illinois to form unions whose principal political objective in the

decade after the Civil War was to achieve a system of state mine

 

4. The 1870 census showed that at least one-third of Ohio's miners were born in

Britain; Charlotte Erickson, American Industry and the European Immigrant,

1860-1885 (Cambridge, MA, 1957), 107.

5. A standard account of British influence on the American labor movement is

Clifton K. Yearley, Jr., Britons in American Labor (Baltimore, 1957), 123-41.

6. No modern history of the entire British mine safety movement has been

published, but see O. O. G. M. MacDonagh, "Coal Mines Regulation: The First

Decade, 1842-1852," Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain, ed. Robert Robson

(New York, 1967), 58-86. An informative nineteenth-century history written by an

engineer is R. Nelson Boyd, Coal Pits and Pitmen (London, 1892).

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6                                                     OHIO HISTORY

 

inspection.⁷ America's first spectacular mine disaster at Avondale,

located in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, which cost the lives of 110

workers on September 6, 1869, lent an emotional fervor to the cause

and prompted Ohio miners to begin agitation for state safety

regulations.⁸

The Avondale disaster spurred the miners of the Mahoning and

Tuscarawas valleys and their unions to mount a campaign for state

intervention. The leaders included William Thomson of Mineral

Ridge, educated at the University of Edinburgh before settling in the

Mahoning Valley; John Pollock, Irish-born and active in the Scottish

miners' union before migrating to the Tuscarawas Valley where he led

the local union movement; and Scotsman Andrew Roy, who, after

recovering from Civil War wounds, settled near Youngstown and

educated himself in mining engineering, geology, and the British

inspection system.⁹ Roy's knowledge allowed him to emerge as the

leading figure in the Ohio safety movement and eventually become

the first State Inspector of Mines in the nation.

These experienced miners and their followers were appalled by the

condition of the state's mines. Businessmen eager for rapid return on

investment often failed to offer even the most rudimentary safety

provisions. They resisted supplying adequate timbers for the "dead

work" of shoring roofs. Or they failed to insure adequate drainage in

places where water posed special hazards of flooding. Too often

inadequate means of ventilation were constructed, or no artificial

ventilation provided. Worst of all, the simple safety of building double

entries to all working places was overlooked in search of cost

economy. The Avondale disaster had resulted when the single

wooden shaft of the mine ignited and the men, not having an escape

route, suffocated. Miners all over the country agitated for a law

forcing operators to invest in double means of egress to forestall such

disasters. Nor was this the only goal the men championed. Detailed

and standardized mine maps were needed in case of accident, or to

 

7. The only narrative history of the miners' unions in nineteenth-century America is

Andrew Roy, A History of the Coal Miners of the United States (Columbus, 1907).

A history of the first bituminous miners' union is Edward Wieck, The American

Miners Association (New York, 1940).

8. Trachtenberg, History ofLegislation, 23-41. A mine accident is termed a "disaster"

when five or more persons are killed in a single incident. For an account of the Avondale

disaster by a local newspaper editor, see H. W. Chase, An Account of the Unparalleled

Disaster at the Avondale Colliery, Luzerne County, Pa., September 6th, 1869, by which

One Hundred and Ten Lives were Lost (Scranton, 1869).

9. Edward Pinkowski, John Siney, The Miners' Martyr (Philadelphia, 1963), 136;

Roy,History of the Coal Miners, 125-26; "American Labor Portraits-Andrew Roy,"

Workingman's Advocate, January 17, 1874.

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Coal Mine Safety                                               7

 

insure that future operations of neighboring mines did not lead to

unnecessary hazards. Safety appliances on elevators and mine cars

had to be tested and provided. Safe mining required a reliable

communication system to every seam being worked and supervision

of the use of safety lamps.¹⁰

The miners were unwilling to rely upon the beneficence of coal

operators to apply the necessary safety measures. Their leaders were

experienced and educated men who observed that operators were

ignorant of safety concerns and hostile to encumbering any expense

for the improvement of working conditions. The British experience

taught them that mine safety could be improved only by government

supervision. Caught up in the American labor reform movement of

the era which instructed that society was dividing rapidly into two

social classes, labor and capital, the miners turned to democratic

government for redress against businessmen who seemed mainly

interested in profiting from the value created by labor.11

After discussing safety matters in the columns of local newspapers

in the winter of 1869-1870, the miners had Andrew Roy draft a bill to

submit to the 1871 session of the General Assembly. Roy and John B.

Lewis, President of the Miners' and Laborers' Benevolent

Association in the Mahoning Valley, went to Columbus to lobby for

its passage. The bill outlined the miners' observations concerning

safety requirements. Most important to the miners, it divided the

state into two inspection districts and designated two Mine Inspectors

to supervise and enforce the mining code on a full-time basis.

Inspectors were to be appointed by the governor, and approved by

the Senate, only after they had been certified as competent by a

Board of Examiners, composed of a state geologist, two "practical

miners," one "practical mining engineer," and one chemist chosen

by the governor. The bill empowered the inspectors to enter the

mines to investigate their conditions. It outlined the safety

responsibilities of the miners. Inspectors finding violations were to

prosecute offenders by initiating civil suits in the local courts.¹²

 

 

10. Direct, reliable evidence of the ideology of rank-and-file workers is scarce. For

the above, use was made of the testimony reprinted in Ohio, Mining Commission, 1871,

Report of the Mining Commission Appointed under Joint Resolution . . .

(Columbus, 1872), 105-66; for the provisions of the regulatory bill which the miners'

supported, see Ibid., 173-79. Hereafter this source shall be cited as Report of the Mining

Commission.

11. The most recent study of the labor and labor reform movements of the 1860s is

David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans,

1862-1872 (New York, 1967).

12. Senate Bill 249 is reprinted in Report of the Mining Commission, 173-79. Roy,

History of the Coal Miners, 112.

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8                                             OHIO HISTORY

Senator Michael Daugherty, representing the Hocking Valley introduced the bill which prompted immediate opposition from the state's coal operators. They designated a lobbying committee o thirteen members, representing every Ohio mining district, and employed an attorney to work against it. The operators' argumen was simple. The relative shallowness of Ohio mines meant that fou air was absent and methane not encountered. Whenever any problem arose in the mines, they asserted, the operators were fully capable o remedying it. The miners' bill, if enacted, would cause unnecessar expenses, threaten to close mines, and thwart development of th state's resources. State officials entering mines would b mischievous, their very presence prompting men to grumble an strike. Society was an organic unity whose every group relate naturally to every other group, but the miner's bill, "class'

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Coal Mine Safety                                             9

 

legislation, would upset the time-honored social relationships of coal

communities while imposing unwarranted expenses on taxpayers. The

proposal, in short, was nothing short of the work of demagogues who

hoped to secure sinecures from it.13

Roy, believing that safer working conditions would ease the

discontent of workers, had expected many coal operators to accept

the bill's wisdom, but he was frustrated in his lobbying effort. He told

the Senate about the British safety efforts, described the various

dangers which miners faced, and explained the minimum ventilation

and safety requirements which mining experts of the day agreed

upon. "We want mine inspectors to see that good and sufficient

ventilation is provided, and an escapement shaft sunk for the

withdrawl of the mine in case of accident to the main opening," he

noted. Ohio miners deserved the same precautions taken in European

mines. We "are asking for nothing but what is right," he concluded.

"We ask for a mouthful of fresh air amidst the mephitic blasts of

death which surround us; and for a hole to crawl out when the

hoisting shaft is closed up, as was the case at the Avondale shaft a

year ago. ... "14

A Senate vote of eleven to sixteen on April 12 killed the safety bill

for the 1871 session, but Roy and Lewis did not return home

empty-handed. Senator Lauren D. Woodworth, representing the

Mahoning Valley, introduced a resolution, passed on May 2 by a

fourteen to thirteen vote in the Senate, to establish a mining

commission to ascertain the conditions of the state's mines and

recommend remedial legislation.¹⁵ The three-member commission

was to include a "practical miner" and a representative of the

operators. It was instructed "to visit" and "inspect" the "leading

coal mines of the State" to determine the facts concerning the

"health and safety" of miners. Its second charge was "to inquire into

the causes of strikes among the miners . . . and report the facts and

their conclusions .. ." and recommend any needed legislation.¹⁶

Governor Rutherford B. Hayes chose Charles Reemelin, a

prominent Cincinnati Democrat and German-American leader who

had enjoyed a long career in state politics, to head the commission.

 

13. Views of operators are summarized in Roy,History of the Coal Miners, 113-14,

and are reprinted in Report of the Mining Commission, 105-66.

14. Roy's History of the Coal Miners does not report dates reliably, but it does

reprint his testimony to the Senate, 114-20. See also Youngstown Mahoning Register,

November 3, 1870.

15. Ohio, General Assembly, Senate, Journal of the Senate of the State of Ohio,

59th General Assembly, April 12, 1871, 513-14; Ibid., May 2, 1871, 782.

16. The quotations are from the resolution as reprinted in Report of the Mining

Commission,' 3.

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10                                                OHIO HISTORY

 

Reemelin had invested in a Muskingum County mining firm and,

though he claimed ignorance of mining, Hayes chose him as an

industry representative. The Governor also appointed Roy as the

group's "practical miner" and Benjamin M. Skinner, a businessman

and Republican functionary from coal-producing Meigs County.¹⁷

In the summer and autumn of 1871 the commission traveled to the

state's leading coal fields and recorded testimony from coal

operators, mine superintendents and bosses, union leaders, and

ordinary miners. Roy inspected mines and bitterly criticized his

colleagues for not doing so. Reemelin studied mining reports from

Prussia. The three commissioners found much at fault in the state's

mines, but could not agree on the language to characterize them or,

more importantly, on the remedial legislation required.

The majority report, clearly dominated by Reemelin, expressed no

sense of alarm concerning safety and health conditions in the mines.

"The shell of primitiveness is sticking to every part of them," it

stated, "but the evidences of a gradual improvement are also visible

everywhere." All mines could stand some improvement but the only

ones "absolutely dangerous to life" were those "with but one

opening." "The most numerous causes of insecurity and

insalubriousness arise from . . . our western mannerism, which

dislikes close regulations, and is heedless of personal dangers."

Accidents were few and usually not "dreadful," caused most often by

the carelessness of individual miners.¹⁸

Nor was there any particular cause for alarm on the subject of

strikes. According to Reemelin and Skinner, strikes arose from the

peculiar combination of the circumstances of immigration and

industrial growth. Men came to Ohio to mine coal from homelands

where "wealth held by privileges" angered them; then in America

they were "surrounded by folks, who grew rich without the

qualifications, which are usually presumed to be requisite for

acquiring wealth." In the rapidly changing economic scene the miners

"could discover no criterion by which to measure the value of thei

own work"; they observed "the operator whose wealth was, so far a

they could judge, an accident and not a merit. .. ." Miners' wages

the majority found, were adequate; the solution to their discontent lay

in saving, investing in real estate, and rising into the capitalist class

 

 

17. Hayes to Reemelin, May 16, 1871, Reemelin to Hayes, May 20, 1871, Hayes t

L. D. Woodworth, May 29, 1871, Woodworth to Hayes, June 3, 1871, A. D. Fassel

and David Owens to Hayes, June 3, 1871, The Papers of Rutherford B. Hayes

Rutherford B. Hayes Library. Charles Reemelin, Life of Charles Reemeli,

(Cincinnati, 1892), 200.

18. Report of the Mining Commission, 7.

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Coal Mine Safety                                                  11

Strikes were a product in part of misperceptions leading to a determination to use force against the economic interests of the opposition; inevitably they harmed both capital and labor. The proper state policy was to rely on natural social 'evolution toward a realization that strikes did-more harm than good. "Children quit playing with edged tools when they find that they cut both ways," Reemelin and Skinner concluded; "why not hope that the children of labor will eschew strikes, when they have learned their, positively, injurious effects."19 Because the conditions of work and the social relations of the industry were no cause for special alarm, there was no need in the eyes of the majority for special laws dealing specifically with coal mining. Reemelin was prominent nationally for expressing an ideology of the organic nature of society. His views were rooted in the experience of the urban middle class with a regressive system of property taxation which was encountering pressures to support an expanding system of governmental services.20 The commission's recommendations for coal regulations fit into this circumstance. The state must avoid the costs of an inspection system. The miners' demands for state inspection stemmed from a misguided social understanding. They looked upon society as a collectivity of special     19. Ibid., 19-21. 20. Clifton K. Yearley, Jr., The Money Machines (Albany, 1970), 32-34.

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12                                              OHIO HISTORY

interests whereas, in Reemelin's view, it was properly understood as an organic unity. Thus the state must exercise great care to avoid legislation which treated only one segment of the population; even-handedness was the only proper course of action.21 The commission recommended three interrelated laws. The first defined the obligations of all employers to provide "wholesome air" in industries. The second codified common law by leaving damage payments to injured workers up to the results of civil suits. The third would have the state establish in each county a Sanitary Commission consisting of the Sheriff, the Surveyor, and two local physicians to regulate health and safety conditions in local industries.22 Thus the organic unity of society would remain intact in the application of law, control kept within local communities, and the costs of regulating health and safety conditions in industry would stay low. Andrew Roy disagreed entirely with these recommendations and used the opportunity of writing a minority report to explain carefully the need for state regulation and inspection. Knowing that most legislators were ignorant of the industry's details, he explained the various kinds of mine operations and their special problems. He reported the conditions he found upon inspecting numerous mines and concluded that "the majority are badly ventilated, and the smaller quite as badly as the leading mines." He reviewed the practices of European nations in mining education and regulation and urged legislation modeled after their experience. In deprecating the majority recommendations he asserted that laws "must be based upon the facts in the premises"; and the facts were clear, both fron the miners' testimony and from his inspections. The "majority" o   21. Report of the Mining Commission, 27-51. 22. Ibid., 169-73.

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Coal Mine Safety                                          13

 

miners were immigrants who knew that even "despotic

governments" provided mining codes and inspectors; they should not

expect less from their new democratic homeland. Not only would

state regulation of the industry bring a sense of greater justice to these

workers, it would also improve all aspects of the industry, allowing

coal to be mined more economically, more efficiently, and ultimately

more profitably. In the future an expert state inspectorate could

resolve unforeseen problems with recommendations based upon

careful, knowledgable observation and experience. Roy urged the

legislature to enact a modified version of the miners' bill.²³

The mining commission finished its Report in November, and

when the General Assembly convened in Columbus for the 1872

session the two sides clashed again. Roy and John Pollock, sent to

Columbus to work for the inspection bill, were hopeful. There seemed

to be considerable public support for their cause, and the Senate

enacted the bill unanimously on April 10. But the House of

Representatives balked, and by the end of the month Roy and Pollock

were embittered.²⁴

Leading the fight against inspection were Charles Reemelin and

Joseph Conrad, mine operator and Representative from Portage

County. Reemelin's three-part recommendation had encountered

"derisive laughter" in the Senate Committee on Mines and Mining

but in the House, according to Roy and Pollock, "his labored theories

and blundering statements of facts were accepted, by members who

had never seen a coal-mine, and who believed that Reemelin had

really inspected the coal mines, in accordance with his duties as State

Commissioner." The miners' lobbyists were prepared to refute his

arguments, but were unable effectively to counter Conrad's legislative

machinations. He arranged to have the House strike out all the

provisions for inspection, the heart of the Senate bill as far as the

miners were concerned. Pollock admonished that "this is a question

of voting for capital, or human life. . ."25

When the conflicting bills went to a conference committee, the

miners' lobbyists failed to obtain a hearing. The House delegates,

which included two coal operators, were intransigent on the question

of inspection. Friends in the legislature urged Roy and Pollock to

accept a compromise mining code without an inspectorate on the

 

 

23. Ibid., 55-96.

24. Ohio, Mining Commission, 1871, Report of Messrs. Roy and Pollock, Miners'

Committee to Columbus, To Urge the Passage by the Legislature, of the Miners'

Bill, for the Ventilation and Inspection of Coal Mines (Cincinnati, 1872).

25. Report of Messrs. Roy and Pollock; Columbus Ohio Statesman, April 22,

1872.

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14                                                   OHIO HISTORY

 

grounds that it established a desirable legislative precedent. Though a

law was passed, the two men returned home bitterly disappointed

with the failure to achieve inspection.²⁶ "An Avondale disaster may

furnish an argument before another winter," a sympathetic editorial

in The Ohio Statesman concluded.²⁷ Less than three months later

the state witnessed its first mine disaster which cost ten lives in

Portage County.²⁸

Frustrated by the legislative process, the miners saw their next

opportunity in the Constitutional Convention which met in the

summer of 1873. There the miners' cause was led by Martin F. Foran

of Cleveland, national president of the Coopers' Union and later a

member of Congress. The miners sought to have the constitution

contain a section which required the General Assembly to enact laws

for the regulation and inspection of mines. "We want . . . to put it

beyond the power of rich lobbyists to defeat humanitarian projects . . .,"

exclaimed one supporter. Delegates complained of the legislative

power of mine owners and sympathized with the felt needs of miners.

With only six delegates voting against including the section, the

convention responded favorably to the miners' wishes.²⁹

The voters defeated the new constitution the following year, but

meanwhile the miners succeeded in persuading the 1874 session of the

legislature to provide an inspector to enforce the mining code. Roy

returned to Columbus in March. "The legislature of Ohio this session

contains many farmers, or would-be farmers," he wrote his

supporters. "Perhaps the granger movement has suddenly converted

a politician into a farmer." He found the new governor, William

Allen, "well-informed in coal mining" and on mining legislation. "He

had read the reports of the . . . English House[s] of Lords and

Commons of the monstrous abuses as practiced on miners," he

noted.³⁰ With a sympathetic governor behind it, new member,

present in the legislature, and the reality that a mine disaster had

occured in the state, the bill, amended to provide for the single office

of State Mine Inspector, passed both houses by wide margins.³¹ I

26. Report of Messrs. Roy and Pollock.

27. The bill was passed on April 27, 1872.

28. Workingman's Advocate, July 13, 1872; Roy,History of the Coal Miners, 128

29. Ohio, Constitutional Convention, 1873-1874, Official Report of th,

Proceedings and Debates of the Third Constitutional Convention of Ohi

(Cleveland, 1873), I, 345-47, II, 2869.

30. Workingman's Advocate, March 14, 1874.

31. Ohio, General Assembly, Senate, Journal of the Senate of the State of Ohio

61st General Assembly, March 12, 1874, 332; Ohio, General Assembly, House o

Representatives, Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Ohio

61st General Assembly, March 5, 1874, 361-62. The statute is reprinted in Ohio

Inspector of Mines, First Annual Report (Columbus, 1875), 84-88.

• 12
 

Coal Mine Safety                                           15

 

April 1874 Roy found himself appointed State Inspector of Mines.

The new statute did not specify all that Roy and his supporters had

sought. The miners had wanted a two-man inspection force; they

obtained a single officer. This reduction meant that Roy could not

possibly visit each of the state's three hundred mines annually. The

miners had sought a procedure ensuring that the inspectors were

chosen on merit and not on patronage considerations, but the

procedures of certifying state inspectors were stricken from the law.

Nor was there any provision for government certification of mine

managers or, in Roy's view, adequate educational facilities for

providing qualified men. These inadequacies were to provide the

content of future dispute and legislation.

Roy approached the administration of the law in a judicious

fashion. He viewed his role as inspector partly as that of an educator,

hoping that he could teach operators the proper techniques of

ventilation and safety. He believed that a helpful role would appeal to

their self-interest by showing how miners working in a well-

ventilated, safe operation could produce more coal and be less

inclined to strike. Failing gentle persuasion, however, he did not

hesitate to take recalcitrant operators to court for violations of the

mining code.³²

Roy's enforcement policy and his close association with the labor

and labor reform movements led to continuing acrimony and

eventually cost him his job. In the 1876 session coal operators urged

the legislature to replace the inspectorate with another office which

would combine geological surveying, the gathering of mining

statistics, and wage arbitration with the inspection function. The

miners rallied to Roy's support, however; Governor Hayes was

assured of his engineering competence, and the move to oust him died

for the time being.³³

But when the Democrats recaptured control of the statehouse,

Governor Richard M. Bishop in 1878 refused to reappoint Roy to a

second four-year term. Roy's Greenback party affiliation provided a

ready excuse in an age of intense partisanship, but it was probably

patronage considerations combined with his policy of enforcing the

law which cost him the job. The miners supported him for

 

32. Ohio, Inspector of Mines, First Annual Report, 8-9; Idem, Second Annual

Report (Columbus, 1876), 30-31; NationalLabor Tribune, January 27, 1877.

33. National Labor Tribune, February 19, March 11, 1876; Miners' National

Record, II (February 1876), 57; Workingman's Advocate, April 1, 1876; John Siney,

William Thomson, and John James to Hayes, February 23, 1876, and I. S. Newberry to

Hayes, March 20, 1876, Hayes Papers; Ohio, Inspector of Mines, Fourth Annual

Report (Columbus, 1877), 164.

• 13
 

16                                                   OHIO HISTORY

 

reappointment, but Bishop, after studying Roy's use of the courts and

hearing the arguments of operators and allied party officials, chose

James D. Poston of the Hocking Valley as the second State Inspector of

Mines.³⁴

Poston's appointment outraged Roy and the miners. Poston seemed

to know little if anything about mine safety and made no inspections

while in office. He refused to initiate suits against operators who

violated the law, and at least one firm whose mines had been closed

by Roy resumed operations two days after Poston's appointment.

Poston left office in 1879 without writing the Annual Report which

the law required.³⁵

In 1880 Roy was reappointed by Governor Charles Foster to

another four-year term and continued to work for improvements in

state policy regarding mine safety. He had a bill introduced in the

1882 legislature which would require all inspectors and mine

managers to be certified as competent by a board of examiners

appointed by the governor. Such certification procedures were never

enacted during the nineteenth century, but the legislature did provide

safeguards against the appointment of patently inappropriate

inspectors in a code revision. This response to the miners' outrage

over Poston's appointment provided that any fifteen citizens upon

posting bond could require the appointment of a board of examiners

to inquire into the competency of any inspector and, if found wanting,

remove him.³⁶ Meanwhile, in 1881 the state gave Roy an assistant,

and further expanded the staff of the inspectorate in 1883.³⁷

The vision expressed by Roy and his supporters at the time of the

Avondale disaster of the state providing education in mining

engineering began to come to fruition in the 1880s also. In 1877 the

legislature had mandated a School of Mines and Mine Engineering in

the Agricultural and Mechanical College in Columbus (now The Ohio

State University). Although it allocated $4,500 for equipment for the

program, it failed to provide funds for staffing the faculty position.

 

 

34. National Labor Tribune, April 6, April 13, May 4, 1878. In 1878 Roy ran for

Secretary of State on the Greenback ticket. Ohio, Secretary of State, Annual Report

of the Secretary of State for 1878 (Columbus, 1879), 196. John D. Martin to

Governor Richard M. Bishop, March 18, 1878, The Papers of Richard M. Bishop, Ohio

Historical Society.

35. NationalLabor Tribune, April 20, May 11, June 1, June 15, July 20, 1878; Ohio,

Inspector of Mines, "Fifth Annual Report of the State Mine Inspector," in Ohio, Office

of the Governor, Ohio Executive Documents, 1878, part II (Columbus, 1879),

1123-147.

36. Ohio, Inspector of Mines, Eighth Annual Report (Columbus, 1882), 30-31.

37. Ohio, Inspector of Mines, Seventh Annual Report (Columbus, 1882), 8; Idem,

Ninth Annual Report (Columbus, 1884), 129.

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Coal Mine Safety                                           17

 

Consequently the Board of Trustees voted to discontinue the

Department of Political Economy and Civil Polity in order to release

funds for a professor of mine engineering. Adequate appropriations

remained a problem for the next decade. In 1887 Andrew Roy and a

group from the Ohio Institute of Mining Engineering worked with

trustee Rutherford B. Hayes and the legislature to insure funding for a

three-man department offering a regular four-year engineering course,

a special two-year course which hoped to attract "practical miners,"

and independent studies.³⁸

By some measures this movement to install a state safety program

for coal mining was successful; by others it was not. One standard

used to point to the success of inspection involved a favorable

comparison of the number of tons mined, the number of men

employed, and the number of deaths and serious injuries which

occured each year.³⁹ Though the rates of serious injury and death

may have gone down, however, the state's mines did not become safe

places in which to work. In 1881 the state witnessed its first deadly

explosion of methane.⁴⁰ Roy's successors, Chief Inspectors Thomas

Bancroft and R. M. Hazeltine, were confident that their policy of

educating mine managers short of initiating court suits was bringing

safer mines. After he retired from public office, Roy complained that

not enough had been done.⁴¹ A century after the 1874 inspection law,

however, the achievement of healthy and safe working conditions

underground continues to elude scientists, engineers, miners, and

public officials alike.⁴²

Clearly in the 1870s, however, the miners' agitation over unsafe

and unhealthy working conditions was breaking ground for erecting

what was to become in the next century an elaborate structure of

government intervention into the affairs of private business firms.

They established a precedent the end result of which was a broad

public consensus on the propriety of such state regulation. Their

actions, moreover, hold significance for a historical understanding of

the Gilded Age. Older conceptions of the period as a time of

laissez-faire, as a period of inhumanity on the part of businessmen

and the public officials they allegedly controlled, and as an age of the

 

 

38. Alexis Cope,History of The Ohio State University (Columbus, 1920), I, 49-52.

39. Ohio, Inspector of Mines, Sixth Annual Report (Columbus, 1881), 4.

40. Idem, Seventh Annual Report, 17.

41. Andrew Roy, "The Protection of Miners," Ohio Mining Journal, XXIV (1895),

50-54.

42. For an analysis of the continuing safety problems, see Curtis Seltzer, "The

Unions-How Much Can a Good Man Do," The Washington Monthly, VI (June,

1974), 7-24.

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18                                                      OHIO HISTORY

 

powerlessness of labor have been revised recently. Some writers have

suggested that the humanitarian impulses which supported the

anti-slavery movement were transfered, in part, after the Civil War to

promote public policies of ameliorating the conditions of life in

factories and cities.43 Other scholars have pointed out that as the

nation's economic system was undergoing rapid industrial

reorganization, persons whose lives were rooted in local community

structures and local socio-economic patterns frequently behaved in

ways sympathetic toward the workers who bore the psychological

and economic brunt of industrialism.⁴⁴ The story of the mine safety

movement in Ohio fits into this larger pattern of reinterpretation. The

miners showed an early tendency toward union organization based on

perceptions of social stratification and, most important, gave

evidence of considerable political power in the age of the "robber

barons." For historical insight the lasting significance of this

particular story rests on the proposition that ordinary workers willing

to agitate, able to organize, and recruiting capable leaders could make

their weight felt on the political system of the time. The success of

their efforts, in the final analysis, is a tribute to them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

43. David Montgomery, "Radical Republicanism in Pennsylvania, 1866-1873,"

Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, LXXXV (October, 1961),

439-57; James C. Mohr, The Radical Republicans and Reform in New York During

Reconstruction (Ithaca, 1973). See also Sidney Fine, Laizzez-Faire and the

General-Welfare State (Ann Arbor, 1956). In the research for this essay we made no

effort to identify "radical" Republicans and to measure their influence on the

legislative outcome. State inspection did receive the support of Republican Governors

Hayes and Charles Foster, Democratic Governor William Allen, though not Democratic

Governor Richard M. Bishop.

44. Herbert Gutman, "The Workers' Search for Power," The Gilded Age, ed. H.

Wayne Morgan (Syracuse, 1970), 31-54.

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