Federal Government's Role as Strike-Breaker, Says Editor, July 19, 1922

The Government as Strike-Breaker

It is hard to see how the message of the President to the governors of the several states can be construed otherwise than as formal notice that the federal government is committed to the proposition that the coal strike must be broken. This is a development of such vast importance that its full significance cannot be estimated. It affects, not only the immediate problems, but the whole future of the government’s relation to organized labor; which means the whole future of organized labor.

For the government is doing more than merely attempting to maintain order. It has set out definitely to break the strike. Mine operators are not simply assured of protection in case they wish to reopen their mines. They are categorically instructed to open those mines, and it is even declared that if workers are not forthcoming the government itself will call for volunteers and so furnish workers to the mines.

Such a proposal is unprecedented in the history of government. The President of the United States is perpetually being called upon to intervene in labor disputes. Time and again he has thrown the weight of his influence to one side or the other. President Cleveland event went so far as to send federal troops into Chicago during the Pullman strike of 1894, and the strike immediately collapsed; but those troops were sent there for the purpose of preventing interference with the dispatch of the United States mails, and the fact that their presence wrecked the strike was, officially at least, altogether incidental. But never before has a President used the power of the federal government for the avowed purpose of breaking a strike.

The logical steps by which Mr. Harding has reached his present position are plain enough. He regards it as his duty, as chief magistrate of the nation, not to preserve order only, but to protect the interests of the nation at large especially to prevent the wide-spread suffering an the immense property damage that would attend a serious shortage of coal next winter. If the strike continues, there will be no coal. He therefore called upon miners and operators to meet in conference and adjust their differences; presenting a tentative solution of the questions at issue. The operators accepted the invitation; the miners rejected it, and their strike conduct committee emphasized the rejection by adjourning sine die. Therefore, argues the president, since the operators evince a desire to co-operate with the government, and the miners reject its efforts to effect a reconciliation, there is no further use in arguing with the miners, and all that remains for the government to do is to assure a sufficient supply of coal for next winter. To accomplish this, it is obviously necessary to break the strike.

President Harding has been described by practically everyone who knows him as a patient man. But a patient man, once he is thoroughly aroused, is generally more dangerous by far than a swashbuckler. One wonders if the gratuitously contemptuous method of the rejection of his proposal by the miners has not had a good deal to do with the vigor of his present procedure?

At any rate, the die is cast. The government is irrevocably committed to a policy of strike-breaking, and it cannot back down without an immense, indeed a fatal, loss of prestige. All that remains in question now is the speed with which its purpose can be accomplished. If the union leaders recognize the inevitable, and abandon their arrogant attitude, a settlement may yet be reached without disastrous consequences. If not—well, let them think upon the American railway union. That organization had 150,000 members in 1894; but then it set itself up in opposition to Stephen Grover Cleveland, President of the United States, and today its very name is forgotten except by students of history—including the keepers of the records of the penitentiary, where its leaders finally landed.

In a straight-out fight between the miners and the government there can be no doubt of the final outcome; and that seems to be what the coal strike has become.

From the editorial page of The Greensboro Daily News, July 19, 1922. “Sine die” means without a day, so if they adjourned sine die, they adjourned without setting a date to reconvene.