The strike never resumed, as the miners received a 10 percent wage increase and reduced workdays from ten to nine hours; the owners got a higher price for coal and did not recognize the trade union as a bargaining agent.

[3] The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) had won a sweeping victory in the 1897 strike by the soft-coal (bituminous coal) miners in the Midwest, winning significant wage increases.

[4] It hoped to make similar gains in 1900, but found the operators, who had established an oligopoly through concentration of ownership after drastic fluctuations in the market for anthracite, to be far more determined opponents than it had anticipated.

Relying on J. P. Morgan to convey his message to the industry that a strike would hurt the reelection of Republican William McKinley, Hanna convinced the owners to concede a wage increase and grievance procedure to the strikers.

John Mitchell, President of the UMWA, proposed mediation through the National Civic Federation, then a body of relatively progressive employers committed to collective bargaining as a means of resolving labor disputes.

George Baer, President of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, one of the leading employers in the industry, brushed aside both proposals dismissively: Anthracite mining is a business, and not a religious, sentimental, or academic proposition....

[7] The strike soon produced threats of violence between the strikers on one side and strikebreakers, the Pennsylvania National Guard, local police, and hired detective agencies on the other.

Wright investigated and proposed reforms that acknowledged each side's position, recommending a nine-hour day on an experimental basis and limited collective bargaining.

Hanna and many others in the Republican Party were likewise concerned about the political implications if the strike dragged on into winter, when the need for anthracite was greatest.

As Roosevelt told Hanna, "A coal famine in the winter is an ugly thing and I fear we shall see terrible suffering and grave disaster.

[11] The economics of coal revolved around two factors: most of the cost of production was wages for miners, and if the supply fell, the price would shoot up.

[12] Roosevelt continued to try to build support for a mediated solution, persuading former president Grover Cleveland to join the commission he was creating.

The commissioners held hearings in Scranton over the next three months, taking testimony from 558 witnesses, including 240 for the striking miners, 153 for nonunion mineworkers, 154 for the operators, and eleven called by the Commission itself.

Although the commissioners heard some evidence of terrible conditions, they concluded that the "moving spectacle of horrors" represented only a small number of cases.

By and large, social conditions in mine communities were found to be good, and miners were judged as only partly justified in their claim that annual earnings were not sufficient "to maintain an American standard of living."

[19] Darrow, for his part, summed up the pages of testimony of mistreatment he had obtained in the soaring rhetoric for which he was famous: "We are working for democracy, for humanity, for the future, for the day will come too late for us to see it or know it or receive its benefits, but which will come, and will remember our struggles, our triumphs, our defeats, and the words which we spake.

An immigrant striker named Anthony Giuseppe was found fatally shot near a Lehigh Valley Coal Company colliery in Old Forge.

[24] Street fighting in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania on July 30 between a mob of 5,000 striking miners versus police resulted in the beating death of Joseph Beddall, a merchant and the brother of the deputy sheriff.

Membership in other unions soared, as moderates argued they could produce concrete benefits for workers much sooner than radical Socialists who planned to overthrow capitalism in the future.

[29] By contrast, the strikes of the radical Western Federation of Miners in the West often turned into full-scale warfare between strikers and both employers and the civil and military authorities.

This strike was successfully mediated through the intervention of the federal government, which strove to provide a "Square Deal"—which Roosevelt took as the motto for his administration—to both sides.