Liberalism: Power, Economic Crisis, Reform, War 107this condition resulted from the overwhelming level of outside ownership of
the mines. After the Civil War, investors such as Charles Pratt, Abram Hewitt,
and Peter Cooper began to develop the coal industry there. Pratt’s company
was part of the Standard Oil trust; Hewitt was the mayor of New York City;
and Cooper was his father-in-law. Two of the biggest investors in West
Virginia were Andrew Carnegie, who obviously used the coal in his mills, and
John D. Rockefeller, who owned numerous mines and companies, including
the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company of Ludlow infamy. Not surprisingly,
Railroad companies saw great opportunities in the coal industry, so the
Chesapeake & Ohio, the Norfolk & Western, and the Coal & Coke companies,
among others, bought into West Virginia coal, as did railroad and banking
barons such as Commodore Vanderbilt, J.P. Morgan, and others. One of the
biggest firms, the Briar Hill Coal Company, came out of a merger of the hold-
ings of the Watson family—already influential in West Virginia politics—with
John D. Rockefeller. In nearby Pennsylvania, one of Carnegie’s closest associ-
ates, Henry Clay Frick, invested heavily in coal, controlling 80 percent of the
output there. Outsiders saw numerous opportunities in coal all over—railroad
companies could get rights-of-way for transporting coal to national markets;
northern factories could use it for fuel; and public utilities could mine coal
and use it to electrify cities. Following a trend that was commonplace after
the Civil War, northern capital was flooding into southern states to industrial-
ize the region and take the profits back home. For the people and workers
of places like West Virginia, the native-born and immigrants, of which south-
ern Italians and Sicilians were the largest group, there was little more than
harsh work and poverty.
Such conditions, perhaps inevitably, led to class conflict. In the late 1800s
a secretive society of mostly Irish miners, the Molly Maguires, organized and
fought the coal owners in Pennsylvania. As already noted, there was a major
coal strike in 1902 mediated by President Roosevelt, and in 1907 in
Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania and in Monangah, West Virginia, two of
the worst mine disasters in U.S. history, killing over 600 miners, took place.
Indeed, even given the dangerous conditions of U.S. industry, coal mining
stood out for the number of accidents and deaths in the mines [as the graph
on the next page comparing the U.S. with the other biggest coal producer,
Britain, shows], with West Virginia alone suffering over 4,200 miners’ deaths