Pennsylvania Magazine of HISTORY and BIOGRAPHY
THE Pennsylvania Magazine OF HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY The Social Order of the Anthracite Region, 1825-1902 HE place of the Pennsylvania anthracite region in American history has been fixed for nearly a century. The Molly TMaguire conspiracy, the miners' strikes of the i87o's and 1902, the Lattimer massacre, a railroad president who believed him- self one of "the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given control of the property interests of the country/1 and, looming behind all these, the anthracite coal trust have become stock types of nineteenth-century capitalistic oppression and labor re- sistance. A region of company towns and stores, child labor and mine disasters, starvation wages and squalor, race wars between successive waves of immigrants; they are all familiar enough. From the perspective of the mid-twentieth century, however, things that were not present in the society of the anthracite region appear no less significant than things that were. Instead of a simple melodrama of ruthless bosses and embattled workingmen, the story is one of groups, classes, institutions, and individuals so equivocally related as to be mutually unintelligible and quite heedless of each other. The region had plenty of groups, classes, institutions, and notable personages, to be sure, but it is hard to find among them 261 262 ROWLAND BERTHOFF July any functional design of reciprocal rights and duties, the nuts and bolts which pin together a stable social order. Geology was partly to blame. The anthracite region is an irregular area or discontinuous series of areas broken by mountain ridges and coalless farming valleys, altogether some four hundred square miles scattered over eight counties, reaching from a wide southern base north of the Blue Mountain, between the Susquehanna and Lehigh rivers, nearly a hundred miles northeastward along the broad Wyoming and narrow Lackawanna valleys.
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