able to gain the nine-hour day in substantially all book and job offices.  In 1903 the union demanded the eight-hour day in all printing offices to become effective January 1, 1906.  To gain an advantage over the union, the United Typothetae, late in the summer of 1905, locked out all its union men.  This at once precipitated a strike for the eight-hour day.  The American Federation of Labor levied a special assessment on all its members in aid of the strikers.  By 1907 the Typographical Union won its demand all along the line, although at a tremendous cost of money running into several million dollars, and in 1909 the United Typothetae formally conceded the eight-hour day.

Another proof of trade union progress is found in the spread of trade agreements.  The idea of a joint partnership of organized labor and organized capital in the management of industry, which, ever since the fifties, had been struggling for acceptance, finally showed definite signs of coming to be materialized.

(1) The Miners

In no other industry has a union’s struggle for “recognition” offered a richer and more instructive picture of the birth of the new order with its difficulties as well as its promises than in coal mining.  Faced in the anthracite field[50] by a small and well knitted group of employers, generally considered a “trust,” and by a no less difficult situation in bituminous mining due to cut-throat competition among the mine operators, the United Mine Workers have succeeded in a space of fifteen years in unionizing the one as well as the other; while at the same time successfully and progressively solving the gigantic internal problem of welding a polyglot mass of workers into a well disciplined and obedient army.

The miners’ union attained its first successes in the so-called central bituminous competitive field, including Western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois.  In this field a beginning had been made in 1886 when the coal operators and the union entered into a collective agreement.  However, its scope was practically confined to Ohio and even that limited agreement went under in 1890.[51] With the breakdown of this agreement, the membership dwindled so that by the time of a general strike in 1894, the total paid-up membership was barely 13,000.  This strike was undertaken to restore the wage-scale of 1893, but during the ensuing years of depression wages were cut still further.[52]

The turn came as suddenly as it was spectacular.  In 1897, with a membership which had dropped to 10,000 and of which 7000 were in Ohio and with an empty treasury, the United Mine Workers called a general strike trusting to a rising market and to an awakened spirit of solidarity in the majority of the unorganized after four years of unemployment and distress.  In fact the leaders had not miscalculated.  One hundred thousand or more coal miners obeyed the order to go on a strike.