Sociologists are apt to claim that many-sided conflicts hold society together
rather than destroy it, so long as economic, religious, political, racial, or
national patterns of conflict
Wyoming Valley has its full quota of conflict patterns in the economic, religious, political, educational, and social-work fields. In the economic field, for example, agriculture has been fought to a standstill by anthracite mining and manufacture. Hard coal is dominant over all industry and business in the Valley. Anthracite has never looked too kindly upon new and possibly competing industries. But the slow decay of its own markets and the need of substitute employment opportunities in place of mining are modifying to some degree this feudalistic attitude of the anthracite industry toward other forms of enterprise.
Business depends upon, but fears and sometimes hates, the large mining population. The Newspaper Guild, when it tied up the local papers for six months, made a nightly appeal over the radio to the mine workers for support. More than once a considerable body of miners helped to picket the newspaper offices. Business heads in the Valley silently but grimly condemned the Guild, the C.I.O., and the miners, and forthwith set up a "Citizens Committee" to cope with future labor crises.
The miners themselves from time to time fight against the mine operators for a new contract. At times they even contend among themselves in rival unions. This is in part a product of the rank and file distrust of their union leaders, and in part due to the suspicion of the newer nationality groups that they have not been adequately represented among the officials of the United Mine Workers.
Finally, technological change and labor displacement aggravate the problem of permanent unemployment in the Valley. The struggle for jobs between youth and age, between male and female, between manual labor and skilled labor, and between different nationality groups grows even more ruthless.
In the political field one finds innumerable ridiculously small geographic units holding stubbornly to their old, and one-time reasonable, political boundaries. Today the rising cost of government, especially corrupt government, emphasizes the folly of excessive parochialism. Roads and buildings go to ruin, even without the aid of frequent mine subsidence.2 Real estate taxes rise as assessment values fall. School directors become prosperous while educational "frills" such as kindergartens, summer playgrounds, or teachers' salaries are cut to balance the budget.
In some of the townships the bulk of the taxes is paid by the leading coal corporations in the area, but the tax expenditure remains in the hands of the professional politicians who care little for the deluge that must submerge them when the coal remaining under their townships will consist merely of "pillars." Political obtuseness of this character handicaps the future of the Valley's two to three hundred thousand population, because the wider world does not know the area as "the third largest city of the State," but only as the city of Wilkes-Barre, the boroughs of Kingston, Edwardsville, Pringle, Luzerne, Forty-Fort—to list but a few of the many illogical political entities now struggling against common economic difficulties.
In the sphere of religion there has been conflict from the very early days, when the "Old Ship Zion" on the Public Square split its congregation over the issue of decorating the church with evergreens at Christmastide. That was "pagan: so the Episcopalians had to take themselves and their pagan ideas into a building of their own. Today the big town churches are commonly looked upon as the spiritual homes of the local elite. The rest of the forty-odd churches in the city of Wilkes-Barre cater to "the people." But these people are torn into nearly as many denominational or national divisions as there are churches. In the Protestant groups fundamentalist doctrine is the rule rather than the exception.
Over against the Protestant bodies is the rapidly growing power of the Roman Catholic Church, though within this spiritual empire there are said to be heart-burnings on the part of other nationalities because the Irish have too much power. The Roman Catholic Church and its followers seem cold to the Greek Orthodox community within the Valley. Even the Jews, though comparatively few in numbers, fall into three distinet groups, each with its own temple or synagogue, and its own rabbis. Despite the efforts of Jewish and Christian liberals, the smouldering flame of anti-Semitism makes the task of the Jews one of constant alertness against a false step.
In the educational realm the few remaining "first families" have schools of their own; the mass of the citizens use the many public schools scattered through the various political entities to which reference has already been made. The Catholics have elementary schools, high schools, and even colleges within easy commuting distance of the city. There are school organizations for two of the three Jewish groups.
Wyoming Seminary in Kingston and Bucknell University Junior College in Wilkes-Barre stand in a peculiar relation to one and all of these divisive institutions. They appear to know no bounds or limits of township politics, nationality, class, religion, or race.
Even in the field of social work there are many dividing lines. In a period of constantly falling contributions to the Community Chest, west-side and east-side of the river have separate organizations in at least one form of social service. There are, moreover, three family agencies, only one of which is strictly non-sectarian. It is still difficult to convince some lay board members of the need for professional training on the part of their agencies' personnel.
There has been considerable conflict between groups of civic-minded citizens who have tried to keep politics out of the public, tax-supported agencies and the politicians who have hoped to get into new pastures. Underlying this conflict in the field of social work runs a strong feeling that "local boys who have made good" should be given the social workers' jobs, and that the social workers should "have their ears pinned back," or "be sent back where they came from."
From Pittston to Nanticoke the Wyoming Valley stretches some eighteen miles down the Susquehanna River. Hills rising over a thousand feet above the river close the valley into a bottle-neck at each end, but fall back in the center to create an area some three to six miles wide.
Freedom from conflict in this valley seems to have been as rare and unnatural as war in heaven. Long before man wandered over Pennsylvania, layer upon layer of vegetable and animal matter was accumulated in the deep "sunken valley" of Wyoming. Tremendous pressures, over long ages, turned these layers into the "stone coal" which has made this area of Pennsylvania famous or notorious, depending upon the bias of the observer.
The geological formation of the district suggests an analogy in its social history. Layer after layer of foreign born settled in this region. Reversing the geological pattern beneath their feet, the latest layers of immigrants have gone to the bottom of the social and economic mass, while the oldest invaders have been pushed to the top.
Violent, fratricidal struggle appeared with the first group of white settlers in Wyoming Valley. The Yankees from Connecticut, believing that their charter from England gave them the right to the northeaster portion of Pennsylvania, found themselves almost at once at blows, not only with the Indians, but with other white settlers, the so-called "Pennamites" from Pennsylvania.
From 1769 for over thirty years a violent civil war persisted, halted but temporarily by the War of the Revolution. Wyoming Valley bristled with rude forts and blockhouses. There were many pitched battles and much bloodshed. Not until 1807 was the last land title dispute settled, by the courts or by statutory law. Conflict in this Valley was not confined to battles between the Yankees and the Pennamites. As early as 1766 Indians took their protest to the white authorities at Philadelphia against certain white men who were robbing them (the Indians) of their stone- coal in the Wyoming Valley. The Indians warned the Philadel- phia authorities that if this "bootlegging" continued they would be forced to retalitate upon the property of the white men.3
The historic "Massacre of Wyoming" occurred on July 3, 1778, when British, Tories, and Indians slaughtered nearly three-fourths of the white residents during the absence of most of the able-bodied men in Connecticut service of the American Revolutionary army. How important this early history is considered in certain social strata can be seen from the fact that one who can claim an ancestor in the massacre needs but little else for passport into the inner circles of local society.
As symbol of this tradition, the one comparatively exclusive social club in Wilkes-Barre is entitled the "Westmoreland Club. This name goes back to 1776, when the General Assembly of Connecticut established the Wyoming Valley as "Westmoreland County in the State of Connecticut." Thus do the Connecticut Yankees cast their shadow over the leaders of the present, some of whom are anything but Connecticut Yankees.
Up to the days of the Civil War social and industrial customs in the Valley were simple. Travel to and from Wilkes-Barre was leisurely. By stage coach or canal packet it took two days to reach Philadelphia. In 1848 local veterans of the Mexican War returned with much pomp in canal boats. Until the boom in hard coal during the Civil War, mining displaced agriculture as the main industry only very gradually. The first mining was crude and wasteful. Coal crushing and "breakers" came later. Around 1850 anthracite sold at one dollar a ton.
After this comparatively peaceful era came a second period of marked social conflict. The development of railroads, just before and during the Civil War, brought rapid expansion to the anthracite industry as the main economic basis of the Valley's life. Separate little communities, clustering about the mine shafts, sprang up all along the river. The beautiful Wyoming Valley began to show the destructive effects of mining, physically in drab culm-banks and surface cave-ins, and socially in segregation by nationality, religion, and occupation.
Native white labor for mining was insufficient. In the forties the Welsh, English, and Irish provided the mining brawn and skill, with Scots and Germans in lesser numbers. In the eighties Poles and Slovaks flowed in, followed in turn by Croats, Slovenes, Ruthenians, and Italians. How seriously this flood of new na- tionalities affected the population's character can be seen in the census data for Luzerne County for 1890. In that year the native-born whites of native-born parents made up only thirty-five per cent of the total population, while the native-born of foreign parents accounted for thirty-three per cent and the foreign-born ran them a close race with thirty-two per cent.
Low-wage, foreign-born labor brought profits to the coal owners, but at a high social cost. As the communities grew in size and prosperity, the region's component elements drew apart into isolated and mutually exclusive groups. Miss Anne Roller, a social worker well acquainted with the Valley, could say in 1926:
The churches in the heart of the city and the beautiful club houses along Franklin Street and in the country have a membership list made up largely of the names inscribed upon the Wyoming monument (memorial of the famous massacre) ... the Chamber of Commerce has much the same membership, but with a considerable addition of young business men coming in from the outside or rising into prominence from one or the other of the older immigration groups, Welsh, English, Irish, German. The boards of directors of the local social agencies and institu- tions are made up almost exclusively of descendants of the early settlers . . . private schools educate the children of this group. Numbering a few hundred families at most, the social aristocracy identified with the owning and controlling side of the mining industry has an isolation as complete as that of the miners.4
Miss Roller then described the miners as living apart in their little communities, "with their own social organization, sending their children to parochial schools or to public schools within their township or borough." There was, she reported in 1926, "a compact, close-knit neighborhood life in the little town and villages and in the foreign neighborhoods of Wilkes-Barre."
An article in the local Sunday paper about three years ago described current religious services in Wilkes-Barre where sermons were delivered in the native language in Polish, Slovak, Russian, German, Italian, Syrian, and Lithuanian Catholic churches, in the German Lutheran churches, and in a few of the Welsh churches.5 Slovak, Polish, German, and Italian are taught in the respective parochial schools, and Hebrew, of course, is taught by the Jewish congregations. There are, moreover, four foreign-language papers published in the county—Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, and Slovak.
At least half of Luzerne County’s population consists of foreign-born or of native-born of foreign parents. To them, with their varied social and educational backgrounds, Wyoming Valley has been a land of promise, if they were able to survive the fierce struggle for existence. To these European peoples, indeed, survival has meant a pretty merciless struggle. The newest comers have seldom been welcomed by those who had arrived a generation or so earlier. A "select committee" of the United States House of Representatives, reporting to Congress as early as 1889, did not hesitate to express their feelings about these immigrants:
Generally speaking, the class of immigrants who have been lately imported and employed in the coal regions are not such, in the opinion of the committee, as would make desirable inhabitants of the United States. They are of a very low order of intelligence. ... They live in miserable sheds like beasts; the food they eat is so meager, scant, unwholesome, and revolting that it would nauseate and disgust an American workman, and he would find it difficult to sustain life upon it. Their habits are vicious, their customs are disgusting, and the effect of their presence here upon our social condition is to be deplored.... They have been brought here in such numbers, and have been employed at such low wages, that it has resulted in their replacing the American citizen who formerly performed this class of labor, until now there are comparatively few Americans engaged in mining coal in Pennsylvania.6
As the quotation above implies, all nationalities of the anthracite miners have found over against them a powerful industry from which they have had to wrest a living. Witnesses before this Congressional committee declared that Hungarians, Poles, and Italians were coming into the Wilkes-Barre district at a rate of two thousand a year, and that they were rapidly displacing the English-speaking miner and his laborer. One reported that the railroad depot at Wilkes-Barre sometimes presented the appearance of Castle Garden, the immigrant entrepôt in New York City.
The people come there, and come with tags attached to them, around their necks, directing them where to go, and they cannot speak any English, and the people out there look at their tags and then take them or direct them to the point of destination. ... An American can not get employment in the coal regions if there is an Italian or a Hungarian who wants the place.Question : According to that the employers are willing to keep up that state of affairs?Answer : They deliberately do it.7
Challenged to produce evidence, the witness finally gave as his source Mr. J. H. Swoyer, a prominent coal operator.
It is upon his authority that it can be asserted that in 1887 the coal operators of the anthracite coal regions, after consultation, decided that in order to keep the labor of the coal fields in subjection it was necessary to do two things, and it was agreed also that those two things should be done. First, that twice as many coal openings as were necessary to supply the demand should be made and prepared for operation; and, second, to get a supply of cheap foreign labor large enough to overstock the region, so that when any trouble should arise there would be plenty of surplus labor on hand, and if a strike should occur at one point the supply of coal could be kept up at another point...Question : So that the coal operators practically have these men at their mercy?Answer : Undoubtedly...8
The point was made that, notwithstanding a drop in the wage rates of some fifty per cent as a result of mass immigration, the price of coal to the final consumer had not gone down.
Complaint was raised at this same Congressional hearing, half a century ago, that the mine operators in the Wyoming and Lackawanna Valleys had "robbed the miners, in dockage and powder profits, of about three million dollars a year." By "dockage" was indicated the reduction of the actual load on a mine-car credited to the miner. This reduction was made on the plea that some of its contents were unmarketable "culm'; but this culm, it was alleged, really was converted into pea-coal and sold at the mine at $1.75 a ton. The blasting powder referred to was provided to the miner at a price held to be more than double that which the operators had paid. A member of the Congressional committee asked if such a practice would be possible but for the labor surplus due to immigration; to this the witness replied: "Certainly not; the men would stand by their rights and would maintain them."9
This, of course, is ancient history, but it is symptomatic of the economic feudalism in the hard-coal industry. In the first flush of the anthracite boom many operators and coal owners felt with George Baer that "God had made the coal for them." Something of that attitude carried over even into the twentieth century. In the decade 1913-1922 the American population and the demands for fuel both increased, while the production of anthracite remained virtually stationary. Substitute fuels naturally became more common.
The controlling group of companies were not troubled by this growth in the consumption of substitute fuels. They experienced no difficulty in selling their entire output. Their profits were satisfactory, and they apparently had no desire to expand their operations. Furthermore, they did not consider it necessary to make any effort to build up consumer or dealer loyalty. Consumers had to buy anthracite; they could not get it anywhere else; they would therefore have to be satisfied with the type of product and the kind of service which the operators chose to give them.10
Nature's concentration of anthracite in a small geographic area has encouraged a similar concentration of control in the industry, as Governor Earle's Anthracite Coal Commission, quoted immediately above, indicates. The Federal Trade Commission discovered that control of the anthracite producing companies in 1916-1917 was in the hands of the railroads serving those districts where mines and breakers were situated. A few years later the Supreme Court of the United States ordered certain of these "coal roads" to divest themselves of their direction of the coal-producing companies.11
That the separation of control which took place on the legal plane did not result in any great change in actual practice is indicated by the report of the Coal Commission of 1938:
The principal difference between the situation now and that which existed prior to 1920 is that while in the past the railroad companies directly controlled the anthracite producing companies, at the present time the anthracite-carrying railroad companies and the anthracite-producing companies are both controlled by financial and other interests whose directors and principal officers sit on the boards of the anthracite producing and transporting companies, thereby maintaining the unified control which has existed for more than a century.12
Anthracite production is unevenly divided among three groups of producers. During the year 1936 seventy-five per cent of hard-coal production was accounted for by the "Big Ten" anthracite companies or their tenants. The bulk of the remainder was produced by the so-called "Independents," consisting of three sizeable companies and some one hundred and seventy-two smaller concerns. "Bootleggers" produced the balance. The Independents obtain nearly half of their anthracite from lands leased to them by the Big Ten. "Under such conditions," says the Commission's Report, "there cannot be free and independent competition. The situation is becoming increasingly serious as the limited anthracite deposits owned by the independent companies are being exhausted."13
The Independents are sometimes handicapped by higher costs of production than those of the Big Ten, and by the royalties which they must pay to the owners of the land they lease.14 The higher-cost Independents provide a certain protection to the prices charged by the ten larger corporations. The recent Commission alleges that the control of anthracite-producing and transporting companies by common financial interests "makes it immaterial to such financial interests whether the profits come from mining or from transporting anthracite." The Commission continues:
Under such a situation they can forego profits on the production of anthracite and recoup them in high freight rates, thereby forcing the independent companies which must pay the high freight rates to operate on a very close margin, or at a loss, and preventing them from pro- viding any real competition in the price at which anthra- cite is delivered to the customer.15
During the regime of Governor Arthur James efforts have been made to regulate the output of the hard-coal industry by an agreement between the ten large companies and the Independents. The success of such an agreement depends upon the operators' satisfaction with their respective quotas, and, of course, upon the degree of honesty displayed by all operators.
It would appear that these gentlemen's agreements do not contain their own enforcement sanctions. Some of the operators try to seize the market by overproduction or by price cutting. The rest then threaten renewed competition, and the conflict is on again in all its ferocity. That this seems likely to be the fate of the latest attempt at agreement can be seen from the following statement of President W. W. Inglis of the Glen Alden Coal Company, one of the ten big corporations:
As head of a company that is adhering to the allocation program ... it makes a man feel pretty well nettled when he reads that operators are reporting production from 98 per cent to 147 per cent over weekly tonnage production previous to the allocation program. The Glen Alden has always adhered to programs directed at stabilization of the industry and has led in battles against independents who slash prices to win markets and who flood markets very frequently. ... If violators of the tonnage program want a fight they will get it very shortly unless they change their ways. If one operator can brazenly chuck the tonnage allocation total for his mine or mines into the wastebasket, other companies have the same right. There must be something done in a hurry to keep operators in line or out comes our club and then we will see what another good fight can bring.16
The development of bootleg or illegal mining since 1930 offers a serious challenge alike to the Independents and to the "line" corporations.(17) Attempts have been made in the past decade to organize an effective Trade Association within the industry, with the aim of weaning the customer from substitute fuels, and for price and production regulation. The bootleg group, by its own practice from the outset, has suggested a possible means of release from high rail freight rates as far as the Independents are con- cerned—the auto truck. It remains to be seen how far the hard-coal market can be recaptured by such methods and by possible economies in production passed on to the ultimate consumer.18
The very nature of the anthracite miner’s occupation tends to produce a characteristic type, individualistic to a degree. In contrast to soft coal, anthracite is produced with a relative scarcity of underground machinery. The hard-coal miner, therefore, has until recently been left pretty largely to his own devices, despite the ultimate oversight of the foreman, fire boss, and superintendent. Courageous, if not reckless, before constant physical peril, the anthracite miner has proved himself ready to tell his superiors where to go if they should offer too much or too detailed advice.
This characteristic attitude the anthracite miner exhibits toward the officials of his union, as well as toward his superiors in the industry itself. John L. Lewis hardly ever comes into the area, but his subordinates have their troubles with their mining constituents. Minority unions find a rather ready ear among men who allege that the big union leaders and the mine owners work in collusion against the labor ranks.
The violence which occurred during the middle nineteen hundred thirties between the national organization, the United Mine Workers, and a local minority movement, known as the United Anthracite Miners of America, was in part an outcome of dissatisfaction with the leadership of the national organization. The United Mine Workers' union, having contracts with the mines, could count upon active support from the mine owners and the legal authorities of the region. The conflict between the rival unions was no less violent because the minority group recognized that it was fighting the owners, the law, and the national union.
Accustomed to the use of dynamite in their daily work, the young miners made frequent use of it in their campaign of terror against members of the rival union. Almost every night over a period of several weeks, front porches blew up, windows crashed, and even railroad bridges were dynamited. It is significant that the leader of the minority union, Thomas Maloney, a war veteran, died of injuries caused by a bomb sent through the mails, some months after the strike had been called off.
In the days before the governorship of Gifford Pinchot, strife between Pennsylvania miners of all nationalities and the notorious "Coal and Iron Police"(19) was frequent and often bloody. This experience left behind it a tradition of enmity toward all officers of the law, even members of the State Police. In the eyes of the average miner the law is as often an enemy as a protector. Some of this attitude of suspicion is a tradition imported from Ireland and Eastern Europe; much of it is simply a product of bitter past experience with the Coal and Iron Police.
There can be little wonder that in this conflict between the two rival coal unions in Wyoming Valley respected judges of Luzerne County granted injunctions against leaders and ranks of the minority union, and in return were met with refusal to abide by such rulings. Nor is it surprising that the prison sentences which followed such recalcitrant "contempt of court" did not reduce the sense of conflict between the group that dug the coal and the group that enforced the laws.20
The attitude of the general public, outside the ranks of the mine unions, was revealed rather significantly in the "Jennings Case," which drew down upon Wyoming Valley some criticism from outside jurists and journalists between 1935 and 1938.21
Emerson Jennings was a printer-reformer, of New England ancestry, who settled in Wilkes-Barre and was rash enough to meddle in the controversy between the minority mine union and the county legal authorities. Taking the side of the minority union, Jennings displayed a highly critical attitude toward the local judiciary. Some months later he was arrested; subsequently he was put on trial for his alleged share in a bomb outrage on the automobile of a leading local judge. A New York editor declared that it was "the popular belief in Wilkes-Barre that Jennings was framed".22
The bombing occurred on March 28, 1935. The trial was not held until
October, 1936. The jury found Jennings guilty, to the amazement of his
attorney, Arthur Garfield Hays. The State Superior Court, to which appeal
had been made, on January 27, 1938, ordered a new trial, announcing that the
evidence supported "the contention of the defendant Jennings that he was the
victim of a frame-up."23 On April 30, 1938, the
Commonwealth's case against him was nol
prossed. Still a year later "seven persons charged with perjury" by him
"were freed when transcripts in their cases were ignored by the April Grand
Jury in its final report.'24 These cumulative facts seem
to give weight to the
Nearly everyone in Wilkes-Barre who told me that he thought Jennings was innocent. refused to be quoted. Life has come to a pretty pass in a great Commonwealth when decent citizens are thus afraid to speak out. Back of the Jennings case lies a hint of the kind of un- witting fascist repression that an American community is capable of when political and industrial leaders com- bine to hold their own in an economy that has begun to slip.25
The long and dogged struggle of the more recent immigrants to achieve social status has shown itself in many interesting ways. The political field was the first to be invaded, and is now partly ruled by the descendants of last century's "foreigners. When political control is won, whether in school boards or borough and township government, extensive use of that victory is common for purposes of personal power or group enrichment. Wyoming Valley is not unaware of the "kick-back" from wages and salaries to those who have made appointments. Even teachers have been subjected to this type of pressure when they sought to obtain or to retain their positions.
Nevertheless, it would be most unjust to claim that this kind of pressure and graft, or the earlier pattern of violence, were the original patents of the newcomers. These patterns date from the time of the famous forty original settlers. William Brewster's
A survey of the local press indicates that in recent years constantly increasing space in the social columns and in the headlines has been given to the names and doings of the newer nationalities. In school graduation lists today the names are likely to be predominantly European in spelling and origin. In the 1940 census some three hundred and forty enumerators were appointed for the County of Luzerne. Of these no less than one hundred and fifty possessed names reminiscent of Southern and Eastern Europe. Even the social agencies and the Community Chest are slowly coming to include in their lists of board members representatives of nationalities not found on the Wyoming Monument. But it is still distinctly rare to find representatives of organized labor on such boards, even when the national barriers have been lowered.
Economic pressure and population pressure are together forcing a more rational and democratic policy. The budgets of once flourishing private schools are "in the red." The social agencies no longer find a sufficient number of big donors to bear the larger share of private social-work costs. The Community Chest is compelled to turn to the rank and file for greater support. The local newspapers, even after a recent merger, would have insufficient subscribers to draw their advertisers but for the many readers of Eastern European background, now in their second generation. The public schools discover the children of miners not only among their students, but in the ranks of their teaching staff and of their school boards.
The prospect of any effective solution of these social conflicts in the Wyoming Valley is an uncertain one. Continued depression would enhance the influence of those movements that breed group exclusiveness and intolerance. There have been efforts to censor the thought and the reading matter of youth in the area.27 There have been red-baiting campaigns by certain groups. A local "Citizens' Committee" is in existence. Certain of its members are said to lay claim to driving out of the area several liberal leaders, though its officers deny any such claims or intentions.
A careful appraisal of the Valley’s future by one civic expert led him to the conclusion that new industries would not be easily attracted to the Valley as hard coal ineluctably approached its exhaustion point. Many of the present industries are absentee-owned. Families are becoming more dependent upon women wage-earners in the textiles and in the tobacco industry. Male unemployment spreads with the introduction of more mining machinery and the diminution of national markets for anthracite.
There are, however, factors of improvement in the situation which should not be overlooked. Intermarriage between the national groups and even between the religious groups proceeds apace. An interesting sample of this process is seen in the number of marriages between Welsh Protestants and Polish Catholics in some of the mining townships. Further, in at least one instance, a settlement house in a mining district has won the understanding and support of the erstwhile hostile population. The Wyoming Valley Industrial Development Fund was founded in February, 1939, with the aim of attracting new industries to the Valley. The first report of the Fund, covering a period of fourteen months, claims the introduction of eight new concerns into the Valley, with employment for over 1,600 workers and a payroll of over a million dollars a year.
Three outstanding institutions in the Valley, two of considerable age, may also have something to say about the future of the present social conflicts. The long-famous Wyoming Seminary stands for scholarship and good citizenship without barriers of politics or nationality. The privately endowed Osterhout Free Public Library, which recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, is a beacon of liberal democracy and education to the youth and adults of the whole region. But the Osterhout finds itself in difficulties with a falling income from its endowment and a reluctance on the part of local tax authorities to come to its aid with adequate and justifiable financial support, proportional to the large population of the area.
The latest arrival on the scene, the Bucknell University Junior College, has drawn from virtually every nationality group in the region, from all religious faiths, and from many occupational and economic levels. Its student body comes from almost every borough and township in the Valley, from all political parties, from the various public and parochial high schools, the private schools, and the Seminary. In addition, the college night classes gather as their students teachers, social workers, nurses, labor leaders, police officers, and other citizens from all corners of the county, and they affect the community's educational and civic standards accordingly.
More than one city has been saved from decline by the presence in its midst of a great educational institution or a research foundation. A tithe, even a hundredth, of the capital sunk in the local mining industry would endow an invaluable research, educational, and vocational institution in the Valley. The youth of tomorrow, educated in such an institution, imbued with an ideal of greater regional unity, might seek to break down the obsolete and narrow political boundaries in the Valley. Research in such an institution might well turn its attention to the new field of "chemurgy" in relation to the wide agricultural area beyond the mountains that delimit the coal deposits. With the aid of annual crops converted into raw materials for new industries in the Valley itself, such a foundation might re-fashion the economic life of the community.
Recognized at last by its own citizens and by the nation as a metropolitan region, the third largest urban center of the whole Commonwealth, Wyoming Valley might well find itself possessed of new economic and spiritual resources, and emancipated from the unlimited domination of King Coal. With a civic and indus- trial policy of development characterized by enlightened wisdom, the too-evident contemporary patterns of social conflict might well fade from the picture.