Harry Garfield and the Fuel Administration: cooperation between capital and labor

Would President James A. Garfield have sided with capital or with the laboring masses as clashes between them grew in the late nineteenth century? A park ranger at James A. Garfield National Historic Site, writing in the park's Garfield Observer in July 2014, notes that his diaries only allow speculation, and looks for clues in the career of his eldest son, Harry.

James A. Garfield. Image from the Library of Congress, via the National Park Service's page.

The father: wary of the mob, and of the owners

In 1873 Garfield noted a call on former North Carolina Republican Senator John Pool, who was organizing a national workingmen's association, and wrote that he thought it meant a new party based on the labor question. With slavery abolished, some Republicans said the party's purpose was over; Garfield believed economic issues were coming to the fore.

The destruction of the Union Depot in Pittsburgh, July 21-22, 1877, during the Railroad Strike of 1877, which began in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and spread to Baltimore, Pittsburgh and other cities. Image from Harper's Weekly, via the National Park Service's page.

When the July 1877 strike turned violent, Garfield saw both sides. He wrote that the railroad men had been unjust and oppressive to their employees, but that the contest left no choice between suppressing the rioters and the rule of the mob. In another entry he asked whether the strike was the legitimate offspring of the paternal theory of government: if people are raised to think a protective tariff exists to give laborers better wages, they may feel entitled to take good wages by force when times are hard. Like many of his contemporaries, who had lived through the Civil War, he saw social upheaval as something to avert, and it was widely believed that owners had the right to run their businesses without interference from workers.

The son: from Williams to Washington

Harry Garfield was less diligent as a young student than his father but, like his father and brothers, attended Williams College in Massachusetts, where he took part in student government, football and baseball, and later became its president. He became a successful Cleveland lawyer, practicing for several years with his brother James R. In 1903 Princeton's president, Woodrow Wilson, invited him to teach government and political science there. According to Professor Robert Cuff, Garfield was so impressed by Wilson that he left the Republican Party for the Democrats. When Wilson took the nation into the Great War, he asked Garfield to lead the Federal Fuel Administration, charged with a steady coal supply for military and civilian needs and with conserving oil.

Woodrow Wilson, who made Harry Garfield head of the Federal Fuel Administration. Image from the Library of Congress, via the National Park Service's page.

Cuff says the two shared a liberal academic culture and a belief in gradual, evolutionary change: improve rather than start from scratch. Garfield also held the Progressive ideal of "efficiency" and was influenced by Charles Steinmetz's America and the New Epoch, which argued that modern problems would be solved not by the federal government but by the efficiency and responsibility of corporate administration, and that the old principle of competition must give way to cooperation and combination.

The Fuel Administration

Garfield arrived in Washington in August 1917 and had to deal with both the coal mine owners and the United Mine Workers, intending to be just to both.

A poster of the United States Fuel Administration. Image from the National Park Service's page, which credits Wikipedia.

Shortly before the Fuel Administration was created, President Wilson had set a coal price lower than the industry asked. The owners were unhappy, and Garfield adjusted the price to suit them better. He also negotiated wage agreements with the miners' union that would keep the mines running, and invited representatives of owners and miners into the Fuel Administration. Cuff called the result something of a golden age in the coal industry's history.

There were controversies. Railroads used the availability of cars to set rival coal companies bidding against each other for the lowest transportation price. Garfield ordered periodic work stoppages to keep supply from outrunning demand, resisted a wage increase for miners in 1918, and ordered conservation measures that angered parts of the public. The Coal Trade Journal nonetheless praised his steadfastness of purpose as reminiscent of his father's resolute spirit.

Like father, like son

The ranger concludes that Garfield aimed at cooperative administration among government, industry and labor that would serve society in peace as in war, putting the community's interest above any interest group's. James Garfield, in a time of peace, saw the owners' injustices but thought neither strikes nor the violence around them were a solution. In 1917-1918 Harry Garfield tried to satisfy capital, labor and the public through cooperation, with the goal of keeping social order.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Harry Garfield and the Spirit of Cooperation" (https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/harry-garfield-and-the-spirit-of-cooperation.htm), written by Alan Gephardt, park ranger, James A. Garfield National Historic Site, for the Garfield Observer, July 2014. The diary and journal passages are paraphrased, and the Cuff and Steinmetz references are as the essay gives them.
• National Park Service's page; rewritten in hubnx's own words.