JOHN MITCHELL By Francis Calvin Tildbn IN the fall of 1902| in the midst of the great anthracite coal strike, one of the historic labor struggles of modem times, Lincoln Steffens wrote in McClure's Magazine as follows of a, then, Httle known labor leader :
- When labor knew only its emotions, when the working
men only felt that something — they knew not what — was wrong, the expression of that feeling carried the natural re- ward of leadership. Eloquence, in competition with elo- quence, aroused passions that begot violence. The orators could not control the forces they set in motion. . . Thus it came about that the laboring men turned from the orators to men who talked little and worked hard; to men who com- manded them and knew how to compromise with their em- ployers. ' * * Of these new labor leaders, working through man's intel- ligence rather than through his passions, John Mitchell, at that time president of the United Mine Workers of America, was most typical. He remains today not only one of the most skillful and trusted of labor leaders, but one of the foremost of a new type of men, a type as yet little recognized and less understood. This is the type of man who, in the midst of present-day ideas of what constitutes success, of what brings pleasure, of what is worth striving for, deliberately gives up personal ambition and a sure road to private wealth and power for the doubtful leadership of a body of men who un- derstand neither themselves nor him. With ability which, if used for personal ends, could scarcely have failed to bring those things for which most men struggle, he chose to use this unusual ability for the many rather than for himself alone. It seemed better to him that many thousand might eat more and better bread each day than that he should have for him- 1 McClure's 19:365 IT.
