Corporate capitalism on trial: The hearings of the anthracite coal strike commission, 1902–1903

The normative understanding that corporate capitalism in the US “grew” naturally from the small enterprises of the nineteenth century erases decades of impassioned social protest against it. This paper looks at a major episode of this protest, a series of public hearings convened by the state when a strike of anthracite coal miners provoked public demands for nationalization of the mines and railroads that comprised “the coal trust.” At these hearings the miners and their allies argued the “traditional” US national ideology in which both great wealth and a propertyless proletariat were believed to endanger the stability and prosperity of the republic. The trust, defending its disruption of the customary arrangements of mine work, countered with social Darwinism. I argue that the trusts, the incipient form of US Corporate capitalism, wrought a sudden and unwelcome revolution in social relations of production that ultimately transfigured US national ideology.

Key words:

• Corporate capitalism
• national ideology
• republicanism
• social darwinism
• the United States