Lead-Shod Coal

There is no use trying to get sympathy for your business worries from a soft coal man. Trouble is all he has had for the past twelve years. "To bring about the economic coordination of the coal industry," 1,000 men of science (like President Thomas Stockham Baker of Carnegie Institute of Technology) and men of industry (like Utilitarian Samuel Insull and Steelman James A. Farrell) met at Pittsburgh last week. Assembled at Carnegie Tech, the meeting was called the Third International Conference on Bituminous Coal.

Trouble, Chief trouble of the coal business is simply that there is too much coal. In the U. S., which is seamed with 45% of the world's reserve, 31 States mine coal, probably five more are underlaid with it. This brings about inevitable complications. Coal operators cut each others' throats, often selling their product below the margin of a safe return on their investment. The real pain of the trouble is transmitted to the miners, who strike, riot, threaten, starve in the throes of wretched living conditions and inadequate wages. Since 1919 this has been the condition, steadily growing graver, in an industry which is capitalized at two and one-half billion dollars, whose product was valued at 1.3 billions in 1929 and whose employes during the same year numbered 654,000.

Diagnosis, In an address called "The Importance of Coal to Civilization."

Banker Myron C. Taylor of U. S. Steel, wearing a stand-up collar which accentuated his dignity, diagnosed the plight of the industry with flocks of facts and figures. The U. S. coal business had appreciably increased its volume of output in the past 50 years (1878-1928), he found, but not by the whopping percentages of other fuels:

Gain since 1878

Population 140%

Coal production 736%

Hydroelectricity 1,018%

Natural gas production. 2.033% Oil production 3.346%

Here were some major factors that were whittling away the profit margin from the coal business:

1) Oil-burning vessels had vitally diminished the bunkerage business.

2) Although it takes 15,000 to 25,000 cu. ft. of natural gas to do the work of one ton of coal, according to George I. Rhodes, gas engineer of the engineering firm of Ford, Bacon & Davis, gas has already supplanted 10% of the 475,000,000 tons of bituminous coal annually mined.

3) Fuel economies. Railroads alone (biggest coal consumers) have reduced their aggregate requirements during the past ten years by 225,000,000 tons, a saving of $630,000,000.

Plans-- In spite of its alarming condition, the ponderers at Pittsburgh were aware that the coal industry accounts for 58% of all U.S. energy, is still the prime source of power & heat. What was to be done, asked President Baker-who presided at the conference and whose coal-founded Institute constantly probes Coal's ills-about an industry which was "creeping along with leaden shoes on its feet?"

A committee of five was delegated to sort out the prescriptions which had previously been handed in. They returned with six which could be boiled down to four:

1) Get the Governors of the big bituminous coal States east of the Mississippi River (Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Alabama, Tennessee) to appoint a "stabilizing"' commission.

2) Get the coal States' Governors to appoint a commission that would get the operators together to devise their own stabilization plans.

3) Put the matter up to the Federal and State governments, with a "coal tsar" appointed by the President.

4) Let the Governors have the coal operators determine quotas (as did the Governors of Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas for their oilmen) and discontinue selling below cost, enforcing decisions "by civil and military means." Declare coal a public utility.

The conference voted to send all six proposals to the Coal State executives, let them take their pick.

Plan No. 4 had a familiar ring. Sick industries, like oil, shipping and agriculture, eventually seek some sort of Government regulation. Hale industries fight it. Declaring coal a public utility so that the

Government could shut down small mines and steer the larger ones around the Sherman Law into a price-fixing amalgamation, was a scheme laid before Secretary of Commerce Lament last summer (TIME, Aug. 17).

Although the Third International Conference on Coal could only talk, not act, the meeting brought once more to public attention the Sickest Industry, about which something eventually Must Be Done. After five days the meeting disbanded, besought President Baker to continue his efforts in behalf of lead-shod Coal.

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