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When Mr. Moses reached Washington he would not even put his legs under the same table with United Miner Lewis. A bulky, rugged individual, Operator Moses began life as a $1.75-per-day mule skinner in an Illinois mine, joined the union, worked up out of the pit to head U. S. Steel's principal coal holdings and gave up his union card. He stalked into NRA headquarters, was kept waiting five minutes, indignantly stalked out again. From his hotel he wrote General Johnson a scorching letter denouncing the Government's attempt to meddle in his coal business. The General angrily tore it into bits, blackened the air with oaths. But Operator Moses was not a free agent in the negotiations, for his real boss was William Archibald Irvin (pronounced Irwin), president of U. S. Steel Corp. Sitting in his Manhattan office at No. 71 Broadway, President Irvin, another up-from-the-ranks employer, dictated Frick Coke's labor policy. Most of last week he conducted a long-distance duel with General Johnson over the telephone.
Principal mediators with General Johnson were Standard Oil's Walter Teagle and General Electric's Gerard Swope. Mr. Teagle called up Andrew William Mellon, persuaded that old gentleman to bring his Pittsburgh Coal Co. into line. When Charles P. O'Neill, head of the local operators' association, acidly remarked that the United Mine Workers were, after all, responsible for the strike, Miner Lewis hotly retorted: "Oh yeah? You organized company unions and then they turned on you." At one point the outlook was so dark General Johnson was moved to exclaim: "I stuck my nose into something that was none of my business and I got what was coming to me."
But General Johnson has a successful way of making other people's business his. An armistice was finally drawn up and signed by operators and union leaders. But in their versions Messrs. Irvin & Moses had succeeded in knocking out all reference to United Mine Workers. Its terms: 1) all strikers were to return to work without prejudice; 2) they were to have their own checker at the tipple scales (a union victory); 3) their demands were to be arbitrated by a board composed of Mr. Swope, Louis Kirstein (NRA Industrial Advisory Board member and manager of Boston's Filene's department store) and President George L. Berry of the Printing Pressmen's Union. Hearings on a code for the coal industry were set for Aug. 9 when the union v. non-union issue would be fought out all over again.
After General Johnson's arrival in Hyde Park to have the truce approved, President Roosevelt declared: "A great coal strike threatened the revival of manufacturing. . . . Never before has a strike of such threatened proportions been settled so quickly and so generously."