John's Boy

Once there was a little man in a long black coat who roamed the hard-coal fields of Pennsylvania, doing mighty deeds for the United Mine Workers of America. He was John Mitchell, and quite a boy. At 28, he was president of the union; at 32 (in 1902), he led the strike which won an eight-hour day in the coal fields. Soft-coal miners voted him out of office in 1908, eventually put John Llewellyn Lewis in John Mitchell's place. But since John Mitchell died in 1919, he rather than John Lewis has been the sainted hero of Pennsylvania miners.

Annually on John Mitchell Day the miners of Pennsylvania do homage to his memory at his marble statue in Scranton. Last week on John Mitchell Day, every miner in the State took the day off, as usual. Pennsylvania's Republican Governor Arthur Horace ("Breaker Boy") James, who boasts that he used to be a miner himself, celebrated the day with an incredible political blunder. He let subordinates fire John Mitchell's 46-year-old son, Richard, a $2,100-a-year clerk in the Department of Property and Supplies. By nightfall, thousands of miners were petitioning for Richard Mitchell's re-employment and denouncing Governor James, who lamely pleaded that St. John's son had known for two months that he was to be replaced. But State Treasurer F. Clair Ross, one of the few Democratic holdovers from ex-Governor George Earle's labor-minded regime, smartly hired Richard Mitchell on the evening of John Mitchell Day, put him to work as an auditor at $1,800 a year.

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