In October 1902, in the midst of a months-long strike by the United Mine Workers Union, the coal operators’ representative, George Baer, flatly refused to meet with the UMW’s president, John Mitchell. Baer said that Mitchell was “only a common coal-miner, who worked with his hands for 15 years, and was now a labor agitator.”
In response to a plea for negotiation, Baer replied that “the rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for not by labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country.” One northern paper wrote in response that “the doctrine of the divine right of kings was bad enough, but not so intolerable as the doctrine of the divine right of plutocrats.”
