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What had caused the appointment of this labor committee in the first place was a coal strike in Pennsylvania. It was a hit or miss, accidental kind of strike. Nobody could make head nor tail out of it. There, of course, you had the United Mine Workers having a basic organization that was good, out having lost quantities of members during the depression. It was probably an organizing strike actually, but they said it was a strike for a code. They were supposedly on strike in order to have a coal code and they were in full revolt against what we called the coal barons because they hadn't yet developed a code. That was a genuine complaint to a certain degree.

Coal, of course, was a terribly depressed industry. The men in the Pennsylvania mining areas were persons who had been accustomed to having a union. They were not unorganized workers as you found in some other parts of the country, but they had been out of work for a long, long time. The mines hadn't been operating and they were terribly down and terribly depressed - near starvation level. It was one of the saddest