Franklin D. Roosevelt

Statement on the Aversion of a Threatened Coal Strike.

August 04, 1933

A great coal strike threatened the entire bituminous field and because of scant storage at factories also threatened the revival of manufacture on which so much depends.

On the basis of a simple suggestion for settlement, made by General Johnson, both management and labor have declared an absolute truce on dissension at the mines to await the regulation of the whole matter at the coming hearings on the coal codes.

In the meantime all disagreements are to be settled by a board of my selection to which both sides agree—Gerard Swope, Louis Kirstein and George L. Berry. Never in our country has a strike of such threatened proportions been settled so quickly and so generously.

The public-spirited men on both sides of the agreement are to be congratulated in thus averting threatened disaster, but I cannot let the occasion pass without referring to the tireless and constructive labors of the intermediaries, Governor Pinchot, Gerard Swope, Edward McGrady and Walter Teagle, as well as to the operators and to John Lewis and other representatives of the miners.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Statement on the Aversion of a Threatened Coal Strike. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/208815

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