Edward J. Berwind

Edward Julius Berwind was, by the testimony of his own obituaries, "said to have been the country's largest individual owner of bituminous mines", and for a generation around 1900 he was very likely the largest in the world ^[1][3]. He did not invent the coal trade or the company town; what he did was assemble, through ruthless consolidation and a close working partnership with J. P. Morgan, a vertically lashed empire that dug the coal in Pennsylvania, carried it on its own colliers, and sold it to the customers who could not run without it: the United States Navy, foreign navies, the Pennsylvania Railroad, the great transatlantic steamship lines, and the New York subway he himself helped finance ^[2][3][4].

The firm was founded in January 1886 in Philadelphia by Edward, his older brother Charles Frederick Berwind, and Judge Allison White, and it took the prosaic name Berwind-White Coal Mining Company ^[1][3]. Charles, the elder businessman, was president until his death in 1890; thereafter Edward ran the company for forty years, until 1930 ^[1][2]. He had come to it by an unusual road. Appointed to the U.S. Naval Academy in 1865 by Abraham Lincoln and commissioned in 1869, he served as a naval aide in the Grant White House before retiring from the service in 1875, and the connections and the customer he acquired in uniform, the Navy that burned smokeless steam coal, would make his fortune ^[1][3].

Berwind's method was integration and control. He opened his first mine at Houtzdale, then drove into the rich Somerset County field, where in 1897 the company laid out a brand-new town and, in a piece of corporate vanity, named it Windber, the syllables of "Berwind" reversed ^[5][6]. Coached by Morgan, he bought, merged, and chaired: president of six coal companies, director of dozens of banks, railways and steamship lines, chairman of the board of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, and a founding figure in the International Mercantile Marine, the Morgan shipping trust that owned the White Star Line ^[2][3][14]. He was also a director and the largest individual stockholder of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, which ran New York's first subway, and which bought its coal from Berwind-White, an act of self-dealing that critics attacked for years ^[3][7].

The coal made him fabulously rich and, in the coalfields, fabulously hated. Berwind refused on principle to recognize a union or bargain with his men; Harvard Business School's own profile records that his mines were "the last bastions of the open shop in the coal fields" ^[2]. That intransigence produced two of the ugliest episodes in Pennsylvania labor history, the kind of company-town violence that recurs throughout the history of American bituminous coal ^[13]. In the 1906 strike at Windber, company guards and state police broke the walkout; on Easter Monday, April 16, hired detectives opened fire on a crowd, killing three immigrant miners and a ten-year-old boy ^[8]. In 1922–23, after wage cuts of 32 to 54 percent, some 25,000 Somerset County miners struck for seventeen months; Berwind-White answered by evicting more than two thousand families from company houses, who passed the winter in tents, barns, and hen houses while armed Coal and Iron Police patrolled the patch towns ^[9][8].

While his miners froze, Berwind built. In 1901 he completed The Elms, a $1.4-million Newport "cottage" modeled by Horace Trumbauer on an eighteenth-century French château, where he reportedly spent $300,000 a season entertaining and where, in an irony almost too neat to be true, the coal that heated the house was delivered through a hidden underground tunnel and burned in concealed boilers, so that no soot, no wagon, and no laboring servant would ever mar the gilded illusion ^[10][11]. He died in New York on August 18, 1936, at eighty-eight, leaving an estate valued at more than $34 million ^[1][3].

Edward Julius Berwind was born on June 17, 1848, in Philadelphia, the third of six children of John and Augusta (Guldenfennig) Berwind, German-speaking immigrants of modest, middle-class means ^[1][3]. He was emphatically "new money," and the family's first foothold in coal came not through him but through his elder brother Charles Frederick, who started as an office boy in a Philadelphia coal counting-house in 1861 and rose to be a vice-president of the Powelton Coal and Iron Company before he was of age ^[12][3]. The pattern of the Berwinds, disciplined, upwardly clawing, comfortable with the machinery of railroads and credit, was set before Edward came of business age.

Edward's own apprenticeship was in the Navy. Appointed to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis in July 1865 by President Lincoln, he graduated in 1869, was promoted to ensign and then master, and served as a naval aide in Washington during the Grant administration before a service-related disability ended his career and he retired in 1875 ^[1][3]. The decade in uniform was not a detour. It taught him the strategic importance of coal, the fuel that moved the entire fleet, and it gave him entrée to the officers and contracts of a Navy converting to steam. When he turned to business, his decisive early advantage was an inside understanding of, and access to, the government's hunger for high-grade smokeless steam coal ^[3].

In 1886 Berwind married Sarah Vesta Herminie Torrey in Leghorn (Livorno), Italy, where her American father served as a consular agent ^[1]. The couple had no children, and after Sarah's death in 1922 his unmarried sister Julia became the formidable hostess of his houses ^[1][10]. That same year, 1886, Edward joined Charles and Judge Allison White to incorporate the Berwind-White Coal Mining Company, the vehicle that would carry the boy from immigrant Philadelphia into the front rank of America's industrial aristocracy ^[1][3].

Berwind's hard legacy is written on the map. Towns still carry his name, Windber, Pennsylvania; Berwind, West Virginia; Berwind, Colorado, and the privately held Berwind Corporation his family founded survives to this day, managing mineral rights, real estate, and investments long after the mines closed ^[5][3]. The Elms, sold to the Preservation Society of Newport County in 1962 and made a National Historic Landmark in 1996, is now a museum whose immensely popular "servant life" tour turns his vanished downstairs army of servants, and that hidden coal tunnel, into the main attraction, an unintended monument to the labor he tried to keep out of sight ^[10][11].

His softer legacy is contested and, increasingly, critical. To business historians he is a case study in vertical integration and Morgan-era consolidation; to labor historians, above all Mildred Allen Beik, whose The Miners of Windber draws on immigrant newspapers, church records, and oral histories, he is the autocrat whose open-shop regime the new immigrants of Somerset County finally broke in the New Deal era ^[9][8]. The two readings are not really in conflict. Edward Berwind built one of the most efficient and profitable extractive enterprises in America by controlling everything he could, the coal, the carriers, the customers, and the men, and the same monomaniacal control that made the fortune is what makes him, a century on, a byword for the costs of the Gilded Age model he so completely embodied ^[2][9].