Baer, president of the Anthracite Coal Trust in the 1900s, rates only a line or two in most history books. But he is worth remembering. It is because of employers like Baer that unions “mourn the dead, fight for the living!” on Workers Memorial Day.

In Baer’s time, unions were few. Workplace safety laws were inadequate and mostly ignored by employers. As a result, many men, women and children labored long hours at low pay in often deadly jobs. Railroads, mines and factories were slaughterhouses. Thousands of workers were killed, maimed or made seriously ill every year.

Few occupations were more dangerous than mining. When miners joined the United Mine Workers of America, hoping the union would make their jobs better and safer, Baer declared, “The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for -- not by the 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.”

“Amens” rose from corporate boardrooms and from pulpits and pews in big churches where the wealthy worshipped. Well-paid preachers sermonized that rich people were rich because they were godly.

John D. Rockefeller made millions of dollars in the oil business and mining. His workers toiled at death’s elbow. In 1910, 323 miners were killed in Rockefeller’s Colorado coal shafts. A Congressional committee concluded that “half of the accidents were due to the refusal of the coal companies to institute reforms pointed out by the inspectors months prior to the disasters.”

Rockefeller’s mines were full of “breaker boys” who picked out rock from the coal as it rushed past on conveyor belts. “The coal is hard, and accidents to the hands, such as cut, broken, or crushed fingers are common among the boys,” one witness observed. “Sometimes there is a worse accident: a terrified shriek is heard, and a boy is mangled and torn in the machine, or disappears in the chute.”

Children commonly worked 10-hour shifts in the mines, six days a week. They were paid about 60 cents a day. Child labor was widespread in American industry. Adults were so poorly paid that boys and girls as young as 10 had to go to work to help their parents. Industrialists praised child labor as a godsend. They claimed work taught children responsibility and kept them off the streets and out of trouble. Also, mine and factory owners saw a practical side to child labor. Children were paid less than grownups.

Rockefeller was proud of how he ran his businesses. He called himself a Christian. He said God gave him his money. Rockefeller hated Darwin’s theory of evolution. But he and other millionaires loved Social Darwinism, a philosophy which claimed that business worked like nature. It was “survival of the fittest” in both, Social Darwinists said.

They also argued that unions and worker safety and health laws interfered with the “natural operation” of the “free market.” One Social Darwinist said such laws were a waste because they only protected “those of the lowest development.”

With Social Darwinism, millionaires didn’t have to worry about workers losing a leg, an arm, an eye or their lives on the job. Social Darwinists said workers were inferior beings, otherwise they would be millionaires. Besides, worker safety and health laws would cost the millionaire industrialists a few bucks. Greed was their gospel.

Social Darwinist industrialists had friends in high places. Governors glady sent National Guard troops to smash strikes. In the 19th century, two presidents broke big strikes with federal troops. One was a Republican, the other a Democrat. Union-busting was bipartisan in those days. At the same time, industrialists bought off many state and national lawmakers of both parties. They kept worker safety and health laws off the books.

While employers and their flunky politicians fought organized labor and government regulations, most of the media played cheerleader for American business and industry. Newspapers smeared unions as “un-American.” Thus, the George F. Baers, helped by government and a sympathetic press, ensured a strong union movement would be a long time coming, OSHA even longer.

Unions recognize April 28 as Workers Memorial Day because OSHA was born on that date in 1970. OSHA did much to improve worker safety and health. But two years ago, the AFL-CIO released a study which showed that safety and health protection for workers had reached a plateau. For some workers, it was declining.

The study is more evidence that Social Darwinism is back. Republican George W. Bush is the most anti-union president since Herbert Hoover, also a Republican. Republican union-haters run both Houses of Congress, the Labor Department and OSHA.

Today’s GOP would make Abe Lincoln spin in his grave. Conservative, mostly Southern, Democrats would make Franklin D. Roosevelt do likewise. The Zell Miller Democrats are singing in the GOP’s anti-labor chorus. They want the Democrats to be more “business-friendly” and loosen strong ties to organized labor that date to FDR. Workers Memorial Day is a good time to remind the Republican wing of the Democratic party that since the New Deal the party has had deep union roots and a reformist liberal -- there, I said it, liberal -- heritage. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first genuinely pro-union president in U.S. history and proud of it.