In 1903, United Mine Workers President John Mitchell declared revealingly, "The trade union movement in this country can make progress only by identifying itself with the state." Mitchell provided his own best evidence when he identified the labor movement with himself... used his position to acquire businesses and to invest in real estate. Busily organizing a far-flung bureaucracy, he quickly made himself an enemy of the union's radicals and a social friend of coal operators. He had adopted, an otherwise sympathetic biographer says, the "culture and attitudes of the employing class." He naturally became a key labor representative to the new National Civic Federation, which sought to promote labor peace (on the terms of the employers, critics claimed) and to make class consciousness and class struggle obsolete.