In his world there was neither absolute good nor absolute evil—only shifting standards of positive and negative behavior, determined by the majority and subject to constant change. Morality was not defined by God; it was the code a given generation of men wanted to live by. Truth was “what I can’t help believing.” Yesterday’s absolutes must give way to “the felt necessities of the time.”
Theodore Roosevelt, too, “felt” things, if more viscerally. After returning to Oyster Bay on the twenty-fifth, he received Holmes (who had stayed over at Sagamore Hill) and saw, or thought he saw, a healthy bias against “big railroad men and other members of large corporations.” Here was a man who evidently believed—always had believed—that the executive and legislative branches of government should have precedence over the judiciary in controlling natural democratic developments. Roosevelt agreed with Lodge that Holmes, well-bred, learned, and forceful, was “our kind right through.”
HOLMES RETURNED TO Boston unsure of his fate, but a letter appointing him to the Supreme Court arrived within days. He accepted it neither humbly nor vainly, but as an earned consequence of forty years of hard work. Although he agreed to keep quiet, pending the official announcement, he could not resist teasing his wife about moving to Washington in December. “We shall have to dine with the President. In tails, Fanny, and white satin.”
AS AUGUST APPROACHED, sardonic new verses attached themselves to America’s reigning hit, sounding a note of folk concern clearly audible to the President, despite his isolation on Sagamore Hill.
In the good old Summertime,
In the good old Summertime!
The way they’ve raised the price of coal
I don’t like it at all for mine …
Grotesque as it was to think of domestic heat when every noon required another trip to the icehouse (crickets crouching in damp nooks; foot-square chunks of frozen pond packed in eelgrass), Roosevelt was aware that a national crisis was building in the coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania. One hundred and forty-seven thousand anthracite miners had quit work early in the spring, vowing not to return to their jobs in the fall unless management agreed to a substantial increase in wages, and recognized United Mine Workers as their legitimate bargaining representative. The mine operators refused to consider either demand. Now, with eighteen thousand bituminous miners striking in sympathy, and fifty thousand coal-road workers laid off for lack of traffic, the total number of idle men approached a quarter of a million.
Ordinary Americans were only just beginning to realize the superlative dimensions of the crisis. Here was the nation’s biggest union challenging its most powerful industrial combination—a cartel of anthracite railroad operators and absentee “barons” in total control of an exclusive resource. Already it amounted to the greatest labor stoppage in history. A visiting British economist predicted that if the current standoff lasted until cold weather came, there would be “such social consequences as the world has never seen.”
Roosevelt concluded unhappily that he should not intervene in what was essentially a private dispute between labor and management. Only if the public interest was threatened could he assume emergency powers. So far, the strike had been oddly peaceful. Then at the end of July, just as he was about to announce Judge Holmes’s appointment, violence erupted in the anthracite country.
CHAPTER 9
No Power or Duty
MR. HENNESSY What d’ye think iv th’ man down in Pinnsylvania who says th’
Lord an’ him is partners in a coal mine?
MR. DOOLEY Has he divided th’ profits?
FOR ELEVEN WEEKS, the sheriff of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, had patrolled the environs of Shenandoah in anticipation of violence. He and his fellow officers sniffed the carbonic gases leaking from untended mines, and avoided the perpetual flames wavering along dark slopes of culm. Valley after anthracite-packed valley seemed to be smoldering with discontent.
What made Sheriff Bedall nervous was the inscrutability of the striking miners. Most were Slavic, and few spoke English, jabbering away instead in incomprehensible dialects and poring over newspapers apparently printed backward. For “foreigners,” they were clean-living, almost austere. Tens of thousands had sworn off liquor to solemnize the strike; saloons stood empty from Ashland to Tamaqua. In the strangely clear air, women and girls hoed vegetables—preserving extra supplies for the months to come—while men and boys played baseball. Congregations flocking to Mass had the tranquil expressions of pilgrims sure of deliverance.
Only when a young, priestlike figure in black passed their way did the Slavs betray their suppressed passions. They poured from their shacks waving icons of his face, and crowded the wheels of his carriage like pilgrims around a catafalque. With gap-toothed grins and roars they chanted, “Johnny! Father! Johnny da Mitch!”
John Mitchell, the thirty-two-year-old president of United Mine Workers, encouraged this evangelical treatment by wearing his white collar very high, and buttoning his long black coat to the neck. At every stop on his journey he allowed breaker boys to sit at his feet while he preached the gospel of labor organization. A former coal miner himself, he knew that the credulous masses that looked to him for deliverance needed faith to sustain them. Faith, and food: these “anthracite people” would be starving already, had he not persuaded their brethren in the bituminous fields to go back to work and pay extra dues to support them.
Swarthy, silent, introspective, and worn, Mitchell calculated the coefficients of patience and time. The strike was now thirteen weeks old, and Mitchell had risked as many concessions as he dared. He had temporarily held pump men, engineers, and firemen to their jobs, so that mines would not flood or explode; he had offered to arbitrate; he had even hinted to Carroll D. Wright, Roosevelt’s Commissioner of Labor, that he would not push union recognition if management agreed to a reduction in the contract workday from ten to eight hours, an equitable system of assessing each miner’s output, and an overall wage increase of 10 percent.
Mitchell’s concessions had been taken as weakness by the financiers who, through mutual ownership of mines and coal-bearing railroads, operated the greatest industrial monopoly in the United States. Their spokesman, George F. Baer of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, declined private communications with Mitchell and addressed him, tauntingly, through the press. “Anthracite mining,” he said, “is a business and not a religious, sentimental, or academic proposition.”
When the miners responded by calling out their remaining brethren in the pump rooms and firehouses, Baer became truculent. They could stay out “six months, or six years,” he blustered. “Cripple industry, stagnate business or tie up the commerce of the world, and we will not surrender.”
So the first seepages began underground, and the culm fires flickered freely. Mitchell, accepting voluntary relief contributions from other labor organizations, gave notice that the conciliatory phase of his strike was over.
Roaming the anthracite valleys, he discounted rumors of nonunion labor being hired out of state. Both he and Mark Hanna (worriedly monitoring the situation from Cleveland) agreed that if the operators did try to break the strike, the result would be such violence as to obliterate all memories of previous bloodshed in mining disputes.
George Baer assumed a pose of haughty indifference. “The coal presidents are going to settle this strike, and they will settle it in their own way,” he announced on 29 July.
SHENANDOAH WAS QUIET most of the day following his remarks. Blackened willows bent over the stream oozing between colliery and town; gray-black breakers loomed against the sky, silent and smokeless. Spires and domes of Polish and Greek churches caught the afternoon sun. For all its influx of new immigrants, Shenandoah remained a deeply traditional coal town, haunted by memories of the “Molly Maguire” labor terrorists of a generation before. Here, in 1862, America’s first coal strike had occurred.
Centre Street was dominated by the Philadelphia & Reading station. This depot represented just one
node in the ivylike spread of George Baer’s railroad through Schuylkill County. Its steel tendrils linked mineheads and ironworks and slag heaps. Its runner roots carved so deeply into coal seams that the landscape sagged. Every year, it transported some ten million tons of black satiny crystals. Eight other “coal roads” contributed to the anthracite country’s annual production of fifty-five million tons, which heated virtually every house, school, and hospital in the northeastern United States.
Shortly before 6:00 P.M., Sheriff Bedall’s deputy was seen walking out of Shenandoah in the direction of the colliery. He was accompanied by two strangers, one of whom carried a suspicious-looking bundle. A group of picketing strikers confiscated it, and found it to contain miner’s clothing. Screaming “son of a bitch scab!” the strikers beat both strangers unconscious. The deputy took refuge in the Reading depot. Soon five thousand maddened Slavs were besieging him. A bystander tried to go to his aid, and was clubbed to death. Borough policemen managed to bundle the deputy into a locomotive behind the depot. The crowd found out and jammed the rails, whereupon the policemen panicked and began to fire indiscriminately. Waves of Slavs fell wounded. Those with guns of their own fired back. More than one thousand bullets were exchanged before the locomotive churned away. By sunset, Centre Street was in the hands of the mob, and the sheriff sent a desperate telegram to Governor William Stone: BLOODSHED RAN RIOT IN THIS COUNTRY PROPERTY DESTROYED CITIZENS KILLED AND INJURED SITUATION BEYOND MY CONTROL TROOPS SHOULD BE SENT IMMEDIATELY.
THE FIRST DISPATCHES to reach Oyster Bay the next morning were apocalyptic, with stories of policemen being shot through the head and strikers sliced in half by the locomotive. Subsequent accounts reduced the death toll to one, and the list of injured to sixty. Shenandoah was reported to be peacefully under civil control. The guns and bayonets of Pennsylvania’s National Guard glinted on the hills around town, but Governor Stone made no immediate attempt to invade the valley. He said that federal assistance was neither necessary nor desirable.
This freed Roosevelt to continue his own vacation, although he confessed to feeling increasingly “uneasy.” The Shenandoah riot had made front pages across the country, and editorial comment indicated that sympathy for the miners was beginning to erode. The question was, Were John Mitchell and his men determined enough to bring on a social catastrophe in the fall? And not incidentally, what damage might George Baer and his top-hatted cohorts do to Republican prospects in the congressional elections?
Ten thousand bared heads, under beating heat at Scranton on 1 August, indicated that the miners would endure any discomfort in support of their revered leader. “The one among you who violates the law is the worst enemy you have,” Mitchell lectured them. “I want to impress on you the importance of winning this strike,” he went on, shouting and sweating. “If you win … there will be no more strikes.”
Few among the audience realized that Mitchell was a profound conservative who privately thought most Slavs were “a drove of cattle” and detested the action he was required to lead. His nature shrank from confrontation. He saw himself as a businessman specializing in the business of labor; he believed in negotiated “adjustments” based on sound economic principles. Just as George Baer was in obvious terror that the strike would bankrupt an aging industry, so did Mitchell fear that the union he had built up might disintegrate from attrition. Every day now saw a few hundred more Slavs sell up and head back to Europe.
“If you lose the strike,” he warned, “you lose your organization.”
For the next two weeks, calm prevailed in the anthracite valleys. To D. L. Mulford, a visitor from Philadelphia, the calm signified not fear but a rocklike resolve. He sensed an equal hardening in the attitude of management, and saw the two sides as millstones grinding helpless consumers between them.
Roosevelt began to toy with similar images for a series of speeches he had to write on problems of capital and labor. On 22 August, he was due to begin a six-hundred-mile circuit of New England, the first of three tours keyed to the fall congressional campaign. Winter coal, or lack of it, was sure to be on the minds of his northern audiences. Yet he hesitated to make direct reference to the strike.
From what he heard, Americans were still concerned more about combinations in general than about the anthracite combination in particular. “I don’t know whether you understand what a feeling there is on the trust question,” wrote a friend, puzzled by the President’s failure to prosecute more holding companies. (International Harvester had just been capitalized at $120 million, under the same New Jersey law that spawned Northern Securities.)
The feeling went both ways, as Attorney General Knox discovered on 8 August, when he stopped at Atlantic City en route to Oyster Bay. That evening in the Garden Café, Knox entertained a small mixed party. The restaurant’s lights were dim, so he was not recognized by three Pennsylvanian trust lords who lurched in for a bottle of wine—evidently not their first of the evening. Millionaires all, they were Charles T. Schoen, of the Pittsburgh Pressed Steel Car Company; Theodore Cramp, of Cramp & Sons, shipbuilders; and Arthur H. Stephenson, of Stephenson Yarns. A boozy male conversation ensued. Schoen’s voice was particularly loud. (Some years before, Knox’s law firm had been involved in a suit to oust Schoen from his job.) After a few minutes, the headwaiter brought him a message: “Attorney-General Knox objects to your noise and vulgar language.”
“The hell he does,” said Schoen, enraged. “I’d like to know what right he has to interfere with us,” the drunken executive blustered, and began a tirade against government antitrust policy. Knox stood up, small and bristling in his dinner suit. He said crisply that he would not tolerate any more “objectionable remarks.” Cramp and Stephenson at once offered some of their own. Amid jeers and imprecations, Knox escorted his party out.
As he lightly put it to reporters afterward, “I had such a pressing invitation to go back that I couldn’t resist.” But what ensued had not been funny. According to eyewitnesses, the Attorney General had re-entered the restaurant alone and shaken his finger in Schoen’s face. “You are a blackguard, sir!”
Schoen, too sluggish to rise, had roared back, “You are a cur!” Cramp and Stephenson had jumped up, fists flying, but waiters and bystanders pulled them off, and Knox was escorted out, shaken, bruised, and minus several waistcoat buttons.
He tried to make light of the incident at Sagamore Hill, joking that Schoen probably felt worse than he did. But the incident emphasized the passions with which Roosevelt had to contend. A cartoon on the front page of the Philadelphia North American showed the President standing thoughtfully beside the battered, bandaged form of his Attorney General, while three retreating toughs jeered, “Hooray for the trusts!”
AS ALWAYS IN SITUATIONS involving extremes, Roosevelt’s instinct was to seek out the center. He drafted a major speech on trust policy for delivery in Providence, Rhode Island, balancing it to appeal equally to paupers and plutocrats. Just to make sure about the latter, he forwarded a copy to E. H. Harriman. “Will you send it back to me with any comments you choose to make?”
The financier, facing years of legal harassment in the Northern Securities suit, complied. But he let Roosevelt know what priority a presidential document enjoyed in his office. “My day has been so much occupied I have not had an opportunity until after five o’clock to read it.”
Some paragraphs on trust control, Harriman wrote, sounded “a little broad,” and might bring on a sudden recession, even depression. A President should work for “understanding and confidence” between Wall Street and the public, not mutual mistrust. Testily, he asked Roosevelt “to have a little patience” and allow the economy to benefit from the recent boom in consolidations, before making “any radical change” in regulatory law.
If Roosevelt needed any further evidence of the arrogance of capital, he got it on 21 August, when newspapers published George Baer’s reply to a correspondent urging compromise in the coal strike:
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, and upon the successful Management of which so much depends.
This pious protestation touched off a firestorm of ridicule. Baer was accused of blasphemy and hypocrisy. “A good many people think they superintend the earth,” The New York Times remarked, “but not many have the egregious vanity to describe themselves as its managing directors.” The New York Tribune gave mock thanks that God would be able to manage the strike “through the kindness of the coal operators.”
Roosevelt, about to leave for New England, wistfully asked his Attorney General, “What is the reason we cannot proceed against the coal operators as being engaged in a trust?” Knox replied that until the Supreme Court ruled on Northern Securities v. U.S. the Sherman Act was too narrowly drawn to support such a move. As President, he had “no power or duty in the matter.”
THE SYLPH STEAMED across Long Island Sound in glittering sunshine. Roosevelt lounged in a deck chair astern, enjoying the breeze. He sat staring at the green retreating bulk of Sagamore Hill, while Connecticut grew proportionately. The yacht’s wake took with it his last moments of vacation. Thirteen days of campaign duty beckoned, all the way north to Maine: he wanted to get as many Republican congressman as possible elected or re-elected in the fall.
Theodore Rex Page 18