Sentimentalities of this kind left Roosevelt unmoved. More than any prophecies of future doom, or loss of congressional seats in November, he dreaded an immediate spread of “socialistic action” through the ranks of labor if his telegram to Baer failed. So he cast it in the form no American could refuse: that of a presidential invitation.
I SHOULD GREATLY LIKE TO SEE YOU ON FRIDAY NEXT, OCTOBER 3d, AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK A.M., HERE IN WASHINGTON, IN REGARD TO THE FAILURE OF THE COAL SUPPLY, WHICH HAS BECOME A MATTER OF VITAL CONCERN TO THE WHOLE NATION. I HAVE SENT A SIMILAR DISPATCH TO MR. JOHN MITCHELL, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED MINE WORKERS OF AMERICA.
Duplicate telegrams went out to six other mine owners and coal-road executives. All agreed to attend, with the exception of the Pennsylvania’s A. J. Cassatt, who pleaded noninvolvement in the dispute, and the Delaware & Hudson’s aged Robert M. Olyphant, who said he would be represented by his counsel, David Willcox. Mitchell was reluctant to face such a phalanx of management alone, and received permission to bring along three UMW district presidents. Roosevelt made no attempt to explain the curious imbalance of his initial list. To liberals, it betrayed a bias in favor of management; to conservatives, it was a recognition of Mitchell’s monopolistic power. “Doesn’t that just show,” Willcox fumed, “that this one man has got the biggest kind of a trust in labor?”
In an eve-of-conference briefing, Knox and Root cautioned the President against allowing either side to hurl accusations of monopoly and tyranny. The tone of the proceedings must be kept lofty, in the higher interests of millions of innocent Americans without heat.
Roosevelt himself, as he prepared for the greatest challenge of his political career, could take satisfaction in the fact that the operators had already moderated their position. They had actually consented to meet under the same roof as John Mitchell. And in the same room too: a President in a wheelchair could hardly be expected to perform shuttle service.
CHAPTER 11
A Very Big and Entirely New Thing
MR. HENNESSY It’ll be a hard winther if we don’t get coal.
MR. DOOLEY What d’ye want with coal? Ye’re a most onraisonable man. D’ye think ye can have all th’ comforts of life an’ that ye mus’ make no sacryfice to uphold th’ rights iv property?
CURIOUS ONLOOKERS BEGAN congregating outside number 22 Jackson Place early on Friday, 3 October 1902. Their ranks were swelled by the largest contingent of reporters and photographers seen in Washington since the beginning of the Spanish-American War. It was an exquisite fall morning. Sun slanted through the open windows of the President’s second-floor parlor, at such an angle that people across the street could make out several yards of silk wall-covering, and the tops of fourteen empty chairs. Roosevelt himself was nowhere to be seen.
Just before ten o’clock, the Attorney General, natty in white vest and bowler, skipped up the front steps with his hands in his pockets. Moments later, he reappeared above, suddenly bald. From within came a piping shout, “Hello, Knox!” Roosevelt rolled into view in a blue-striped robe, a bowl of asters in his lap. He placed the flowers on a sunny sill, then, to general disappointment, moved out of sight.
Actually, he had only wheeled himself into a corner between two windows. Flanked thus, he sat in inscrutable shadow, facing a semicircle of seats bathed in light. For once he was not performer, but audience. He could not direct the players who would soon appear before him, yet without him they could not interact: they must throw their speeches his way.
For almost an hour he conferred quietly with Knox and another early arrival, Commissioner of Labor Carroll D. Wright. Outside, police tried to contain the thickening crowd. John Mitchell and his three aides came across the square at six minutes before eleven. Kodaks clicked—probably in vain, because with his swarthy face and dark gray eyes under a black fedora, the union leader was dark enough to defeat any exposure. A black frock coat ballooned slightly behind him as he walked. Such saturninity was to be expected, perhaps, of a former coal miner. But Mitchell’s white starched collar, dazzling in the sun, made him also look clean and handsome enough to thrill any woman in the crowd. Only the scarred hands betrayed the years he had spent underground.
“FROM WITHIN CAME A PIPING SHOUT.”
The temporary White House, no. 22 Jackson Place, 1902 (photo credit 11.1)
While George Cortelyou was receiving the UMW delegation, a plush landau drew up. George F. Baer sat alone opposite two colleagues, his isolation proclaiming him their leader. He had breakfasted in his private railroad car, enjoyed a cigar, and taken a walk, yet his face was drawn and droopy-eyed. With his ascetic features and narrow beard (which he fingered nervously at the sight of the crowd), Baer looked almost French. But from behind, as he stepped down onto the sidewalk, he revealed a fat Teutonic neck, close-cropped and obstinate.
Eben B. Thomas, chairman of the Erie Railroad, and William H. Truesdale, president of the Delaware & Hudson, followed Baer into the house, doffing glossy hats, their silver whiskers flashing. Behind, in another landau, came David Willcox, waspishly elegant in a flowered silk vest. He was accompanied by Thomas P. Fowler of the New York, Ontario, & Western, all clenched mouth and crinkly hair, and John Markle, an independent mine owner, whose jowls and choleric complexion advertised him as the most dangerous man of the six.
“Gentlemen,” said Cortelyou, “if you are ready, we will go to the President.”
ROOSEVELT RECEIVED HIS guests apologetically. “You will have to excuse me, gentlemen, I can’t get up to greet you.”
Commissioner Wright performed the introductions.
“Dee-lighted,” Roosevelt kept saying, snapping the syllables off with his teeth. He indicated the empty chairs. Watchers outside were amused to see fourteen heads dropping simultaneously, like cherries in a slot machine. The President reached for a typescript.
“Gentlemen, the matter about which I have called you here is of such extreme importance that I have thought it best to reduce what I have to say into writing.” He began to read with great emphasis, pausing after each sentence to check reactions around the room.
I wish to call your attention to the fact that there are three parties affected by the situation in the anthracite trade—the operators, the miners, and the general public. I speak for neither the operators nor the miners, but for the general public.
A yard or two beyond the President’s propped-up leg, George Baer listened intently. Roosevelt admitted he had no “right or duty to intervene in this way upon legal grounds.” He was bound, however, to use what influence he could to end an “intolerable” situation. His guests must consider the consequences of further disagreement.
We are upon the threshold of winter, with an already existing coal famine, the future terrors of which we can hardly yet appreciate. The evil possibilities are so far-reaching, so appalling, that it seems to me that you [are] required to sink for the time being any tenacity as to your respective claims in the matter at issue between you. In my judgment the situation imperatively requires that you meet upon the common plane of the necessities of the public. With all the earnestness there is in me I ask that there be an immediate resumption of operations in the coal mines in some such way as will without a day’s unnecessary delay meet the crying needs of the people.
Laying down his typescript, Roosevelt added, “I do not invite a discussion of your respective claims and positions.” John Mitchell stood up in polite disobedience.
Mr. President, I am much impressed with what you say. We are willing to meet the gentlemen representing the coal operators to try to adjust our differences among ourselves. If we cannot adjust them that way, Mr. President, we are willing that you shall name a tribunal who shall determine the issues that have resulted in this strike. And if the gentlemen representing the operators will accept the award or decision of such a tribunal, the miners will willingly accept it—even if it is against their claims.
Roosevelt moved quickly to forestall any response from Baer. “Before considering what ou
ght to be done, I think it only just … that you should have time to consider what I have stated as to the reasons for my getting you together.” He distributed copies of his opening declaration. “Give it careful thought and come back at three o’clock.”
THE OPERATORS RETURNED in frustration to their private train. They had expected a formal hearing, at which they could argue that John Mitchell did not represent the peculiar interests of anthracite labor. He was, in fact, president of a union whose membership was predominantly bituminous. Since soft coal was to a certain extent competitive with hard (and might become more so, with emergency conversion of home heating appliances), Mitchell was a walking conflict of interest.
Roosevelt had discouraged them from expressing this reasonable scruple, while weakly—or deliberately?—allowing Mitchell to pontificate in time for the evening papers. Then, adding insult to injury, he had announced a long recess, which meant they would be unable to make any headlines before the next morning.
A typist awaited Baer in his mobile office. Her fingers began to fly as he told her exactly what he thought of the whole proceeding.
A BOWL OF WHITE roses replaced the asters in Roosevelt’s window that afternoon, but it stimulated no feelings of truce. The operators were in a mood of heavy, postprandial truculence. “Do we understand you correctly,” Baer asked over the President’s foot, “that we will be expected to answer the proposition submitted by Mr. Mitchell this morning?”
Roosevelt would have preferred a reply to his own statement. “It would be a pleasure to me,” he said, “to hear any answer that you are willing to make.”
“You asked us to consider the offer of Mr. Mitchell … to go back to work if you will appoint a commission to determine the questions at issue.”
“I did not say that!”
“But you did, Mr. President. Or so we understood you.”
“I did not say it!” Momentarily forgetting himself, Roosevelt leaned forward. Onlookers below saw his blue-sleeved arm punching the air. “And nothing that I did say could possibly bear that construction.”
Cortelyou read back the stenographic record. Baer proceeded in tones of cool insolence.
“We assume that a statement of what is going on in the coal regions will not be irrelevant.” Roosevelt, perhaps realizing that he had been unfair during the morning, made no protest.
Some fifteen to twenty thousand nonunion miners, Baer informed him, stood ready to provide the public with anthracite coal. But they had been terrorized by Mitchell and his goons. Free men were unable to trade their labor on the open market without being “abused, assaulted, injured, and maltreated.” Operators needed armed guards and police to protect private property—all for fear of a bituminous upstart “whom,” Baer scolded the President, “you invited to meet you.”
Roosevelt stared out of the window, tapping his fingers.
For five months, Baer complained, there had been rampant violence in eastern Pennsylvania, “anarchy too great to be suppressed by the civil power.” Governor Stone’s shoot-to-kill order had had a salutary effect. However, anarchy would return if Mitchell’s men got any “false hopes.”
By now Baer’s German blood was up, and he treated Roosevelt to a political lecture. “The Constitution of the United States requires the President, when requested by the Governor, to suppress domestic violence.” Brushing aside the fact that Stone had not yet asked for help, he guaranteed that he and his colleagues would produce all the anthracite America needed, if they could be assured of federal protection. “The duty of the hour is not to waste time [but] to reestablish order and peace at any cost. Free government is a contemptible failure—”
The phrase free government sounded like a euphemism for your government.
“—is a contemptible failure if it can only protect the lives and property, and secure the comfort of the people, by compromising with the violators of the law and the instigators of violence and crime.”
Baer concluded with a sarcastic rejection of “Mr. Mitchell’s considerate offer to let our men work on terms that he makes.” His tone was so bitter that neither Roosevelt nor the UMW men caught the significance of a last-minute counterproposal: that anthracite labor disputes be referred to local courts “for final determination.”
Obliquely, Baer was accepting Mitchell’s key demand: that the operators submit to the authority of a third power. The line between adjudication and arbitration was thin, and Baer had been forced to choose one side against the other. Contrary to popular impression, he was telling the truth when he said that a 10 percent wage hike would threaten industry profitability. Anthracite mining was a rich but moribund business, vulnerable to extinction if it allowed cheaper, more plentiful bituminous coal to become the Northeast’s fuel of choice. By next spring, if the strike lasted through winter or was too expensively settled, Shenandoah could be on its way to ghosthood, and the Philadelphia & Reading’s freight cars filled with nothing but air.
Roosevelt felt a twinge of sympathy. Baer was a self-made man who had begun work at thirteen. He rightly believed in capital as “the legitimate accumulations of the frugal and the industrious.” Behind his bluster, he could not long deny the necessities of life—work and wages and warmth—to people as desperate as he once had been.
Mitchell, rising to reply, repeated his call for arbitration by a presidential board. He spoke with deliberate softness, looking earnestly into Roosevelt’s eyes. Courteous, flattering phrases floated in the air: much impressed with the views you expressed … deferring to your wishes … accept your award … respectfully yours. He managed to use the second-person singular eleven times in six sentences.
Roosevelt asked the views of the other operators. E. B. Thomas specifically blamed the UMW for twenty deaths, plus “constant and increasing destruction of dwellings, works, machinery, and railroads.” He echoed Baer’s adjudication offer. Again it was ignored.
John Markle stood up next, and angrily loomed over Roosevelt’s wheelchair. “This, Mr. President, is Exhibit A of the operators.” He brandished a newspaper cartoon of the goddess Labor being pursued by hoodlums, while the goddess Justice sat blind and helpless, bound by political cords. “Are you asking us to deal with a set of outlaws?”
Roosevelt was fortunate in being confined to his wheelchair, for he confessed afterward that he would have liked to have taken Markle “by the seat of the breeches and nape of the neck” and thrown him out the window. He stoically endured a further indictment of UMW propaganda by Truesdale, and demands by Willcox for antitrust proceedings against the union. When silence fell at last, he asked Mitchell if he had anything more to say.
It was a crucial moment for the labor leader. Thomas had made serious accusations of homicide, which he must answer for the record. Roosevelt’s eye calmed him.
“The truth of the matter,” Mitchell said, “is, as far as I know, there have been seven deaths. No one regrets them more than I do.” However, three of these deaths were caused by management’s private police forces, and no charges had been leveled in the other four cases. “I want to say, Mr. President, that I feel very keenly the attacks made upon me and my people, but I came here with the intention of doing nothing and saying nothing that would affect reconciliation.”
The air in the room was chill with failure. Roosevelt formally asked if Mitchell’s arbitration proposal was acceptable. To a man, the operators replied, “No.”
OUTSIDE IN LAFAYETTE SQUARE, shadows were lengthening to dusk. The onlookers, especially those up telephone poles and trees, knew things were not going well. They had seen angry gestures, heard once the crash of a fist—Baer’s?—on wood. Now the door of number 22 flew open, and the operators came out grimly en masse. They refused to take press questions. “You may as well talk to that wall,” one of them said, “as to us.” Upstairs, Mitchell and his deputies remained closeted with Roosevelt. Reporters guessed, correctly, that the most urgent colloquy of the day was taking place.
While doctors hovered to check his b
lood pressure, the President warned Mitchell that any more atrocities, as detailed in the afternoon’s complaints, would warrant federal intervention. In that case he, as Commander-in-Chief of the United States Army, “would interfere in a way which would put an absolute stop to mob violence within twenty-four hours, and put a stop to it for good and all, too.”
The bells of Washington struck five as Mitchell went down into the street, his face blank with despair.
“There is no settlement,” he announced.
“WELL, I HAVE TRIED and failed,” Roosevelt wrote Mark Hanna after the doctors had gone. “I feel downhearted over the result because of the great misery ahead for the mass of our people.” Aides were surprised to find the President not angry. He even tried to find excuses for Baer. As for Mitchell, “I felt he did very well to keep his temper.” Roosevelt agreed with Carroll Wright that the strike reflected injustice on both sides. “What my next move will be I cannot yet say.”
He wanted to see how the American people would react to the official report of the day’s proceedings, which was even now thumping through Government Printing Office presses. It was made available just before midnight. The next morning, Roosevelt sensed such a rush of popular approval as to sweep away any feelings of personal failure.
The national newspapers congratulated him almost unanimously for his courage in calling the conference. Never before, the New York Sun remarked, had a President of the United States mediated the contentions of capital and labor. The New York Mail & Express said his “happily worded” address was one “that any President might have been proud to utter.” John Mitchell won praise for his firmness and good manners, and blame for “lack of patriotism” in bargaining with a vital resource. Most negative comments focused on the “insolent,” “audacious,” “sordid” behavior of the operators.
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