Theodore Rex (38 page)
Authors: Edmund Morris
“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 ought 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?”