Theodore Rex (39 page)

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 blood 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.

Roosevelt tended to agree with the Brooklyn
Eagle
that the fundamental issue now was “coal and not controversy.” He was inundated with mail demanding a military invasion of the anthracite fields. Some letters, on heavy corporate stationery, reminded him that President Cleveland had not hesitated to break up the 1894 Pullman railroad strike, in the name of free enterprise and private property. Others, misspelled and querulous, besought him to seize the mines “for the people,” under law of eminent domain.

Roosevelt began to empathize with Lincoln at the onset of the Civil War. For the first time in his Presidency, he breathed the alpine air of a great decision. He could not retreat from the height he had assumed on 3 October—not unless he wanted to risk “
the most awful riots this country has ever seen.” Only one other living American knew what it was like to be so alone at the peak of power. Or was that man too old and fat to remember, much less care?

As if to reassure him, Grover Cleveland wrote from Princeton, New Jersey. “My dear Mr. President, I read in the paper this morning on my way home from Buzzard’s Bay, the newspaper accounts of what took place yesterday between you and the parties directly concerned in the coal strike.” The patient, spiky, sloping script was the same as it had been when Cleveland had been in the White House, benignly tolerating Roosevelt’s activism as Civil Service Commissioner. “I am so surprised and ‘stirred up’ by the position taken by the contestants that I cannot refrain from making a suggestion.”

This was that Baer and Mitchell would welcome a “temporary escape” from their deadlock, if appealed to in such a way as to make them both look humane. They should be asked to postpone their quarrel long enough to allow the production of anthracite for the winter. Then they could “take up the fight again where they left off.”

Roosevelt, of course, had already suggested much the same thing. Cleveland had always been a bit slow. Nevertheless, his counsel represented eight years of presidential experience. Here was the brute disciplinarian of 1894 recommending reason over force.

“
Your letter was a real help and comfort to me,” Roosevelt replied. He declined, however, to issue another appeal, feeling that Baer’s attitude precluded it. “
I think I shall now tell Mitchell that if the miners will go back to work I will appoint a commission to investigate the whole situation and will do whatever in my power lies to have the findings of such a commission favorably acted upon.”

Roosevelt did not say which distinguished private citizen he hoped might chair this commission. He merely ended his letter with a reminder that he had been “very glad” to make one of Cleveland’s friends Surgeon General.

JOHN MITCHELL RECEIVED
the President’s new proposal doubtfully. He said he would consider it. Roosevelt, meanwhile, was put under medical orders
to refrain from further work. He expressed his frustration to the Librarian of Congress:

Putnam obliged, only to receive a presidential reprimand. “I do not like the Poland. It is too short.”

WHILE ROOSEVELT READ
and Mitchell pondered, violence continued to roar in the anthracite valleys. At night, military searchlights played nervously around Shenandoah. “Things are steadily growing worse,” a state trooper reported, “and the future of this region is dark indeed.” A Justice Department spy in Wilkes-Barre reported that he had lost sympathy for the miners. UMW executives were openly inciting mobs to riot. The New York
Sun
demanded that labor thugs be treated like Filipino guerrillas: “without parley and without terms.” Governor Stone called out Pennsylvania’s entire ten-thousand-man National Guard.

The weather turned cold and wet. Inch by inch, seepage mounted in empty mine shafts. Hills of unsold anthracite lay under the beating rain. Public pressure built on George Baer, who seemed at the point of a nervous breakdown before meeting with J. P. Morgan in New York. “
He literally ran to the elevator making frantic motions with his right arm, to ward off the reporters,” a UMW observer wrote Mitchell. “He almost hysterically repeated over and over, nothing to say, nothing to say.… He shook and trembled and his face was livid.”

Mitchell, sensing weakness, turned Roosevelt down. “
We believe that we went more than half way in our proposal at Washington, and we do not feel that we should be asked to make further sacrifice.”
His statement was published on 9 October. Within hours, a striker was shot dead at Shenandoah. Panicking, the mayors of more than one hundred of America’s largest cities called for the nationalization of the anthracite industry.

Roosevelt noted that Poland’s ancient kings had also been hampered by irresponsible subjects. “
I must not be drawn into any violent step which would bring reaction and disaster afterward.” He decided to appoint his
commission of inquiry, whether Mitchell liked it or not.
Congress was entitled to a full report on the situation before he took the law into his own hands. A follow-up letter reached Grover Cleveland on 11 October:

Cleveland was sixty-five years old, retired, and chronically short of money. His only substantial investment was in—of all things—the anthracite industry. If he accepted Roosevelt’s invitation, he would be obliged to sell these stocks at current, depressed prices. “You rightly appreciate my reluctance to assume any public service,” he wrote back. However, “I feel so deeply the gravity of the situation, and I so fully sympathize with you in your efforts to remedy present sad conditions, that I believe it is my duty to undertake the service.”