Theodore Rex (41 page)

Temptingly, he dropped the names of Bishop L. Spalding, a Baltimore patrician and industrial scholar, and Edgar E. Clark, chief of the Railway Conductors Union. Mitchell showed interest, and allowed that the latter would make an “excellent” commissioner. The first whiff of settlement gathered in the air.

Roosevelt cautioned that he could only “try” to get management to agree to all this. After Mitchell left, he ordered Root to get somebody from the House of Morgan to come south as quickly as possible. Then, feeling a need for fresh air, he laid aside his crutches and went for a long drive out of town.

GEORGE PERKINS AND
Robert Bacon reached 22 Jackson Place at seven o’clock, as the President was dressing for dinner with John Hay. They said they had “full power” to represent both Morgan and the operators. He
showed them his expanded list of commissioners, then limped the hundred yards to Hay’s house. Perkins and Bacon remained behind to huddle on the telephone with Morgan and Baer.

While they conferred, Roosevelt celebrated. He obviously believed the strike was over. Pride in his skills as mediator, and joy in his returning health, bubbled up inside him. “He began talking at the oysters, and the
pousse-café
found him still at it,” Hay reported to Henry Adams. “When he was one of us, we could sit on him—but who except you, can sit on a Kaiser?”

THE STRIKE, HOWEVER
, was not over, as Roosevelt found to his chagrin when he got back to Jackson Place at 10:00. Perkins and Bacon said they personally approved the idea of a seven-man commission, but that Baer was driving them mad with objections to the inclusion of Edgar Clark. Under no circumstances would the operators allow “a labor man” power over their future.

Roosevelt privately looked on the next three hours as a “screaming comedy.” Yet the evening could well have disintegrated into tragedy. Perkins and Bacon predicted civil warfare if the President did not yield to Baer’s objections. Roosevelt saw revolution if he did. Root and Wright joined in the debate, to a jangling counterpoint of long-distance telephone calls. Midnight struck. In two more hours, the morning newspapers would go to press. Roosevelt redoubled his pressure on Perkins and Bacon. Suddenly, the latter said there could be some “latitude” in choosing commissioners, as long as they were put under the right “headings.” Roosevelt pounced.

With a straight face, he proposed that Edgar E. Clark be moved to the “eminent sociologist” slot. After all, Mr. Clark must have “thought and studied deeply on social questions” as a union executive. Perkins and Bacon agreed at once. They also said yes to the selection of Bishop Spalding, while Roosevelt approved E. W. Parker of the United States Geological Survey as the scientist.

The President now had five commissioners acceptable to both sides, with one more slot—that of the Army engineer—not yet negotiated. For the seventh,
he still hoped to appoint Grover Cleveland. If Clark qualified as a “sociologist,” a former Commander-in-Chief could be described as having some military experience.

Suspecting, perhaps, that even mighty brains might jib at this, he said casually that he would like Carroll Wright to serve “as recorder.” Perkins and Bacon again agreed, not realizing that the President now had, in effect, a reserve board member, whom he could promote at leisure if any of the seven proved problematic.

Morgan’s men adjourned once more to the telephone. Back over the line came consent to the “eminent sociologist” and to the Catholic prelate. But Baer had the satisfaction of rejecting a former President of the United States. This permitted the instant elevation of Wright. And so, as Roosevelt put it, the thing was done. “Heavens and earth, it has been a struggle!”

SOME WEEKS AFTER
the Coal Strike Commission had begun its work, and anthracite fires were glowing in forty million grates, George Baer encountered Owen Wister and roared at him, “Does your friend ever think?” The railroad executive was still furious over Roosevelt’s “impetuous” intervention between free-market forces. Even the most conservative economic experts were predicting that United Mine Workers would win at least a 10 percent wage increase, plus fairer and safer working conditions and the right to arbitrate all disputes.

“He certainly seems to act,” Wister replied.

The rest of the world seemed to agree. Theodore Roosevelt’s mediation between capital and labor earned him fame as the first head of state to confront the largest problem of the twentieth century. He was cheered in the French Chamber of Deputies, and hailed by
The Times
of London as a political original. “
In a most quiet and unobtrusive manner the President has done a very big and entirely new thing. We are witnessing not merely the ending of the coal strike, but the definite entry of a powerful government upon a novel sphere of operation.”

At home, Roosevelt basked in a popular outpouring of admiration and affection that boded well for 1904. And far beyond that, to the end of his days, he could rejoice with falsetto giggles at “the eminent sociologist.”

“
THE PRESIDENT RETURNS
to Secretary Hay the two little German brochures on the trust question,” said Roosevelt, dictating. “The President has troubles of his own, and positively declines to read these articles in the original. If the enthusiastic consul who sent them will translate them (by preference into verse), the President may or may not look at them.”

He was in high good humor as his forty-fourth birthday approached. The late October air was fragrant with political fruit. With arbitration of the coal strike under way, Democratic Congressional candidates were unable to campaign on the theme of labor unrest. Nor could they attack the Republican Party in other vulnerable areas.
Harper’s Weekly
noted how deftly the President had neutralized such issues as trust control, Philippine independence, Cuban reciprocity, and tariff reform. If the GOP was rescued from a rout in November, it had Theodore Roosevelt to thank. “The power of one man thus to cover his party with the mantle of his own strength is unprecedented in the history of American politics.”

Tributes, in the form of endorsements from state Republican conventions, were already piling up, each gaily wrapped with the ribbon “1904.” Political veterans could not remember a time when delegates across the country had pledged themselves to a sitting President so soon.
At latest count, Roosevelt had 394 votes from fifteen states. Ninety-eight more votes would give him half of the projected maximum of 984, and he had nineteen months to expand that half into a majority. Wall Street, of course, still wanted Senator Hanna in the White House. Yet J. P. Morgan had shown that it was possible to do business with the President and not burst a blood vessel. Even E. H. Harriman now proclaimed himself a Roosevelt man, and had “
come to the front handsomely” with campaign contributions.

Roosevelt’s l
ong-term prospects, indeed, were so favorable that he had lost interest in the current campaign. “I feel like throwing up my hands and going to the circus.” Secretly, he plotted a postelection hunting trip to Mississippi, and allowed himself several bad puns on the words
Baer
and
bear
.

It was not blood he craved, so much as exercise. His left leg had now healed, but he was lame from the wheelchair, and his girth was increasing. He felt he might turn fat to muscle with a few days’ violent activity. The alternative method of losing weight did not seem to occur to him: he continued to eat heartily three times a day.
A guest at lunch noticed that waiters “were always moving toward the President.”

He had, besides, a sound domestic reason to quit town as soon as possible. The newly restored White House was ready for occupancy—or would be, as soon as it stopped reeking of fresh paint and varnish.
Edith was busy choosing fabric and furnishings for some twenty large rooms. Such delicate details were beneath his robust attention. To hunt swatches of chintz was a woman’s job; to kill
Ursus horribilis
, a man’s.

ON 4 NOVEMBER
, Roosevelt was chagrined to see Oyster Bay fall to the Democrats. Only the traditional Republican vote of northern New York saved his native state from a takeover. Governor Benjamin B. Odell, Jr., won re-election by fewer than ten thousand votes. Nationwide, the Democratic Party gained twenty-six new Congressmen.

Even so, analysis of the results showed that the GOP had performed better than normal for a ruling party in off-year elections. It still had a House majority of thirty seats, ample for legislative purposes, and its margin of dominance in the Senate was unchanged. Some seriously eroded fields of support south of the Mason-Dixon Line could be written off as Democratic territory anyway. Everywhere else, except Nevada, the aggregate of votes cast indicated statewide Republican pluralities.