Calculate risks of getting involved.
Even at this early stage of the strike, Roosevelt was “thoroughly awake” to the potential perils of the situation. Though repeatedly told that he had “no earthly responsibility” for the strike and should do nothing to interfere, he recognized that if the strike continued for any length of time, the public would “tend to visit upon our heads responsibility for the shortage in coal precisely as Kansas and Nebraska visited upon our heads their failure to raise good crops in the arid belt, eight, ten or a dozen years ago.” In other words, if people were hurt, their leader would be held accountable whether or not he had the legal authority to act.
Furthermore, passivity ran counter to Roosevelt’s disposition as well as his conception of leadership. His study of history persuaded him that there were “two schools of thought” regarding presidential power. The first, identified with James Buchanan, was a “narrowly legalistic view that the President is the servant of Congress rather than of the people, and can do nothing, no matter how necessary, unless the Constitution explicitly commands the action,” thus resolving “every doubt in favor of inaction against action.” A second, opposing philosophical stance, exemplified by Abraham Lincoln, considered the executive “the steward of the people.” Under this conception, to which Roosevelt wholeheartedly ascribed, it was not only the executive’s right but his responsibility “to do whatever the needs of the people demand, unless the Constitution or the laws explicitly forbid him to do it.”
So it happened that many months before the situation had reached crisis proportions, Roosevelt was proactively seeking ways to intervene, to create a position of solid ground from which to lead. Rather than rush in, however, he demonstrated a methodical, understated, patient demeanor at odds with his storied headlong leadership style. “I am slowly going on,” he told the journalist Jacob Riis, “working within my limited range of powers and endeavoring neither to shirk any responsibilities nor yet to be drawn into such hasty and violent action as almost invariably provokes reaction.”
Secure a reliable understanding of the facts, causes, and conditions of the situation.
On June 8, a month into the strike, the president took a small, establishing step to prepare the public for future executive action. In conversation with his commissioner of labor, Carroll Wright, a provision in a law enacted years earlier came to light. This provision authorized the labor commissioner “to make special reports on particular subjects whenever required to do so by the President or either House of Congress.” Roosevelt thereby verbally directed Wright to ascertain “all facts possible relating to the present controversy.” Wright, regarded as “one of the foremost statisticians in the world,” was the right man for the job of conducting an evenhanded investigation into the causes and conditions underlying the strike. He had dedicated his innovative career to the study of working conditions in the new Industrial Age. And for a numbers man, he possessed an unusual sensitivity to the all-too-human elements entangled in both sides of the strike—authority and control, recognition and pride.
Roosevelt’s call for the report was not simply a request for a statistical accounting. As he hoped, a report would push things forward. “The President’s action in sending the Commissioner of Labor to investigate the coal strike is thought by some to forecast presidential influence,” noted one editorial. “President Roosevelt evidently looks upon the strike not as a private quarrel, but as a conflict in which public interests are directly involved,” remarked another. By making his directive to Wright public, Roosevelt had taken the first step, however tentative, in what would become a slow, deliberate process of seeding “a new and untried field” of presidential power.
Wright decided at the start to avoid venturing straight into the Pennsylvania coalfields, fearing that as a representative of the president, his “presence there would do more harm than good.” Instead, he headed for New York, where he conducted a lengthy series of interviews with the presidents of the coal-carrying railroads, officials of the United Mine Workers union, miners, and laborers.
Wright sought to understand the pressures exerted on both sides, each answerable to its own constituency. The operators, responsible to their shareholders, claimed higher wages and shorter hours would drive several collieries out of business. “I cannot afford voluntarily to bankrupt my Company,” Baer explained, “by inviting losses that any man charged with the responsibility of management would say were unnecessary and unwise.” Mitchell, voice of the fledgling union, had to prove to the miners that their lives would be improved by their commitment to collective action. And beyond the specific disputes about wages, hours, and working conditions, Wright concluded, “the psychological elements must be considered” to get a true measure of the situation. “Suspicion lurks in the minds of everyone.”
Commissioner Wright told Roosevelt he could not complete his report without making a few suggestions that “might lead to a more peaceful and satisfactory condition in the anthracite coal field.” He proposed a six-month experimental reduction from ten to nine working hours a day to see how productivity was affected. To assuage the mistrust and ill will rippling beneath the surface, he recommended that when workers were paid by the ton, two inspectors, one representing the operators, one the miners, should be on hand to weigh the coal. And most significantly, he urged the creation of “a joint committee on conciliation, composed of representatives of the operators and the new union.” These steps, Wright acknowledged, would not lead “to the millennium” but, he believed, would “allay irritation and reach the day when the anthracite coal regions” might be governed “in accordance with greater justice.”
Remain uncommitted in the early stages.
“This is an important report by Carroll D. Wright,” Roosevelt told his attorney general, Philander C. Knox. “Will you read it over and then at cabinet we can discuss whether it shall be made public. I like its tone greatly.” Knox strongly advised against its publication. He told Roosevelt that the affair was of no concern to the president, and that “he could not see what good would come of publishing the report.” Elaborating further, Knox reminded the president that the report had been made for his “personal information,” not because he had any responsibility for the situation. “For you to make this report public would be construed as implying your approval of the findings of fact and the recommendations therein. I do not think you are called upon to thus commit yourself.”
Roosevelt pondered the weight of this argument. To publish the report, with Wright’s suggestions for improved working conditions, might seem sympathetic to the miners. If, as president, he had already “expressed an opinion” on specific issues, he would find himself in “an embarrassing and undignified position” should duty eventually require him to intervene. Yet, not to publish the report after it had been publicly announced might seem like an act of suppression, angering progressives anxiously awaiting some positive action. Caught in a crossfire, Roosevelt decided for the time being against making the report public.
SUMMER
The seasonal clock was ticking. While there was no drastic change in the daily lives of the people in the heat of summer, each passing day brought factories, schools, and hospitals, along with millions of homeowners, closer to the necessity of securing their winter’s coal supply. As supplies dwindled and the dealers’ bins were increasingly cleaned out, retail prices rose 50 to 60 percent—for the great majority of the people, an exorbitant burden. Reports from New England cities and towns revealed that even for those able to afford the onerous prices, the scarcity of coal was such that stockpiles could be found “only here and there” in the hands of a few dealers. “Doubtless the stage is very near,” the Coal Trade Journal predicted, “when, to all intents and purposes, supplies of anthracite will be entirely exhausted.”
Use history to provide perspective.
That summer, with Congress in recess, Roosevelt closely monitored developments in the strike from his family’s home in Oyster Bay. In the sa
nctuary of his library, he found what Lincoln had secured at the Soldiers’ Home—the time and space in which to reflect upon the deeper roots of the struggle.
A lifelong student of history, a voracious reader, and a historian himself, Roosevelt recognized that the collision between the owners and the miners, capital and labor, the rich and the poor, had been decades in the making. “The labor problem,” he comprehended, “had entered a new phase” in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. “Great financial corporations, doing a nation-wide and even a world-wide business, had taken the place of the smaller concerns of an earlier time. The old familiar, intimate relations between employer and employee were passing. A few generations before, the boss had known every man in his shop.” By contrast, Roosevelt surmised, it was unlikely that any but a random coal miner had ever laid eyes on the Reading Railroad president, much less befriended him. Furthermore, as a consequence of such consolidation, “a crass inequality in the bargaining relation between the employer and the individual employee standing alone” had developed. The miners, individually, “were impotent when they sought to enter a wage contract” with their employers; “they could make fair terms only by uniting into trade unions to bargain collectively.” Labor unions, Roosevelt understood, “were bound to grow in size, in strength.” And this historical inevitability “the great coal operators did not see.”
Roosevelt had not only read about the Gilded Age and the growth of combinations, trusts, and labor unions, his family’s history provided a singular chronicle of how wealth had accumulated in the new industrial order. From his grandfather Cornelius Roosevelt, who had become “one of the five richest men in New York” through a successful career as a merchant, banker, and real estate magnate, Theodore had inherited a family trust. From his father, who had become a pillar of the New York philanthropic world, he had developed a sense of duty and civic responsibility. From his own experiences in the woods of Maine, among the cowboys in the West, as a civil servant in Washington, a police commissioner in New York, and a soldier in Cuba, Theodore had fashioned a different path from that imagined by noblesse oblige. He had confronted a larger vision of American diversity and had developed a more complicated conception of public responsibility and leadership. The history that was being played out in the strike of 1902 was part and parcel of his knowledge of history and his own family life, his biography, and his times.
That same summer, Roosevelt embarked on completing the ten-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln by John Nicolay and John Hay. He had not only enjoyed the reading, he wrote Hay, “but I really believe I have profited.” Though he understood, of course, that the task before him differed in degree from “what Lincoln saw in the supreme years of the nation’s struggle,” the “men and forces” at play were “yet the same in their infinite variety of kind.” Furthermore, he had “a good idea of Lincoln’s worry” when he was denounced by extremists on one side for not going “far enough” and on the other for going “too far.” In the present coal strike, conservatives were roundly denouncing him for “showing sympathy with the miners,” while progressives wanted him “to take the coal barons by the throat.” Most of all, Roosevelt emphasized, Lincoln’s character provided the most telling model—“to try to be good-natured and forbearing and to free myself from vindictiveness.”
Be ready to grapple with reversals, abrupt intrusions that can unravel all plans.
The explosion of an anarchist’s pistol had made Roosevelt president. Grappling with such sudden twists of the kaleidoscope had shaped his philosophy of life and of leadership. So now, as the relatively peaceful strike entered its twelfth week, a single violent incident at a colliery in the coal town of Shenandoah threatened to upend all hopes for a peaceful solution. From the start, Mitchell had counseled his men to avoid provocation and to keep their picket lines orderly. By late July, however, tempers were beginning dangerously to fray.
On July 30, a sheriff’s deputy was escorting two men carrying “a suspicious looking bundle” into the mine. Upon the discovery that the package contained miner’s gear, the union pickets turned on the “scabs,” clubbing and beating them into unconsciousness. Policemen rushed to the scene. Mobs gathered in the street. “Upward of one thousand shots were fired,” the New York Times reported. Scores of strikers and local residents were hit; “it is expected that many deaths will result.” A citizen who came to the aid of the sheriff’s deputy was “brutally clubbed to death.” Front-page headlines across the country proclaimed “a reign of terror.”
Reading the dispatches at Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt considered returning to Washington. If the violence continued, it was possible that the Pennsylvania governor would request federal troops to maintain order. “Once there is a resort to mob violence,” Roosevelt later told a friend, “the only thing to do is to maintain order.” While such intervention was well within his constitutional authority, Roosevelt knew from his study of history that the arrival of federal troops would be construed as a coercive action on behalf of the operators, an action that could well break the back of the strike. “It is a dreadful thing to be brought face to face with the necessity of taking measures, however unavoidable, which will mean the death of men who have been maddened by want and suffering.”
Waiting to see how the situation would unfold, Roosevelt remained vigilantly but quietly at home. His patience was rewarded. The following day, John Mitchell traveled to the site of the violence. He understood that even those members of the public most sympathetic to the miners’ cause would not condone a disruption of law and order. A crowd of ten thousand miners greeted the union president when he reached Scranton. The men “went fairly wild” over his appearance, one newspaper reported, but they listened soberly when he pleaded with them to refrain from violence. “The one among you who violates the law is the worst enemy you have,” he warned. “I want to impress on you the importance of winning this strike. If you win . . . there will be no more strikes,” but “if you lose the strike, you lose your organization.”
Because Theodore Roosevelt did not rush in, because John Mitchell did swiftly and effectively respond, an uncertain peace was restored once again to the anthracite region.
Reevaluate options; be ready to adapt as a situation escalates.
As the strike entered its fourth month, public anxiety deepened. Both sides were replenishing their coffers to hunker down for the long haul. The strike would come to an end, the owners repeatedly emphasized, only when the miners conceded defeat and returned to work. For their part, the miners, having solicited the largest strike fund ever accumulated from fellow union members in different parts of the country, had “settled down to a long trial of endurance.”
On August 21, rendered increasingly “uneasy” by this protracted stasis, Roosevelt queried his attorney general: “What is the reason we cannot proceed against the coal operators as being engaged in a trust? I ask because it is a question being continually asked of me.” Indeed, reporters had suggested that the coal trust seemed in more flagrant violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act than Northern Securities, the vast transportation company against which Roosevelt had brought suit the previous February. Northern Securities, forged under the auspices of J. P. Morgan during Roosevelt’s watch in late 1901, had consolidated three rival rail and shipping lines into one giant company, creating (behind Morgan’s U.S. Steel) “the second largest corporation in the world.” The new holding company had absolute power to determine freight rates within its domain. The unforeseen announcement of the government’s suit to “test the validity of the merger,” had staggered the financial world.
“If we have done anything wrong,” Morgan had informed Roosevelt in a White House meeting three days later, “send your man to my man and they can fix it up.” Morgan’s attitude, Roosevelt later said, was “a most illuminating illustration of the Wall Street point of view,” which regarded the president as simply “a rival operator.” With the Northern Securities suit, the first of a series that would establish for Roosevelt the
moniker “trust-buster,” the president intended “to serve notice on everybody that it was going to be the Government,” not Wall Street, “who governed these United States.”
In answer to the president’s query concerning an antitrust suit against the coal operators, however, Knox argued that they were not combined in such a manner as to fit the legal definition of a trust. Furthermore, he reminded Roosevelt that even if a suit against the coal owners should eventually prevail, the slow workings of the court machinery would deliver no remedy for the crisis at hand. After seven months, the Northern Securities suit was still in the first stage of argument in the federal courts; nearly three years would pass before the Supreme Court finally decided the case in the government’s favor.
Troubled by the attorney general’s objections, Roosevelt contemplated a different, less controversial step. Perhaps, he suggested to Knox, the time had come to reevaluate his earlier decision to withhold the Wright Report. Knox reiterated that he had “never thought it wise for you to give it out, and have no reason now to change my opinion.” This time, however, after consulting with additional advisers, Roosevelt chose to move ahead and release the report to the press. Let the case be laid before the public! In the appendix of the report, which included the letters exchanged between the operators and the miners, the virulent animosity of the operators toward their employees spoke loud and clear. Again and again, the operators had refused to meet with Mitchell. As for the idea of ensuring every miner a minimum daily wage, the owners countered that it was “patent to anyone” who had any knowledge of the differing conditions in different mines that “such an idea can be but the product of an ignorant and diseased mind.”
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