Leadership

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Most significantly, the report revealed that the operators did not in any way feel answerable to the public. When Wright asked them if there were “any sort of suggestion” the president might make to help resolve the strike, the owners bluntly replied that if he and everyone else simply got out of the way, “it will do more to end it than anything else.”

  When Roosevelt released the report, he was careful to include Knox’s opinion that the president had neither authority nor responsibility in the matter. But increasingly, Roosevelt felt otherwise. As representative of the public, he had substantial influence, if not the power of explicit law. And, slowly, the idea that the public—whose lives and livelihoods hung in the balance of this increasingly bitter struggle—had a role to play was beginning to take a firm hold. The seeds that Roosevelt had planted early in the struggle had begun to grow, nurtured by the expectations and needs of the public. Incrementally, the president had constructed a new kind of platform from which he could speak. And now the time had come to build a foundation of support among the citizenry in the eye of the coming storm—the people of New England.

  Be visible. Cultivate public support among those most directly affected by the crisis.

  Even before the coal strike approached an acute stage, Roosevelt had planned a late-summer speaking tour through New England and the Midwest to generate enthusiasm for Republicans in the upcoming fall elections. The mounting concerns of New Englanders about the prolonged strike gave the barnstorming venture a decided political jolt and accent. Traveling by train and open carriage from Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts to Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, Roosevelt attracted massive throngs every place he went. “The booming of cannon, the clanging of church bells, the tooting of whistles, the braying of brass bands and the cheering of thousands” signaled his progress. “Factories shut down,” the Boston Daily Globe reported, “stores put up their shutters, flags were hoisted and the people were out in their holiday clothes.” It struck one journalist that “small towns turned out their entire population.” Roosevelt understood that people were drawn “to see the President much as they would come to see a circus.” His energy never flagged: he smiled, gesticulated, radiated good humor, absorbed and reciprocated affection. At every stop, he delivered extemporaneous remarks about citizenship, character, and “a square deal for every man, great or small, rich or poor.”

  While he deliberately avoided speaking about the coal strike during set speeches, he lent “a sympathetic ear” to the “unfocused discontent” he encountered about the growing consolidation of industry and the growing gap between the rich and the poor. He understood that many looked back with nostalgia upon the preindustrial era, “when the average man lived more to himself.” He challenged them to look forward, not backward—to a time when public sentiment was ready for the national government to find constructive ways to intervene in the workings of the economic order, to regulate the trusts, stimulate competition, and protect small companies. He agreed with Lincoln about the essential role that public sentiment plays when a leader hopes to move his countrymen in a different direction.

  As the summer days were coming to a close, Roosevelt was stirring up that public sentiment. More frequently, the pressure of public opinion was being heard and the eyes of the people were looking to the White House for help. “We have endured patiently,” came one message. But now “it is time for the people to speak. It is time that their voice should be heard.” We appeal “to the president of the people” to “use your influence to stay the juggernaut which crushes us.” The power of public sentiment was creating space for the president to act.

  FALL

  Clear the deck to focus with single-mindedness on the crisis.

  As the coal strike began to flare into an acute phase at the beginning of the fall, Theodore Roosevelt was halfway through barnstorming, raising his political stock and his visibility. Once again chance bolted into his life with terrible violence. The horse-driven carriage transporting the president’s party from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to Lenox for a speaking engagement was crossing trolley tracks when rammed at full speed by an onrushing trolley car.

  “With a crash that echoed through the hills the car ploughed through the landau,” witnessed a reporter, “overturning it and smashing wheels and body into bits.” The president’s favorite secret service agent, William Craig, was cast under the wheels of the trolley car and killed. Amid this carnage, Roosevelt himself was catapulted some thirty feet, suffering bruises to his jaw and eye and a deep bone contusion on his left shin. “I felt sure,” he remembered, “all in the carriage would be killed.”

  With characteristic bravado, he sloughed off his injuries, determined to proceed with the next part of his scheduled speaking tour in the Midwest. By the time he reached Indiana, his leg was badly swollen, the result of a developing abscess. When the pain became severe and his temperature rose, he finally consented to hospitalization. Doctors decided to operate immediately. Refusing anesthesia, Roosevelt joked with the surgeons, “Gentlemen, you are formal; I see you have your gloves on,” referring to their antiseptic gloves. “Mr. President,” said one surgeon. “It is always in order to wear gloves at a president’s reception.”

  The abscess was successfully drained, but the doctors insisted that he cancel the rest of his tour and stay off his foot for at least two weeks to avoid what could be serious complications. Returning to Washington, Roosevelt was carried by stretcher to the temporary White House at 22 Jackson Place, the executive mansion being renovated to separate the living quarters from a new West Wing of executive offices.

  This man of action who had always dealt with private tragedy and adversity with a flurry of distracting motion was now incapacitated. Ironically, his lingering injuries would provide the occasion for a single-minded focus on the coal strike at the very moment when the worsening consequences of that strike were about to burst into public consciousness. He did not need to clear the deck of all superfluous matters; the accident had cleared the deck for him. “I do not have to see the innumerable people whom there is no object in seeing, but whom I would have to see if I were not confined to my room with my leg up,” he told Connecticut senator Orville Platt, “and I am able to do all the important work, like that affecting the coal strike, just exactly as well as if I were on two legs.”

  In the course of two weeks of convalescence, Roosevelt would make a precedent-breaking decision to intervene in the coal strike. “I had as yet no legal or constitutional duty—and therefore no legal or constitutional right in the matter,” he acknowledged. “I knew I might fail; but I made up my mind that if I did fail it should at least not be because of adopting the Buchanan-like attitude of fearing to try anything.” What had transpired during his immobility that emboldened Roosevelt’s decision?

  Scarcely had he settled into his bedroom overlooking Lafayette Park when he was pelted by a veritable nor’easter of alarming forecasts. Urgent pleas came from mayors of big cities in the path of the storm. “I cannot emphasize enough injustices of the existing coal situation,” New York mayor Seth Low wired, “millions of innocent people . . . will endure real suffering if present conditions continue.” From Maine came reports that the coal shortage would soon result in the closing of the mills: “Thousands of operatives are in danger of being thrown out of employment. Hotels and railroads are also short of fuel.” In Connecticut, lack of fuel had already forced factories and small businesses to shut down. Workers were being laid off at an alarming, accelerating clip. Hospitals throughout the region reported a rise in tuberculosis and diphtheria. Damp and frigid schoolhouses were compelled to send children home to houses with empty coal stoves. Most troubling, the threat of violence filled the air. Mobs commandeered coal cars as they moved heavily through villages and towns; bombs were detonated at bridges and railway lines.

  The time left on the clock before this fuel famine spread “untold misery” and spilled blood had nearly run out. Whether or not he had a clear legal m
andate, this was not a normal course of events. The time of appraisal was over; the time of decision had come. Theodore Roosevelt would find or force a way in.

  Assemble a crisis management team.

  There was nothing haphazard about the crisis management team Theodore Roosevelt assembled from both outside and inside his administration. Each of the seven men he gathered for consultation had a particular vantage from which to view the strike; each was aligned to a different aspect of the stalemated contest. And all these lines converged in Roosevelt and his own overlapping fields of experience and expertise. He knew who they were, what they knew, and what they knew how to do. If he could bring their intelligence, perspectives, and influence together on a team, they would figure out how to proceed with a shared objective. Indeed, the decisions he made in the weeks ahead would directly spring from this assembled team.

  The first person Roosevelt summoned was Governor Winthrop Crane of Massachusetts, a state in the crosshairs of the coal famine. The two men had bonded during the president’s recent trip to Massachusetts. Seated next to Roosevelt when the rushing trolley cleaved the presidential carriage, Crane, too, had escaped death by being thrown to the ground. Roosevelt trusted the conservative businessman, surely “no alarmist,” to provide a firsthand view of the situation. Crane lost no time providing urgent advice. “Unless you end this strike,” Crane warned Roosevelt in a tone so strident it could not be ignored, “the workers in the North will begin tearing down buildings for fuel. They will not stand being frozen to death.” Delay was not an option.

  Crane remained in Washington in the days that followed while Roosevelt conducted a series of daylong meetings with his newly assembled team, which brought together the worlds of big business, labor, politics, and law. Secretary of War Elihu Root’s lifelong ties to Wall Street made him a reliable liaison to the financial world and a conduit to J. P. Morgan, the unmoved mover of the financial reservoir behind the operators of the railroads and the mines. Postmaster General Henry Payne understood the mind-set of the railroad owners, having been president of the Chicago and Northern Railroad before joining the administration. To represent the union’s perspective, Roosevelt consulted Frank Sargent, his commissioner of immigration, who had formerly served as chief of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and was a respected cohort of Samuel Gompers and, most importantly, a friend of John Mitchell. Pennsylvania’s senior senator, Matthew Quay, had a deep familiarity with the operation of the anthracite mines. Labor Commissioner Wright, Roosevelt’s invaluable statistician, fairly represented both sides. And of course, there was Attorney General Knox, who had consistently counseled him to keep his hands off the whole matter.

  Crane proposed a course of action based on his recent experience with a teamsters’ strike in Massachusetts in which neither side would meet with the other. As their governor, Crane had invited the employers and the union members to take separate suites in the same hotel. He then traveled back and forth between the two suites and eventually brought them to a compromise settlement. What if the president invited the coal owners and the union representatives to meet with him in Washington?

  Roosevelt immediately grasped the potential of Crane’s concept; the team was less certain, preferring the strike be settled without presidential interference. Finally, everyone except Knox concurred that the president must act. Knox continued to fear that a precedent was being set that would involve the chief executive in every future labor struggle. Once the policy was determined, however, Knox “acted as he always does in such cases,” Roosevelt approvingly said, “he did his very best to make it successful.”

  Identical telegrams were sent to union president John Mitchell and the six presidents of the anthracite coal companies. “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.” This ostensibly straightforward yet unprecedented invitation captured headlines across the nation. “For the first time in the history of the country,” a writer in Collier’s Weekly exclaimed, great corporate leaders and union representatives would join “the President of the United States to talk over their differences face-to-face.”

  At once, a din of protest sounded in the conservative press, which characterized the intervention as a dangerous “un-American” experiment. “Worse by far than the strike is Mr. Roosevelt’s seemingly uncontrollable penchant for impulsive self-intrusion,” complained the Journal of Commerce.

  Frame the narrative.

  “It was very kind of you to come here at my invitation,” Roosevelt hailed his guests as they filed into the second-floor parlor room of the temporary White House. “You will have to excuse me, I can’t get up to greet you.” Seated in a wheelchair in the corner of the room, Roosevelt was dressed in a “blue-striped bathrobe belted around him.” Covered with a soft white blanket, his “wounded leg stuck out straight in front of him.”

  Roosevelt opened the meeting by reading a carefully scripted statement laying out the ground rules for their discussion: “There are three parties affected by the situation in the anthracite trade—the operators, the miners, and the general public.” He assured them that he championed “neither the operators or the miners.” He spoke for “the general public.” While disclaiming any legal “right or duty to intervene,” Roosevelt considered the current situation so “intolerable” that he felt compelled to use whatever personal influence he had to bring the parties together. “I do not invite a discussion of your respective claims and positions. I appeal to your spirit of patriotism, to the spirit that sinks personal considerations and makes individual sacrifices for the general good.”

  No sooner had the president finished than John Mitchell, seated in the back row of chairs beside three of his district presidents, “literally jumped to his feet.” In a dramatic bid to frame the narrative, Mitchell pledged that “the miners should immediately go back to work and that all questions between the operators and miners should be left to the decision of a commission appointed by [the president], each side agreeing to abide by this decision.” Mitchell’s opening salvo took both the operators and the president by surprise. Turning to the operators, Roosevelt asked: “What have you gentlemen to say to this proposition?” After hastily conferring with his fellow owners, George Baer rose: “We cannot agree to any proposition advanced by Mr. Mitchell,” he categorically proclaimed. “Very well,” said the president. “I shall ask you, then, to return at three o’clock and I wish you would present at that time your various positions in writing.”

  When the group reconvened, Baer presented a written statement designed to reframe the story to the owners’ advantage. Twenty thousand workers, he maintained, “stood ready” to return to the mines and secure the needed coal, but were prevented “by Mitchell and his goons” from doing so. “The duty of the hour is not to waste time negotiating with the fomenters of this anarchy and insolent defiance of the law,” he argued, “but to do as was done in the war of the rebellion, restore the majesty of law, the only guardian of a free people.” Looking directly at the president, he charged that if the administration refused to send federal troops to protect the destruction of private property and end the strike, then “government is a contemptible failure.”

  They not only “insulted me for not preserving order,” Roosevelt later wrote of the mine owners, but they “attacked Knox for not having brought suit against the miners’ union as violating the Sherman antitrust law.” Tension escalated when coal owner John Markle advanced into the space of the confined president and shouted: “Are you asking us to deal with a set of outlaws?”

  Keep temper in check.

  From start to finish, Roosevelt later wrote, the operators “did everything in their power to goad and irritate Mitchell, becoming fairly abusive in their language to him, and were insolent to me. I made no comment on what they said, for it seemed to me that it was very important that I should (keep my temper and b
e drawn into no squabble).” Rupture nearly came at the moment when Markle chastised him for dealing with “a set of outlaws.” Roosevelt later admitted that he wanted to take him “by the seat of his breeches and nape of the neck and chuck him out of the window.” By grabbing the edge of the wheelchair and biting his lip, however, Roosevelt managed to tamp down his anger.

  The president was impressed and astonished by John Mitchell’s discipline: how, regardless of provocation, “Mitchell behaved with great dignity and moderation,” never once losing his temper. In so doing, he “towered above” them all. When Roosevelt asked the union leader to respond to the charge the owners had made of wanton violence and murder, Mitchell acknowledged straight off that seven deaths had occurred. “No one regrets them more than I do. However, three of these deaths were caused by management’s private police forces, and no charges have been leveled in the other four cases. I want to say, Mr. President that I feel very keenly the attack made upon me and my people, but I came here with the intention of doing nothing and saying nothing that would affect reconciliation.”

  A sense of failure pervaded the room. Roosevelt tried one final time to resolve the conflict, asking the owners once again if they would submit the conflict to a presidential tribunal. “NO,” they chimed in unison. Adamantly, they refused “to have any dealings of any nature with John Mitchell.” And with that, the conference came to an abrupt close. As the conferees filed out, the coal barons provided their own account to the press, reveling “in the fact that they had ‘turned down’ both the miners and the President.” In a note to Mark Hanna, Roosevelt acknowledged: “Well, I have tried and failed. I feel downhearted over the result.” Yet if the conference had failed, a plan to salvage something from that failure was already under way.

  Document proceedings each step of the way.