Leadership

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Earlier that morning, before the start of the meeting, Roosevelt had obtained the permission of the conferees, given the gravity of the circumstances, to bring in his stenographer to make a record of the entire proceeding. This would be “the first time since the foundation of the Republic,” one journalist remarked, that a verbatim report of a presidential meeting had ever been recorded.

  No sooner had the conference ended than Roosevelt’s office staff began typing up the stenographer’s shorthand. The transcript was then rushed to the Government Printing Office, which produced a small pamphlet containing all that was said, representing, one journalist marveled, “one of the quickest pieces of work ever turned out by that establishment.” Pamphlets were handed to the press in time for the papers to meet their midnight deadline for publication in the morning edition.

  Control the message in the press.

  As the press exposed the narrative of the conference in front-page stories across the country the next morning, Roosevelt’s sense of failure quickly dissipated. The majority of the press contrasted the president’s patient, courteous, dignified, and evenhanded behavior with the surly demeanor of the coal barons, “who resented in unmistakable terms his interference in what they claimed to be their own business.” As Roosevelt’s opening statement was read in city homes and country farms, the idea that a third party had rights and interests in this “private struggle” gained a powerful grasp on the public. “The President did both a brave and wise thing,” The Outlook editorialized, by bringing the public into the strike as a third party, thus giving “official recognition” to the idea that “its interests are more important than those of either labor or capitalist.”

  Furthermore, as the contrasting tones of John Mitchell and George Baer were read and reread, public sentiment canted overwhelmingly in favor of the miners. With a public relations canniness equal to that of Roosevelt himself, John Mitchell appeared eminently reasonable at all times, exhibiting a willingness to abide by arbitration, demonstrating heartfelt concern over the scattered outbreaks of violence, knowing that in a single day of bloody riot he could forfeit all public sympathy. By contrast, the coal owners appeared intransigent and oblivious to the public welfare.

  In the days that followed, a simplified morality play was enacted in real time before the eyes of the American public: A standoff between the oppressor and the oppressed began to emerge, between the coal barons who arrived at the conference in elaborate carriages staffed by footmen in “plum-colored livery” and the miners who trudged down the street carrying their own grips.

  Certainly, the statements of George Baer did little to bolster the owners’ cause. At one point he even insisted that the rights of the working men would be better protected not by labor agitators but by “Christian men to whom God in his infinite wisdom has given control of the property interests of the country.” His statement, which was reproduced in the press, created widespread condemnation and mockery. “The divine right of kings was bad enough,” scoffed one Boston paper, “but not so intolerable as the doctrine of the divine right of plutocrats.”

  Even if Roosevelt’s decision to hold the conference met with broad public approval, future action was anything but clear. “All Washington is waiting with bated breath to see what the President will do next,” the Washington Times reported, “and undoubtedly the whole country is in the same state of painful suspense.”

  Find ways to relieve stress.

  “I find it pleasant when I have been hard at work at some big state question,” Roosevelt told a friend, “to entirely change the current of my thoughts.” Though possessed of no surpassing athletic gifts, robust activity was his way of keeping mental balance. His letters abound with accounts of raucous tennis matches, strenuous hikes in the wooded cliffs of Rock Creek Park, and numerous efforts to scour up sparring partners to box with him. He regaled his children with comic tales of being “thrown about” by two Japanese wrestlers: “I am not the age or build one would think to be whirled lightly over an opponent’s head and batted down on a mattress without damage but they are so skillful that I’ve not been hurt at all.” Similarly, he relished jousting with his helmeted and armored friends in a game called Singlestick.

  Deprived of such zany exertions by his infected leg, Roosevelt turned with a vengeance to his most reliable recreation—books. From his earliest days, young Roosevelt had found in literature not only diversion but an escape into the lives of others, allowing him to embark vicariously on thrilling adventures, to breathe free, and accomplish great deeds. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that books were the chief building blocks of his identity.

  So now, confined to his wheelchair, he appealed to the librarian of Congress, Herbert Putnam, for “some books that would appeal to my queer taste”—histories of Poland or the early Mediterranean races. Two days later, fully gratified, he wrote to Putnam. “I owe you much! You sent me exactly the books I wished. I am now reveling in Maspero and occasionally make a deviation into Sergis’ theories about the Mediterranean races. . . . It has been such a delight to drop everything useful—everything that referred to my duty—everything, for instance, relating to the coal strike . . . and to spend an afternoon in reading about the relations between Assyria and Egypt; which could not possibly do me any good and in which I reveled accordingly.”

  Be ready with multiple strategies; prepare contingent moves.

  In the wake of the failed conference, Roosevelt’s activity markedly quickened. If the several plans he now contemplated differed in the degree and severity of executive interference (ranging from demonstration to persuasion to coercion), they all shared the same goal: to protect the public from the lack of fuel once plummeting temperatures enveloped the region. The situation that had troubled him in both spring and summer had come to pass in a full-blown crisis.

  “There was beginning to be ugly talk of a general sympathetic strike,” Roosevelt recalled in a letter to Senator Crane, “which would have meant a crisis only less serious than the civil war.” The entire nation would come to a standstill. Roosevelt confided to Knox and Root that he was contemplating a far-reaching action that “would form an evil precedent.” He would take this radical action “most reluctantly,” but he was determined to do whatever was necessary to protect the citizens from “suffering and chaos.” This plan must remain secret until he was ready to set it in motion. At that point, just as Lincoln had readily permitted his cabinet officials to file written objections to his Emancipation Proclamation, so Roosevelt instructed both Knox and Root, the only two cabinet members apprised of the plan, to “write letters of protest against it if they wished, so as to free themselves from responsibility.” He would act on his own as commander in chief, “just as if we were in a state of war.”

  As Roosevelt figured out details of his radical plan, he pressed ahead on two less extreme fronts. “It is never well to take drastic action,” he liked to say, “if the result can be achieved with equal efficiency in less drastic fashion.” His crisis management team suggested that pressure be brought to bear on Pennsylvania governor William A. Stone to send state troops into the coalfields to test the operators’ claim that tens of thousands of miners would “flock back to the mines” if protected from union intimidation. While the operators’ inflexibility had inflamed public sentiment, this one claim had “made quite an impression throughout the country.” Because he represented and advocated for the public rather than for either capital or labor, Roosevelt recognized the importance of verifying the operators’ contentions.

  Governor Stone agreed to deploy the state troops, and within thirty-six hours the entire body of the Pennsylvania State Guard reached the coalfields. The days that followed loudly demonstrated the fallacy of the operators’ claim. No more than “a trifling” number of miners showed up to work; the overwhelming majority decided to remain on strike until a decent settlement was reached.

  With “not the slightest sign of an end to the strike,” Roosevelt readied a second plan—t
he creation of a Blue Ribbon Commission to investigate the causes of the strike and make recommendations for both executive and legislative action. Scrambling once again to find warrant for such intervention, he argued he was empowered by his constitutional duty to report to Congress on the state of the Union. To lend the prospective commission gravity, he needed distinguished names. “In all the country,” he flatteringly confided to former Democratic president Grover Cleveland, “there is no man whose name would add such weight to this inquiry as would yours.”

  In truth, the proposed commission possessed more ribbons than authority, for there was no means to enforce its findings. Nonetheless, the prospect of a Blue Ribbon Commission was more than a simple replication of Wright’s earlier investigation, for it signaled bipartisan support at the approach of the midterm elections and, most importantly, supplied a persuasive instrument to build “the strongest possible bulwark of public opinion” should Roosevelt find it necessary to deploy the harshest, most problematic, and least desirable of his plots to compel the ending of the strike.

  Don’t hit unless you have to, but when you hit, hit hard.

  It was now mid-October. Weeks would pass before the Blue Ribbon Commission could be assembled, conduct and complete an investigation, and issue its findings. By then, it might well be too late. Roosevelt knew that even after the strike ended, it would take time for coal to be mined and the supply restocked. Urgently needful action was no longer counted in weeks or even days, but in hours. “Wherever the fault might lie the present system of management had failed,” Roosevelt asserted, “and the needs of the country would brook no delay in curing the failure.” His strategy of “last resort” was to organize an invasion of the coalfields with ten thousand regular army troops under “a first-rate general.” The troops would “dispossess the operators” and run the mines as a receiver for the government until such time as a settlement could be reached.

  For this formidable task, he summoned retired general John M. Schofield, the right mixture of “good sense, judgment, and nerve to act.” Roosevelt secured the general’s agreement to pay “no heed to any authority, judicial or otherwise,” except his own as “Commander-in-Chief.” In the event “the operators went to court and had a writ served on him, [Schofield] would do as was done under Lincoln, and simply send the writ on to the President.” If the strikers tried to prevent coal from being mined, he would bring the full weight of federal force to bear upon them. Simultaneously, the federal troops would maintain law and order among the miners and divest the operators of their property.

  To create the chain of communications required to activate such a strategy, Roosevelt brought Pennsylvania senator Matthew Quay to the temporary White House. Without divulging details of the seizure portion of the plot, he asked Quay to arrange with Pennsylvania’s Governor Stone that whenever the president “gave the word,” the governor should formally request federal troops, thus triggering the sole constitutional power a president had to intervene—the power to keep order. The signal to start the chain of communications would come in the form of a presidential telegram with the inconspicuous message: “The time for the request has come.” Roosevelt assured Quay that once federal troops were deployed, he, himself, would take full responsibility for all that subsequently transpired. Indeed, the senator should feel “perfectly welcome” later on, if the ensuing action sufficiently vexed him, to institute impeachment proceedings! The audacious plan exemplified one of Roosevelt’s favorite maxims: “Don’t hit till you have to, but, when you do hit, hit hard.”

  Was Roosevelt bluffing? Some believe that Roosevelt never intended to carry out his radical plan. After all, the far less invasive measures already taken had provoked shrill charges of the “usurpation of power.” Nor was it clear how the coal would actually be mined. Would the miners return once the government acted as receiver? If not, would the government attempt to mobilize nonunion miners? If the owners of the coal-carrying railroads were dispossessed, how could coal be transported to the eastern seaboard? There is no evidence that any work had been done to determine exactly how to prime the great machinery of coal production and distribution.

  Yet, everything we know about Roosevelt’s temperament suggests that he was not bluffing. Although he had exhibited an exemplary caution and patience throughout the strike, the situation had reached a state of acute danger to the people he was pledged to protect. When the people needed help, Roosevelt’s spirit could not tolerate “any implication that the government of the United States was helpless.” This was the motive heart of his iconoclasm. For this, he was ready and willing to break precedents. For this, he would risk his leadership. “I am Commander in Chief of the Army,” he flatly declared. “I will give the people coal.”

  Theodore Roosevelt later contended that his scheme of military seizure of the coal mines provided the long-sought key to the resolution of the strike. Threat of “the intervention that never happened” provided the “big stick” that Elihu Root carried with him to New York, where he met with J. P. Morgan for five hours aboard his private yacht, the Corsair. If anyone could bring the operators to the table before the launch of a massive military invasion that nobody wanted, it was J. P. Morgan, the original architect of the powerful coal trust.

  Find ways to save face.

  Before taking the midnight sleeper to New York, Secretary of War Root told Roosevelt he had figured out a way for the operators “to get out of the impasse without humiliation,” but needed “entire freedom” to negotiate with Morgan. That would be possible only if he went to New York as a private citizen, “an interloper” on his own behalf, rather than the president’s official representative. Roosevelt gave his blessing. Despite Root’s conditions, he was clearly no ordinary citizen on this visit, but the president’s most intimate cabinet adviser, imbued with the aura of Roosevelt’s leadership.

  Root had parsed the stenographer’s notes from the October 3 conference at which the cadre of operators had flatly refused to consider Mitchell’s suggestion of a presidential commission to arbitrate the issues. Beneath the downright negativity of the operators, Root detected not an opposition to arbitration per se, but an unwillingness to accept any suggestion put forth by Mitchell himself. The union leader represented a frontal challenge to their authority, a threat to the basic assumptions of their financial worldview. “There cannot be two masters in the management of the business,” George Baer repeatedly said.

  “The bones of it struck you in the eye for anyone who has been in litigation of this description,” Root later said. What if the owners themselves advocated the idea of arbitration, allowing them to maintain the fiction they were not dealing directly with Mitchell? Anchored aboard the Corsair, Root and Morgan drafted a memorandum to be signed by the operators. “We suggest,” the draft memo proposed, “a commission be appointed by the President (if he is willing to perform that public service) to whom shall be referred all questions at issue,” and “the decision of that commission shall be accepted by us.” Root later acknowledged that “it was a damn lie” to attribute ownership of the originating arbitration idea to the operators when it was clearly Mitchell’s idea. It “looked fair on paper,” however, and somewhat soothed the operators’ egos.

  That evening, Root took the return train to Washington while Morgan brought the memorandum to a meeting of owners at the Union Club. The situation was about to boil over, Morgan warned. A military plan for taking over their mines was well in the works. Agreement to arbitrate would derail that plan. Reluctant, but fully aware of the consequences of further delay, the owners grudgingly signed the agreement with the added stipulation that the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission be comprised of five members chosen from specific categories: a military officer, an expert mining engineer, a Pennsylvania judge, a businessman familiar with mining and selling coal, and an eminent sociologist.

  Upon receiving the signed agreement from Morgan, Roosevelt immediately spotted a glaring, crippling absence of any category representing labor
. Nonetheless, “in view of the great urgency of the case,” Roosevelt sought to persuade Mitchell to accept, trusting that as president of the commission, he would choose first-class, exceptionally fair-minded men to fill each of the five categories. Mitchell had indeed come to trust the president but argued that he could never gain the miners’ approval without a labor man on the commission. In a dispute between labor and capital, labor self-evidently must have a seat at the table. Mitchell also requested that the commission be expanded to include a Catholic bishop, since the majority of the miners were Catholic.

  Through Root, Roosevelt sent word to Morgan that he needed someone from the House of Morgan to come to Washington posthaste to reopen negotiations. That same evening, with Roosevelt now hobbling around on crutches, two of Morgan’s young partners arrived at the temporary White House with full authority to negotiate for the owners, who had convened at Morgan’s office. For a frantic three hours over an open phone line, the young partners tried to extract the owners’ consent to add the two extra men. While the owners might consider adding a Catholic prelate, under no circumstances would they acquiesce to a labor man.

  “It looked as if a deadlock were inevitable,” Roosevelt recalled. “They had worked themselves into a frame of mind where they were prepared to sacrifice everything and see civil war rather than back down.” Then, as midnight drew nigh, imminent tragedy turned to farce. “Suddenly it dawned on me,” Roosevelt said, “that they were not objecting to the thing, but to the name. I found they did not mind my appointing any man, whether he was a labor man or not, so long as he was not appointed as a labor man,” so long as the appointment somehow fell under one of the five agreed-upon titles. To fill the “eminent sociologist” slot, Roosevelt promptly suggested labor leader E. E. Clark, the head of the Order of Railway Conductors. “I shall never forget the mixture of relief and amusement I felt when I thoroughly grasped the fact that while they would heroically submit to anarchy rather than have Tweedledum, yet if I would call it Tweedledee they would accept with rapture.”