Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [162]
Emerging from the White House, he made an official statement of policy on the canal situation. He said that Roosevelt would refrain from action “as long as there was the least possible hope” of a change of mind by the Colombian Congress. The President, Moody stressed, “takes the ground that this is a most important question, and the final decision is a decision for centuries.”
HAVING THUS TRIED to dispel rumors that he wished to use force against Colombia, Roosevelt braced himself for a showdown with Samuel Gompers and other executives of the American Federation of Labor. He scheduled their visit for an unusually late hour—after dinner—and made a thorough study of the Government Printing Office case, which was sure to be an item on the agenda. His instinct was to give Gompers “a good jolt.” Labor must be made to understand that it was subject to the same Square Deal as capital, in the Rooseveltian scheme of things.
In this particular matter I would be as incapable of considering my own personal future as if I were facing foreign or civil war, or any other tremendous crisis. It is a sheer waste of time for these people … to threaten me with defeat for the Presidency next year. Nothing would hire me even to accept the Presidency if I had to take it on terms which would mean a forfeiting of self-respect. Just as I should refuse to accept it at the cost of abandoning the Northern Securities suit, or of repealing the trust regulation of last [sic] year, or of undoing what I did in the anthracite coal strike, so I should refuse to take it at the cost of undoing what I did in this matter of Miller and the labor unions.
William A. Miller was the GPO foreman whose dismissal he had overridden as an unjust reprisal for increasing the productivity of the bindery division. Now the bookbinders were trying to get Miller out on morals charges, saying that he kept three wives. Roosevelt, embarrassed, could argue only that the foreman’s morals, or lack thereof, constituted “a new case,” subject to routine review.
This apparent sanction of both the open shop and open marriage was bringing in some of the most hostile mail he had ever received. Unions in more than a dozen states had pledged opposition to his candidacy in 1904. Plainly, he risked losing his most hard-won constituency if he failed to satisfy the AFL delegates. He drafted a “reply” to what he guessed they were going to say, asked Moody, Garfield, and Cortelyou to check it, then had it typed pending release. This document was in his dinner-jacket pocket when Gompers came to the White House at 9:15, accompanied by four aides.
One of them was John Mitchell, shockingly changed from the handsome union executive of one year before. Mitchell’s eyes were hollow from drink, his body had thickened, and a hernia stiffened his gait. For all the fame he had won in the great strike, his miners were still unrecognized and overworked, their 10 percent raise already eroded by inflation.
Roosevelt sized Gompers up as “a sleek article,” and found that he could handle him with ease. The AFL leader was plainly anxious to avoid a confrontation in threatening economic times. Not until toward the end of a general review of labor matters did Gompers drop the name Miller, enabling Roosevelt to produce his statement.
“I thank you and your committee for your courtesy,” the President read aloud, “and I appreciate the opportunity to meet with you.” They had to hear him out.
I ask you to remember that I am dealing purely with the relation of the government to its employees. I must govern my action by the laws of the land, which I am sworn to administer, and which differentiate