Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [21]
These boys began their careers at eight or nine, picking splinters of slate out of the coal breakers until their hands were scarred for life. These men worked coal ten hours a day, six days a week. They ate coal dust in their bread and drank it in their milk; they breathed it and coughed it. At forty or forty-five, most were so ravaged by black-lung disease that they had to return to the breakers to pick slate with their grandchildren, contracting fresh black scars until they died.
Roosevelt understood enough about social repression to sense that today’s contempt for the unskilled worker was tomorrow’s likely revolution. Trade-union membership had more than doubled in the last five years. Sullen miners personally fueled most of the nation’s industrial machine. In his opinion, “the labor question” was the greatest problem confronting twentieth-century America, “the most far-reaching in its stupendous importance.” He had been saying so since the United Mine Workers (UMW) first struck the Pennsylvania anthracite mines in 1900. How worried Hanna had been that bloodshed might prevent McKinley’s re-election! The Senator had wheedled both sides to an interim contract. Today’s New York Sun noted that this modus vivendi was to expire in six months. Passion was building in the pits: if the UMW was not soon recognized as a bargaining agent by the mine operators, the next coal strike could be violent enough to obliterate memories of the Haymarket Riot.
Roosevelt had been violently inclined himself in Haymarket days. He had fantasized leading a band of riflemen against the rioters, and shooting them into submission. But middle age, and the democratizing effect of war, had moderated his attitude toward organized labor.
PILLARS OF HEMLOCK and pine rose on either side of the train, suffusing it in cool gloom. Here and there a shaft of light fell vertically (for the sun stood at noon), disclosing naves and transepts carpeted with needles, cloisters where deer and pheasants sought sanctuary from the hunting season.
Roosevelt was more prone to revere such natural architecture than any Gothic cathedral. Trees were objects of deep spiritual significance to him, especially when they were full of birdsong. He had stocked the bare slopes of Sagamore Hill with elms and chestnuts and oaks and dogwoods, faithful to his family motto, Qui plantavit curabit. The jungles of Cuba had made a soldier of him; the forests of Wyoming had brought him solace after the death of his first wife; the piney air of Maine had cut and soothed the asthma in his teenage lungs. Further back still, in boyhood, were memories of summer nights in the woods, and the sound of a beloved, bass voice reading Last of the Mohicans under fire-reddened branches.
I am sorry the trees have been cut down. Little Teedie Roosevelt had been nine when he wrote that, after some minor act of vandalism in Georgia. As an adult, what was he to make of the wasteland he now began to see in Pennsylvania? The Allegheny forest receded on both sides, leaving only stumps. Soon there was nothing but a fringe of trees on the highest ridges, beyond reach of any saw. Stumps, stumps, and more stumps perforated the landscape, like arrows snapped off in death agony. Most were blackened. Local lumberjacks wanted white pines only—less profitable trees could be burned like weeds. There were no saplings to be seen. With billions more trees beyond the horizon, replanting was a waste of time.
Descent via Emporium Junction and Driftwood revealed even worse devastation. Roosevelt had foreseen just such sterility when Governor of New York: “Unrestrained greed means the ruin of the great woods and the drying up of the sources of the rivers.” These hillsides, which for centuries had absorbed foliage-filtered rainfall,