• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3115 0

Morgan was responsible for including in the final published Agreement “a statement of the operators’ case that excluded the possibility of recognition of the union.” But the identical statement appears in the original, in Root’s hand. It was, in fact, the “powerful incentive” that Root said produced “a sudden change of front” on the part of the operators (Root to Mark Sullivan, 14 July 1927 [ER]). Wiebe further accuses TR of sabotaging the UMW’s primary objective—recognition—by quoting this statement in his instructions to the Commission. John Mitchell had already withdrawn recognition as a strike demand.

74 It was also calculated TR, Letters, vol. 3, 351; Bishop, Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 1, 205.

75 He stopped under The Washington Post, 14 Oct. 1902.

76 THE “CORSAIR AGREEMENT” George Cortelyou to John Mitchell, 14 Oct. 1902 (TRP); TR, Letters, vol. 3, 365, 351.

77 Mitchell was sure Cornell, Anthracite Coal Strike, 226; TR, Letters, vol. 3, 353.

78 Temptingly, he TR, Letters, vol. 3, 365.

79 Roosevelt cautioned Ibid. TR wrote a detailed memorandum of his conversation with Mitchell to send to Morgan, but did not send it, probably because he was more confident of persuading the financier’s deputies orally than Morgan himself in black and white. See ibid., 351–53.

80 GEORGE PERKINS Lodge, Selections, vol. 1, 540.

81 While they conferred The lightening of TR’s mood is palpable after 13 Oct. 1902 in TRP, passim; Hay, Letters, vol. 3, 258.

82 THE STRIKE, HOWEVER Lodge, Selections, vol. 1, 540; TR, Letters, vol. 3, 366.

83 Roosevelt privately TR, Letters, vol. 3, 357, 366; Lodge, Selections, vol. 1, 539–40. Bacon, a former all-star athlete, had recently suffered a complete nervous and physical collapse. On doctor’s orders he was soon to resign from the House of Morgan. Strouse, Morgan, 443.

84 “I found” TR, Autobiography, 483 (italics added).

85 With a straight TR, Letters, vol. 3, 366.

86 Suspecting, perhaps TR, Autobiography, 484; TR, Letters, vol. 3, 366.

87 Morgan’s men TR, Letters, vol. 3, 366; Elihu Root to TR, 29 June 1903, and TR to Winthrop Murray Crane, 16 Oct. 1902 (TRP). “May Heaven preserve me from ever again dealing with so wooden-headed a set,” TR wrote his sister. Letters from Theodore Roosevelt to Anna Roosevelt Cowles (New York, 1926), 254.

88 SOME WEEKS AFTER Wister Roosevelt, 193.

Chronological Note: It was years before Baer met Wister again and conceded, in milder mood, “About the best thing your friend ever did was to appoint the Coal Strike Commission.” By that time memories of the great strike had mellowed, if not into nostalgia, then at least to mutual forgiveness.

The operators got a 10 percent increase in the price of anthracite, plus permission to go on assessing output the way they always had. The union got its 10 percent wage hike, and a reduction of one to two hours per day in its work quota. Anthracite Coal Commission, Report to the President, 80–87. For a summary of findings, see Cornell, Anthracite Coal Strike, 236–59. For a negative view of the settlement from the point of view of Mitchell and the UMW, see Joe Gowaskie, “John Mitchell and the Anthracite Mine Workers: Leadership Conservatism and Rank-and-File Militancy,” Labor History, winter 1985–1986. The most balanced account of the arbitration is Wiebe, “The Anthracite Coal Strike,” showing that on the whole it profited management more than it did labor.

The UMW had to wait more than a decade for the formal recognition it so desperately traded away, but was compensated by general public recognition. George Baer was to die rich but mocked, unable to expiate his self-anointment as God’s personal representative in eastern Pennsylvania. John Mitchell could look forward to a few years of such idolatry as no labor leader had yet known in the United States, but the strain of the great strike, afflicting his heart and mind, was to lead progressively through melancholy to insomnia to alcoholism (Glück, John Mitchell, 92, 197ff.; Charles A. Madison, American Labor Leaders [New York, 1950], 171–72). He, too, would die rich—having discovered