Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [78]
HOLMES RETURNED TO Boston unsure of his fate, but a letter appointing him to the Supreme Court arrived within days. He accepted it neither humbly nor vainly, but as an earned consequence of forty years of hard work. Although he agreed to keep quiet, pending the official announcement, he could not resist teasing his wife about moving to Washington in December. “We shall have to dine with the President. In tails, Fanny, and white satin.”
AS AUGUST APPROACHED, sardonic new verses attached themselves to America’s reigning hit, sounding a note of folk concern clearly audible to the President, despite his isolation on Sagamore Hill.
In the good old Summertime,
In the good old Summertime!
The way they’ve raised the price of coal
I don’t like it at all for mine …
Grotesque as it was to think of domestic heat when every noon required another trip to the icehouse (crickets crouching in damp nooks; foot-square chunks of frozen pond packed in eelgrass), Roosevelt was aware that a national crisis was building in the coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania. One hundred and forty-seven thousand anthracite miners had quit work early in the spring, vowing not to return to their jobs in the fall unless management agreed to a substantial increase in wages, and recognized United Mine Workers as their legitimate bargaining representative. The mine operators refused to consider either demand. Now, with eighteen thousand bituminous miners striking in sympathy, and fifty thousand coal-road workers laid off for lack of traffic, the total number of idle men approached a quarter of a million.
Ordinary Americans were only just beginning to realize the superlative dimensions of the crisis. Here was the nation’s biggest union challenging its most powerful industrial combination—a cartel of anthracite railroad operators and absentee “barons” in total control of an exclusive resource. Already it amounted to the greatest labor stoppage in history. A visiting British economist predicted that if the current standoff lasted until cold weather came, there would be “such social consequences as the world has never seen.”
Roosevelt concluded unhappily that he should not intervene in what was essentially a private dispute between labor and management. Only if the public interest was threatened could he assume emergency powers. So far, the strike had been oddly peaceful. Then at the end of July, just as he was about to announce Judge Holmes’s appointment, violence erupted in the anthracite country.
CHAPTER 9
No Power or Duty
MR. HENNESSY What d’ye think iv th’ man down in Pinnsylvania who says th’
Lord an’ him is partners in a coal mine?
MR. DOOLEY Has he divided th’ profits?
FOR ELEVEN WEEKS, the sheriff of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, had patrolled the environs of Shenandoah in anticipation of violence. He and his fellow officers sniffed the carbonic gases leaking from untended mines, and avoided the perpetual flames wavering along dark slopes of culm. Valley after anthracite-packed valley seemed to be smoldering with discontent.
What made Sheriff Bedall nervous was the inscrutability of the striking miners. Most were Slavic, and few spoke English, jabbering away instead in incomprehensible dialects and poring over newspapers apparently printed backward. For “foreigners,” they were clean-living, almost austere. Tens of thousands had sworn off liquor to solemnize the strike; saloons stood empty from Ashland to Tamaqua. In the strangely clear air, women and girls hoed vegetables—preserving extra supplies for the months to come—while men and boys played baseball. Congregations flocking to Mass had the tranquil expressions of pilgrims sure of deliverance.
Only when a young, priestlike figure in black passed their way did the Slavs betray their suppressed