Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [80]
Shortly before 6:00 P.M., Sheriff Bedall’s deputy was seen walking out of Shenandoah in the direction of the colliery. He was accompanied by two strangers, one of whom carried a suspicious-looking bundle. A group of picketing strikers confiscated it, and found it to contain miner’s clothing. Screaming “son of a bitch scab!” the strikers beat both strangers unconscious. The deputy took refuge in the Reading depot. Soon five thousand maddened Slavs were besieging him. A bystander tried to go to his aid, and was clubbed to death. Borough policemen managed to bundle the deputy into a locomotive behind the depot. The crowd found out and jammed the rails, whereupon the policemen panicked and began to fire indiscriminately. Waves of Slavs fell wounded. Those with guns of their own fired back. More than one thousand bullets were exchanged before the locomotive churned away. By sunset, Centre Street was in the hands of the mob, and the sheriff sent a desperate telegram to Governor William Stone: BLOODSHED RAN RIOT IN THIS COUNTRY PROPERTY DESTROYED CITIZENS KILLED AND INJURED SITUATION BEYOND MY CONTROL TROOPS SHOULD BE SENT IMMEDIATELY.
THE FIRST DISPATCHES to reach Oyster Bay the next morning were apocalyptic, with stories of policemen being shot through the head and strikers sliced in half by the locomotive. Subsequent accounts reduced the death toll to one, and the list of injured to sixty. Shenandoah was reported to be peacefully under civil control. The guns and bayonets of Pennsylvania’s National Guard glinted on the hills around town, but Governor Stone made no immediate attempt to invade the valley. He said that federal assistance was neither necessary nor desirable.
This freed Roosevelt to continue his own vacation, although he confessed to feeling increasingly “uneasy.” The Shenandoah riot had made front pages across the country, and editorial comment indicated that sympathy for the miners was beginning to erode. The question was, Were John Mitchell and his men determined enough to bring on a social catastrophe in the fall? And not incidentally, what damage might George Baer and his top-hatted cohorts do to Republican prospects in the congressional elections?
Ten thousand bared heads, under beating heat at Scranton on 1 August, indicated that the miners would endure any discomfort in support of their revered leader. “The one among you who violates the law is the worst enemy you have,” Mitchell lectured them. “I want to impress on you the importance of winning this strike,” he went on, shouting and sweating. “If you win … there will be no more strikes.”
Few among the audience realized that Mitchell was a profound conservative who privately thought most Slavs were “a drove of cattle” and detested the action he was required to lead. His nature shrank from confrontation. He saw himself as a businessman specializing in the business of labor; he believed in negotiated “adjustments” based on sound economic principles. Just as George Baer was in obvious terror that the strike would bankrupt an aging industry, so did Mitchell fear that the union he had built up might disintegrate from attrition. Every day now saw a few hundred more Slavs sell up and head back to Europe.
“If you lose the strike,” he warned, “you lose your organization.”
For the next two weeks, calm prevailed in the anthracite valleys. To D. L. Mulford, a visitor from Philadelphia, the calm signified not fear but a rocklike resolve. He sensed an equal hardening in the attitude of management, and saw the two sides as millstones grinding helpless consumers between them.
Roosevelt began to toy with similar images for a series of speeches he had to write on problems of capital and labor. On 22 August, he was due to begin a six-hundred-mile circuit of New England, the first of three tours keyed to the fall congressional campaign. Winter coal, or lack of it, was sure to be on the minds of his northern audiences. Yet he hesitated to make direct reference to the strike.
From what he heard, Americans were still concerned more about combinations in general