Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [94]
“But you did, Mr. President. Or so we understood you.”
“I did not say it!” Momentarily forgetting himself, Roosevelt leaned forward. Onlookers below saw his blue-sleeved arm punching the air. “And nothing that I did say could possibly bear that construction.”
Cortelyou read back the stenographic record. Baer proceeded in tones of cool insolence.
“We assume that a statement of what is going on in the coal regions will not be irrelevant.” Roosevelt, perhaps realizing that he had been unfair during the morning, made no protest.
Some fifteen to twenty thousand nonunion miners, Baer informed him, stood ready to provide the public with anthracite coal. But they had been terrorized by Mitchell and his goons. Free men were unable to trade their labor on the open market without being “abused, assaulted, injured, and maltreated.” Operators needed armed guards and police to protect private property—all for fear of a bituminous upstart “whom,” Baer scolded the President, “you invited to meet you.”
Roosevelt stared out of the window, tapping his fingers.
For five months, Baer complained, there had been rampant violence in eastern Pennsylvania, “anarchy too great to be suppressed by the civil power.” Governor Stone’s shoot-to-kill order had had a salutary effect. However, anarchy would return if Mitchell’s men got any “false hopes.”
By now Baer’s German blood was up, and he treated Roosevelt to a political lecture. “The Constitution of the United States requires the President, when requested by the Governor, to suppress domestic violence.” Brushing aside the fact that Stone had not yet asked for help, he guaranteed that he and his colleagues would produce all the anthracite America needed, if they could be assured of federal protection. “The duty of the hour is not to waste time [but] to reestablish order and peace at any cost. Free government is a contemptible failure—”
The phrase free government sounded like a euphemism for your government.
“—is a contemptible failure if it can only protect the lives and property, and secure the comfort of the people, by compromising with the violators of the law and the instigators of violence and crime.”
Baer concluded with a sarcastic rejection of “Mr. Mitchell’s considerate offer to let our men work on terms that he makes.” His tone was so bitter that neither Roosevelt nor the UMW men caught the significance of a last-minute counterproposal: that anthracite labor disputes be referred to local courts “for final determination.”
Obliquely, Baer was accepting Mitchell’s key demand: that the operators submit to the authority of a third power. The line between adjudication and arbitration was thin, and Baer had been forced to choose one side against the other. Contrary to popular impression, he was telling the truth when he said that a 10 percent wage hike would threaten industry profitability. Anthracite mining was a rich but moribund business, vulnerable to extinction if it allowed cheaper, more plentiful bituminous coal to become the Northeast’s fuel of choice. By next spring, if the strike lasted through winter or was too expensively settled, Shenandoah could be on its way to ghosthood, and the Philadelphia & Reading’s freight cars filled with nothing but air.
Roosevelt felt a twinge of sympathy. Baer was a self-made man who had begun work at thirteen. He rightly believed in capital as “the legitimate accumulations of the frugal and the industrious.” Behind his bluster, he could not long deny the necessities of life—work and wages and warmth—to people as desperate as he once had been.
Mitchell, rising to reply, repeated his call for arbitration by a presidential board. He spoke with deliberate softness, looking earnestly into Roosevelt’s eyes. Courteous, flattering phrases floated in the air: much impressed with the views you expressed … deferring to your wishes … accept your award … respectfully yours. He managed to use the second-person singular eleven times in six sentences.
Roosevelt asked the views of the other operators. E. B. Thomas specifically blamed the UMW