Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [95]
John Markle stood up next, and angrily loomed over Roosevelt’s wheelchair. “This, Mr. President, is Exhibit A of the operators.” He brandished a newspaper cartoon of the goddess Labor being pursued by hoodlums, while the goddess Justice sat blind and helpless, bound by political cords. “Are you asking us to deal with a set of outlaws?”
Roosevelt was fortunate in being confined to his wheelchair, for he confessed afterward that he would have liked to have taken Markle “by the seat of the breeches and nape of the neck” and thrown him out the window. He stoically endured a further indictment of UMW propaganda by Truesdale, and demands by Willcox for antitrust proceedings against the union. When silence fell at last, he asked Mitchell if he had anything more to say.
It was a crucial moment for the labor leader. Thomas had made serious accusations of homicide, which he must answer for the record. Roosevelt’s eye calmed him.
“The truth of the matter,” Mitchell said, “is, as far as I know, there have been seven deaths. No one regrets them more than I do.” However, three of these deaths were caused by management’s private police forces, and no charges had been leveled in the other four cases. “I want to say, Mr. President, that I feel very keenly the attacks made upon me and my people, but I came here with the intention of doing nothing and saying nothing that would affect reconciliation.”
The air in the room was chill with failure. Roosevelt formally asked if Mitchell’s arbitration proposal was acceptable. To a man, the operators replied, “No.”
OUTSIDE IN LAFAYETTE SQUARE, shadows were lengthening to dusk. The onlookers, especially those up telephone poles and trees, knew things were not going well. They had seen angry gestures, heard once the crash of a fist—Baer’s?—on wood. Now the door of number 22 flew open, and the operators came out grimly en masse. They refused to take press questions. “You may as well talk to that wall,” one of them said, “as to us.” Upstairs, Mitchell and his deputies remained closeted with Roosevelt. Reporters guessed, correctly, that the most urgent colloquy of the day was taking place.
While doctors hovered to check his blood pressure, the President warned Mitchell that any more atrocities, as detailed in the afternoon’s complaints, would warrant federal intervention. In that case he, as Commander-in-Chief of the United States Army, “would interfere in a way which would put an absolute stop to mob violence within twenty-four hours, and put a stop to it for good and all, too.”
The bells of Washington struck five as Mitchell went down into the street, his face blank with despair.
“There is no settlement,” he announced.
“WELL, I HAVE TRIED and failed,” Roosevelt wrote Mark Hanna after the doctors had gone. “I feel downhearted over the result because of the great misery ahead for the mass of our people.” Aides were surprised to find the President not angry. He even tried to find excuses for Baer. As for Mitchell, “I felt he did very well to keep his temper.” Roosevelt agreed with Carroll Wright that the strike reflected injustice on both sides. “What my next move will be I cannot yet say.”
He wanted to see how the American people would react to the official report of the day’s proceedings, which was even now thumping through Government Printing Office presses. It was made available just before midnight. The next morning, Roosevelt sensed such a rush of popular approval as to sweep away any feelings of personal failure.
The national newspapers congratulated him almost unanimously for his courage in calling the conference. Never before, the New York Sun remarked, had a President of the United States mediated the contentions of capital and labor. The New York Mail & Express said his “happily worded” address was one “that any President might have been proud to utter.” John Mitchell won praise for his firmness and good manners,