Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [96]
Roosevelt tended to agree with the Brooklyn Eagle that the fundamental issue now was “coal and not controversy.” He was inundated with mail demanding a military invasion of the anthracite fields. Some letters, on heavy corporate stationery, reminded him that President Cleveland had not hesitated to break up the 1894 Pullman railroad strike, in the name of free enterprise and private property. Others, misspelled and querulous, besought him to seize the mines “for the people,” under law of eminent domain.
Roosevelt began to empathize with Lincoln at the onset of the Civil War. For the first time in his Presidency, he breathed the alpine air of a great decision. He could not retreat from the height he had assumed on 3 October—not unless he wanted to risk “the most awful riots this country has ever seen.” Only one other living American knew what it was like to be so alone at the peak of power. Or was that man too old and fat to remember, much less care?
As if to reassure him, Grover Cleveland wrote from Princeton, New Jersey. “My dear Mr. President, I read in the paper this morning on my way home from Buzzard’s Bay, the newspaper accounts of what took place yesterday between you and the parties directly concerned in the coal strike.” The patient, spiky, sloping script was the same as it had been when Cleveland had been in the White House, benignly tolerating Roosevelt’s activism as Civil Service Commissioner. “I am so surprised and ‘stirred up’ by the position taken by the contestants that I cannot refrain from making a suggestion.”
This was that Baer and Mitchell would welcome a “temporary escape” from their deadlock, if appealed to in such a way as to make them both look humane. They should be asked to postpone their quarrel long enough to allow the production of anthracite for the winter. Then they could “take up the fight again where they left off.”
Roosevelt, of course, had already suggested much the same thing. Cleveland had always been a bit slow. Nevertheless, his counsel represented eight years of presidential experience. Here was the brute disciplinarian of 1894 recommending reason over force.
“Your letter was a real help and comfort to me,” Roosevelt replied. He declined, however, to issue another appeal, feeling that Baer’s attitude precluded it. “I think I shall now tell Mitchell that if the miners will go back to work I will appoint a commission to investigate the whole situation and will do whatever in my power lies to have the findings of such a commission favorably acted upon.”
Roosevelt did not say which distinguished private citizen he hoped might chair this commission. He merely ended his letter with a reminder that he had been “very glad” to make one of Cleveland’s friends Surgeon General.
JOHN MITCHELL RECEIVED the President’s new proposal doubtfully. He said he would consider it. Roosevelt, meanwhile, was put under medical orders to refrain from further work. He expressed his frustration to the Librarian of Congress:
Dear Mr. Putnam: As I lead, to put it mildly, a sedentary life for the moment I would greatly like some books that would appeal to my queer taste. I do not suppose there are any histories or any articles upon the early Mediterranean races. That man Lindsay who wrote about prehistoric Greece has not put out a second volume, has he? Has a second volume of Oman’s Art of War appeared? If so, send me either or both; if not, then a good translation of Niebuhr and Momsen [sic] or the best modern history of Mesopotamia. Is there a good history of Poland?
Putnam obliged, only to receive a presidential reprimand. “I do not like the Poland. It is too short.”
WHILE ROOSEVELT READ and Mitchell pondered, violence continued to roar in the anthracite valleys. At night, military searchlights played nervously around Shenandoah. “Things are steadily growing worse,” a state trooper reported, “and the future of this region is dark