Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
first stages in the battle was necessarily to fight for the rights of
the workingman. For this reason I felt most strongly that all that the
government could do in the interest of labor should be done. The Federal
Government can rarely act with the directness that the State governments
act. It can, however, do a good deal. My purpose was to make the
National Government itself a model employer of labor, the effort being
to make the per diem employee just as much as the Cabinet officer regard
himself as one of the partners employed in the service of the public,
proud of his work, eager to do it in the best possible manner, and
confident of just treatment. Our aim was also to secure good laws
wherever the National Government had power, notably in the Territories,
in the District of Columbia, and in connection with inter-State
commerce. I found the eight-hour law a mere farce, the departments
rarely enforcing it with any degree of efficiency. This I remedied
by executive action. Unfortunately, thoroughly efficient government
servants often proved to be the prime offenders so far as the
enforcement of the eight-hour law was concerned, because in their zeal
to get good work done for the Government they became harsh taskmasters,
and declined to consider the needs of their fellow-employees who served
under them. The more I had studied the subject the more strongly I had
become convinced that an eight-hour day under the conditions of labor
in the United States was all that could, with wisdom and propriety, be
required either by the Government or by private employers; that more
than this meant, on the average, a decrease in the qualities that tell
for good citizenship. I finally solved the problem, as far as Government
employees were concerned, by calling in Charles P. Neill, the head
of the Labor Bureau; and acting on his advice, I speedily made the
eight-hour law really effective. Any man who shirked his work, who
dawdled and idled, received no mercy; slackness is even worse than
harshness; for exactly as in battle mercy to the coward is cruelty to
the brave man, so in civil life slackness towards the vicious and idle
is harshness towards the honest and hardworking.
We passed a good law protecting the lives and health of miners in the
Territories, and other laws providing for the supervision of employment
agencies in the District of Columbia, and protecting the health
of motormen and conductors on street railways in the District. We
practically started the Bureau of Mines. We provided for safeguarding
factory employees in the District against accidents, and for the
restriction of child labor therein. We passed a workmen's compensation
law for the protection of Government employees; a law which did not
go as far as I wished, but which was the best I could get, and which
committed the Government to the right policy. We provided for an
investigation of woman and child labor in the United States. We
incorporated the National Child Labor Committee. Where we had most
difficulty was with the railway companies engaged in inter-State
business. We passed an act improving safety appliances on railway trains
without much opposition, but we had more trouble with acts regulating
the hours of labor of railway employees and making those railways which
were engaged in inter-State commerce liable for injuries to or the death
of their employees while on duty. One important step in connection with
these latter laws was taken by Attorney-General Moody when, on behalf of
the Government, he intervened in the case of a wronged employee. It
is unjust that a law which has been declared public policy by the
representatives of the people should be submitted to the possibility of
nullification because the Government leaves the enforcement of it to the
private initiative of poor people who have just suffered some crushing
accident. It should be the business of the Government to enforce laws of
this kind, and to appear in court to argue for their constitutionality
and proper enforcement. Thanks to Moody, the Government assumed this
position. The first employers' liability law affecting inter-State
railroads was declared unconstitutional. We got through another, which
stood the test of the courts.
The principle to which we especially strove to give expression, through
these laws and through executive action, was that a right is valueless
unless reduced from the abstract to the concrete. This sounds like a
truism. So far from being such, the effort practically to apply it was
almost revolutionary, and gave rise to the bitterest denunciation of us
by all the big lawyers, and all the big newspaper editors, who, whether
sincerely or for hire, gave expression to the views of the privileged
classes. Ever since the Civil War very many of the decisions of the
courts, not as regards ordinary actions between man and man, but as
regards the application of great governmental policies for social
and industrial justice, had been in reality nothing but ingenious
justification of the theory that these policies were mere high-sounding
abstractions, and were not to be given practical effect. The tendency of
the courts had been, in the majority of cases, jealously to exert their
great power in protecting those who least needed protection and hardly
to use their power at all in the interest of those who most needed
protection. Our desire was to make the Federal Government efficient as
an instrument for protecting the rights of labor within its province,
and therefore to secure and enforce judicial decisions which would
permit us to make this desire effective. Not only some of the Federal
judges, but some of the State courts invoked the Constitution in a
spirit of the narrowest legalistic obstruction to prevent the Government
from acting in defense of labor on inter-State railways. In effect,
these judges took the view that while Congress had complete power as
regards the goods transported by the railways, and could protect wealthy
or well-to-do owners of these goods, yet that it had no power to protect
the lives of the men engaged in transporting the goods. Such judges
freely issued injunctions to prevent the obstruction of traffic in
the interest of the property owners, but declared unconstitutional
the action of the Government in seeking to safeguard the men, and the
families of the men, without whose labor the traffic could not take
place. It was an instance of the largely unconscious way in which the
courts had been twisted into the exaltation of property rights over
human rights, and the subordination of the welfare of the laborer when
compared with the profit of the man for whom he labored. By what I fear
my conservative friends regarded as frightfully aggressive missionary
work, which included some uncommonly plain speaking as to certain unjust
and anti-social judicial decisions, we succeeded in largely, but by no
means altogether, correcting this view, at least so far as the best and
most enlightened judges were concerned.
Very much the most important action I took as regards labor had nothing
to do with legislation, and represented executive action which was not
required by the Constitution. It illustrated as well as anything that
I did the theory which I have called the Jackson-Lincoln theory of the
Presidency; that is, that occasionally great national crises arise which
call for immediate and vigorous executive action, and that in such cases
it is the duty of the President to act upon the theory that he is the
steward of the people, and that the proper attitude for him to take is
that he is bound to assume that he has the legal right to do whatever
the needs of the people demand, unless the Constitution or the laws
explicitly forbid him to do it.
Early in the spring of 1902 a universal strike began in the anthracite
regions. The miners and the operators became deeply embittered, and the
strike went on throughout the summer and the early fall without any sign
of reaching an end, and with almost complete stoppage of mining. In many
cities, especially in the East, the heating apparatus is designed
for anthracite, so that the bituminous coal is only a very partial
substitute. Moreover, in many regions, even in farmhouses, many of the
provisions are for burning coal and not wood. In consequence, the coal
famine became a National menace as the winter approached. In most big
cities and many farming districts east of the Mississippi the shortage
of anthracite threatened calamity. In the populous industrial States,
from Ohio eastward, it was not merely calamity, but the direct disaster,
that was threatened. Ordinarily conservative men, men very sensitive as
to the rights of property under normal conditions, when faced by this
crisis felt, quite rightly, that there must be some radical action. The
Governor of Massachusetts and the Mayor of New York both notified me, as
the cold weather came on, that if the coal famine continued the misery
throughout the Northeast, and especially in the great cities, would
become appalling, and the consequent public disorder so great that
frightful consequences might follow. It is not too much to say that the
situation which confronted Pennsylvania, New York, and New England, and
to a less degree the States of the Middle West, in October, 1902, was
quite as serious as if they had been threatened by the invasion of a
hostile army of overwhelming force.
The big coal operators had banded together, and positively refused
to take any steps looking toward an accommodation. They knew that the
suffering among the miners was great; they were confident that if order
were kept, and nothing further done by the Government, they would win;
and they refused to consider that the public had any rights in the
matter. They were, for the most part, men of unquestionably good private
life, and they were merely taking the extreme individualistic view of
the rights of property and the freedom of individual action upheld in
the _laissez-faire_ political economics. The mines were in the State
of Pennsylvania. There was no duty whatever laid upon me by the
Constitution in the matter, and I had in theory the power to act
directly unless the Governor of Pennsylvania or the Legislature, if
it were in session, should notify me that Pennsylvania could not keep
order, and request me as commander-in-chief of the army of the United
States to intervene and keep order.
As long as I could avoid interfering I did so; but I directed the head
of the Labor Bureau, Carroll Wright, to make a thorough investigation
and lay the facts fully before me. As September passed without any sign
of weakening either among the employers or the striking workmen,
the situation became so grave that I felt I would have to try to do
something. The thing most feasible was to get both sides to agree to a
Commission of Arbitration, with a promise to accept its findings; the
miners to go to work as soon as the commission was appointed, at the old
rate of wages. To this proposition the miners, headed by John Mitchell,
agreed, stipulating only that I should have the power to name the
Commission. The operators, however, positively refused. They insisted
that all that was necessary to do was for the State to keep order, using
the militia as a police force; although both they and the miners asked
me to intervene under the Inter-State Commerce Law, each side requesting
that I proceed against the other, and both requests being impossible.
Finally, on October 3, the representatives of both the operators and the
miners met before me, in pursuance of my request. The representatives of
the miners included as their head and spokesman John Mitchell, who kept
his temper admirably and showed to much advantage. The representatives