Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
of the operators, on the contrary, came down in a most insolent frame of
mind, refused to talk of arbitration or other accommodation of any kind,
and used language that was insulting to the miners and offensive to me.
They were curiously ignorant of the popular temper; and when they went
away from the interview they, with much pride, gave their own account of
it to the papers, exulting in the fact that they had "turned down" both
the miners and the President.
I refused to accept the rebuff, however, and continued the effort to get
an agreement between the operators and the miners. I was anxious to get
this agreement, because it would prevent the necessity of taking
the extremely drastic action I meditated, and which is hereinafter
described.
Fortunately, this time we were successful. Yet we were on the verge of
failure, because of self-willed obstinacy on the part of the operators.
This obstinacy was utterly silly from their own standpoint, and
well-nigh criminal from the standpoint of the people at large. The
miners proposed that I should name the Commission, and that if I put
on a representative of the employing class I should also put on a labor
union man. The operators positively declined to accept the suggestion.
They insisted upon my naming a Commission of only five men, and
specified the qualifications these men should have, carefully choosing
these qualifications so as to exclude those whom it had leaked out I was
thinking of appointing, including ex-President Cleveland. They made the
condition that I was to appoint one officer of the engineer corps of
the army or navy, one man with experience of mining, one "man of
prominence," "eminent as a sociologist," one Federal judge of the
Eastern district of Pennsylvania, and one mining engineer.
They positively refused to have me appoint any representative of labor,
or to put on an extra man. I was desirous of putting on the extra man,
because Mitchell and the other leaders of the miners had urged me
to appoint some high Catholic ecclesiastic. Most of the miners were
Catholics, and Mitchell and the leaders were very anxious to secure
peaceful acquiescence by the miners in any decision rendered, and they
felt that their hands would be strengthened if such an appointment
were made. They also, quite properly, insisted that there should be
one representative of labor on the commission, as all of the others
represented the propertied classes. The operators, however, absolutely
refused to acquiesce in the appointment of any representative of labor,
and also announced that they would refuse to accept a sixth man on the
Commission; although they spoke much less decidedly on this point. The
labor men left everything in my hands.
The final conferences with the representatives of the operators took
place in my rooms on the evening of October 15. Hour after hour went by
while I endeavored to make the operators through their representatives
see that the country would not tolerate their insisting upon such
conditions; but in vain. The two representatives of the operators were
Robert Bacon and George W. Perkins. They were entirely reasonable. But
the operators themselves were entirely unreasonable. They had worked
themselves into a frame of mind where they were prepared to sacrifice
everything and see civil war in the country rather than back down and
acquiesce in the appointment of a representative of labor. It looked as
if a deadlock were inevitable.
Then, suddenly, after about two hours' argument, it dawned on me that
they were not objecting to the thing, but to the name. I found that they
did not mind my appointing any man, whether he was a labor man or
not, so long as he was not appointed _as_ a labor man, or _as_ a
representative of labor; they did not object to my exercising any
latitude I chose in the appointments so long as they were made under the
headings they had given. I shall never forget the mixture of relief
and amusement I felt when I thoroughly grasped the fact that while they
would heroically submit to anarchy rather than have Tweedledum, yet if
I would call it Tweedledee they would accept it with rapture; it gave
me an illuminating glimpse into one corner of the mighty brains of these
"captains of industry." In order to carry the great and vital point and
secure agreement by both parties, all that was necessary for me to do
was to commit a technical and nominal absurdity with a solemn face. This
I gladly did. I announced at once that I accepted the terms laid down.
With this understanding, I appointed the labor man I had all along
had in view, Mr. E. E. Clark, the head of the Brotherhood of Railway
Conductors, calling him an "eminent sociologist"--a term which I doubt
whether he had ever previously heard. He was a first-class man, whom
I afterward put on the Inter-State Commerce Commission. I added to the
Arbitration Commission, on my own authority, a sixth member, in the
person of Bishop Spalding, a Catholic bishop, of Peoria, Ill., one of
the very best men to be found in the entire country. The man whom the
operators had expected me to appoint as the sociologist was Carroll
Wright--who really was an eminent sociologist. I put him on as recorder
of the Commission, and added him as a seventh member as soon as
the Commission got fairly started. In publishing the list of the
Commissioners, when I came to Clark's appointment, I added: "As a
sociologist--the President assuming that for the purposes of such a
Commission, the term sociologist means a man who has thought and studied
deeply on social questions and has practically applied his knowledge."
The relief of the whole country was so great that the sudden appearance
of the head of the Brotherhood of Railway Conductors as an "eminent
sociologist" merely furnished material for puzzled comment on the part
of the press. It was a most admirable Commission. It did a noteworthy
work, and its report is a monument in the history of the relations of
labor and capital in this country. The strike, by the way, brought me
into contact with more than one man who was afterward a valued friend
and fellow-worker. On the suggestion of Carroll Wright I appointed as
assistant recorders to the Commission Charles P. Neill, whom I afterward
made Labor Commissioner, to succeed Wright himself, and Mr. Edward
A. Moseley. Wilkes-Barre was the center of the strike; and the man in
Wilkes-Barre who helped me most was Father Curran; I grew to know
and trust and believe in him, and throughout my term in office, and
afterward, he was not only my stanch friend, but one of the men by whose
advice and counsel I profited most in matters affecting the welfare of
the miners and their families.
I was greatly relieved at the result, for more than one reason. Of
course, first and foremost, my concern was to avert a frightful calamity
to the United States. In the next place I was anxious to save the great
coal operators and all of the class of big propertied men, of which they
were members, from the dreadful punishment which their own folly would
have brought on them if I had not acted; and one of the exasperating
things was that they were so blinded that they could not see that I was
trying to save them from themselves and to avert, not only for their
sakes, but for the sake of the country, the excesses which would have
been indulged in at their expense if they had longer persisted in their
conduct.
The great Anthracite Strike of 1902 left an indelible impress upon
the people of the United States. It showed clearly to all wise and
far-seeing men that the labor problem in this country had entered upon
a new phase. Industry had grown. Great financial corporations, doing a
nation-wide and even a world-wide business, had taken the place of
the smaller concerns of an earlier time. The old familiar, intimate
relations between employer and employee were passing. A few generations
before, the boss had known every man in his shop; he called his men
Bill, Tom, Dick, John; he inquired after their wives and babies; he
swapped jokes and stories and perhaps a bit of tobacco with them. In the
small establishment there had been a friendly human relationship between
employer and employee.
There was no such relation between the great railway magnates, who
controlled the anthracite industry, and the one hundred and fifty
thousand men who worked in their mines, or the half million women and
children who were dependent upon these miners for their daily bread.
Very few of these mine workers had ever seen, for instance, the
president of the Reading Railroad. Had they seen him many of them could
not have spoken to him, for tens of thousands of the mine workers were
recent immigrants who did not understand the language which he spoke and
who spoke a language which he could not understand.
Again, a few generations ago an American workman could have saved money,
gone West and taken up a homestead. Now the free lands were gone. In
earlier days a man who began with pick and shovel might have come to own
a mine. That outlet too was now closed, as regards the immense majority,
and few, if any, of the one hundred and fifty thousand mine workers
could ever aspire to enter the small circle of men who held in their
grasp the great anthracite industry. The majority of the men who earned
wages in the coal industry, if they wished to progress at all, were
compelled to progress not by ceasing to be wage-earners, but by
improving the conditions under which all the wage-earners in all the
industries of the country lived and worked, as well of course, as
improving their own individual efficiency.
Another change which had come about as a result of the foregoing was a
crass inequality in the bargaining relation between the employer and
the individual employee standing alone. The great coal-mining and
coal-carrying companies, which employed their tens of thousands, could
easily dispense with the services of any particular miner. The miner, on
the other hand, however expert, could not dispense with the companies.
He needed a job; his wife and children would starve if he did not get
one. What the miner had to sell--his labor--was a perishable commodity;
the labor of to-day--if not sold to-day--was lost forever. Moreover,
his labor was not like most commodities--a mere thing; it was part of
a living, breathing human being. The workman saw, and all citizens who
gave earnest thought to the matter saw, that the labor problem was not
only an economic, but also a moral, a human problem. Individually the
miners were impotent when they sought to enter a wage-contract with the
great companies; they could make fair terms only by uniting into trade
unions to bargain collectively. The men were forced to cooperate to
secure not only their economic, but their simple human rights. They,
like other workmen, were compelled by the very conditions under which
they lived to unite in unions of their industry or trade, and these
unions were bound to grow in size, in strength, and in power for good
and evil as the industries in which the men were employed grew larger
and larger.
A democracy can be such in fact only if there is some rough
approximation in similarity in stature among the men composing it. One
of us can deal in our private lives with the grocer or the butcher
or the carpenter or the chicken raiser, or if we are the grocer or
carpenter or butcher or farmer, we can deal with our customers, because
_we are all of about the same size_. Therefore a simple and poor society
can exist as a democracy on a basis of sheer individualism. But a rich
and complex industrial society cannot so exist; for some individuals,
and especially those artificial individuals called corporations, become
so very big that the ordinary individual is utterly dwarfed beside them,