Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
hand, and to Messrs. Moyer, Haywood and Debs on the other, as being
equally undesirable citizens. It is as foolish to assert that this was
designed to influence the trial of Moyer and Haywood as to assert that
it was designed to influence the suits that have been brought against
Mr. Harriman. I neither expressed nor indicated any opinion as to
whether Messrs. Moyer and Haywood were guilty of the murder of Governor
Steunenberg. If they are guilty, they certainly ought to be punished.
If they are not guilty, they certainly ought not to be punished. But no
possible outcome either of the trial or the suits can affect my judgment
as to the undesirability of the type of citizenship of those whom I
mentioned. Messrs. Moyer, Haywood, and Debs stand as representatives of
those men who have done as much to discredit the labor movement as the
worst speculative financiers or most unscrupulous employers of labor and
debauchers of legislatures have done to discredit honest capitalists and
fair-dealing business men. They stand as the representatives of those
men who by their public utterances and manifestoes, by the utterances of
the papers they control or inspire, and by the words and deeds of those
associated with or subordinated to them, habitually appear as guilty of
incitement to or apology for bloodshed and violence. If this does
not constitute undesirable citizenship, then there can never be any
undesirable citizens. The men whom I denounce represent the men who
have abandoned that legitimate movement for the uplifting of labor, with
which I have the most hearty sympathy; they have adopted practices which
cut them off from those who lead this legitimate movement. In every way
I shall support the law-abiding and upright representatives of labor,
and in no way can I better support them than by drawing the sharpest
possible line between them on the one hand, and, on the other hand,
those preachers of violence who are themselves the worst foes of the
honest laboring man.
Let me repeat my deep regret that any body of men should so far forget
their duty to the country as to endeavor by the formation of societies
and in other ways to influence the course of justice in this matter.
I have received many such letters as yours. Accompanying them
were newspaper clippings announcing demonstrations, parades, and
mass-meetings designed to show that the representatives of labor,
without regard to the facts, demand the acquittal of Messrs. Haywood and
Moyer. Such meetings can, of course, be designed only to coerce court
or jury in rendering a verdict, and they therefore deserve all the
condemnation which you in your letters say should be awarded to those
who endeavor improperly to influence the course of justice.
You would, of course, be entirely within your rights if you merely
announced that you thought Messrs. Moyer and Haywood were "desirable
citizens"--though in such case I should take frank issue with you and
should say that, wholly without regard to whether or not they are guilty
of the crime for which they are now being tried, they represent as
thoroughly undesirable a type of citizenship as can be found in this
country; a type which, in the letter to which you so unreasonably take
exception, I showed not to be confined to any one class, but to exist
among some representatives of great capitalists as well as among some
representatives of wage-workers. In that letter I condemned both types.
Certain representatives of the great capitalists in turn condemned
me for including Mr. Harriman in my condemnation of Messrs. Moyer and
Haywood. Certain of the representatives of labor in their turn condemned
me because I included Messrs. Moyer and Haywood as undesirable citizens
together with Mr. Harrison. I am as profoundly indifferent to the
condemnation in one case as in the other. I challenge as a right the
support of all good Americans, whether wage-workers or capitalists,
whatever their occupation or creed, or in whatever portion of the
country they live, when I condemn both the types of bad citizenship
which I have held up to reprobation. It seems to be a mark of utter
insincerity to fail thus to condemn both; and to apologize for either
robs the man thus apologizing of all right to condemn any wrongdoing in
any man, rich or poor, in public or in private life.
You say you ask for a "square deal" for Messrs. Moyer and Haywood. So
do I. When I say "Square deal," I mean a square deal to every one; it is
equally a violation of the policy of the square deal for a capitalist to
protest against denunciation of a capitalist who is guilty of wrongdoing
and for a labor leader to protest against the denunciation of a labor
leader who has been guilty of wrongdoing. I stand for equal justice to
both; and so far as in my power lies I shall uphold justice, whether
the man accused of guilt has behind him the wealthiest corporation, the
greatest aggregations of riches in the country, or whether he has behind
him the most influential labor organization in the country.
I treated anarchists and the bomb-throwing and dynamiting gentry
precisely as I treated other criminals. Murder is murder. It is not
rendered one whit better by the allegation that it is committed
on behalf of "a cause." It is true that law and order are not all
sufficient; but they are essential; lawlessness and murderous violence
must be quelled before any permanence of reform can be obtained. Yet
when they have been quelled, the beneficiaries of the enforcement of
law must in their turn be taught that law is upheld as a means to the
enforcement of justice, and that we will not tolerate its being turned
into an engine of injustice and oppression. The fundamental need in
dealing with our people, whether laboring men or others, is not charity
but justice; we must all work in common for the common end of
helping each and all, in a spirit of the sanest, broadest and deepest
brotherhood.
It was not always easy to avoid feeling very deep anger with the
selfishness and short-sightedness shown both by the representatives of
certain employers' organizations and by certain great labor federations
or unions. One such employers' association was called the National
Association of Manufacturers. Extreme though the attacks sometimes made
upon me by the extreme labor organizations were, they were not quite
as extreme as the attacks made upon me by the head of the National
Association of Manufacturers, and as regards their attitude toward
legislation I came to the conclusion toward the end of my term that the
latter had actually gone further the wrong way than did the former--and
the former went a good distance also. The opposition of the National
Association of Manufacturers to every rational and moderate measure
for benefiting workingmen, such as measures abolishing child labor, or
securing workmen's compensation, caused me real and grave concern; for
I felt that it was ominous of evil for the whole country to have men who
ought to stand high in wisdom and in guiding force take a course and use
language of such reactionary type as directly to incite revolution--for
this is what the extreme reactionary always does.
Often I was attacked by the two sides at once. In the spring of 1906 I
received in the same mail a letter from a very good friend of mine who
thought that I had been unduly hard on some labor men, and a letter from
another friend, the head of a great corporation, who complained about me
for both favoring labor and speaking against large fortunes. My answers
ran as follows:
April 26, 1906.
"Personal. _My dear Doctor_:
"In one of my last letters to you I enclosed you a copy of a letter of
mine, in which I quoted from [So and so's] advocacy of murder. You may
be interested to know that he and his brother Socialists--in reality
anarchists--of the frankly murderous type have been violently attacking
my speech because of my allusion to the sympathy expressed for murder.
In _The Socialist_, of Toledo, Ohio, of April 21st, for instance, the
attack [on me] is based specifically on the following paragraph of my
speech, to which he takes violent exception:
"We can no more and no less afford to condone evil in the man of capital
than evil in the man of no capital. The wealthy man who exults because
there is a failure of justice in the effort to bring some trust magnate
to an account for his misdeeds is as bad as, and no worse than, the
so-called labor leader who clamorously strives to excite a foul class
feeling on behalf of some other labor leader who is implicated in
murder. One attitude is as bad as the other, and no worse; in each case
the accused is entitled to exact justice; and in neither case is there
need of action by others which can be construed into an expression of
sympathy for crime.
"Remember that this crowd of labor leaders have done all in their
power to overawe the executive and the courts of Idaho on behalf of men
accused of murder, and beyond question inciters of murder in the past."
April 26, 1906.
"_My dear Judge_:
"I wish the papers had given more prominence to what I said as to the
murder part of my speech. But oh, my dear sir, I utterly and radically
disagree with you in what you say about large fortunes. I wish it were
in my power to devise some scheme to make it increasingly difficult to
heap them up beyond a certain amount. As the difficulties in the way
of such a scheme are very great, let us at least prevent their being
bequeathed after death or given during life to any one man in excessive
amount.
"You and other capitalist friends, on one side, shy off at what I say
against them. Have you seen the frantic articles against me by [the
anarchists and] the Socialists of the bomb-throwing persuasion, on the
other side, because of what I said in my speech in reference to those
who, in effect, advocate murder?"
On another occasion I was vehemently denounced in certain capitalistic
papers because I had a number of labor leaders, including miners from
Butte, lunch with me at the White House; and this at the very time that
the Western Federation of Miners was most ferocious in its denunciation
of me because of what it alleged to be my unfriendly attitude toward
labor. To one of my critics I set forth my views in the following
letter:
November 26, 1903.
"I have your letter of the 25th instant, with enclosure. These men, not
all of whom were miners, by the way, came here and were at lunch with
me, in company with Mr. Carroll D. Wright, Mr. Wayne MacVeagh, and
Secretary Cortelyou. They are as decent a set of men as can be. They all
agreed entirely with me in my denunciation of what had been done in the
Court d'Alene country; and it appeared that some of them were on the
platform with me when I denounced this type of outrage three years ago
in Butte. There is not one man who was here, who, I believe, was in
any way, shape or form responsible for such outrages. I find that the
ultra-Socialistic members of the unions in Butte denounced these men for
coming here, in a manner as violent--and I may say as irrational--as the
denunciation [by the capitalistic writer] in the article you sent me.
Doubtless the gentleman of whom you speak as your general manager is
an admirable man. I, of course, was not alluding to him; but I most
emphatically _was_ alluding to men who write such articles as that you
sent me. These articles are to be paralleled by the similar articles in
the Populist and Socialist papers when two years ago I had at dinner
at one time Pierpont Morgan, and at another time J. J. Hill, and at
another, Harriman, and at another time Schiff. Furthermore, they could
be paralleled by the articles in the same type of paper which at the
time of the Miller incident in the Printing Office were in a condition