Theodore Rex (32 page)

Having thus briskly disposed of the doctrine of an independent judiciary, Roosevelt left Lodge to send his candidate down, and went for a cruise on the
Mayflower
.

FOG DELAYED THE
President’s return on 24 July. His press detail was marooned with him off Sea Girt, New Jersey, so a tremendously tall stranger was able to arrive at the Oyster Bay station that afternoon, unannounced and unrecognized.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, was not well-known outside legal circles, but his distinction was obvious to anyone, even in mist. Unabashed by his height, he walked with lean, military grace. A ten-inch mustache, whitening (he was sixty-one), swept like a bow wave on either side of his haughty profile. His gaze, clear gray and cool, projected the most original intelligence in American jurisprudence. It was Holmes who, in 1881, had shockingly suggested that most statutes were obsolete by the time they got between leather covers. “The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.… At any given time [it] pretty nearly corresponds … with what is then understood to be convenient.”

In his world there was neither absolute good nor absolute evil—only shifting standards of positive and negative behavior, determined by the majority and subject to constant change. Morality was not defined by God; it was the code a given generation of men wanted to live by. Truth was “what I can’t help believing.” Yesterday’s absolutes must give way to “the felt necessities of the time.”

Theodore Roosevelt, too, “felt” things, if more viscerally.
After returning to Oyster Bay on the twenty-fifth, he received Holmes (who had stayed over at Sagamore Hill) and saw, or thought he saw, a healthy bias against “big railroad men and other members of large corporations.” Here was a man who evidently believed—always had believed—that the executive and legislative branches of government should have precedence over the judiciary in controlling natural democratic developments.
Roosevelt agreed with Lodge that Holmes, well-bred, learned, and forceful, was “our kind right through.”

HOLMES RETURNED TO
Boston unsure of his fate, but a letter appointing him to the Supreme Court arrived within days. He accepted it neither humbly nor vainly, but as an earned consequence of forty years of hard work. Although he agreed to keep quiet, pending the official announcement, he could not resist teasing his wife about moving to Washington in December. “
We shall have to dine with the President. In tails, Fanny, and white satin.”

AS AUGUST APPROACHED
, sardonic new verses attached themselves to America’s reigning hit, sounding a note of folk concern clearly audible to the President, despite his isolation on Sagamore Hill.

Grotesque as it was to think of domestic heat when every noon required another trip to the icehouse (crickets crouching in damp nooks; foot-square chunks of frozen pond packed in eelgrass), Roosevelt was aware that a national crisis was building in the coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania.
One hundred and forty-seven thousand anthracite miners had quit work early in the spring, vowing not to return to their jobs in the fall unless management agreed to a substantial increase in wages, and recognized United Mine Workers as their legitimate bargaining representative. The mine operators refused to consider either demand. Now, with eighteen thousand bituminous miners striking in sympathy, and fifty thousand coal-road workers laid off for lack of traffic, the total number of idle men approached a quarter of a million.

Ordinary Americans were only just beginning to realize the superlative dimensions of the crisis. Here was the nation’s biggest union challenging its most powerful industrial combination—a cartel of anthracite railroad operators and absentee “barons” in total control of an exclusive resource. Already it amounted to the greatest labor stoppage in history.
A visiting British economist predicted that if the current standoff lasted until cold weather came, there would be “such social consequences as the world has never seen.”

Roosevelt concluded unhappily that he should not intervene in what was essentially a private dispute between labor and management. Only if the public interest was threatened could he assume emergency powers. So far, the strike had been oddly peaceful. Then at the end of July, just as he was about to announce Judge Holmes’s appointment, violence erupted in the anthracite country.

FOR ELEVEN WEEKS
, the sheriff of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, had patrolled the environs of Shenandoah in anticipation of violence. He and his fellow officers sniffed the carbonic gases leaking from untended mines, and avoided the perpetual flames wavering along dark slopes of culm. Valley after anthracite-packed valley seemed to be smoldering with discontent.

What made Sheriff Bedall nervous was the inscrutability of the striking miners. Most were Slavic, and few spoke English, jabbering away instead in incomprehensible dialects and poring over newspapers apparently printed backward. For “foreigners,” they were clean-living, almost austere. Tens of thousands had sworn off liquor to solemnize the strike; saloons stood empty from Ashland to Tamaqua. In the strangely clear air, women and girls hoed vegetables—preserving extra supplies for the months to come—while men and boys played baseball. Congregations flocking to Mass had the tranquil expressions of pilgrims sure of deliverance.

Only when a young, priestlike figure in black passed their way did the Slavs betray their suppressed passions. They poured from their shacks waving icons of his face, and crowded the wheels of his carriage like pilgrims around a catafalque. With gap-toothed grins and roars they chanted,
“Johnny! Father! Johnny da Mitch!”

John Mitchell, the thirty-two-year-old president of United Mine Workers, encouraged this evangelical treatment by wearing his white collar very high, and buttoning his long black coat to the neck. At every stop on his journey he allowed breaker boys to sit at his feet while he preached the gospel of labor organization. A former coal miner himself, he knew that the credulous masses that looked to him for deliverance needed faith to sustain them. Faith, and
food: these “anthracite people” would be starving already, had he not persuaded their brethren in the bituminous fields to go back to work and pay extra dues to support them.

Swarthy, silent, introspective, and worn, Mitchell calculated the coefficients of patience and time. The strike was now thirteen weeks old, and Mitchell had risked as many concessions as he dared. He had temporarily held pump men, engineers, and firemen to their jobs, so that mines would not flood or explode; he had offered to arbitrate; he had even hinted to Carroll D. Wright, Roosevelt’s Commissioner of Labor, that he would not push union recognition if management agreed to a reduction in the contract workday from ten to eight hours, an equitable system of assessing each miner’s output, and an overall wage increase of 10 percent.

Mitchell’s concessions had been taken as weakness by the financiers who, through mutual ownership of mines and coal-bearing railroads, operated the greatest industrial monopoly in the United States. Their spokesman, George F. Baer of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, declined private communications with Mitchell and addressed him, tauntingly, through the press. “Anthracite mining,” he said, “is a business and not a religious, sentimental, or academic proposition.”

When the miners responded by calling out their remaining brethren in the pump rooms and firehouses, Baer became truculent. They could stay out “six months, or six years,” he blustered. “Cripple industry, stagnate business or tie up the commerce of the world, and we will not surrender.”

So the first seepages began underground, and the culm fires flickered freely. Mitchell, accepting voluntary relief contributions from other labor organizations, gave notice that the conciliatory phase of his strike was over.

Roaming the anthracite valleys, he discounted rumors of nonunion labor being hired out of state. Both he and Mark Hanna (worriedly monitoring the situation from Cleveland) agreed that if the operators did try to break the strike, the result would be such violence as to obliterate all memories of previous bloodshed in mining disputes.

George Baer assumed a pose of haughty indifference. “
The coal presidents are going to settle this strike, and they will settle it in their own way,” he announced on 29 July.

SHENANDOAH WAS QUIET
most of the day following his remarks. Blackened willows bent over the stream oozing between colliery and town; gray-black breakers loomed against the sky, silent and smokeless. Spires and domes of Polish and Greek churches caught the afternoon sun. For all its influx of new immigrants, Shenandoah remained a deeply traditional coal town, haunted by memories of the “Molly Maguire” labor terrorists of a generation before. Here, in 1862, America’s first coal strike had occurred.