Theodore Rex (33 page)

Centre Street was dominated by the Philadelphia & Reading station. This depot represented just one node in the ivylike spread of George Baer’s railroad through Schuylkill County. Its steel tendrils linked mineheads and ironworks and slag heaps. Its runner roots carved so deeply into coal seams that the landscape sagged. Every year, it transported some ten million tons of black satiny crystals. Eight other “coal roads” contributed to the anthracite country’s annual production of fifty-five million tons, which heated virtually every house, school, and hospital in the northeastern United States.

Shortly before 6:00
P.M.
, Sheriff Bedall’s deputy was seen walking out of Shenandoah in the direction of the colliery.
He was accompanied by two strangers, one of whom carried a suspicious-looking bundle. A group of picketing strikers confiscated it, and found it to contain miner’s clothing. Screaming “son of a bitch scab!” the strikers beat both strangers unconscious. The deputy took refuge in the Reading depot. Soon five thousand maddened Slavs were besieging him. A bystander tried to go to his aid, and was clubbed to death. Borough policemen managed to bundle the deputy into a locomotive behind the depot. The crowd found out and jammed the rails, whereupon the policemen panicked and began to fire indiscriminately. Waves of Slavs fell wounded. Those with guns of their own fired back. More than one thousand bullets were exchanged before the locomotive churned away. By sunset, Centre Street was in the hands of the mob, and the sheriff sent a desperate telegram to Governor William Stone:
BLOODSHED RAN RIOT IN THIS COUNTRY PROPERTY DESTROYED CITIZENS KILLED AND INJURED SITUATION BEYOND MY CONTROL TROOPS SHOULD BE SENT IMMEDIATELY
.

THE FIRST DISPATCHES
to reach Oyster Bay the next morning were apocalyptic, with stories of policemen being shot through the head and strikers sliced in half by the locomotive. Subsequent accounts reduced the death toll to one, and the list of injured to sixty. Shenandoah was reported to be peacefully under civil control. The
guns and bayonets of Pennsylvania’s National Guard glinted on the hills around town, but Governor Stone made no immediate attempt to invade the valley. He said that federal assistance was neither necessary nor desirable.

This freed Roosevelt to continue his own vacation, although he confessed to feeling increasingly “uneasy.” The Shenandoah riot had made front pages across the country, and editorial comment indicated that sympathy for the miners was beginning to erode. The question was, Were John Mitchell and his men determined enough to bring on a social catastrophe in the fall? And not incidentally, what damage might George Baer and
his
top-hatted cohorts do to Republican prospects in the congressional elections?

Ten thousand bared heads, under beating heat at Scranton on 1 August,
indicated that the miners would endure any discomfort in support of their revered leader. “The one among you who violates the law is the worst enemy you have,” Mitchell lectured them. “I want to impress on you the importance of winning this strike,” he went on, shouting and sweating. “If you win … there will be no more strikes.”

Few among the audience realized that Mitchell was a profound conservative who privately thought most Slavs were “a drove of cattle” and detested the action he was required to lead. His nature shrank from confrontation. He saw himself as a businessman specializing in the business of labor; he believed in negotiated “adjustments” based on sound economic principles. Just as George Baer was in obvious terror that the strike would bankrupt an aging industry, so did Mitchell fear that the union he had built up might disintegrate from attrition. Every day now saw a few hundred more Slavs sell up and head back to Europe.

“
If you lose the strike,” he warned, “you lose your organization.”

For the next two weeks, calm prevailed in the anthracite valleys. To D. L. Mulford, a visitor from Philadelphia, the calm signified not fear but a rocklike resolve. He sensed an equal hardening in the attitude of management, and saw the two sides as millstones grinding helpless consumers between them.

Roosevelt began to toy with similar images for a series of speeches he had to write on problems of capital and labor. On 22 August, he was due to begin a six-hundred-mile circuit of New England, the first of three tours keyed to the fall congressional campaign. Winter coal, or lack of it, was sure to be on the minds of his northern audiences. Yet he hesitated to make direct reference to the strike.

From what he heard, Americans were still concerned more about combinations in general than about the anthracite combination in particular. “I don’t know whether you understand what a feeling there is on the trust question,” wrote a friend, puzzled by the President’s failure to prosecute more holding companies. (International Harvester had just been capitalized at $120 million, under the same New Jersey law that spawned Northern Securities.)

The feeling went both ways, as Attorney General Knox discovered on 8 August, when he stopped at Atlantic City en route to Oyster Bay. That evening in the Garden Café, Knox entertained a small mixed party. The restaurant’s lights were dim, so he was not recognized by three Pennsylvanian trust lords who lurched in for a bottle of wine—evidently not their first of the evening. Millionaires all, they were Charles T. Schoen, of the Pittsburgh Pressed Steel Car Company; Theodore Cramp, of Cramp & Sons, shipbuilders; and Arthur H. Stephenson, of Stephenson Yarns. A boozy male conversation ensued. Schoen’s voice was particularly loud. (Some years before,
Knox’s law firm had been involved in a suit to oust Schoen from his job.) After a few minutes, the headwaiter brought him a message: “Attorney-General Knox objects to your noise and vulgar language.”

“The hell he does,” said Schoen, enraged. “I’d like to know what right he has to interfere with us,” the drunken executive blustered, and began a tirade against government antitrust policy. Knox stood up, small and bristling in his dinner suit. He said crisply that he would not tolerate any more “objectionable remarks.” Cramp and Stephenson at once offered some of their own. Amid jeers and imprecations, Knox escorted his party out.

As he lightly put it to reporters afterward, “I had such a pressing invitation to go back that I couldn’t resist.” But what ensued had not been funny. According to eyewitnesses, the Attorney General had re-entered the restaurant alone and shaken his finger in Schoen’s face. “You are a blackguard, sir!”

Schoen, too sluggish to rise, had roared back, “You are a cur!” Cramp and Stephenson had jumped up, fists flying, but waiters and bystanders pulled them off, and Knox was escorted out, shaken, bruised, and minus several waistcoat buttons.

He tried to make light of the incident at Sagamore Hill, joking that Schoen probably felt worse than he did. But the incident emphasized the passions with which Roosevelt had to contend. A cartoon on the front page of the
Philadelphia North American
showed the President standing thoughtfully beside the battered, bandaged form of his Attorney General, while three retreating toughs jeered, “Hooray for the trusts!”

AS ALWAYS IN SITUATIONS
involving extremes, Roosevelt’s instinct was to seek out the center. He drafted a major speech on trust policy for delivery in Providence, Rhode Island, balancing it to appeal equally to paupers and plutocrats. Just to make sure about the latter, he forwarded a copy to E. H. Harriman. “
Will you send it back to me with any comments you choose to make?”

The financier, facing years of legal harassment in the
Northern Securities
suit, complied. But he let Roosevelt know what priority a presidential document enjoyed in his office. “
My day has been so much occupied I have not had an opportunity until after five o’clock to read it.”

Some paragraphs on trust control, Harriman wrote, sounded “a little broad,” and might bring on a sudden recession, even depression. A President should work for “understanding and confidence” between Wall Street and the public, not mutual mistrust. Testily, he asked Roosevelt “to have a little patience” and allow the economy to benefit from the recent boom in consolidations, before making “any radical change” in regulatory law.

If Roosevelt needed any further evidence of the arrogance of capital, he
got it on 21 August, when newspapers published George Baer’s reply to a correspondent urging compromise in the coal strike:

This pious protestation touched off a firestorm of ridicule. Baer was accused of blasphemy and hypocrisy. “A good many people think they superintend the earth,”
The New York Times
remarked, “but not many have the egregious vanity to describe themselves as its managing directors.” The
New York Tribune
gave mock thanks that God would be able to manage the strike “through the kindness of the coal operators.”

Roosevelt, about to leave for New England, wistfully asked his Attorney General, “What is the reason we cannot proceed against the coal operators as being engaged in a trust?” Knox replied that until the Supreme Court ruled on
Northern Securities v. U.S
. the Sherman Act was too narrowly drawn to support such a move. As President, he had “no power or duty in the matter.”

THE
SYLPH
STEAMED
across Long Island Sound in glittering sunshine. Roosevelt lounged in a deck chair astern, enjoying the breeze. He sat staring at the green retreating bulk of Sagamore Hill, while Connecticut grew proportionately. The yacht’s wake took with it his last moments of vacation. Thirteen days of campaign duty beckoned, all the way north to Maine: he wanted to get as many Republican congressman as possible elected or re-elected in the fall.

Three traveling aides—George Cortelyou, Assistant Secretary Benjamin F. Barnes, and Captain George A. Lung of the Navy Medical Corps—left the President alone, as did a pool of five reporters, four typists, and two telephonists. But his ubiquitous bodyguard hovered.

Roosevelt had grown fond of William Craig. Time was when Big Bill, an immigrant from Britain, had protected Queen Victoria. Now forty-eight years old, he stood six foot three and was still quick and muscular as a bull. Perhaps his best friend in the world was four-year-old Quentin Roosevelt. They liked to read comics together.