Theodore Roosevelt: an Autobiography — Ch 13-Social and Industrial Justice, pt 1

SOCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL JUSTICE

By the time I became President I had grown to feel with deep intensity of conviction that governmental agencies must find their justification largely in the way in which they are used for the practical betterment of living and working conditions among the mass of the people.

I felt that the fight was really for the abolition of privilege; and one of the 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 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, and cannot deal with them on terms of equality.

It therefore becomes necessary for these ordinary individuals to combine in their turn, first in order to act in their collective capacity through that biggest of all combinations called the Government, and second, to act, also in their own self-defense, through private combinations, such as farmers' associations and trade unions.

This the great coal operators did not see.

They did not see that their property rights, which they so stoutly defended, were of the same texture as were the human rights, which they so blindly and hotly denied.

They did not see that the power which they exercised by representing their stockholders was of the same texture as the power which the union leaders demanded of representing the workmen, who had democratically elected them.

They did not see that the right to use one's property as one will can be maintained only so long as it is consistent with the maintenance of certain fundamental human rights, of the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or, as we may restate them in these later days, of the rights of the worker to a living wage, to reasonable hours of labor, to decent working and living conditions, to freedom of thought and speech and industrial representation,--in short, to a measure of industrial democracy and, in return for his arduous toil, to a worthy and decent life according to American standards.

Still another thing these great business leaders did not see.

They did not see that both their interests and the interests of the workers must be accommodated, and if need be, subordinated, to the fundamental permanent interests of the whole community.

No man and no group of men may so exercise their rights as to deprive the nation of the things which are necessary and vital to the common life.

A strike which ties up the coal supplies of a whole section is a strike invested with a public interest.

So great was that public interest in the Coal Strike of 1902, so deeply and strongly did I feel the wave of indignation which swept over the whole country that had I not succeeded in my efforts to induce the operators to listen to reason, I should reluctantly but none the less decisively have taken a step which would have brought down upon my head the execrations of many of "the captains of industry," as well as of sundry "respectable" newspapers who dutifully take their cue from them.

As a man should be judged by his intentions as well as by his actions, I will give here the story of the intervention that never happened.

While the coal operators were exulting over the fact that they had "turned down" the miners and the President, there arose in all parts of the country an outburst of wrath so universal that even so naturally conservative a man as Grover Cleveland wrote to me, expressing his sympathy with the course I was following, his indignation at the conduct of the operators, and his hope that I would devise some method of effective action.

In my own mind I was already planning effective action; but it was of a very drastic character, and I did not wish to take it until the failure of all other expedients had rendered it necessary.

Above all, I did not wish to talk about it until and unless I actually acted.

I had definitely determined that somehow or other act I would, that somehow or other the coal famine should be broken.

To accomplish this end it was necessary that the mines should be run, and, if I could get no voluntary agreement between the contending sides, that an Arbitration Commission should be appointed which would command such public confidence as to enable me, without too much difficulty, to enforce its terms upon both parties.

Ex-President Cleveland's letter not merely gratified me, but gave me the chance to secure him as head of the Arbitration Commission.

I at once wrote him, stating that I would very probably have to appoint an Arbitration Commission or Investigating Commission to look into the matter and decide on the rights of the case, whether or not the operators asked for or agreed to abide by the decisions of such a Commission; and that I would ask him to accept the chief place on the Commission.

He answered that he would do so.

I picked out several first-class men for other positions on the Commission.