Mark Hanna was another. As owner of bituminous coal mines, he had had a large experience with striking miners. He had tried the old-fashioned lock-out, negotiation with the miners' union and the substitution of green men for the old miners, with the purpose of breaking up a strike or ending a lock-out. He had come to the conclusion that of all of them, negotiation with the miners' union was on the whole the best plan. His business experience was now joined to his political standing and he gave the benefit of both to the public. Then there was President Roosevelt. With a practical agreement between the three it might have seemed as if a resolution were easy; and they had to deal with only six organizations as through mining and railroad combinations, the whole business of mining anthracite coal may have been said to be centered in these six, chief of whom was George F. Baer, President of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company as well as of the Railroad Company. Baer, a self-made man, a lawyer by profession, seems to have dominated all the rest and even for a time to have prevailed over J. P. Morgan who had great influence with all of the coal operators. The bituminous coal miners in session at Indianapolis during July, 1902, decided against a sympathetic strike, for the reason that they had a contract with the producers not expiring until the following April; but although living up to their contract, they arranged to give to their brothers in the anthracite region the largest amount possible of material assistance which enabled them to prolong the strike. Thus affairs continued during the summer of 1902. There was a dead-lock between the miners and producers. When September came, the public in eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and New England began to be alarmed regarding their supply of anthracite coal, as on that depended practically their domestic use. Much pressure was brought to bear that in some way the matter be settled so that the public should have their usual supply. Of this pressure the greatest amount was on the President, who appreciated thoroughly the gravity of the situation, and on September 27 wrote to Senator Hanna: "What gives me the greatest concern at the moment is the coal famine. Of course we have nothing to do whatever with this coal strike and no earthly responsibility for it. But the public at large will tend to visit on our heads responsibility for the shortage in coal. . . . But I do most earnestly feel that from every consideration of public policy and good morals, the operators should make some slight concession." 1 No one after the President bore so important a part in this matter as did Mark Hanna. He had temporarily settled the anthracite coal strike of 1900, had now become chairman of the Industrial Department of the Civic Federation, whose object was to prevent strikes and lockouts through trade agreements by means of collective bargaining. This position gave him an added influence with the men. He shared the President's "anxiety in regard to the coal situation." Visiting him at Oyster Bay he went thence to New York City where he saw Mitchell and Morgan. He obtained from Morgan a proposition of settlement which Mitchell, on behalf of 1 Life of Hanna, Croly, 397. As to Hanna's connection with the Civic Federation see Croly, 390 et seg. the miners, agreed to accept. "I really felt encouraged," he wrote to the President, "to think that I was about to accomplish a settlement. I went to Philadelphia and saw Mr. Baer and to my surprise he absolutely refused to entertain it." 1 Apparently at this time Baer was the master of the situation. He maintained that the operators must control their own business and not allow any dictation from a miners' union. To the demand for arbitration their reply was, "We have nothing to arbitrate." Hanna felt that the operators were determined on starving the miners to submission which seemed to him difficult as they were "getting abundant supplies from their fellowworkmen all over the country." Roosevelt appreciated every point in the situation. On the same day that he wrote to Hanna, he wrote to Senator Lodge. The operators "have said that they are never going to submit again to having their laborers given a triumph over them for political purposes, as Senator Hanna secured the triumph in 1900. They are now repeating with great bitterness that they do not intend to allow Quay to bully them into making any concession for his political ends any more than they would allow Hanna to do it for his." Roosevelt, however, made up his mind to leave nothing undone. He invited representatives of the operators and miners to meet him in Washington on October 3, and on their assembling, he made them a brief address, telling them that he was impelled to his action by "the urgency and the terrible nature of the catastrophe impending 1 Hanna's letter of Sept. 29, Croly, 398. ' Bishop, i. 200. over a large portion of our people in the shape of a winter fuel famine." The story of the Conference is told by the President in a letter of October 3 to Hanna. "Well! I have tried and failed," he wrote. "I feel downhearted over the result both because of the great misery ensuing for the mass of our people and because the attitude of the operators will beyond a doubt double the burden on us who stand between them and socialistic action. . . . At the meeting to-day the operators assumed a fairly hopeless attitude. None of them appeared to such advantage as Mitchell, whom most of them denounced with such violence and rancor that I felt he did very well to keep his temper. Between times they insulted me for not preserving order." Mitchell proposed "that all matters in dispute be submitted to the arbitration of a tribunal selected by the President." 2 The President continued in his letter to Hanna, "If the operators had acceded to Mitchell's proposition, I intended to put you on the commission or board of arbitration. But the operators declined to accede to the proposition. . . . A coal famine in the winter is an ugly thing and I fear we shall see terrible suffering and grave disaster." 3 Now entered upon the scene Grover Cleveland. He read in the newspaper of October 4 the account of the Conference of the preceding day and in a private letter to the President expressed himself as "especially disturbed and vexed by the tone and substance of the operators' deliverances." He suggested that for the moment the proprietors and miners sink their present controversy, produce coal sufficient "to serve the necessities of con2 Organized Labor, Mitchell, 387. $ Croly, 398. 1 Bishop, i. 203. sumers" and afterwards "take up the fight again where they left off 'without prejudice."" Roosevelt was glad to receive such a letter; he had been studying Cleveland's and Olney's action in the Pullman car strike 1 and he expected to act with the same firmness that they had shown. Now he told Cleveland that the operators "refused point blank" to consider Mitchell's proposition of arbitration, and he had substantially adopted the suggestion of the letter. On October 6 the President proposed that if the men would go to work, he would appoint a commission to determine matters in dispute promising to do all in his power to have what legislation they proposed enacted. This offer was refused by Mitchell for what he deemed good and sufficient reasons.2 The President was not especially pleased that his plan to settle the trouble was thus rejected by Mitchell but this feeling was soon overcome by his irritation at the standpoint of the operators; he now proposed to ask Carroll D. Wright, United States Commissioner of Labor, and two eminent men to make a thorough investigation and to say how the dispute should be settled. He earnestly begged Cleveland to be one of the three. Receiving the Ex-President's assent on October 13, he "immediately wrote to a certain Federal judge asking him to be the third member of the Commission." As the investigation would consume considerable time, the President determined that operations should begin at once, so he arranged with Senator Quay to have the governor of Pennsylvania notify him that he could not keep order in the coal regions without Federal interference. Then 1 See viii. 424. Organized Labor, 388. |