Zoological Society.

The passage of the Act of June 29, 1906, providing for the establishment
of the Grand Canyon Game Preserve of Arizona, now comprising 1,492,928
acres.

The passage of the National Monuments Act of June 8, 1906, under which
a number of objects of scientific interest have been preserved for all
time. Among the Monuments created are Muir Woods, Pinnacles National
Monument in California, and the Mount Olympus National Monument,
Washington, which form important refuges for game.

The passage of the Act of June 30, 1906, regulating shooting in the
District of Columbia and making three-fourths of the environs of the
National Capital within the District in effect a National Refuge.

The passage of the Act of May 23, 1908, providing for the establishment
of the National Bison Range in Montana. This range comprises about
18,000 acres of land formerly in the Flathead Indian Reservation, on
which is now established a herd of eighty buffalo, a nucleus of which
was donated to the Government by the American Bison Society.

The issue of the Order protecting birds on the Niobrara Military
Reservation, Nebraska, in 1908, making this entire reservation in effect
a bird reservation.

The establishment by Executive Order between March 14, 1903, and
March 4, 1909, of fifty-one National Bird Reservations distributed in
seventeen States and Territories from Porto Rico to Hawaii and Alaska.
The creation of these reservations at once placed the United States
in the front rank in the world work of bird protection. Among these
reservations are the celebrated Pelican Island rookery in Indian River,
Florida; the Mosquito Inlet Reservation, Florida, the northernmost home
of the manatee; the extensive marshes bordering Klamath and Malhuer
Lakes in Oregon, formerly the scene of slaughter of ducks for market
and ruthless destruction of plume birds for the millinery trade; the
Tortugas Key, Florida, where, in connection with the Carnegie Institute,
experiments have been made on the homing instinct of birds; and the
great bird colonies on Laysan and sister islets in Hawaii, some of the
greatest colonies of sea birds in the world.

CHAPTER XII

THE BIG STICK AND THE SQUARE DEAL

One of the vital questions with which as President I had to deal was the
attitude of the Nation toward the great corporations. Men who understand
and practice the deep underlying philosophy of the Lincoln school of
American political thought are necessarily Hamiltonian in their belief
in a strong and efficient National Government and Jeffersonian in their
belief in the people as the ultimate authority, and in the welfare
of the people as the end of Government. The men who first applied the
extreme Democratic theory in American life were, like Jefferson, ultra
individualists, for at that time what was demanded by our people was the
largest liberty for the individual. During the century that had elapsed
since Jefferson became President the need had been exactly reversed.
There had been in our country a riot of individualistic materialism,
under which complete freedom for the individual--that ancient license
which President Wilson a century after the term was excusable has called
the "New" Freedom--turned out in practice to mean perfect freedom for
the strong to wrong the weak. The total absence of governmental control
had led to a portentous growth in the financial and industrial world
both of natural individuals and of artificial individuals--that is,
corporations. In no other country in the world had such enormous
fortunes been gained. In no other country in the world was such power
held by the men who had gained these fortunes; and these men almost
always worked through, and by means of, the giant corporations which
they controlled. The power of the mighty industrial overlords of
the country had increased with giant strides, while the methods of
controlling them, or checking abuses by them, on the part of the people,
through the Government, remained archaic and therefore practically
impotent. The courts, not unnaturally, but most regrettably, and to
the grave detriment of the people and of their own standing, had for a
quarter of a century been on the whole the agents of reaction, and by
conflicting decisions which, however, in their sum were hostile to the
interests of the people, had left both the nation and the several
States well-nigh impotent to deal with the great business combinations.
Sometimes they forbade the Nation to interfere, because such
interference trespassed on the rights of the States; sometimes they
forbade the States to interfere (and often they were wise in this),
because to do so would trespass on the rights of the Nation; but always,
or well-nigh always, their action was negative action against the
interests of the people, ingeniously devised to limit their power
against wrong, instead of affirmative action giving to the people power
to right wrong. They had rendered these decisions sometimes as upholders
of property rights against human rights, being especially zealous in
securing the rights of the very men who were most competent to take care
of themselves; and sometimes in the name of liberty, in the name of
the so-called "new freedom," in reality the old, old "freedom,"
which secured to the powerful the freedom to prey on the poor and the
helpless.

One of the main troubles was the fact that the men who saw the evils and
who tried to remedy them attempted to work in two wholly different ways,
and the great majority of them in a way that offered little promise of
real betterment. They tried (by the Sherman law method) to bolster up
an individualism already proved to be both futile and mischievous; to
remedy by more individualism the concentration that was the inevitable
result of the already existing individualism. They saw the evil done
by the big combinations, and sought to remedy it by destroying them and
restoring the country to the economic conditions of the middle of the
nineteenth century. This was a hopeless effort, and those who went into
it, although they regarded themselves as radical progressives, really
represented a form of sincere rural toryism. They confounded monopolies
with big business combinations, and in the effort to prohibit both
alike, instead of where possible prohibiting one and drastically
controlling the other, they succeeded merely in preventing any effective
control of either.

On the other hand, a few men recognized that corporations and
combinations had become indispensable in the business world, that it was
folly to try to prohibit them, but that it was also folly to leave them
without thoroughgoing control. These men realized that the doctrines
of the old laissez faire economists, of the believers in unlimited
competition, unlimited individualism, were in the actual state of
affairs false and mischievous. They realized that the Government must
now interfere to protect labor, to subordinate the big corporation
to the public welfare, and to shackle cunning and fraud exactly as
centuries before it had interfered to shackle the physical force which
does wrong by violence.

The big reactionaries of the business world and their allies and
instruments among politicians and newspaper editors took advantage of
this division of opinion, and especially of the fact that most of their
opponents were on the wrong path; and fought to keep matters absolutely
unchanged. These men demanded for themselves an immunity from
governmental control which, if granted, would have been as wicked and as
foolish as immunity to the barons of the twelfth century. Many of them
were evil men. Many others were just as good men as were some of
these same barons; but they were as utterly unable as any medieval
castle-owner to understand what the public interest really was. There
have been aristocracies which have played a great and beneficent part at
stages in the growth of mankind; but we had come to the stage where for
our people what was needed was a real democracy; and of all forms of
tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere
wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy.

When I became President, the question as to the method by which the
United States Government was to control the corporations was not yet
important. The absolutely vital question was whether the Government had
power to control them at all. This question had not yet been decided in
favor of the United States Government. It was useless to discuss methods
of controlling big business by the National Government until it was
definitely settled that the National Government had the power to control
it. A decision of the Supreme Court had, with seeming definiteness,
settled that the National Government had not the power.

This decision I caused to be annulled by the court that had rendered
it; and the present power of the National Government to deal effectively
with the trusts is due solely to the success of the Administration in
securing this reversal of its former decision by the Supreme Court.

The Constitution was formed very largely because it had become
imperative to give to some central authority the power to regulate and
control interstate commerce. At that time when corporations were in
their infancy and big combinations unknown, there was no difficulty
in exercising the power granted. In theory, the right of the Nation
to exercise this power continued unquestioned. But changing conditions
obscured the matter in the sight of the people as a whole; and
the conscious and the unconscious advocates of an unlimited and
uncontrollable capitalism gradually secured the whittling away of the
National power to exercise this theoretical right of control until it
practically vanished. After the Civil War, with the portentous growth
of industrial combinations in this country, came a period of reactionary
decisions by the courts which, as regards corporations, culminated in
what is known as the Knight case.

The Sherman Anti-Trust Law was enacted in 1890 because the formation of
the Tobacco Trust and the Sugar Trust, the only two great trusts then
in the country (aside from the Standard Oil Trust, which was a gradual
growth), had awakened a popular demand for legislation to destroy
monopoly and curb industrial combinations. This demand the Anti-Trust
Law was intended to satisfy. The Administrations of Mr. Harrison and Mr.
Cleveland evidently construed this law as prohibiting such combinations
in the future, not as condemning those which had been formed prior
to its enactment. In 1895, however, the Sugar Trust, whose output
originally was about fifty-five per cent of all sugar produced in the
United States, obtained control of three other companies in Philadelphia
by exchanging its stock for theirs, and thus increased its business
until it controlled ninety-eight per cent of the entire product. Under
Cleveland, the Government brought proceedings against the Sugar Trust,
invoking the Anti-Trust Law, to set aside the acquisition of these
corporations. The test case was on the absorption of the Knight Company.
The Supreme Court of the United States, with but one dissenting vote,
held adversely to the Government. They took the ground that the power
conferred by the Constitution to regulate and control interstate
commerce did not extend to the production or manufacture of commodities
within a State, and that nothing in the Sherman Anti-Trust Law
prohibited a corporation from acquiring all the stock of other
corporations through exchange of its stock for theirs, such exchange
not being "commerce" in the opinion of the Court, even though by such
acquisition the corporation was enabled to control the entire production
of a commodity that was a necessary of life. The effect of this decision
was not merely the absolute nullification of the Anti-Trust Law, so
far as industrial corporations were concerned, but was also in effect a
declaration that, under the Constitution, the National Government could
pass no law really effective for the destruction or control of such
combinations.

This decision left the National Government, that is, the people of the
Nation, practically helpless to deal with the large combinations of
modern business. The courts in other cases asserted the power of
the Federal Government to enforce the Anti-Trust Law so far as
transportation rates by railways engaged in interstate commerce were
concerned. But so long as the trusts were free to control the production
of commodities without interference from the General Government, they
were well content to let the transportation of commodities take care of
itself--especially as the law against rebates was at that time a dead
letter; and the Court by its decision in the Knight case had interdicted
any interference by the President or by Congress with the production of
commodities. It was on the authority of this case that practically all
the big trusts in the United States, excepting those already mentioned,
were formed. Usually they were organized as "holding" companies, each
one acquiring control of its constituent corporations by exchanging its
stock for theirs, an operation which the Supreme Court had thus decided
could not be prohibited, controlled, regulated, or even questioned by
the Federal Government.

Such was the condition of our laws when I acceded to the Presidency.
Just before my accession, a small group of financiers, desiring to
profit by the governmental impotence to which we had been reduced by the
Knight decision, had arranged to take control of practically the entire
railway system in the Northwest--possibly as the first step toward
controlling the entire railway system of the country. This control of
the Northwestern railway systems was to be effected by organizing a new
"holding" company, and exchanging its stock against the stock of the
various corporations engaged in railway transportation throughout that
vast territory, exactly as the Sugar Trust had acquired control of the
Knight company and other concerns. This company was called the Northern
Securities Company. Not long after I became President, on the advice of
the Attorney-General, Mr. Knox, and through him, I ordered proceedings
to be instituted for the dissolution of the company. As far as could be
told by their utterances at the time, among all the great lawyers in the
United States Mr. Knox was the only one who believed that this action
could be sustained. The defense was based expressly on the ground that
the Supreme Court in the Knight case had explicitly sanctioned the
formation of such a company as the Northern Securities Company. The
representatives of privilege intimated, and sometimes asserted outright,
that in directing the action to be brought I had shown a lack of respect
for the Supreme Court, which had already decided the question at issue
by a vote of eight to one. Mr. Justice White, then on the Court and
now Chief Justice, set forth the position that the two cases were in
principle identical with incontrovertible logic. In giving the views of
the dissenting minority on the action I had brought, he said:

"The parallel between the two cases [the Knight case and the Northern
Securities case] is complete. The one corporation acquired the stock
of other and competing corporations in exchange for its own. It was
conceded for the purposes of the case, that in doing so monopoly had
been brought about in the refining of sugar, that the sugar to be
produced was likely to become the subject of interstate commerce, and
indeed that part of it would certainly become so. But the power of
Congress was decided not to extend to the subject, because the ownership
of the stock in the corporations was not itself commerce."

Mr. Justice White was entirely correct in this statement. The cases were
parallel. It was necessary to reverse the Knight case in the interests
of the people against monopoly and privilege just as it had been
necessary to reverse the Dred Scott case in the interest of the people
against slavery and privilege; just as later it became necessary to
reverse the New York Bakeshop case in the interest of the people
against that form of monopolistic privilege which put human rights below
property rights where wage workers were concerned.

By a vote of five to four the Supreme Court reversed its decision in
the Knight case, and in the Northern Securities case sustained the
Government. The power to deal with industrial monopoly and suppress it
and to control and regulate combinations, of which the Knight case had
deprived the Federal Government, was thus restored to it by the Northern
Securities case. After this later decision was rendered, suits were
brought by my direction against the American Tobacco Company and the
Standard Oil Company. Both were adjudged criminal conspiracies, and
their dissolution ordered. The Knight case was finally overthrown.
The vicious doctrine it embodied no longer remains as an obstacle to
obstruct the pathway of justice when it assails monopoly. Messrs.
Knox, Moody, and Bonaparte, who successively occupied the position of
Attorney-General under me, were profound lawyers and fearless and
able men; and they completely established the newer and more wholesome
doctrine under which the Federal Government may now deal with
monopolistic combinations and conspiracies.

The decisions rendered in these various cases brought under my direction
constitute the entire authority upon which any action must rest that
seeks through the exercise of national power to curb monopolistic
control. The men who organized and directed the Northern Securities
Company were also the controlling forces in the Steel Corporation, which
has since been prosecuted under the act. The proceedings against the
Sugar Trust for corruption in connection with the New York Custom House
are sufficiently interesting to be considered separately.

From the standpoint of giving complete control to the National
Government over big corporations engaged in inter-State business, it
would be impossible to over-estimate the importance of the Northern
Securities decision and of the decisions afterwards rendered in line
with it in connection with the other trusts whose dissolution was
ordered. The success of the Northern Securities case definitely
established the power of the Government to deal with all great
corporations. Without this success the National Government must have
remained in the impotence to which it had been reduced by the Knight
decision as regards the most important of its internal functions. But
our success in establishing the power of the National Government to curb
monopolies did not establish the right method of exercising that
power. We had gained the power. We had not devised the proper method of
exercising it.

Monopolies can, although in rather cumbrous fashion, be broken up by
law suits. Great business combinations, however, cannot possibly be made
useful instead of noxious industrial agencies merely by law suits, and
especially by law suits supposed to be carried on for their destruction
and not for their control and regulation. I at once began to urge upon
Congress the need of laws supplementing the Anti-Trust Law--for this law
struck at all big business, good and bad, alike, and as the event
proved was very inefficient in checking bad big business, and yet was
a constant threat against decent business men. I strongly urged the
inauguration of a system of thoroughgoing and drastic Governmental
regulation and control over all big business combinations engaged in
inter-State industry.

Here I was able to accomplish only a small part of what I desired to
accomplish. I was opposed both by the foolish radicals who desired to
break up all big business, with the impossible ideal of returning to
mid-nineteenth century industrial conditions; and also by the great
privileged interests themselves, who used these ordinarily--but
sometimes not entirely--well-meaning "stool pigeon progressives" to
further their own cause. The worst representatives of big business
encouraged the outcry for the total abolition of big business, because
they knew that they could not be hurt in this way, and that such an
outcry distracted the attention of the public from the really efficient
method of controlling and supervising them, in just but masterly
fashion, which was advocated by the sane representatives of reform.
However, we succeeded in making a good beginning by securing the passage
of a law creating the Department of Commerce and Labor, and with it the
erection of the Bureau of Corporations. The first head of the Department
of Commerce and Labor was Mr. Cortelyou, later Secretary of the
Treasury. He was succeeded by Mr. Oscar Straus. The first head of
the Bureau of Corporations was Mr. Garfield, who was succeeded by Mr.
Herbert Knox Smith. No four better public servants from the standpoint
of the people as a whole could have been found.

The Standard Oil Company took the lead in opposing all this legislation.
This was natural, for it had been the worst offender in the amassing of
enormous fortunes by improper methods of all kinds, at the expense of
business rivals and of the public, including the corruption of public
servants. If any man thinks this condemnation extreme, I refer him to
the language officially used by the Supreme Court of the nation in its
decision against the Standard Oil Company. Through their counsel, and
by direct telegrams and letters to Senators and Congressmen from various
heads of the Standard Oil organization, they did their best to kill the
bill providing for the Bureau of Corporations. I got hold of one or two
of these telegrams and letters, however, and promptly published them;
and, as generally happens in such a case, the men who were all-powerful
as long as they could work in secret and behind closed doors became
powerless as soon as they were forced into the open. The bill went
through without further difficulty.

The true way of dealing with monopoly is to prevent it by administrative
action before it grows so powerful that even when courts condemn it they
shrink from destroying it. The Supreme Court in the Tobacco and Standard
Oil cases, for instance, used very vigorous language in condemning these
trusts; but the net result of the decision was of positive advantage to
the wrongdoers, and this has tended to bring the whole body of our law
into disrepute in quarters where it is of the very highest importance
that the law be held in respect and even in reverence. My effort was to
secure the creation of a Federal Commission which should neither excuse
nor tolerate monopoly, but prevent it when possible and uproot it
when discovered; and which should in addition effectively control and
regulate all big combinations, and should give honest business certainty
as to what the law was and security as long as the law was obeyed. Such
a Commission would furnish a steady expert control, a control adapted to
the problem; and dissolution is neither control nor regulation, but is
purely negative; and negative remedies are of little permanent avail.
Such a Commission would have complete power to examine into every big
corporation engaged or proposing to engage in business between the
States. It would have the power to discriminate sharply between
corporations that are doing well and those that are doing ill; and the
distinction between those who do well and those who do ill would
be defined in terms so clear and unmistakable that no one could
misapprehend them. Where a company is found seeking its profits through
serving the community by stimulating production, lowering prices, or
improving service, while scrupulously respecting the rights of others
(including its rivals, its employees, its customers, and the general
public), and strictly obeying the law, then no matter how large its
capital, or how great the volume of its business it would be encouraged
to still more abundant production, or better service, by the fullest
protection that the Government could afford it. On the other hand, if
a corporation were found seeking profit through injury or oppression
of the community, by restricting production through trick or device,
by plot or conspiracy against competitors, or by oppression of
wage-workers, and then extorting high prices for the commodity it had
made artificially scarce, it would be prevented from organizing if its
nefarious purpose could be discovered in time, or pursued and suppressed
by all the power of Government whenever found in actual operation. Such
a commission, with the power I advocate, would put a stop to abuses of
big corporations and small corporations alike; it would draw the line on
conduct and not on size; it would destroy monopoly, and make the biggest
business man in the country conform squarely to the principles laid down
by the American people, while at the same time giving fair play to the
little man and certainty of knowledge as to what was wrong and what was
right both to big man and little man.

Although under the decision of the courts the National Government had
power over the railways, I found, when I became President, that
this power was either not exercised at all or exercised with utter
inefficiency. The law against rebates was a dead letter. All the
unscrupulous railway men had been allowed to violate it with impunity;
and because of this, as was inevitable, the scrupulous and decent
railway men had been forced to violate it themselves, under penalty of
being beaten by their less scrupulous rivals. It was not the fault of
these decent railway men. It was the fault of the Government.

Thanks to a first-class railway man, Paul Morton of the Santa Fe, son of
Mr. Cleveland's Secretary of Agriculture, I was able completely to stop
the practice. Mr. Morton volunteered to aid the Government in abolishing
rebates. He frankly stated that he, like every one else, had been guilty
in the matter; but he insisted that he uttered the sentiments of
the decent railway men of the country when he said that he hoped the
practice would be stopped, and that if I would really stop it, and not
merely make believe to stop it, he would give the testimony which would
put into the hands of the Government the power to put a complete check
to the practice. Accordingly he testified, and on the information which
he gave us we were able to take such action through the Inter-State
Commerce Commission and the Department of Justice, supplemented by
the necessary additional legislation, that the evil was absolutely
eradicated. He thus rendered, of his own accord, at his own personal
risk, and from purely disinterested motives, an invaluable service to
the people, a service which no other man who was able to render was
willing to render. As an immediate sequel, the world-old alliance
between Blifil and Black George was immediately revived against Paul
Morton. In giving rebates he had done only what every honest railway
man in the country had been obliged to do because of the failure of the
Government to enforce the prohibition as regards dishonest railway
men. But unlike his fellows he had then shown the courage and sense of
obligation to the public which made him come forward and without
evasion or concealment state what he had done, in order that we might
successfully put an end to the practice; and put an end to the practice
we did, and we did it because of the courage and patriotism he had
shown. The unscrupulous railway men, whose dishonest practices were
thereby put a stop to, and the unscrupulous demagogues who were either
under the influence of these men or desirous of gaining credit with
thoughtless and ignorant people no matter who was hurt, joined in
vindictive clamor against Mr. Morton. They actually wished me to
prosecute him, although such prosecution would have been a piece of
unpardonable ingratitude and treachery on the part of the public toward
him--for I was merely acting as the steward of the public in this
matter. I need hardly say that I stood by him; and later he served under
me as Secretary of the Navy, and a capital Secretary he made too.

We not only secured the stopping of rebates, but in the Hepburn Rate
Bill we were able to put through a measure which gave the Inter-State
Commerce Commission for the first time real control over the railways.
There were two or three amusing features in the contest over this bill.
All of the great business interests which objected to Governmental
control banded to fight it, and they were helped by the honest men of
ultra-conservative type who always dread change, whether good or bad. We
finally forced it through the House. In the Senate it was referred to
a committee in which the Republican majority was under the control of
Senator Aldrich, who took the lead in opposing the bill. There was one
Republican on the committee, however, whom Senator Aldrich could
not control--Senator Dolliver, of Iowa. The leading Democrat on the
committee was Senator Tillman, of South Carolina, with whom I was not on
good terms, because I had been obliged to cancel an invitation to him to
dine at the White House on account of his having made a personal assault
in the Senate Chamber on his colleague from South Carolina; and later I
had to take action against him on account of his conduct in connection
with certain land matters. Senator Tillman favored the bill. The
Republican majority in the committee under Senator Aldrich, when they
acted adversely on the bill, turned it over to Senator Tillman, thereby
making him its sponsor. The object was to create what it was hoped would
be an impossible situation in view of the relations between Senator
Tillman and myself. I regarded the action as simply childish. It was a
curious instance of how able and astute men sometimes commit blunders
because of sheer inability to understand intensity of disinterested
motive in others. I did not care a rap about Mr. Tillman's getting
credit for the bill, or having charge of it. I was delighted to go with
him or with any one else just so long as he was traveling in my way--and
no longer.

There was another amusing incident in connection with the passage of the
bill. All the wise friends of the effort to secure Governmental control
of corporations know that this Government control must be exercised
through administrative and not judicial officers if it is to be
effective. Everything possible should be done to minimize the chance
of appealing from the decisions of the administrative officer to the
courts. But it is not possible Constitutionally, and probably would not
be desirable anyhow, completely to abolish the appeal. Unwise zealots
wished to make the effort totally to abolish the appeal in connection
with the Hepburn Bill. Representatives of the special interests wished
to extend the appeal to include what it ought not to include. Between
stood a number of men whose votes would mean the passage of, or the
failure to pass, the bill, and who were not inclined towards either
side. Three or four substantially identical amendments were proposed,
and we then suddenly found ourselves face to face with an absurd
situation. The good men who were willing to go with us but had
conservative misgivings about the ultra-radicals would not accept a good
amendment if one of the latter proposed it; and the radicals would not
accept their own amendment if one of the conservatives proposed it.
Each side got so wrought up as to be utterly unable to get matters into
proper perspective; each prepared to stand on unimportant trifles; each
announced with hysterical emphasis--the reformers just as hysterically
as the reactionaries--that the decision as regards each unimportant
trifle determined the worth or worthlessness of the measure. Gradually
we secured a measurable return to sane appreciation of the essentials.
Finally both sides reluctantly agreed to accept the so-called Allison
amendment which did not, as a matter of fact, work any change in the
bill at all. The amendment was drawn by Attorney-General Moody after
consultation with the Inter-State Commerce Commission, and was forwarded
by me to Senator Dolliver; it was accepted, and the bill became law.

Thanks to this law and to the way in which the Inter-State Commerce
Commission was backed by the Administration, the Commission, under men
like Prouty, Lane, and Clark, became a most powerful force for good.
Some of the good that we had accomplished was undone after the close of
my Administration by the unfortunate law creating a Commerce Court; but
the major part of the immense advance we had made remained. There was
one point on which I insisted, and upon which it is necessary always to
insist. The Commission cannot do permanent good unless it does justice
to the corporations precisely as it exacts justice from them. The
public, the shippers, the stock and bondholders, and the employees, all
have their rights, and none should be allowed unfair privileges at the
expense of the others. Stock watering and swindling of any kind should
of course not only be stopped but punished. When, however, a road is
managed fairly and honestly, and when it renders a real and needed
service, then the Government must see that it is not so burdened as to
make it impossible to run it at a profit. There is much wise
legislation necessary for the safety of the public, or--like workmen's
compensation--necessary to the well-being of the employee, which
nevertheless imposes such a burden on the road that the burden must be
distributed between the general public and the corporation, or there
will be no dividends. In such a case it may be the highest duty of the
commission to raise rates; and the commission, when satisfied that the
necessity exists, in order to do justice to the owners of the road,
should no more hesitate to raise rates, than under other circumstances
to lower them.

So much for the "big stick" in dealing with the corporations when they
went wrong. Now for a sample of the square deal.

In the fall of 1907 there were severe business disturbances and
financial stringency, culminating in a panic which arose in New York
and spread over the country. The damage actually done was great, and the
damage threatened was incalculable. Thanks largely to the action of
the Government, the panic was stopped before, instead of being merely a
serious business check, it became a frightful and Nation-wide calamity,
a disaster fraught with untold misery and woe to all our people. For
several days the Nation trembled on the brink of such a calamity, of
such a disaster.

During these days both the Secretary of the Treasury and I personally
were in hourly communication with New York, following every change in
the situation, and trying to anticipate every development. It was
the obvious duty of the Administration to take every step possible to
prevent appalling disaster by checking the spread of the panic before
it grew so that nothing could check it. And events moved with such
speed that it was necessary to decide and to act on the instant, as each
successive crisis arose, if the decision and action were to accomplish
anything. The Secretary of the Treasury took various actions, some
on his own initiative, some by my direction. Late one evening I was
informed that two representatives of the Steel Corporation wished to see
me early the following morning, the precise object not being named. Next
morning, while at breakfast, I was informed that Messrs. Frick and
Gary were waiting at the office. I at once went over, and, as the
Attorney-General, Mr. Bonaparte, had not yet arrived from Baltimore,
where he had been passing the night, I sent a message asking the
Secretary of State, Mr. Root, who was also a lawyer, to join us, which
he did. Before the close of the interview and in the presence of the
three gentlemen named, I dictated a note to Mr. Bonaparte, setting forth
exactly what Messrs. Frick and Gary had proposed, and exactly what I
had answered--so that there might be no possibility of misunderstanding.
This note was published in a Senate Document while I was still
President. It runs as follows:

THE WHITE HOUSE, Washington, November 4, 1907.

My dear Mr. Attorney-General:

Judge E. H. Gary and Mr. H. C. Frick, on behalf of the Steel
Corporation, have just called upon me. They state that there is a
certain business firm (the name of which I have not been told, but
which is of real importance in New York business circles), which will
undoubtedly fail this week if help is not given. Among its assets are
a majority of the securities of the Tennessee Coal Company. Application
has been urgently made to the Steel Corporation to purchase this stock
as the only means of avoiding a failure. Judge Gary and Mr. Frick
informed me that as a mere business transaction they do not care to
purchase the stock; that under ordinary circumstances they would not
consider purchasing the stock, because but little benefit will come to
the Steel Corporation from the purchase; that they are aware that the
purchase will be used as a handle for attack upon them on the ground
that they are striving to secure a monopoly of the business and prevent
competition--not that this would represent what could honestly be said,
but what might recklessly and untruthfully be said.

They further informed me that, as a matter of fact, the policy of the
company has been to decline to acquire more than sixty per cent of
the steel properties, and that this purpose has been persevered in for
several years past, with the object of preventing these accusations,
and, as a matter of fact, their proportion of steel properties has
slightly decreased, so that it is below this sixty per cent, and the
acquisition of the property in question will not raise it above sixty
per cent. But they feel that it is immensely to their interest, as to
the interest of every responsible business man, to try to prevent a
panic and general industrial smash-up at this time, and that they are
willing to go into this transaction, which they would not otherwise
go into, because it seems the opinion of those best fitted to express
judgment in New York that it will be an important factor in preventing
a break that might be ruinous; and that this has been urged upon them by
the combination of the most responsible bankers in New York who are now
thus engaged in endeavoring to save the situation. But they asserted
that they did not wish to do this if I stated that it ought not to be
done. I answered that, while of course I could not advise them to take
the action proposed, I felt it no public duty of mine to interpose any
objections.

Sincerely yours, (Signed) THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

HON. CHARLES J. BONAPARTE, Attorney-General.

Mr. Bonaparte received this note in about an hour, and that same morning
he came over, acknowledged its receipt, and said that my answer was the
only proper answer that could have been made, having regard both to
the law and to the needs of the situation. He stated that the legal
situation had been in no way changed, and that no sufficient ground
existed for prosecution of the Steel Corporation. But I acted purely on
my own initiative, and the responsibility for the act was solely mine.

I was intimately acquainted with the situation in New York. The word
"panic" means fear, unreasoning fear; to stop a panic it is necessary
to restore confidence; and at the moment the so-called Morgan interests
were the only interests which retained a full hold on the confidence of
the people of New York--not only the business people, but the immense
mass of men and women who owned small investments or had small savings
in the banks and trust companies. Mr. Morgan and his associates were
of course fighting hard to prevent the loss of confidence and the panic
distrust from increasing to such a degree as to bring any other big
financial institutions down; for this would probably have been followed
by a general, and very likely a worldwide, crash. The Knickerbocker
Trust Company had already failed, and runs had begun on, or were
threatened as regards, two other big trust companies. These companies
were now on the fighting line, and it was to the interest of everybody
to strengthen them, in order that the situation might be saved. It was
a matter of general knowledge and belief that they, or the individuals
prominent in them, held the securities of the Tennessee Coal and Iron
Company, which securities had no market value, and were useless as a
source of strength in the emergency. The Steel Corporation securities,
on the contrary, were immediately marketable, their great value being
known and admitted all over the world--as the event showed. The proposal
of Messrs. Frick and Gary was that the Steel Corporation should at once
acquire the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company, and thereby substitute,
among the assets of the threatened institutions (which, by the way,
they did not name to me), securities of great and immediate value for
securities which at the moment were of no value. It was necessary for
me to decide on the instant, before the Stock Exchange opened, for the
situation in New York was such that any hour might be vital, and failure
to act for even an hour might make all subsequent effort to act utterly
useless. From the best information at my disposal, I believed (what
was actually the fact) that the addition of the Tennessee Coal and
Iron property would only increase the proportion of the Steel Company's
holdings by about four per cent, making them about sixty-two per cent
instead of about fifty-eight per cent of the total value in the country;
an addition which, by itself, in my judgment (concurred in, not only by
the Attorney-General but by every competent lawyer), worked no change
in the legal status of the Steel corporation. The diminution in the
percentage of holdings, and production, has gone on steadily, and the
percentage is now about ten per cent less than it was ten years ago.

The action was emphatically for the general good. It offered the only
chance for arresting the panic, and it did arrest the panic. I answered
Messrs. Frick and Gary, as set forth in the letter quoted above, to the
effect that I did not deem it my duty to interfere, that is, to forbid
the action which more than anything else in actual fact saved the
situation. The result justified my judgment. The panic was stopped,
public confidence in the solvency of the threatened institution being at
once restored.

Business was vitally helped by what I did. The benefit was not only
for the moment. It was permanent. Particularly was this the case in the
South. Three or four years afterwards I visited Birmingham. Every man
I met, without exception, who was competent to testify, informed me
voluntarily that the results of the action taken had been of the utmost
benefit to Birmingham, and therefore to Alabama, the industry having
profited to an extraordinary degree, not only from the standpoint of the
business, but from the standpoint of the community at large and of the
wage-workers, by the change in ownership. The results of the action I
took were beneficial from every standpoint, and the action itself, at
the time when it was taken, was vitally necessary to the welfare of the
people of the United States.

I would have been derelict in my duty, I would have shown myself a timid
and unworthy public servant, if in that extraordinary crisis I had not
acted precisely as I did act. In every such crisis the temptation to
indecision, to non-action, is great, for excuses can always be found for
non-action, and action means risk and the certainty of blame to the man
who acts. But if the man is worth his salt he will do his duty, he will
give the people the benefit of the doubt, and act in any way which
their interests demand and which is not affirmatively prohibited by law,
unheeding the likelihood that he himself, when the crisis is over and
the danger past, will be assailed for what he has done.

Every step I took in this matter was open as the day, and was known in
detail at the moment to all people. The press contained full accounts of
the visit to me of Messrs. Frick and Gary, and heralded widely and
with acclamation the results of that visit. At the time the relief and
rejoicing over what had been done were well-nigh universal. The danger
was too imminent and too appalling for me to be willing to condemn those
who were successful in saving them from it. But I fully understood and
expected that when there was no longer danger, when the fear had been
forgotten, attack would be made upon me; and as a matter of fact after
a year had elapsed the attack was begun, and has continued at intervals
ever since; my ordinary assailant being some politician of rather cheap
type.

If I were on a sail-boat, I should not ordinarily meddle with any of the
gear; but if a sudden squall struck us, and the main sheet jammed, so
that the boat threatened to capsize, I would unhesitatingly cut the main
sheet, even though I were sure that the owner, no matter how grateful
to me at the moment for having saved his life, would a few weeks later,
when he had forgotten his danger and his fear, decide to sue me for the
value of the cut rope. But I would feel a hearty contempt for the owner
who so acted.

There were many other things that we did in connection with
corporations. One of the most important was the passage of the meat
inspection law because of scandalous abuses shown to exist in the great
packing-houses in Chicago and elsewhere. There was a curious result of
this law, similar to what occurred in connection with the law providing
for effective railway regulation. The big beef men bitterly opposed the
law; just as the big railway men opposed the Hepburn Act. Yet three
or four years after these laws had been put on the statute books every
honest man both in the beef business and the railway business came to
the conclusion that they worked good and not harm to the decent business
concerns. They hurt only those who were not acting as they should have
acted. The law providing for the inspection of packing-houses, and the
Pure Food and Drugs Act, were also extremely important; and the way in
which they were administered was even more important. It would be hard
to overstate the value of the service rendered in all these cases
by such cabinet officers as Moody and Bonaparte, and their outside
assistants of the stamp of Frank Kellogg.

It would be useless to enumerate all the suits we brought. Some of
them I have already touched upon. Others, such as the suits against the
Harriman railway corporations, which were successful, and which had
been rendered absolutely necessary by the grossly improper action of the
corporations concerned, offered no special points of interest. The Sugar
Trust proceedings, however, may be mentioned as showing just the kind of
thing that was done and the kind of obstacle encountered and overcome in
prosecutions of this character.

It was on the advice of my secretary, William Loeb, Jr., afterward head
of the New York Custom-House, that the action was taken which started
the uncovering of the frauds perpetrated by the Sugar Trust and other
companies in connection with the importing of sugar. Loeb had from time
to time told me that he was sure that there was fraud in connection with
the importations by the Sugar Trust through the New York Custom-House.
Finally, some time toward the end of 1904, he informed me that Richard
Parr, a sampler at the New York Appraisers' Stores (whose duties took
him almost continually on the docks in connection with the sampling of
merchandise), had called on him, and had stated that in his belief the
sugar companies were defrauding the Government in the matter of weights,
and had stated that if he could be made an investigating officer of
the Treasury Department, he was confident that he could show there was
wrongdoing. Parr had been a former school fellow of Loeb in Albany, and
Loeb believed him to be loyal, honest, and efficient. He thereupon laid
the matter before me, and advised the appointment of Parr as a special
employee of the Treasury Department, for the specific purpose of
investigating the alleged sugar frauds. I instructed the Treasury
Department accordingly, and was informed that there was no vacancy in
the force of special employees, but that Parr would be given the first
place that opened up. Early in the spring of 1905 Parr came to Loeb
again, and said that he had received additional information about the
sugar frauds, and was anxious to begin the investigation. Loeb again
discussed the matter with me; and I notified the Treasury Department to
appoint Parr immediately. On June 1, 1905, he received his appointment,
and was assigned to the port of Boston for the purpose of gaining
some experience as an investigating officer. During the month he was
transferred to the Maine District, with headquarters at Portland, where
he remained until March, 1907. During his service in Maine he uncovered
extensive wool smuggling frauds. At the conclusion of the wool case, he
appealed to Loeb to have him transferred to New York, so that he might
undertake the investigation of the sugar underweighing frauds. I now
called the attention of Secretary Cortelyou personally to the matter,
so that he would be able to keep a check over any subordinates who might
try to interfere with Parr, for the conspiracy was evidently widespread,
the wealth of the offenders great, and the corruption in the service
far-reaching--while moreover as always happens with "respectable"
offenders, there were many good men who sincerely disbelieved in the
possibility of corruption on the part of men of such high financial
standing. Parr was assigned to New York early in March, 1907, and at
once began an active investigation of the conditions existing on the
sugar docks. This terminated in the discovery of a steel spring in one
of the scales of the Havemeyer & Elder docks in Brooklyn, November 20,
1907, which enabled us to uncover what were probably the most colossal
frauds ever perpetrated in the Customs Service. From the beginning of
his active work in the investigation of the sugar frauds in March, 1907,
to March 4, 1909, Parr, from time to time, personally reported to Loeb,
at the White House, the progress of his investigations, and Loeb in his
turn kept me personally advised. On one occasion there was an attempt
made to shunt Parr off the investigation and substitute another agent of
the Treasury, who was suspected of having some relations with the sugar
companies under investigation; but Parr reported the facts to Loeb,
I sent for Secretary Cortelyou, and Secretary Cortelyou promptly took
charge of the matter himself, putting Parr back on the investigation.

During the investigation Parr was subjected to all sorts of harassments,
including an attempt to bribe him by Spitzer, the dock superintendent
of the Havemeyer & Elder Refinery, for which Spitzer was convicted and
served a term in prison. Brzezinski, a special agent, who was assisting
Parr, was convicted of perjury and also served a term in prison, he
having changed his testimony, in the trial of Spitzer for the attempted
bribery of Parr, from that which he gave before the Grand Jury. For his
extraordinary services in connection with this investigation Parr was
granted an award of $100,000 by the Treasury Department.

District-Attorney Stimson, of New York, assisted by Denison,
Frankfurter, Wise, and other employees of the Department of Justice,
took charge of the case, and carried on both civil and criminal
proceedings. The trial in the action against the Sugar Trust, for the
recovery of duties on the cargo of sugar, which was being sent over the
scales at the time of the discovery of the steel spring by Parr, was
begun in 1908; judgment was rendered against the defendants on March
5, 1909, the day after I left office. Over four million dollars were
recovered and paid back into the United States Treasury by the sugar
companies which had perpetrated the various forms of fraud. These frauds
were unearthed by Parr, Loeb, Stimson, Frankfurter, and the other men
mentioned and their associates, and it was to them that the people owed
the refunding of the huge sum of money mentioned. We had already secured
heavy fines from the Sugar Trust, and from various big railways, and
private individuals, such as Edwin Earle, for unlawful rebates. In the
case of the chief offender, the American Sugar Refining Company (the
Sugar Trust), criminal prosecutions were carried on against every living
man whose position was such that he would naturally know about the
fraud. All of them were indicted, and the biggest and most responsible
ones were convicted. The evidence showed that the president of the
company, Henry O. Havemeyer, virtually ran the entire company, and was
responsible for all the details of the management. He died two weeks
after the fraud was discovered, just as proceedings were being begun.
Next to him in importance was the secretary and treasurer, Charles R.
Heike, who was convicted. Various other officials and employees of the
Trust, and various Government employees, were indicted, and most of
them convicted. Ernest W. Gerbracht, the superintendent of one of the
refineries, was convicted, but his sentence was commuted to a short
jail imprisonment, because he became a Government witness and greatly
assisted the Government in the suits.

Heike's sentence was commuted so as to excuse him from going to the
penitentiary; just as the penitentiary sentence of Morse, the big New
York banker, who was convicted of gross fraud and misapplication of
funds, was commuted. Both commutations were granted long after I left
office. In each case the commutation was granted because, as was stated,
of the prisoner's age and state of health. In Morse's case the President
originally refused the request, saying that Morse had exhibited
"fraudulent and criminal disregard of the trust imposed upon him," that
"he was entirely unscrupulous as to the methods he adopted," and
"that he seemed at times to be absolutely heartless with regard to the
consequences to others, and he showed great shrewdness in obtaining
large sums of money from the bank without adequate security and without
making himself personally liable therefor." The two cases may be
considered in connection with the announcement in the public press that
on May 17, 1913, the President commuted the sentence of Lewis A. Banks,
who was serving a very long term penitentiary sentence for an attack on
a girl in the Indian Territory; "the reason for the commutation which is
set forth in the press being that 'Banks is in poor health.'"

It is no easy matter to balance the claims of justice and mercy in such
cases. In these three cases, of all of which I had personal cognizance,
I disagreed radically with the views my successors took, and with the
views which many respectable men took who in these and similar cases,
both while I was in office and afterward, urged me to show, or to ask
others to show, clemency. It then seemed to me, and it now seems to me,
that such clemency is from the larger standpoint a gross wrong to the
men and women of the country.

One of the former special assistants of the district-attorney, Mr. W.
Cleveland Runyon, in commenting bitterly on the release of Heike
and Morse on account of their health, pointed out that their health
apparently became good when once they themselves became free men, and
added:

"The commutation of these sentences amounts to a direct interference
with the administration of justice by the courts. Heike got a $25,000
salary and has escaped his imprisonment, but what about the six $18 a
week checkers, who were sent to jail, one of them a man of more than
sixty? It is cases like this that create discontent and anarchy. They
make it seem plain that there is one law for the rich and another for
the poor man, and I for one will protest."

In dealing with Heike the individual (or Morse or any other individual),
it is necessary to emphasize the social aspects of his case. The moral
of the Heike case, as has been well said, is "how easy it is for a man
in modern corporate organization to drift into wrongdoing." The
moral restraints are loosened in the case of a man like Heike by
the insulation of himself from the sordid details of crime, through
industrially coerced intervening agents. Professor Ross has made the
penetrating observation that "distance disinfects dividends"; it also
weakens individual responsibility, particularly on the part of the very
managers of large business, who should feel it most acutely. One of the
officers of the Department of Justice who conducted the suit, and who
inclined to the side of mercy in the matter, nevertheless writes: "Heike
is a beautiful illustration of mental and moral obscuration in the
business life of an otherwise valuable member of society. Heike had
an ample share in the guidance of the affairs of the American Sugar
Company, and we are apt to have a foreshortened picture of his
responsibility, because he operated from the easy coign of vantage of
executive remoteness. It is difficult to say to what extent he did,
directly or indirectly, profit by the sordid practices of his company.
But the social damage of an individual in his position may be just as
deep, whether merely the zest of the game or hard cash be his dominant
motive."

I have coupled the cases of the big banker and the Sugar Trust official
and the case of the man convicted of a criminal assault on a woman. All
of the criminals were released from penitentiary sentences on grounds of
ill health. The offenses were typical of the worst crimes committed
at the two ends of the social scale. One offense was a crime of brutal
violence; the other offenses were crimes of astute corruption. All of
them were offenses which in my judgment were of such a character that
clemency towards the offender worked grave injustice to the community
as a whole, injustice so grave that its effects might be far-reaching in
their damage.

Every time that rape or criminal assault on a woman is pardoned, and
anything less than the full penalty of the law exacted, a premium is
put on the practice of lynching such offenders. Every time a big moneyed
offender, who naturally excites interest and sympathy, and who has
many friends, is excused from serving a sentence which a man of less
prominence and fewer friends would have to serve, justice is discredited
in the eyes of plain people--and to undermine faith in justice is to
strike at the foundation of the Republic. As for ill health, it must
be remembered that few people are as healthy in prison as they would be
outside; and there should be no discrimination among criminals on this
score; either all criminals who grow unhealthy should be let out, or
none. Pardons must sometimes be given in order that the cause of justice
may be served; but in cases such as these I am considering, while I know
that many amiable people differ from me, I am obliged to say that in my
judgment the pardons work far-reaching harm to the cause of justice.

Among the big corporations themselves, even where they did wrong, there
was a wide difference in the moral obliquity indicated by the wrongdoer.
There was a wide distinction between the offenses committed in the case
of the Northern Securities Company, and the offenses because of which
the Sugar Trust, the Tobacco Trust, and the Standard Oil Trust were
successfully prosecuted under my Administration. It was vital to destroy
the Northern Securities Company; but the men creating it had done so in
open and above-board fashion, acting under what they, and most of the
members of the bar, thought to be the law established by the Supreme
Court in the Knight sugar case. But the Supreme Court in its decree
dissolving the Standard Oil and Tobacco Trusts, condemned them in the
severest language for moral turpitude; and an even severer need of
condemnation should be visited on the Sugar Trust.

However, all the trusts and big corporations against which we
proceeded--which included in their directorates practically all the
biggest financiers in the country--joined in making the bitterest
assaults on me and on my Administration. Of their actions I wrote as
follows to Attorney-General Bonaparte, who had been a peculiarly close
friend and adviser through the period covered by my public life in high
office and who, together with Attorney-General Moody, possessed the same
understanding sympathy with my social and industrial program that
was possessed by such officials as Straus, Garfield, H. K. Smith, and
Pinchot. The letter runs:

January 2, 1908.

My dear Bonaparte:

I must congratulate you on your admirable speech at Chicago. You said
the very things it was good to say at this time. What you said bore
especial weight because it represented what you had done. You have shown
by what you have actually accomplished that the law is enforced against
the wealthiest corporation, and the richest and most powerful manager
or manipulator of that corporation, just as resolutely and fearlessly as
against the humblest citizen. The Department of Justice is now in very
fact the Department of Justice, and justice is meted out with an even
hand to great and small, rich and poor, weak and strong. Those who have
denounced you and the action of the Department of Justice are either
misled, or else are the very wrongdoers, and the agents of the very
wrongdoers, who have for so many years gone scot-free and flouted the
laws with impunity. Above all, you are to be congratulated upon the
bitterness felt and expressed towards you by the representatives and
agents of the great law-defying corporations of immense wealth, who,
until within the last half-dozen years, have treated themselves and have
expected others to treat them as being beyond and above all possible
check from law.

It was time to say something, for the representatives of predatory
wealth, of wealth accumulated on a giant scale by iniquity,
by wrongdoing in many forms, by plain swindling, by oppressing
wage-workers, by manipulating securities, by unfair and unwholesome
competition and by stock-jobbing,--in short, by conduct abhorrent to
every man of ordinarily decent conscience, have during the last few
months made it evident that they are banded together to work for a
reaction, to endeavor to overthrow and discredit all who honestly
administer the law, and to secure a return to the days when every
unscrupulous wrongdoer could do what he wished unchecked, provided he
had enough money. They attack you because they know your honesty and
fearlessness, and dread them. The enormous sums of money these men have
at their control enable them to carry on an effective campaign. They
find their tools in a portion of the public press, including especially
certain of the great New York newspapers. They find their agents in
some men in public life,--now and then occupying, or having occupied,
positions as high as Senator or Governor,--in some men in the pulpit,
and most melancholy of all, in a few men on the bench. By gifts to
colleges and universities they are occasionally able to subsidize in
their own interest some head of an educational body, who, save only a
judge, should of all men be most careful to keep his skirts clear from
the taint of such corruption. There are ample material rewards for those
who serve with fidelity the Mammon of unrighteousness, but they are
dearly paid for by that institution of learning whose head, by example
and precept, teaches the scholars who sit under him that there is one
law for the rich and another for the poor. The amount of money the
representatives of the great moneyed interests are willing to spend can
be gauged by their recent publication broadcast throughout the papers
of this country from the Atlantic to the Pacific of huge advertisements,
attacking with envenomed bitterness the Administration's policy of
warring against successful dishonesty, advertisements that must have
cost enormous sums of money. This advertisement, as also a pamphlet
called "The Roosevelt Panic," and one or two similar books and
pamphlets, are written especially in the interest of the Standard Oil
and Harriman combinations, but also defend all the individuals and
corporations of great wealth that have been guilty of wrongdoing. From
the railroad rate law to the pure food law, every measure for honesty
in business that has been pressed during the last six years, has been
opposed by these men, on its passage and in its administration, with
every resource that bitter and unscrupulous craft could suggest, and the
command of almost unlimited money secure. These men do not themselves
speak or write; they hire others to do their bidding. Their spirit and
purpose are made clear alike by the editorials of the papers owned in,
or whose policy is dictated by, Wall Street, and by the speeches of
public men who, as Senators, Governors, or Mayors, have served these
their masters to the cost of the plain people. At one time one of their
writers or speakers attacks the rate law as the cause of the panic; he
is, whether in public life or not, usually a clever corporation lawyer,
and he is not so foolish a being as to believe in the truth of what he
says; he has too closely represented the railroads not to know well that
the Hepburn Rate Bill has helped every honest railroad, and has hurt
only the railroads that regarded themselves as above the law. At another
time, one of them assails the Administration for not imprisoning people
under the Sherman Anti-Trust Law; for declining to make what he well
knows, in view of the actual attitude of juries (as shown in the Tobacco
Trust cases and in San Francisco in one or two of the cases brought
against corrupt business men) would have been the futile endeavor to
imprison defendants whom we are actually able to fine. He raises the
usual clamor, raised by all who object to the enforcement of the law,
that we are fining corporations instead of putting the heads of the
corporations in jail; and he states that this does not really harm the
chief offenders. Were this statement true, he himself would not be found
attacking us. The extraordinary violence of the assault upon our policy
contained in speeches like these, in the articles in the subsidized
press, in such huge advertisements and pamphlets as those above referred
to, and the enormous sums of money spent in these various ways, give a
fairly accurate measure of the anger and terror which our actions have
caused the corrupt men of vast wealth to feel in the very marrow of
their being.

The man thus attacking us is usually, like so many of his fellows,
either a great lawyer, or a paid editor who takes his commands from the
financiers and his arguments from their attorneys. If the former, he has
defended many malefactors, and he knows well that, thanks to the advice
of lawyers like himself, a certain kind of modern corporation has been
turned into an admirable instrument by which to render it well nigh
impossible to get at the really guilty man, so that in most cases the
only way of punishing the wrong is by fining the corporation or by
proceeding personally against some of the minor agents. These lawyers
and their employers are the men mainly responsible for this state of
things, and their responsibility is shared with the legislators who
ingeniously oppose the passing of just and effective laws, and with
those judges whose one aim seems to be to construe such laws so that
they cannot be executed. Nothing is sillier than this outcry on behalf
of the "innocent stockholders" in the corporations. We are besought to
pity the Standard Oil Company for a fine relatively far less great than
the fines every day inflicted in the police courts upon multitudes of
push cart peddlers and other petty offenders, whose woes never extort
one word from the men whose withers are wrung by the woes of the mighty.
The stockholders have the control of the corporation in their own hands.
The corporation officials are elected by those holding the majority of
the stock and can keep office only by having behind them the good-will
of these majority stockholders. They are not entitled to the slightest
pity if they deliberately choose to resign into the hands of great
wrongdoers the control of the corporations in which they own the stock.
Of course innocent people have become involved in these big corporations
and suffer because of the misdeeds of their criminal associates. Let
these innocent people be careful not to invest in corporations where
those in control are not men of probity, men who respect the laws; above
all let them avoid the men who make it their one effort to evade or defy
the laws. But if these honest innocent people are in the majority in
any corporation they can immediately resume control and throw out of
the directory the men who misrepresent them. Does any man for a moment
suppose that the majority stockholders of the Standard Oil are others
than Mr. Rockefeller and his associates themselves and the beneficiaries
of their wrongdoing? When the stock is watered so that the innocent
investors suffer, a grave wrong is indeed done to these innocent
investors as well as to the public; but the public men, lawyers and
editors, to whom I refer, do not under these circumstances express
sympathy for the innocent; on the contrary they are the first to protest
with frantic vehemence against our efforts by law to put a stop to
over-capitalization and stock-watering. The apologists of successful
dishonesty always declaim against any effort to punish or prevent it on
the ground that such effort will "unsettle business." It is they who by
their acts have unsettled business; and the very men raising this
cry spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in securing, by speech,
editorial, book or pamphlet, the defense by misstatement of what they
have done; and yet when we correct their misstatements by telling the
truth, they declaim against us for breaking silence, lest "values be
unsettled!" They have hurt honest business men, honest working men,
honest farmers; and now they clamor against the truth being told.

The keynote of all these attacks upon the effort to secure honesty in
business and in politics, is expressed in a recent speech, in which the
speaker stated that prosperity had been checked by the effort for the
"moral regeneration of the business world," an effort which he denounced
as "unnatural, unwarranted, and injurious" and for which he stated the
panic was the penalty. The morality of such a plea is precisely as great
as if made on behalf of the men caught in a gambling establishment when
that gambling establishment is raided by the police. If such words mean
anything they mean that those whose sentiments they represent stand
against the effort to bring about a moral regeneration of business which
will prevent a repetition of the insurance, banking, and street railroad
scandals in New York; a repetition of the Chicago and Alton deal; a
repetition of the combination between certain professional politicians,
certain professional labor leaders and certain big financiers from the
disgrace of which San Francisco has just been rescued; a repetition of
the successful efforts by the Standard Oil people to crush out every
competitor, to overawe the common carriers, and to establish a monopoly
which treats the public with the contempt which the public deserves so
long as it permits men like the public men of whom I speak to represent
it in politics, men like the heads of colleges to whom I refer to
educate its youth. The outcry against stopping dishonest practices among
the very wealthy is precisely similar to the outcry raised against every
effort for cleanliness and decency in city government because, forsooth,
it will "hurt business." The same outcry is made against the Department
of Justice for prosecuting the heads of colossal corporations that is
made against the men who in San Francisco are prosecuting with impartial
severity the wrongdoers among business men, public officials, and labor
leaders alike. The principle is the same in the two cases. Just as
the blackmailer and the bribe giver stand on the same evil eminence
of infamy, so the man who makes an enormous fortune by corrupting
Legislatures and municipalities and fleecing his stockholders and the
public stands on a level with the creature who fattens on the blood
money of the gambling house, the saloon and the brothel. Moreover,
both kinds of corruption in the last analysis are far more intimately
connected than would at first sight appear; the wrong-doing is at bottom
the same. Corrupt business and corrupt politics act and react, with
ever increasing debasement, one on the other; the rebate-taker, the
franchise-trafficker, the manipulator of securities, the purveyor and
protector of vice, the black-mailing ward boss, the ballot box stuffer,
the demagogue, the mob leader, the hired bully and mankiller, all alike
work at the same web of corruption, and all alike should be abhorred by
honest men.

The "business" which is hurt by the movement for honesty is the kind of
business which, in the long run, it pays the country to have hurt. It
is the kind of business which has tended to make the very name "high
finance" a term of scandal to which all honest American men of business
should join in putting an end. One of the special pleaders for business
dishonesty, in a recent speech, in denouncing the Administration for
enforcing the law against the huge and corrupt corporations which
have defied the law, also denounced it for endeavoring to secure
a far-reaching law making employers liable for injuries to their
employees. It is meet and fit that the apologists for corrupt wealth
should oppose every effort to relieve weak and helpless people from
crushing misfortune brought upon them by injury in the business from
which they gain a bare livelihood and their employers fortunes. It is
hypocritical baseness to speak of a girl who works in a factory where
the dangerous machinery is unprotected as having the "right" freely
to contract to expose herself to dangers to life and limb. She has
no alternative but to suffer want or else to expose herself to such
dangers, and when she loses a hand or is otherwise maimed or disfigured
for life it is a moral wrong that the burden of the risk necessarily
incidental to the business should be placed with crushing weight upon
her weak shoulders and the man who has profited by her work escape
scot-free. This is what our opponents advocate, and it is proper that
they should advocate it, for it rounds out their advocacy of those most
dangerous members of the criminal class, the criminals of vast wealth,
the men who can afford best to pay for such championship in the press
and on the stump.

It is difficult to speak about the judges, for it behooves us all to
treat with the utmost respect the high office of judge; and our judges
as a whole are brave and upright men. But there is need that those who
go wrong should not be allowed to feel that there is no condemnation of
their wrongdoing. A judge who on the bench either truckles to the mob or
bows down before a corporation; or who, having left the bench to become
a corporation lawyer, seeks to aid his clients by denouncing as enemies
of property all those who seek to stop the abuses of the criminal rich;
such a man performs an even worse service to the body politic than the
Legislator or Executive who goes wrong. In no way can respect for the
courts be so quickly undermined as by teaching the public through the
action of a judge himself that there is reason for the loss of such
respect. The judge who by word or deed makes it plain that the corrupt
corporation, the law-defying corporation, the law-defying rich man,
has in him a sure and trustworthy ally, the judge who by misuse of the
process of injunction makes it plain that in him the wage-worker has a
determined and unscrupulous enemy, the judge who when he decides in an
employers' liability or a tenement house factory case shows that he has
neither sympathy for nor understanding of those fellow-citizens of his
who most need his sympathy and understanding; these judges work as much
evil as if they pandered to the mob, as if they shrank from sternly
repressing violence and disorder. The judge who does his full duty well
stands higher, and renders a better service to the people, than any
other public servant; he is entitled to greater respect; and if he is a
true servant of the people, if he is upright, wise and fearless, he will
unhesitatingly disregard even the wishes of the people if they conflict
with the eternal principles of right as against wrong. He must serve
the people; but he must serve his conscience first. All honor to such a
judge; and all honor cannot be rendered him if it is rendered equally
to his brethren who fall immeasurably below the high ideals for which he
stands. There should be a sharp discrimination against such judges. They
claim immunity from criticism, and the claim is heatedly advanced by men
and newspapers like those of whom I speak. Most certainly they can claim
immunity from untruthful criticism; and their champions, the newspapers
and the public men I have mentioned, exquisitely illustrate by their own
actions mendacious criticism in its most flagrant and iniquitous form.

But no servant of the people has a right to expect to be free from just
and honest criticism. It is the newspapers, and the public men whose
thoughts and deeds show them to be most alien to honesty and truth
who themselves loudly object to truthful and honest criticism of their
fellow-servants of the great moneyed interests.

We have no quarrel with the individuals, whether public men, lawyers
or editors, to whom I refer. These men derive their sole power from the
great, sinister offenders who stand behind them. They are but puppets
who move as the strings are pulled by those who control the enormous
masses of corporate wealth which if itself left uncontrolled threatens
dire evil to the Republic. It is not the puppets, but the strong,
cunning men and the mighty forces working for evil behind, and to a
certain extent through, the puppets, with whom we have to deal. We seek
to control law-defying wealth, in the first place to prevent its
doing evil, and in the next place to avoid the vindictive and dreadful
radicalism which if left uncontrolled it is certain in the end to
arouse. Sweeping attacks upon all property, upon all men of means,
without regard to whether they do well or ill, would sound the death
knell of the Republic; and such attacks become inevitable if decent
citizens permit rich men whose lives are corrupt and evil to domineer
in swollen pride, unchecked and unhindered, over the destinies of this
country. We act in no vindictive spirit, and we are no respecters of
persons. If a labor union does what is wrong, we oppose it as fearlessly
as we oppose a corporation that does wrong; and we stand with equal
stoutness for the rights of the man of wealth and for the rights of the
wage-workers; just as much so for one as for the other. We seek to stop
wrongdoing; and we desire to punish the wrongdoer only so far as is
necessary in order to achieve this end. We are the stanch upholders of
every honest man, whether business man or wage-worker.

I do not for a moment believe that our actions have brought on business
distress; so far as this is due to local and not world-wide causes,
and to the actions of any particular individuals, it is due to the
speculative folly and flagrant dishonesty of a few men of great
wealth, who now seek to shield themselves from the effects of their own
wrongdoings by ascribing its results to the actions of those who have
sought to put a stop to the wrongdoing. But if it were true that to
cut out rottenness from the body politic meant a momentary check to an
unhealthy seeming prosperity, I should not for one moment hesitate to
put the knife to the cancer. On behalf of all our people, on behalf no
less of the honest man of means than of the honest man who earns each
day's livelihood by that day's sweat of his brow, it is necessary to
insist upon honesty in business and politics alike, in all walks of
life, in big things and in little things; upon just and fair dealing
as between man and man. We are striving for the right in the spirit of
Abraham Lincoln when he said:

"Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge may
speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the
wealth piled by the bondsmen's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited
toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the
lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three
thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord
are true and righteous altogether.'

"With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the
right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the
work we are in."

Sincerely yours, THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

HON. CHARLES J. BONAPARTE. Attorney-General.

CHAPTER XIII

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.

Meanwhile the Governor of Pennsylvania had all the Pennsylvania
militia in the anthracite region, although without any effect upon the
resumption of mining. The method of action upon which I had determined
in the last resort was to get the Governor of Pennsylvania to ask me
to keep order. Then I would put in the army under the command of some
first-rate general. I would instruct this general to keep absolute
order, taking any steps whatever that was necessary to prevent
interference by the strikers or their sympathizers with men who wanted
to work. I would also instruct him to dispossess the operators and run
the mines as a receiver until such time as the Commission might make its
report, and until I, as President, might issue further orders in view of
this report. I had to find a man who possessed the necessary good sense,
judgment, and nerve to act in such event. He was ready to hand in the
person of Major-General Schofield. I sent for him, telling him that if
I had to make use of him it would be because the crisis was only less
serious than that of the Civil War, that the action taken would be
practically a war measure, and that if I sent him he must act in a
purely military capacity under me as commander-in-chief, paying no heed
to any authority, judicial or otherwise, except mine. He was a fine
fellow--a most respectable-looking old boy, with side whiskers and a
black skull-cap, without any of the outward aspect of the conventional
military dictator; but in both nerve and judgment he was all right, and
he answered quietly that if I gave the order he would take possession
of the mines, and would guarantee to open them and to run them without
permitting any interference either by the owners or the strikers or
anybody else, so long as I told him to stay. I then saw Senator Quay,
who, like every other responsible man in high position, was greatly
wrought up over the condition of things. I told him that he need be
under no alarm as to the problem not being solved, that I was going to
make another effort to get the operators and miners to come together,
but that I would solve the problem in any event and get coal; that,
however, I did not wish to tell him anything of the details of my
intention, but merely to have him arrange that whenever I gave the word
the Governor of Pennsylvania should request me to intervene; that when
this was done I would be responsible for all that followed, and would
guarantee that the coal famine would end forthwith. The Senator made
no inquiry or comment, and merely told me that he in his turn would
guarantee that the Governor would request my intervention the minute I
asked that the request be made.

These negotiations were concluded with the utmost secrecy, General
Schofield being the only man who knew exactly what my plan was, and
Senator Quay, two members of my Cabinet, and ex-President Cleveland and
the other men whom I proposed to put on the Commission, the only other
men who knew that I had a plan. As I have above outlined, my efforts to
bring about an agreement between the operators and miners were finally
successful. I was glad not to have to take possession of the mines on my
own initiative by means of General Schofield and the regulars. I was all
ready to act, and would have done so without the slightest hesitation or
a moment's delay if the negotiations had fallen through. And my action
would have been entirely effective. But it is never well to take drastic
action if the result can be achieved with equal efficiency in less
drastic fashion; and, although this was a minor consideration, I was
personally saved a good deal of future trouble by being able to avoid
this drastic action. At the time I should have been almost unanimously
supported. With the famine upon them the people would not have tolerated
any conduct that would have thwarted what I was doing. Probably no man
in Congress, and no man in the Pennsylvania State Legislature, would
have raised his voice against me. Although there would have been
plenty of muttering, nothing would have been done to interfere with the
solution of the problem which I had devised, _until the solution was
accomplished and the problem ceased to be a problem_. Once this was
done, and when people were no longer afraid of a coal famine, and began
to forget that they ever had been afraid of it, and to be indifferent as
regards the consequences to those who put an end to it, then my enemies
would have plucked up heart and begun a campaign against me. I doubt if
they could have accomplished much anyway, for the only effective remedy
against me would have been impeachment, and that they would not have
ventured to try.[*]

     [*] One of my appointees on the Anthracite Strike Commission
     was Judge George Gray, of Delaware, a Democrat whose
     standing in the country was second only to that of Grover
     Cleveland. A year later he commented on my action as
     follows:

"I have no hesitation in saying that the President of the United States
was confronted in October, 1902, by the existence of a crisis more grave
and threatening than any that had occurred since the Civil War. I mean
that the cessation of mining in the anthracite country, brought about
by the dispute between the miners and those who controlled the greatest
natural monopoly in this country and perhaps in the world, had
brought upon more than one-half of the American people a condition
of deprivation of one of the necessaries of life, and the probable
continuance of the dispute threatened not only the comfort and health,
but the safety and good order, of the nation. He was without legal or
constitutional power to interfere, but his position as President of the
United States gave him an influence, a leadership, as first citizen
of the republic, that enabled him to appeal to the patriotism and good
sense of the parties to the controversy and to place upon them the moral
coercion of public opinion to agree to an arbitrament of the strike then
existing and threatening consequences so direful to the whole country.
He acted promptly and courageously, and in so doing averted the dangers
to which I have alluded.

"So far from interfering or infringing upon property rights, the
Presidents' action tended to conserve them. The peculiar situation, as
regards the anthracite coal interest, was that they controlled a natural
monopoly of a product necessary to the comfort and to the very life of a
large portion of the people. A prolonged deprivation of the enjoyment of
this necessary of life would have tended to precipitate an attack upon
these property rights of which you speak; for, after all, it is vain
to deny that this property, so peculiar in its conditions, and which
is properly spoken of as a natural monopoly, is affected with a public
interest.

"I do not think that any President ever acted more wisely, courageously
or promptly in a national crisis. Mr. Roosevelt deserves unstinted
praise for what he did."

They would doubtless have acted precisely as they acted as regards the
acquisition of the Panama Canal Zone in 1903, and the stoppage of
the panic of 1907 by my action in the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company
matter. Nothing could have made the American people surrender the canal
zone. But after it was an accomplished fact, and the canal was
under way, then they settled down to comfortable acceptance of the
accomplished fact, and as their own interests were no longer in
jeopardy, they paid no heed to the men who attacked me because of what I
had done--and also continue to attack me, although they are exceedingly
careful not to propose to right the "wrong," in the only proper way if
it really was a wrong, by replacing the old Republic of Panama under the
tyranny of Colombia and giving Colombia sole or joint ownership of
the canal itself. In the case of the panic of 1907 (as in the case
of Panama), what I did was not only done openly, but depended for its
effect upon being done and with the widest advertisement. Nobody in
Congress ventured to make an objection at the time. No serious leader
outside made any objection. The one concern of everybody was to stop
the panic, and everybody was overjoyed that I was willing to take the
responsibility of stopping it upon my own shoulders. But a few months
afterward, the panic was a thing of the past. People forgot the
frightful condition of alarm in which they had been. They no longer had
a personal interest in preventing any interference with the stoppage of
the panic. Then the men who had not dared to raise their voices until
all danger was past came bravely forth from their hiding places and
denounced the action which had saved them. They had kept a hushed
silence when there was danger; they made clamorous outcry when there was
safety in doing so.

Just the same course would have been followed in connection with the
Anthracite Coal Strike if I had been obliged to act in the fashion I
intended to act had I failed to secure a voluntary agreement between the
miners and the operators. Even as it was, my action was remembered with
rancor by the heads of the great moneyed interests; and as time went by
was assailed with constantly increasing vigor by the newspapers these
men controlled. Had I been forced to take possession of the mines,
these men and the politicians hostile to me would have waited until the
popular alarm was over and the popular needs met, just as they waited
in the case of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company; and then they
would have attacked me precisely as they did attack me as regards the
Tennessee Coal and Iron Company.

Of course, in labor controversies it was not always possible to champion
the cause of the workers, because in many cases strikes were called
which were utterly unwarranted and were fought by methods which cannot
be too harshly condemned. No straightforward man can believe, and no
fearless man will assert, that a trade union is always right. That
man is an unworthy public servant who by speech or silence, by direct
statement or cowardly evasion, invariably throws the weight of his
influence on the side of the trade union, whether it is right or wrong.
It has occasionally been my duty to give utterance to the feelings of
all right thinking men by expressing the most emphatic disapproval of
unwise or even immoral notions by representatives of labor. The man is
no true democrat, and if an American, is unworthy of the traditions
of his country who, in problems calling for the exercise of a moral
judgment, fails to take his stand on conduct and not on class. There are
good and bad wage-workers just as there are good and bad employers, and
good and bad men of small means and of large means alike.

But a willingness to do equal and exact justice to all citizens,
irrespective of race, creed, section or economic interest and position,
does not imply a failure to recognize the enormous economic, political
and moral possibilities of the trade union. Just as democratic
government cannot be condemned because of errors and even crimes
committed by men democratically elected, so trade-unionism must not be
condemned because of errors or crimes of occasional trade-union leaders.
The problem lies deeper. While we must repress all illegalities and
discourage all immoralities, whether of labor organizations or of
corporations, we must recognize the fact that to-day the organization of
labor into trade unions and federations is necessary, is beneficent,
and is one of the greatest possible agencies in the attainment of a true
industrial, as well as a true political, democracy in the United States.

This is a fact which many well-intentioned people even to-day do not
understand. They do not understand that the labor problem is a human
and a moral as well as an economic problem; that a fall in wages, an
increase in hours, a deterioration of labor conditions mean wholesale
moral as well as economic degeneration, and the needless sacrifice of
human lives and human happiness, while a rise of wages, a lessening of
hours, a bettering of conditions, mean an intellectual, moral and social
uplift of millions of American men and women. There are employers to-day
who, like the great coal operators, speak as though they were lords of
these countless armies of Americans, who toil in factory, in shop, in
mill and in the dark places under the earth. They fail to see that all
these men have the right and the duty to combine to protect themselves
and their families from want and degradation. They fail to see that
the Nation and the Government, within the range of fair play and a just
administration of the law, must inevitably sympathize with the men who
have nothing but their wages, with the men who are struggling for
a decent life, as opposed to men, however honorable, who are merely
fighting for larger profits and an autocratic control of big business.
Each man should have all he earns, whether by brain or body; and
the director, the great industrial leader, is one of the greatest of
earners, and should have a proportional reward; but no man should live
on the earnings of another, and there should not be too gross inequality
between service and reward.

There are many men to-day, men of integrity and intelligence, who
honestly believe that we must go back to the labor conditions of half
a century ago. They are opposed to trade unions, root and branch. They
note the unworthy conduct of many labor leaders, they find instances
of bad work by union men, of a voluntary restriction of output, of
vexations and violent strikes, of jurisdictional disputes between unions
which often disastrously involve the best intentioned and fairest of
employers. All these things occur and should be repressed. But the same
critic of the trade union might find equal causes of complaint against
individual employers of labor, or even against great associations of
manufacturers. He might find many instances of an unwarranted cutting of
wages, of flagrant violations of factory laws and tenement house laws,
of the deliberate and systematic cheating of employees by means of truck
stores, of the speeding up of work to a point which is fatal to the
health of the workman, of the sweating of foreign-born workers, of
the drafting of feeble little children into dusty workshops, of
black-listing, of putting spies into union meetings and of the
employment in strike times of vicious and desperate ruffians, who
are neither better nor worse than are the thugs who are occasionally
employed by unions under the sinister name, "entertainment committees."
I believe that the overwhelming majority, both of workmen and of
employers, are law-abiding peaceful, and honorable citizens, and I do
not think that it is just to lay up the errors and wrongs of individuals
to the entire group to which they belong. I also think--and this is
a belief which has been borne upon me through many years of practical
experience--that the trade union is growing constantly in wisdom as well
as in power, and is becoming one of the most efficient agencies toward
the solution of our industrial problems, the elimination of poverty and
of industrial disease and accidents, the lessening of unemployment,
the achievement of industrial democracy and the attainment of a larger
measure of social and industrial justice.

If I were a factory employee, a workman on the railroads or a
wage-earner of any sort, I would undoubtedly join the union of my trade.
If I disapproved of its policy, I would join in order to fight that
policy; if the union leaders were dishonest, I would join in order to
put them out. I believe in the union and I believe that all men who are
benefited by the union are morally bound to help to the extent of their
power in the common interests advanced by the union. Nevertheless,
irrespective of whether a man should or should not, and does or does
not, join the union of his trade, all the rights, privileges and
immunities of that man as an American and as a citizen should be
safeguarded and upheld by the law. We dare not make an outlaw of any
individual or any group, whatever his or its opinions or professions.
The non-unionist, like the unionist, must be protected in all his legal
rights by the full weight and power of the law.

This question came up before me in the shape of the right of a non-union
printer named Miller to hold his position in the Government Printing
Office. As I said before, I believe in trade unions. I always prefer to
see a union shop. But any private preferences cannot control my public
actions. The Government can recognize neither union men nor non-union
men as such, and is bound to treat both exactly alike. In the Government
Printing Office not many months prior to the opening of the Presidential
campaign of 1904, when I was up for reelection, I discovered that a man
had been dismissed because he did not belong to the union. I reinstated
him. Mr. Gompers, the President of the American Federation of Labor,
with various members of the executive council of that body, called upon
me to protest on September 29, 1903, and I answered them as follows:

"I thank you and your committee for your courtesy, and I appreciate the
opportunity to meet with you. It will always be a pleasure to see you
or any representative of your organizations or of your Federation as a
whole.

"As regards the Miller case, I have little to add to what I have already
said. In dealing with it I ask you to remember that I am dealing purely
with the relation of the Government to its employees. I must govern
my action by the laws of the land, which I am sworn to administer,
and which differentiate any case in which the Government of the United
States is a party from all other cases whatsoever. These laws are
enacted for the benefit of the whole people, and cannot and must not be
construed as permitting the crimination against some of the people. I
am President of all the people of the United States, without regard to
creed, color, birthplace, occupation or social condition. My aim is
to do equal and exact justice as among them all. In the employment and
dismissal of men in the Government service I can no more recognize
the fact that a man does or does not belong to a union as being for or
against him than I can recognize the fact that he is a Protestant or a
Catholic, a Jew or a Gentile, as being for or against him.

"In the communications sent me by various labor organizations protesting
against the retention of Miller in the Government Printing Office, the