Theodore Roosevelt and the 1902 Coal Strike That Gave Us the Square Deal

It is the first week of October, and the nights are turning cold. Picture a hypothetical family in a brick row house in a northern city, the kind with a coal bin in the cellar and a furnace that has to be fed every morning. The father is a clerk. The mother takes in sewing. The bin is a third full, and the dealer on the corner says he cannot promise more at any price. There is a coal strike on, and it has been going since May. Every newspaper on the stoop says that nobody in Washington is going to do anything about it. Winter is coming. And somewhere in the back of that family's mind is a plain question: who is in charge of this country?

That was the question that confronted Theodore Roosevelt in the autumn of 1902. His answer changed the office. For almost two centuries Americans had thought of strikes as private fights, to be settled by the parties or put down by force. Roosevelt decided that when a dispute threatened the heat in millions of homes, the President was not a bystander and not a bodyguard for either side. He was a referee. I want to tell you how it happened, in order, because the story is better than the summary, and because it has something to teach both the friends and the critics of strong presidents.

The strike begins, May 1902

The setting was the anthracite coal fields of northeastern Pennsylvania. Anthracite is hard coal, which burns clean and hot, and in those days it heated the homes of the big cities of the Northeast. The mines were controlled largely by a handful of railroad companies, which owned both the track and the coal beneath it. The men who dug that coal worked long days in dangerous tunnels, often for wages that did not stretch far, and many of them lived in company housing and bought from company stores.

The United Mine Workers of America, led by a careful, soft-spoken president named John Mitchell, called the miners out in May 1902. The union wanted higher pay, shorter hours and recognition of the union as the miners' bargaining agent, along with fairer ways of weighing the coal they dug. Well over a hundred thousand men left the pits. The owners refused to bargain with the union. They had a simple position: they ran the mines, the miners worked for them, and the union was an outsider. The strike dragged on through the summer.

For the first months, almost nobody in power thought it was their business. This is worth noting, because it was the conventional wisdom of the era and it was not a foolish view. The Constitution does not give the President a role in settling private labor disputes. The common-law tradition treated a contract between an employer and a worker as a private matter. And the memory of earlier federal interventions was bitter. In 1894 President Grover Cleveland had sent federal troops to break the Pullman strike, which put the force of the government on one side of a labor fight. A President who wanted to avoid that mistake had a choice between doing nothing and doing something novel.

George Baer's letter

Then, in the summer, one of the owners handed the public a gift of the worst sort. George F. Baer, the president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railway and its coal company, wrote a letter in July 1902 answering a citizen who had urged him to settle. Baer's reply said, in substance, that the rights and interests of working men would be protected and cared for not by the labor agitators but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom had given control of the property interests of the country.

I do not hold Baer's religion against him, and neither should you. A man can believe in God and in property rights both. What made the letter a disaster was its tone. It read as if the owners considered themselves appointed by heaven and the miners a nuisance. When it was published, it was quoted in newspapers across the country and became a symbol of everything that ordinary people distrusted about the big combinations of capital. The public mood was shifting. The owners had lost the argument before they had lost the vote.

The fall: cold, prices and pressure

As the summer ended, the arithmetic of the calendar took over. Anthracite had no easy substitute for home heating. Prices rose as the stored supplies dwindled. Mayors and governors wrote to Washington. Schools and hospitals worried about heating. By October the pressure on the White House was intense, and it did not come only from the left. Many Republican business leaders feared that a bitter winter would produce public anger, disorder and a backlash against the party and against business as a whole. Republican senator Mark Hanna of Ohio, a businessman himself, had long argued for conciliation between capital and labor. The idea that the President could play a neutral role gained support from men who had spent their lives in boardrooms.

Roosevelt acted. In the first days of October he invited both sides to the White House for a meeting on October 3, 1902. He was not in good physical shape; he had been injured in a carriage and trolley accident in September, and he was still lame as he presided. That detail is worth remembering because it is the sort of thing that would have excused a weaker man from the job.

October 3: the White House meeting

Here is how the meeting went, according to the accounts that survive. Mitchell, for the miners, was calm and respectful, and offered to accept whatever a commission appointed by the President decided. The operators were hostile, and they used the meeting to denounce the union and demand that the government use force against it. They treated the President's invitation as if he had called them in to be scolded. Roosevelt was angry with them. In his own private letters afterward he said as much. The union man had acted like a reasonable citizen. The owners had acted like men who thought the mines were a private kingdom.

The meeting produced no deal. But it produced something almost as important: a clear public contrast between the side that said "let a fair body decide" and the side that said "we will not talk." That contrast mattered for what came next.

The threat to run the mines

Roosevelt then did what a President who has run out of polite options does. He prepared to use his power in a way no one expected. Under the plan worked out with his Secretary of War, Elihu Root, the Army would be sent into the coal fields, not to break the strike, as Cleveland had in 1894, but to run the mines for the public until the dispute was resolved. A retired general, John Schofield, was named to take charge of the operation.

Pause on that for a moment, because it raises the question I find the most interesting. Did the President have the legal authority to seize and operate the mines? There was no statute that said so. Roosevelt's own view, in later years, was that a President could do whatever the needs of the nation required unless the Constitution or the laws forbade it. A great many conservatives, then and now, reject that theory, and you can find the opposing view stated in the framework Justice Robert Jackson used in a famous 1952 case, which we put to work in Justice Jackson's Three-Box Test for Presidential Power, Put to Work. I think the skeptics are right about the principle. A President who can seize private property whenever he thinks the public needs it holds a power the Founders would not have recognized.

But in practice the threat did not have to be carried out. It served as a lever. Root went to see the financier J. P. Morgan, whose banking house had deep interests in the railroads that owned the mines. In a delicious irony, Morgan was the same man whose holding company, the Northern Securities Company, Roosevelt's administration was suing under the antitrust law at that very time. Root and Morgan reached an arrangement under which the operators would agree to the appointment of a presidential commission to arbitrate the dispute. The operators had the hardest time with it, because they did not want to be seen as dealing with the union. The face-saving formula was that they would accept the commission's findings without recognizing the union as such.

The commission and the settlement

On October 13, the miners agreed to go back to work while a commission studied the case, and the strike formally ended on October 23, 1902. Roosevelt appointed the commission on October 16. It was chaired by a federal judge, George Gray, and it included an engineer, mining experts, a Catholic bishop and a labor leader, who was placed under a heading that let the President meet the operators' demand for particular categories. Roosevelt famously stretched the category list in order to get a labor man on the body. The point is that he cared who sat on the panel.

The commission held hearings through the winter and issued its award in March 1903. The miners received a pay increase of about ten percent, and a shorter workday of nine hours. The operators did not have to recognize the union as the bargaining agent, a victory for them, and the award set up a board to handle disputes between the sides, a victory for orderly process. In other words, nobody got everything. It was a compromise reached by a process that both parties had agreed to ahead of time.

What "a square deal" meant

Soon after, Roosevelt began using the phrase "square deal" to describe his approach to public affairs, and by the 1904 campaign it was his motto. It would be easy to hear it as a vague slogan. It was not. In practice it meant three things.

1. The government is neutral between the parties. The President would not be the owners' enforcer, as Cleveland had been in the Pullman strike, and he would not be the unions' champion either. The question was what was fair.
2. Public safety and public needs come first. Not the owners' profits and not the union's demands. The family in the brick row house had a claim too, and nobody else was speaking for it.
3. Disputes should be settled by a process, not a showdown. Arbitration put a fair body in the middle, which was better than forcing either side to surrender.

Do those principles belong to conservatism? I would say yes, with a caution. Conservatives respect property, contract and limited government. They also respect order, community and the rule of law. Roosevelt's approach tried to protect the second set without trampling the first, and his reputation as a Republican reformer rests in part on that. You can see the larger picture of his record, including the part of it the party remembers less fondly, in Theodore Roosevelt busted trusts and saved forests, and the GOP forgot half.

The strongest objection

The best case against Roosevelt's role goes like this. One, the President invented a power he did not have. Two, by stepping in he rewarded the union for striking and taught every future labor dispute to run to Washington. Three, an arbitration that split the difference teaches the parties that the way to get a better result is to make the dispute loud enough to force intervention.

Those arguments contain truth. The precedent of presidential intervention did grow in the twentieth century, and not always for the better. But I would answer that Roosevelt did not seize anything. He used the threat of action and his standing to bring two stubborn parties to the table, and the settlement he got was voluntary. That is a very different thing from permanent government control of an industry. When a government steps in as a referee, it is acting in the oldest tradition of the law: the neutral party who says, "Present your case and abide by the result."

What it means now

The 1902 story has echoes for anyone who wonders what a President's proper role is when private disputes hit the public. The lesson is not that the White House should insert itself into every quarrel. It is that when millions of families are affected and the parties are deadlocked, a President with a reputation for fairness can sometimes accomplish what neither side can do alone. If you are interested in how that works in the White House today, take a look at the question of what a President can and cannot do on his own authority, and compare it to the way Roosevelt's successors handled the same pressures. A good companion read is Five vetoes Congress overrode and what each showed about presidential power, which examines the limits on presidential power from the other side.

The bottom line

• The 1902 coal strike shows that a President can serve the public by acting as a neutral referee, but the authority to do so rests on persuasion and public trust more than on any written power.
• Be wary of any claim that the President can seize private property because he says the public needs it. That theory is a danger to a free economy, whoever is in office.
• When you hear a business leader or a union leader speak as if the public does not matter, remember George Baer's letter. The side that forgets the family in the cold house usually loses the argument.
• If your state or town faces a dispute that affects heating, water or power, ask your elected officials what process exists to settle it before the crisis, not after.
• Read the primary record. The Report to the President on the Anthracite Coal Strike is in the public record, and the Library of Congress holds Roosevelt's papers.