A STORM was brewing in March, 1902, which was to add immeas-
urably to Roosevelt's fame. The threat of a strike in the an-
thracite coal fields, with economic disaster and probable defeat
for the Republican party in the Congressional elections that fall, was
causing dissension in the ranks of the industrialists. They had been united
in condemnation of the Northern Securities suit. This time, opposing
the stupidities of the extreme conservatives, Roosevelt had as allies
J. Pierpont Morgan, Elihu Root, Charles M. Schwab, and John D.
Rockefeller, Jr. Roosevelt wrote to Morgan, when the crisis had passed:

. . . Let me thank you for the service you rendered the whole people.
If it had not been for your going in the matter, I do not see how the strike
could have been settled at this time, and the consequences that might have
followed . . . are . . . very dreadful to contemplate.

Abuses in the coal fields had long been comparable to the horrors of
slavery in the South. In a hundred dismal mining towns in Ohio, Il-
linois, Pennsylvania, and the other coal-producing States, the scaffold
of the mine cast its shadow on despair. In Ohio, in 1886, the average
annual earnings were $239 a year, and the men worked from ten to
twelve hours a day underground. ² By 1901 the wage had risen to about
$560 a year, but conditions of employment were irregular and hazard-
ous. In 1899 there had been 358 fatal accidents; in 1901, although the
number of men employed had increased only slightly, 441 men had
been killed. This was before the day of workmen's compensation. The
only recourse for death or injury was a long lawsuit with any possible
damages fairly certain to go to attorneys. ³

The miners had struggled against their lot. Hope had come to them
in 1885, when word drifted into the mining regions that the American

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