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