Flying the Line Volume II: The Line Pilot in Crisis: ALPA Battles Airline Deregulation and Other Forces by George E. Hopkins

Author:George E. Hopkins [Hopkins, George E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: aviation, union, airlines, airline
Publisher: The Air Line Pilots Association
Published: 2015-08-18T15:18:12+00:00

CHAPTER 12

PILOTS AND PACS, REPUBLICANS

AND LABOR

The “Reagan Revolution” Hits ALPA

I

“ wanted to take him by the scruff of his neck and throw him out of the room,”

said President Theodore Roosevelt.

Who was the President so mad at, some tinhorn Central American dictator?

Some slick lawyer defending a cattle rustler whom Teddy had caught red-handed?

Actually, he was a perfectly respectable member of the President’s own class, a man named George F. Baer, who had come to the White House about the little matter of a nationwide coal strike.

“Teddy” Roosevelt, for whom the “teddy bear” was named, has come down through history with something of a “cuddly” image. Often seen as an eternally adolescent President, forever out hiking, camping, and exploring, Teddy’s zest for life and concern for the “less fortunate” (as the poor were quaintly called in those days) made him a hero to millions.

But Teddy Roosevelt had another side. He was also noted for carrying a “big stick” (he hardly ever “walked softly”), which he used regularly on enemies—

foreign and domestic. Overseas, Teddy laid into sleazy politicians in Latin America who dared stand in the way of his canal in Panama. At home, he took dead aim at the corporate greedheads who were known then as “robber barons.” Teddy’s pugnacity toward the “trusts” (or business monopolies) earned him enemies in corporate boardrooms and affection in the hearts of ordinary Americans. In short, working people loved Teddy Roosevelt for the enemies he made.

One such enemy was the aforementioned George F. Baer, a pompous, overbearing labor-baiter who acted as principal spokesman for the nation’s coal mine owners. Despite the fact that he and Teddy spoke the same language (in an upper-class accent barely distinguishable from that of the British aristocracy), Teddy found Baer immediately disagreeable. So disagreeable, in fact, that Teddy wanted to lay hands on Baer and throw him bodily out of the White House.

Teddy’s angry remark about Baer came in 1902, following a meeting he had just sat through in the White House. Teddy had called the meeting between the coal mine operators and representatives of the United Mine Workers to help settle the strike. This unprecedented attempt by a sitting President to mediate a labor dispute (which the newspapers of the day were calling “The Great Anthracite Coal Strike”) invites some obvious comparisons with the lack of action by George Bush during the Eastern Airlines strike of 1989.

Nothing like Roosevelt’s intervention had ever happened before. Before Teddy 138

Pilots and PACS, Republicans and Labor Roosevelt, Presidents (whether Democrat or Republican) had been uniformly hostile to labor unions and had sided with the courts in regarding them as

“syndicalist conspiracies.” Grover Cleveland (a Democrat, we must remember) had ordered federal troops to shoot down strikers during the Pullman Strike of 1894, on the totally spurious grounds that they were “interfering” with the mail.

Teddy Roosevelt was something new in the history of the American presidency and its relationship to organized labor. Despite his wealth, patrician upbringing, and privileged place in the American caste system of the 19th century, Teddy Roosevelt was a fair-minded man.

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