This self-serving use of religion made many Americans support the striking workers.

HARRY MONROE: After several months, President Roosevelt invited coal mine owners and union leaders to a meeting in Washington. He asked them to keep in mind that a third group was involved in their dispute: the public. He warned that the nation faced the possibility of a winter without heating fuel.

Roosevelt said: "I did not call this meeting to discuss your claims and positions. I called it to appeal to your love of country."

The union leaders said they were willing to have the president appoint an independent committee to settle the strike. They said they would accept the committee's decision as final. The mine owners rejected the idea. One warned the president not even to talk about it. Such talk, he said, was illegal interference in private industry.

KAY GALLANT: That made Theodore Roosevelt angry. Later, he said: "If it were not for the high office I held, I would have taken him by the seat of the pants and the nape of the neck and thrown him out the window."

Finally, Roosevelt got both sides to agree to a compromise. Mine owners agreed to have an independent committee study the miners' demands. And the miners' agreed to return to work until the study was completed.

Several months later, the report was ready. The committee proposed that miners accept a smaller pay increase in exchange for improved working conditions. Both sides accepted the proposal. The coal strike ended.