ldquo;Yours very truly,
“W. H. LANGDON, District Attorney.”
ROOSEVELT’S LETTER TO SPRECKELS ON THE GRAFT SITUATION.
“The White House, Washington, June 8, 1908.
“My Dear Mr. Spreckels—Now and then you and Mr. Heney and the others who are associated with you must feel down-hearted when you see men guilty of atrocious crimes who from some cause or other succeed in escaping punishment, and especially when you see men of wealth, of high business and, in a sense, of high social standing, banded together against you.
“My dear sir, I want you to feel that your experience is simply the experience of all of us who are engaged in this fight. There is no form of slander and wicked falsehood which will not as a matter of course be employed against all men engaged in such a struggle, and this not only on the part of men and papers representing the lowest type of demagogy, but, I am sorry to say, also on the part of men and papers representing the interests that call themselves pre-eminently conservative, pre-eminently cultured.
“In such a struggle it is too often true that the feeling against those engaged in it becomes peculiarly bitter, not merely in the business houses of the great financiers who directly profit by the wrongdoing, but also in the clubs, in certain newspaper offices where business interests exercise an unhealthy control and, I regret to add, in other newspaper offices which like to be considered as to a marked degree the representatives of the cultivation and high social standing of the country.
“Now, I do hope that you and your colleagues will treat all this bitterness with entire disregard. It is of small consequence to you, or to any of us who are engaged in this work, whether men think well or ill of us personally; but it is of very great consequence that we should do the work without flinching, on the one hand, and on the other hand, without losing our good-humored common sense, without becoming angered and irritated to a degree that will in any way cause us to lose our heads.
“Therefore, I hope that you and Heney and your associates will keep reasonably good-natured; but that above all things you will not lose heart. You must battle on valiantly, no matter what the biggest business men may say, no matter what the mob may say, no matter what may be said by that element which may be regarded as socially the highest element. You must steadfastly oppose those foolish or wicked men who would substitute class consciousness and loyalty to class interest, for loyalty to American citizenship as a whole, for loyalty to the immutable laws of righteousness, of just and fair dealing as between man and man.
“It is just as bad to be ruled by a plutocracy as by a mob. It is profoundly un-American and, in a social sense, profoundly immoral, to stand for or against a given man, not because he is or is not a brave, upright and able man, but because he does or does not belong to a labor union or does or does not represent the big business interests. In their essence, down at the foundation of things, the ties that are all-important are those that knit honest men, brave men, square-dealing men, together, and it is a mighty poor substitute if we replace these ties by those that bind men together, whether they are good or bad, simply because they follow a particular business, have a given social standing or belong to a particular organization. It is an evil and a dreadful thing for laboring men to endeavor to secure the political dominance of labor unions by conniving at crookedness or violence, by being ‘loyal’ to crooked labor leaders, for to be ‘loyal’ to the fancied interests of the unions when they are against the laws of morality and the interests of the whole people means ultimately the destruction of the unions themselves, as an incident to the destruction of all good citizenship.