Injury and Abscess: Teddy Roosevelt, Immigration, and Population Collapse

“If you're set on risking your life,” Roosevelt thought to himself, “go to Pittsfield, Massachusetts – and take a trolley ride.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt, October 18, 1902.

In July 2023, economist Madeline Zavodny published a brief for the National Foundation for American Policy, stating: “Without continued net inflows of immigrants, the US working-age population will shrink over the next two decades and by 2040 [...] International migration [will be] the only potential source of growth in the US working-age population.” This news was a long time coming, news that President Theodore Roosevelt predicted a year into his first term.

A month earlier, during a campaign visit to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the president’s carriage was struck by a speeding trolley, killing a Secret Service agent and injuring Roosevelt's left leg. The White House was being renovated, so Teddy had wheeled himself ungracefully to his desk in Jackson Place, his temporary residence. The injury resulted in an abscess, and physicians were forced to scrape his bone. It was excruciatingly painful, but Roosevelt did not acknowledge it; he was far too busy. A week earlier, during the conference to end the 1902 Coal Strike, he sat cushioned in his chair, brokering a negotiation between miners and railroad presidents, his wounded leg propped straight out in front and his square jaw protruding aggressively from beneath his stiff moustache.

“A democracy can be such in fact only if there is some rough approximation to similarity in stature among the men composing it,” Roosevelt thought. “A simple and poor society can exist as a democracy on a basis of sheer individualism, but a rich and complex industrial society cannot so exist, for some individuals – and especially those artificial individuals called corporations – become so very big that the ordinary individual is utterly dwarfed beside them and cannot deal with them on terms of equality.”

If nothing else, the great Anthracite Strike left an indelible impression on the American people. It showed that the labour problem had entered a new phase. Industry had grown. Great financial corporations were conducting nationwide and global business and had replaced the smaller concerns of an earlier time. Roosevelt noted, “The old familiar intimate relations between employer and employee were passing. A few generations before the boss had known every man in his shop—he called his men Bill, Tom, Dick, John – he inquired after their wives and babies, he swapped jokes and stories, and perhaps a bit of tobacco with them.”

Frank Sargent, Commissioner General of Immigration, had given Roosevelt the numbers and the warnings. On the southern border, Mexican labourers were being smuggled into the country and were willing to work for 25 cents a day. “These people,” said Sargent, “are fed from troughs as hogs might be, and are treated as slaves.” Nearly one million inhabitants of foreign countries joined the American population in 1902, the largest number of immigrants to arrive in the country in any single year of America’s history. Sargent feared that such an influx of immigration would affect the labour market. Very few of these mine workers had ever seen the president of the Reading Railroad. Even if they had, many of them could not have spoken to him, for many thousands of them were recent immigrants who did not understand the language.

As President Roosevelt grappled with the complex dynamics of labour relations and immigration, another societal concern began to emerge on his radar. The year 1902 not only witnessed pivotal events like the Anthracite Strike and the 1902 Coal Strike but also marked a period of profound reflection for Roosevelt on the broader social fabric of the nation – namely the declining birthrate. This interest was accelerated by articles serialised in Everyday Magazine. Bessie Von Vorst’s undercover investigation of the working conditions of American women was revelatory – the latest instalment was particularly worrisome. Roosevelt re-read the passage with a countenance that betrayed his alarm:

“The American woman is restless, dissatisfied. Society, whether among the highest or lowest classes, has driven her toward a destiny that is not normal. The factories are full of old maids; the colleges are full of old maids; the ballrooms in the worldly centers are full of old maids. For natural obligations are substituted the fictitious duties of clubs, meetings, committees, organisations, professions, a thousand unwomanly occupations. Among the American born women of this country the sterility is greater, the fecundity less than those of any other nation in the world, unless it be France, whose anxiety regarding her depopulation we would share in full measure were it not for the foreign immigration to the United States, which counteracts the degeneracy of the American.

The original causes for this increasing sterility are moral and not physical. When this is known, does not the philosophy of the American working woman become a subject of vital interest? Among the enemies to fecundity and a natural destiny there are two which act as potently in the lower as in the upper classes: the triumph of individualism, the love of luxury. America is not a democracy, the unity of effort between the man and the woman does not exist. Men were too long in a majority. Women have become autocrats or rivals [...] The American-born girl is an egoist. Her whole effort (and she makes and sustains one in the life of mill drudgery) is for herself. She works for luxury until the day when a proper husband presents himself. Then, she stops working and lets him toil for both, with the hope that the budget shall not be diminished by increasing family demands.”

Roosevelt wrote a letter to Van Vorst, telling her how much he appreciated the articles and offered a few reflections of his own:

"I do not know whether I most pity or despise the foolish and selfish man or woman who does not understand that the only things really worth having in life are those the acquirement of which normally means cost and effort. If a man or woman through no fault of his or hers goes throughout life denied those highest of all joys which spring only from home life from the having and bringing up of many healthy children [...] If the men of the nation are not anxious to work in many different ways with all their might and strength and ready and able to fight at need and anxious to be fathers of families and if the women do not recognise that the greatest thing for any woman is to be a good wife and mother[,] why[,] that nation has cause to be alarmed about its future."