Theodore Roosevelt began his presidency in 1901 promising to follow business-friendly policies. However, it was the Gilded Age, where monopolies grew to dominate industry, particularly coal and the railroads that delivered it. Roosevelt soon turned toward regulating those monopolies and their predatory practices. Then in May of 1902, the United Mine Workers of America went on strike in the Pennsylvania anthracite fields. That strike lasted 162 days and threatened to deprive a big part of the US of heating fuel for the winter. Advisors cautioned Roosevelt stay out of it.
By early September, the Washington Monument had run out of coal to operate its new electric elevator for the thousands of tourists who visited every month. Unscrupulous businessmen in cities throughout the Northeast and Midwest were buying most of the remaining supply and charging four times the normal price. The Post Office threatened to shut down, and public schools warned they might not be able to remain open past Thanksgiving.
Roosevelt was restless, fretful. He knew he would be blamed for remaining idle while Americans suffered. “Of course we have nothing whatever to do with this coal strike and no earthly responsibility for it. But the public at large will tend to visit on our heads responsibility for the shortage,” he wrote a friend.
Prices increased at laundries, bakeries, cafés, restaurants. Landlords raised the rent on apartments. Hotels charged more for rooms. Landowners sold their timber. In Chicago, residents tore out wooden paving from their streets to use as fuel. Railroads gave their employees old crossties to burn. Trolley lines limited service. Some manufacturers had to get by with sawdust in their furnaces. Pennsylvania steel mill owners said they might be forced to impose mass layoffs.
Eventually, Roosevelt did intervene. Read how that worked, and how he became the first president to settle a labor strike at Smithsonian.