mining and commercial interests quietly contributed the tens of thousands of dollars needed to destroy the Federation.
Roosevelt’s own behavior, it turned out, was also of the “grossest impropriety.” Just days before the Supreme Court heard the oral arguments in the extradition case the president had hosted the justices at the White House, where he read aloud from a letter he had written condemning Moyer and Haywood as “undesirable” citizens. The incident became public in the spring of 1907.20 Labor and the Left erupted. Socialists and unionists, who had been forming “Moyer-Haywood conferences” around the country, chose May 4—the Saturday before the trial was to begin—for a national day of protest. A hundred thousand marched and cheered in Boston and almost as many in New York, where they waved red flags and sang the “Marseillaise.” Thousands wore badges that said, “I am an Undesirable Citizen.”21
Roosevelt’s most malodorous intervention was still to come. It was triggered by a cable from federal investigators in Idaho alerting the White House that the “civilization” which Governor Gooding was “saving” was rotten to the core. The Haywood prosecution, the investigators said, was being used to deflect attention from pervasive corruption.
“Investigations will show Steunenberg to be leading member timber frauds,” they said. Borah was “morally if not criminally connected. Cobb of Statesman and Governor Gooding both use all influence against investigation. Cobb morally and probably criminally connected.” Attorney General Charles Bonaparte quickly confirmed, and wrote the president, that the findings in the cable were “well-founded.”
The news stunned Roosevelt. If it became public it could ruin all the productive work that Cobb, McParland, and the others had done to paint Steunenberg as a saintly victim. Worse yet, it gave credence to the defense’s contention that Orchard might have had other paymasters. The findings offered an alternative “motive for the persons involved in these timber frauds to kill Steunenberg,” the attorney general advised Roosevelt.
The Haywood prosecution, moreover, was depending on Borah’s arts of persuasion. The “new U.S. senator” cited in the cable was a favorite of the president and a darling of the press. With “keen blue eyes, a powerful square chin, a frank straightforward manner and a winning boyish smile,” Borah beat down his foes with “the dazzling force of a thunderbolt,” the New York Sun reported. He was a self-made man who had married a governor’s daughter and profited from his ties to the mining industry as he rose from hick lawyer to corporate attorney and, eventually, to the Senate. “This is the work of my personal enemies,” Borah told Roosevelt—and, he said, of the Federation. But the miners had not caused Borah’s troubles. The investigation was launched by Roosevelt’s own land office personnel in response to widespread swindling in the Northwest. A similar prosecution in Oregon had been applauded by the White House, and its prosecutors lauded as heroes.
Gooding moved to get the White House to quash the investigation. He sent Roosevelt copies of Pinkerton reports which revealed that the prosecution had another spy—Operative 21—embedded in the defense who warned that Haywood’s legal team had gotten wind of the probe. “Everything should be made subservient to this great trial,” Gooding wrote, urging Roosevelt to rein in the investigators.
Roosevelt caved. There were no lectures on propriety this time. If he had any qualms about Gooding’s news that the state of Idaho had used a Pinkerton detective to infiltrate the defense staff and corrupt the jury selection process, the president of the United States never voiced them. He ordered Bonaparte to seal the indictments until Borah had finished hanging Haywood. “I have sacrificed, or at least, endangered, some of the chances of a successful prosecution of the Steunenberg frauds,” Bonaparte reported back to Roosevelt, “in order … not to injuriously affect the chances of the prosecution in the Haywood case.”
Operative 21—a Pinkerton detective by the name of Johnson—was a deep-cover man for the agency. He had arrived in Idaho in the days after the assassination posing as a socialist agitator and wormed his way onto the local defense team. There he was assigned the task of surveying the people on the voting rolls, from whom the Haywood jurors would be chosen.22 Canvassing was a vital practice in a big trial. Teams of investigators from both sides would roam the countryside posing as salesmen or lost travelers, engaging the locals in casual gossip and turning the conversation to the case at hand. They would compile lists of each prospective juror’s age and occupation, political affiliation, and views about the