The Wild West
American history is widely
interpreted as the pre-eminent refutation of Karl Marx's social and political
theories. Ironically, though, it was in the United States, between 1890 and
1915, that something very close to Marx's vision of class warfare
unfolded--not, as Marx might have predicted, in the nation's industrial centers
or financial capitals, but in the mining and logging camps of the West. Lacking
a sizable middle class of farmers and shopkeepers (who would arrive only after
World War I), and undergoing intense and rapid capitalist development, large
portions of Colorado, Nevada, and Idaho became sharply polarized along class
lines--"labor in one camp, the employers in another, no in-between camp, with
government a football between the two," according to the final volume of John
R. Commons and associates' venerable History of Labor in the United
States .
Western
miners and loggers defended themselves and their jobs with rifles and dynamite.
They also created some of the most incendiary labor organizations ever seen,
above all the Western Federation of Miners. Their employers were no less
violence-prone. Timber magnates and mine owners deployed armed Pinkertons and
strikebreakers as if they were baronial armies. When private force failed,
employers persuaded local and state governments to suspend due process of law,
arrest suspected troublemakers, initiate mass deportations, and crush strikes
with National Guardsmen--using what Commons and his associates called all "the
paraphernalia of dictatorship."
While writing Big Trouble , the late Pulitzer
Prize-winner J. Anthony Lukas, who took his own life in June this year, may
have sensed that readers in the conservative 1990s would resist being reminded
about these ferocious, long-ago American upheavals. Lukas' penchant for epic
had served him well in Common Ground , his account of racial turmoil in
Boston during the '60s and '70s. But, by all reports, he was depressed about
the prospects for a large tome about American class conflict.
The United
States, after all, has been blessed (we are constantly told) with a dynamic,
egalitarian sort of capitalism, one that has always rewarded individual
initiative and confounded class distinctions. Lukas' book runs afoul of this
conventional wisdom in two ways: first, by describing a world (as Woody West
complains in a dismissive review of Big Trouble for the Weekly
Standard ) in which there was "no middle term" between plutocrats and wage
slaves; and second, by appearing to ignore what West contends is "the most
remarkable fact of the capital consolidation of those years, especially in the
West: the permeable nature of 'class' in America." Lukas knew better about such
pre-World War I hellholes as the Coeur d'Alenes district of Idaho; or Cripple
Creek and Leadville in Colorado; or the Comstock mines of Nevada, as described
by one Eliot Lord:
View their work!
Descending from the surface in shaft-cages, they enter narrow galleries where
the air is scarce respirable. By the dim light of their lanterns, a dingy rock
surface, braced by rotting props, is visible. The stenches of decaying
vegetable matter, hot foul water and human excretions intensify the effects of
the heat. The men throw off their clothes. ... Only a light breech-cloth covers
their hips and thick-soled shoes protect their feet from the scorching rocks
and steaming rills of water.
In telling
of these American places, Lukas had to challenge some powerful reassuring myths
about our past.
He decided to focus on a particular story: the
murder, in 1905, of Idaho's former Democratic governor, 44-year-old Frank
Steunenberg. Considered a moderate on labor issues, Steunenberg had been
elected governor by a wide margin in 1896, with the support of the Populists
and organized labor. Three years later, however, Steunenberg approved the
deployment of black troops and the use of preventive detention "bull pens" to
squelch labor unrest in the Coeur d'Alenes mining camps. Denied re-election in
1900, he retired to his hometown of Caldwell, about 30 miles west of Boise,
forgotten by most of his fellow Idahoans--but not by the aggrieved miners. On
the evening of Dec. 30, 1905, as he walked through his front gate, a bomb blast
blew him to pieces. Idaho officials immediately suspected that militant miners
were responsible.
The job
of investigating the murder fell to the celebrated Pinkerton detective James
McParland, who had broken up the notorious Molly Maguire labor terrorist groups
in the anthracite fields of Pennsylvania 30 years earlier. In Caldwell,
McParland quickly apprehended a drifter and sometime associate of various union
miners who called himself Harry Orchard. In Orchard's hotel room, police
discovered materials for rigging up a bomb. After prolonged coaxing by
McParland, Orchard confessed to Steunenberg's murder--and, with the clear
impression that he could save his own neck by naming others, he went on to
implicate three executives of the Denver-based Western Federation of Miners,
one of whom, William D. ("Big Bill") Haywood, had co-founded an even more
notorious organization, the Industrial Workers of the World.
The arrest of Haywood and the others in Colorado and their
removal on a secret train to Idaho (in what amounted to a legal kidnapping)
brought an outraged response from such relatively conservative labor leaders as
Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor, as well as from such
radicals as the socialist leader Eugene Debs. The defense, in turn, acquired
the services of the nation's most famous lawyer, Clarence Darrow. And after a
year and a half of legal wrangling and nationwide protest demonstrations,
followed by a three-month trial, Darrow won an acquittal for Haywood, mainly on
the grounds that Orchard's testimony was unreliable. A few months later,
another jury acquitted one of the other WFM men, and charges against the third
were then dropped. Only the wretched Orchard wound up getting convicted, and
(following the commutation of his death sentence) he spent the rest of his life
in an Idaho penitentiary.
It's easy
to see what drew Lukas to the Steunenberg episode: a tale of murder that is
still shrouded in mystery; along with a long-forgotten cause
célèbre populated by such larger-than-life characters as Haywood,
Darrow, and McParland; all wrapped around a history lesson about the class
bitterness of a century ago. Indeed, Lukas was so drawn to the story and its
details that he sometimes seems to have lost his bearings, trying to read
significance into every little shard of information that his research had
uncovered.
As a result of these huge authorial efforts,
Big Trouble is bigger than it had to be. It includes long digressions on
subjects ranging from the European origins of private detective work to the
gradings along the circuitous railroad route from Denver to Boise. The major
characters receive ample biographical treatments, but so do dozens of other
figures, famous and obscure, who had only fleeting links to Lukas' story. The
book certainly rewards readers whenever it returns to the main story. Lukas'
mastery of historical events and contexts, and his ability to dramatize them,
was acute. But it is a shame, in an age of blockbuster publishing, that Lukas'
editors either did not or could not prevail upon him to lighten up, on himself
and on his audience.
Historians may also question
whether the Steunenberg affair, on its own, touched off, in Lukas' words, "a
struggle for the soul of America." To be sure, the larger industrial conflicts
of the period amounted to such a struggle. And to his credit, Lukas, for all
his obvious sympathies with the workers, was scrupulous in assessing the events
surrounding the murder. (In his epilogue, he offered compelling, albeit
circumstantial, bits of evidence that strongly suggest that Haywood and the
others actually were involved in an assassination plot.) But Lukas never fully
clarified why Steunenberg's murder and its aftermath were as pivotal as his
subtitle implies they were. In fact, the immediate result of the trials was to
widen the breach between Haywood (who became increasingly radical) and his more
cautious WFM associates (who wound up pulling back from the revolutionary IWW).
In this sense, Lukas' story may have been important as part of the struggle
over the future of organized labor, but less so as a struggle over America's
soul, at least when compared with the truly momentous Homestead and Pullman
strikes of the 1890s, the Triangle Shirt Waist Co. fire of 1911, or any of the
other more familiar set pieces of turn-of-the-century labor history.
Still, it is the rare author
who can re-create, with so much passion and exactness, aspects of our history
that most Americans would just as soon forget. Anyone who knew Tony Lukas even
slightly was deeply impressed by his boundless, open-minded curiosity about the
injustices of modern life, along with his stubborn reportorial integrity about
getting to the very bottom of any story as best he could. Its flaws aside,
Big Trouble is a brave book that exhibits those qualities bounteously.
And so its tale is truly tragic.
