The Coal War

by Upton Sinclair

  Hal had come with an idea of what happens in strikes, derived from the reading of newspapers and the conversations of his leisure-class friends: the idea being that as soon as a strike is declared, the strikers with one accord turn out to defend their jobs with clubs and brick-bats and revolvers. But Hal saw that in this strike, at any rate, the course of events was entirely different. The leaders of the strike were convinced that they could win with the weapon of solidarity; they wanted no other weapon, and regarded a man who suggested any other as an enemy. There were rough characters among these miners, of course; but the vast majority of them were men accustomed to earning their bread by severe and patient toil. They had confidence in their leaders, and were eager to do what their leaders ordered. Their attitude to “scabs” was not always one of blind hatred; many of them could understand that the “scab” was a man out of a job like themselves, and that he might be ignorant concerning the wrongs suffered by the workers in this district. If they could explain to him, if they could plead with him, he might refuse to take the bread out of their children’s mouths, and continue this system of oppression!

  There came word to the Horton tent-colony that a couple of automobiles, each with two armed guards, were waiting at the railroad-station. That meant that strikebreakers were expected, and a dozen or more of the colonists set out for the village. “Go and see those fellows behave themselves,” said Jim Moylan to Hal; and so Hal ran after the party. When the train came in, he stood watching, with his friend Mike Madvik, the Croatian mule-driver, at his side.

  Several men who looked like workingmen got off the train. “Fellow I know there!” exclaimed Madvik, and stepped forward to speak to the man; when one of the guards seized him by the shoulder and threw him back. There were cries from the other strikers, and a rush forward; whereupon the guard drew his revolver and sprang into the midst of them, striking right and left with the butt of the weapon. He struck one man in the jaw, and with another blow he laid open the Croatian’s scalp. The other guards joined in, and having driven the angry strikers back, they pushed the strike-breakers into the automobiles, leaped onto the running-boards, and sped away.

  Hal took the job of binding up the head of his mule-driver friend; all during the operation the poor fellow was crying—not with pain, but with rage. Hal strove to tell him, in words of one syllable, of the wonderful vision of labor-solidarity, the one big union that was coming out of agonies such as these. But all the time Hal had an inner struggle to be convinced by his own eloquence. He really wanted to get a gun!

  A day or two later a group of strikers flagged a railroad-train, to make a search for strike-breakers. They did not find any, as it happened, but they made a terrible excitement. Reading about it in the Western City papers, one got the impression that the coal-camps were in a state near to insurrection; and how could a young man of decent rearing and education give his support to such rioters and assassins? Hal could see the impression his relatives and friends must be getting, yet he was powerless to convey any other impression to them.

  The newspapers were so very plausible in their accounts, that sometimes even Hal would be seized with doubts. Might it not be that some of these things were happening as described? He knew that the strikers were men with a sense of bitter wrongs, and that some of them were inflaming this sense with liquor. Might it not be that some of them had done the wild deeds which the newspapers told about? Some of them in remoter parts of the field, too far for Hal to know them!

  There came one flagrant incident, a night attack upon the Harvey’s Run mine, by what the papers described as a mob of armed strikers. There was a tent-colony in this neighborhood, and Jim Moylan got it on the telephone, and received most solemn assurance that there had been no fighting whatever—at least none that the strikers knew of. So Hal called up Billy Keating, who was in Pedro, and suggested that he make an investigation of this particular riot. Billy set out, and next day the “Gazette” had a report of what he had found. Over a thousand shots were fired, according to the story; but Billy had challenged the marshal of the camp, who had been able to show only three bullet-holes in the buildings—and these in an unoccupied Japanese boarding-house! It was claimed that the attacking mob had been hidden on the hillside above the camp; but Keating had stuck a lead-pencil through the bullet-holes, and found all three of them horizontal! It was the most obvious kind of “frame-up”; yet the newspapers were making it the basis of a demand for the calling out of the militia!

  [19]

  The reason for such proceedings was plain enough to Hal. The coal-operators were in a state of dismay, because of the completeness of the strike. Their reports had led them to expect a quick collapse; but here practically all their men were out; and many of the best were leaving the district, over five hundred having purchased railroad tickets on a single day! The efforts to keep them by force had broken down; in several cases the camp had risen en masse, stormed the defenses, and marched out. In other camps the union had sent in spies among the strike-breakers, and there were secret meetings, and the strike-breakers were striking!

  The cost of paying and feeding the guards and deputies amounted to something like ten thousand dollars a day; and this expense the operators wished to put off on the state. They wanted the Governor to order out the militia; and to support the demand, they wanted violence.

  Day by day the rifle-carrying “guards” crowded closer upon the tent-colonies, their ways becoming more insolent, their language more vile. They would stop and turn back parties of men from the post-office; solitary men they would beat, women they would grossly insult. They attacked strikers who came into the open camps to demand their back pay; they arrested men for attempting to speak to strike-breakers, even in public places. And when all this failed, they took to hiding in the hills, or in the coal-camps which happened to be near the tent-colonies, and practicing long-range firing with human targets.

  There were a dozen tent-colonies, scattered along the railroad for fifty miles; and this last-mentioned experience befell them all. Again and again the miners’ officials went to Sheriff Raymond, asking protection. They demanded that he take away the deputy’s commissions which he had illegally issued to non-residents. They demanded that he furnish men to protect the tents—offering to lodge and feed some of the deputies, in the hope of keeping off the bullets of the others! But the sheriff-emperor said No; and when Harmon and Moylan requested that he issue deputy’s commissions to the strikers, so that they might protect their own homes, he answered, “I never arm both factions!”

  So naturally the miners took to arming themselves. Before this, it had been the hot-heads who bought weapons; but after the interview with Alf Raymond, the union officials themselves ordered guns and ammunition. This fact, of course, became known, and was diligently used by the strikers’ enemies, in order to make the public believe that the strikers were law-breakers and desperadoes.

  The public understood that the coal-companies had to employ guards to protect their properties, which otherwise would be burned or dynamited; also to protect the men who wanted to go on working, who would otherwise be beaten or shot. When you asked the public to believe that guards were being secretly used to beat and kill strikebreakers, and even to burn and dynamite properties, in order that the public might be led to think that the strikers had committed these crimes—then you went out of the realm of reality, you set yourself down for a romancer of the “penny-dreadful” order. Unless by chance you were something worse—a secret abettor and fomentor of crime!

  But to the strikers these matters appeared quite differently. Not merely did they know that the “penny-dreadful” tales were true, that these strike-breaking agencies were “framing things up” on them; they knew that they did this systematically, as their regular business routine. Union labor had seen this technique of strike-breaking being developed for twenty years: from the great Chicago railway strike, where a commission appointed by the President of the United States had reported that the burning of cars and
other violence had been committed by “thugs, thieves and ex-convicts” in the employ of the Railway Managers’ Association; down to the recent great strike of the wage-slaves of the woolen trust, where the president of the mighty corporation was almost sent to prison—having made the mistake of employing the dynamiters himself, instead of letting a detective agency do it.

  Here in this coal-country, the detective agencies were so sure of their control of government and news-agencies that they scarcely made any pretense of concealing their doings. They could not have done it, had they wished to; because their employes, swollen with suddenly acquired authority, were not to be kept from boasting. For example, Pete Hanun, the breaker of teeth, and Gus Dirkett, his pal! These two, the murderers of Olson, were under bonds of ten thousand dollars, but they still had their deputy’s commissions, and carried rifles, in addition to the revolvers with which they had shot the organizer. By day they rode about the district, terrorizing all they met, and at night they got drunk in the saloons of Pedro, and told of the coming of the “death special”, and the use they intended to make of this new toy.

  This “death special” was the talk of all the camps: an armored automobile which was being constructed in one of the mills of the General Fuel Company. It was provided with three-eights inch steel plates, high up on the sides and about the body and wheels; it was shaped in front and back like a battle-ship, and mounted two machine-guns, one in front and one in back, each firing a hundred and forty-seven steel bullets per minute.

  There was a meeting of the miners at Horton one morning, two weeks after the beginning of the strike. John Harmon spoke, and Mother Mary denounced the Schultz detectives in her coal-camp English. Some of the detectives were present, and reported her uncomplimentary remarks; and that same afternoon came the avenging “death special”. In it were Schultz, Pete Hanun, Gus Dirkett, and a fourth man, the chief clerk of the General Fuel Company. They approached the colony from over the hills, took post where a ridge of bushes hid them from view, and without any sort of warning opened fire on the tents.

  [20]

  Hal was in the headquarters tent, discussing with Harmon and Moylan the problem of sanitary inspection, when a wild clamor broke, and the three men rushed out into the street. Women and children were running this way and that, screaming.

  “What is it?” Hal cried; and Rosa Minetti answered that it was bullets—somebody was shooting at them!

  At first Hal could not believe her. “Listen!” she exclaimed; and he heard a swift whirring, like the sound of a flying-machine; also a whining, buzzing sound, that might have been the hiving of bees. “Bullets!” cried Rosa. “They shoot us all!”

  Now Hal had never heard the sound of a machine-gun; he had never thought of such a weapon as a possibility in his life of culture and ease. “It’s an automobile!” he declared.

  But Rosa persisted. “Look! Look!” And she pointed down the street, where spurts of dirt were leaping high up. “We got coffee-pot on stove! They come hole in it! Coffee run all over!”

  A man rushed past Hal. “Kill them! Kill them!” he was shouting. He had a double-barreled shot-gun in his hand, and Harmon called, “Stop that fellow!” So Hal leaped in pursuit, and grabbed the man, an Italian. But it was impossible to stop him; he was like a mad creature. When Hal tried to take the gun, he leaped back and pointed it. “They killa my brud, I killa them! You stoppa me, I killa you!”

  So Hal had to let him go, and follow him out into the fields beyond the tents. Other men came running, with rifles and revolvers, even axes and picks. They looked about wildly, but could not tell where the shooting came from, even though the bullets kicked the dirt into their eyes and mouths. The little Italian, beside himself with fury, took aim at the mountains and fired both barrels at once.

  Now Hal had come to this coal-country with his mind made up to a role of non-resistance. Whatever others might do, his job was to make an appeal to people’s moral sense. He had foreseen that it would not be easy, but he had taken his resolve—he would fight with the weapons of the mind, and in the end the conscience of the community must rally to his support.

  But here was a trying problem. What is the proper course of action for a non-resistant, when bullets are actually kicking dirt into his eyes? Shall he dance about and dodge, like a tenderfoot in a frontier bar-room! Shall he crawl under the bed with the women, or behind the stove with the children? Or shall he go about his affairs unmoved, according to the tradition of the British army officer? The latter course might satisfy a man’s dignity, but it hardly satisfied his common-sense.

  Fortunately this test was not a long one. Having fired about a thousand shots without hitting anyone, the guards considered that they had taught the colony its lesson, and the “death special” moved on out of sight beyond the hills. They left the inhabitants of the tents behaving like a nest of ants that has been suddenly dug out of the ground.

  This episode constituted the “first battle of Horton”. It had apparently been planned to cause terror, to put a stop to “incendiary speeches” in the colony; if so, it failed, for it caused only furious indignation. There was a conference of union leaders in the headquarters tent that night, and at this meeting the peace men could hardly get themselves heard. It seemed that there were only two of them left—John Edstrom and Louie the Greek—the latter being a Tolstoyan, who carried his peace ideas so far that he refused to eat meat!

  The outcome of the conference was that the union leaders drew up a letter to the Governor, giving notice that from this time on the strikers would protect themselves; they would establish a guard for the tent-colonies, and be prepared to meet their assailants. The Governor did not answer this directly, but Sheriff Raymond made answer of a sort—ordering his deputies to arrest as many strikers as they could find carrying weapons. In Pedro they charged Tim Rafferty with carrying a revolver, and sent him to the filthy city-jail for thirty days.

  [21]

  The reports of this “battle of Horton”, published in the Western City morning papers, were the cause of Hal’s getting a long-distance telephone-call—a very long long-distance call, which must have cost the caller many dollars. It was Edward, demanding that his brother should get out of that strike-district. He was terribly excited, and more profane than Hal had ever known him before. “If you don’t come, by God, I’ll come and fetch you!”

  Hal answered, “I’ve been wishing that you might see things here with your own eyes!”

  “If I come,” declared the far-off voice, “it won’t be to see anything—it will be to have you locked up in a lunatic asylum.”

  “If you’d only come, Edward, you might stop some of the shooting! They wouldn’t take chances of killing a business-man!”

  “I tell you to take the night-train!” persisted the tones of distant indignation. “I mean for you to do what I say! If you don’t, I’ll have Dad cut you off! I’ll denounce you in the newspapers! I’ll make it clear that I have nothing to do with this tom-foolery!”

  “There’s no use wasting telephone charges on that sort of talk, Edward. I’m not going to desert these people in their trouble. If you want to save my life, the thing for you to do is to go to Governor Barstow and make him protect these tent-colonies.”

  There was an interruption in the telephone service. After some delay Hal heard the faint voice, seeming pathetic in its helplessness: “Why don’t you come up and see the Governor yourself?”

  That seemed a real idea. “Wait a minute,” said Hal, and he turned and asked John Harmon about it. “By all means!” Harmon said, and Hal answered, “I’ll take the train at once. But I want you to understand that I’m coming back—straight back!”

  “Take the train!” insisted Edward. “Promise me you’ll take the train!” If he could only get his hands on this madman!

  “All right,” was the reply—“but I’m coming back!”

  Hal made a dash and caught the morning train, and got into Western City in the evening. His brother met him in an automo
bile—and such a row as they had! At home there was Hal’s father, who had heard of the fighting and was in terror for his boy. There was nothing for Hal to do but tell his side; and this, while it overwhelmed the old gentleman, did not lessen his distress in the least.

  Hal found that his brother hoped to back him down from his idea of seeing the Governor. Peter Harrigan would be so furious! But though Edward argued until midnight, Hal was not to be moved, and early next morning he climbed the hill and entered the white marble State House. The Governor’s secretary took his card, and after reading the name, said politely that he would endeavor to arrange an interview. Soon afterwards he ushered Hal into an inner office where the chief executive stood behind a flat-topped desk.

  He was an extraordinary chief executive for the people of a great state to have chosen. No one could credit an account of him, without first coming to understand the political and social system of which he was a product. This mountain state possessed enormous wealth in coal and minerals, and for fifty years, ever since the Indians had been driven out, its politics had served as a weapon in the struggle for the control of this wealth. At the present time the question had been pretty well settled: the mines, the railroads, the franchises of every sort were in the hands of a few great corporations, which managed both political parties, subsidizing their leaders and providing them with money to bewilder and corrupt the public. The corporations would support one party for a few years; then, when the actions of that party had made it odious, they would shift to the other party, starting a fresh campaign on the issues of “economy”, “public honesty”, “law and order”.

  Being in possession, all that the corporations now asked of the state was to be let alone; and in order to be sure of being let alone, it was their custom to choose public officials who had too little intelligence to interfere, even if they wanted to. If you let a clever crook get into office, you could not tell what turn his crookedness might take; but if you chose an honest and well-meaning imbecile, you were safe. Thus it happened that the “invisible government” had contributed to the portrait gallery in the white marble State House a long row of studies in human futility.