The Coal War

by Upton Sinclair

  The shooting had continued for a couple of hours; and in the course of it a ranchman who lived near-by had ridden out to try to bring his horses to a place of shelter. He had a wife and three children, who besought him to stay at home, but he insisted that no one would hurt him. He rode toward the steel bridge, not knowing the gunmen were there, and one bullet pierced him through the forehead, and two others through the body. Billy explained that this man had earned the enmity of the guards by leasing to the union the property on which the tent-colony stood.

  Later on the reporter had gone over to the railroad-station, and heard one of the mine-guards denouncing the three sharp-shooters under the bridge. They were hardly hitting the strikers at all, he said; they were filling the water-tank of the railroad full of holes!

  With the receipt of this news, Hal set out on the jump for the white marble State House. This time the secretary declared that the Governor was very busy; finally he took Hal’s card, but the answer was that the Governor could not possibly see anyone that day. Hal, however, was not to be put off; he laid siege to the office, and late in the day caught his victim trying to escape by a side-door. He literally held him up on the grounds of the State House, where they had another vehement argument.

  Hal knew his man by this time—he had got to the desk-pounding stage! He told the Governor that civil war was coming in the strike-district; there would be wholesale murder if he did not go at once. He kept at the distracted official until he went back to his office and ordered his secretary to get ready, and telephoned his wife to get his grip packed. He would take the train that night.

  Whether it was the secretary that leaked, or the wife, Hal never found out; but it was a fact that Peter Harrigan knew about that decision within fifteen minutes after it was taken. The first thing he did was to get Hal’s brother on the telephone and give him a tongue-lashing; the second thing was to get hold of his general manager in Pedro and order him to meet the Governor, and never let him out of his sight while he was in the field.

  Hal went down in the same train with the Governor and secretary, and his heart was so full of hopes and his head so full of plans that he could not sleep. But in the morning all these hopes and plans were dashed. When the party alighted from the train, there was Schulman, the general manager, with a “G.F.C.” automobile; and in this automobile there was room for the Governor and the secretary, but no room for Hal! The young man saw the trap in an instant, and made protest in no timid language. Had the Governor come down here to make his investigation under coal-company supervision? If so, his visit would be a farce—his time worse than wasted.

  It was very awkward; for there was a crowd of people on the station-platform, and the populace is not supposed to be present at the settling of grave affairs of state. The Governor hesitated; but Schulman, a manager who was used to managing, was at his side, with matters of very great importance to lay before the chief executive at once. And so the Governor stepped into the car, and Schulman and the secretary followed, and they rode off with a rush—leaving Hal standing there like a fool.

  And so it was that the visit, for which Hal had worked so hard, came to nothing. The Governor rode about and interviewed company-marshals and guards; he never met one of the strikers, nor heard a word of their story. When Mother Mary got word of his being in Sheridan, she called on him, and when he refused to see her, she organized a procession of women and children, and marched them to the hotel where he sat at dinner. The poor little man had to leave his meal, and make his escape by a back door!

  [26]

  Meantime Hal had returned to Horton, where he found the spirit of things much changed. One no longer heard from pacifists; one heard a cry for men who knew how to shoot. Even Billy Keating had become military. He was going on sending in stories, but merely from loyalty to his chief, and without much faith in the work. All one could accomplish by writing stories was to stir up a few softhearted women—while meantime the hard-headed men went on with their bloody work! Billy was a new kind of “Ironside”—with a reporter’s note-book in one hand and a gun in the other. There were fellows in this tent-colony, Greeks and Bulgarians, who had been fighting each other at home; get them some real rifles, and they would teach these mine-guards a lesson!

  There was no rest for anyone in the colony these nights. At the Barela mine, a couple of miles away, a searchlight was kept playing all night, the light streaming into the tents and making them bright as day. This light made it possible for any vengeful or drunken man to fire into the tents from the darkness; also it kept the women terrified, for there was a machine-gun mounted beside the searchlight, and they knew that their enemy, Stangholz, was in charge of that gun; they could see, in their nightmares, his devilish face leering at them, as he shouted what he was going to do with his “baby”. Some of the strikers took to digging holes in the ground for the women and children to hide in; others, under Billy Keating’s advice, were studying the terrain, planning what students of military science know as the “offensive defense”. Why not occupy the heights which commanded Barela? Why not send a raiding party some dark night, and shoot that searchlight to pieces?

  Hal had not forgotten his promise to Mary; but when he inquired he learned that Tommie Burke was one of the unnamed casualties of the second “battle”. Running to a near-by arroyo to hide, the trapper-boy had been shot through the foot; the bones were badly shattered, the doctor said, and he might be more or less lame all his life. At present he had a fever, and it was out of the question to move him.

  So Hal called up Mary, and told her the bitter news. The girl declared instantly that she would come to Horton; she would take the train that night. Hal said that he would meet her, if he could. One never knew, in setting out for the railroad-station, whether one would get there or not.

  There were two guards on hand when the train came in, but they only glowered, and stood by to watch what Hal did. When they saw a fresh, handsome girl with a treasure of auburn hair and a neat grey travelling suit step from the train, and talk to him with great intensity, and then begin to cry, and have to be led away by the arm, they understood suddenly the solution of a mystery which had troubled them—why a rich young fellow should have come to this tent-colony to live with Dagos and Hunkies and “wops”. One of them uttered his thoughts with a guffaw; and Hal turned upon him, exclaiming, “You go to hell!”

  —Which, one must admit, was not exactly a pacifist utterance. “That’s all right, young rooster,” was the guard’s reply. “We’ll get you before we quit!”

  Hal had not foreseen this consequence of Mary’s coming, but there was no help for it, and they did not talk about it. He tried to console her by saying that John Harmon had gone that day to have an interview with the Governor in Sheridan, to try to have orders issued to the sheriff to provide guards for the tent-colonies. At this time it was still impossible for Hal to believe that the forces of law could be continuously used in the service of anarchy.

  But when the sheriff-emperor came to Horton, it was not to guard it. Two or three days after Mary’s arrival, there was an uproar down at the railroad-track; a box-car with seventeen Mexicans in it, the sheriff-emperor in charge, and a crowd of strikers jeering and shouting. At first Hal supposed the Mexicans were strike-breakers; but soon the situation was explained to him—they were men brought in from the state of New Mexico, in order to be turned into deputy-sheriffs! The strikers had stopped the train, and the sheriff-emperor fled to one of the passenger cars.

  There were Mexicans among the strikers, who talked to the would-be deputies, and learned that they had not even been told there was a strike! They were told it now, with the result that they declared their wish to join their brothers, and descended from the box-car, and marched to the tent-colony amid hilarious rejoicing. The sheriff-emperor retired, vowing vengeance upon the enemies of “law and order”. In order to appreciate the humor of his indignation, one would need to be reminded of the law of the state providing that no man should serve as deputy-sh
eriff until he had been a citizen of the state for a year, and lived for sixty days in the county!

  [27]

  A couple of days later occurred another incident. There were rumors that carloads of strike-breakers were being taken into the Northeastern, and a party of strikers was told to do picket-duty. The union leaders were most strenuous that no man should be armed while on the picket-line, and on this occasion every member of the party had to submit to a search in the tent-colony before he set out for the mine. News of the disarming must have got to the gunmen; for while the men were parading up and down the road in front of the stockade, there appeared Schultz and his “death special” on one side, and a party of a dozen men on horseback on the other. They held up the pickets and marched them away—forty-eight workingmen driven eight or ten miles along a public highway, with armed horsemen in front and on each side, and an armored automobile with machine-guns in the rear! The procession came into the town of Pedro, which was swarming with strikers; but in spite of all the uproar, the prisoners were landed in jail; after which, under the personal escort of the sheriff, two carloads of strike-breakers were run into the mine.

  The “Gazette” wanted some photographs of these scenes, and Billy Keating employed a photographer, who made so bold as to snap the “death special”, with Schultz at the machine-gun; whereupon Schultz leaped from the car and took away the man’s camera. The photographer came back to Pedro, demanding from judges and police-officials the arrest of his assailant. Having failed in all his attempts, he went out on the street, and encountering Schultz, Hanun and Dirkett, made a demand for his property. He thought that he was safe, there on Main Street, with scores of witnesses present; but at Schultz’s command the two gunmen held him up and searched him, and after they had made sure he had no weapon, Schultz struck him over the head with his cane, and beat him in the face with his fists.

  Next day came another “battle”, this time at Harvey’s Run. The “death special” was turned loose for a quarter of an hour, and a couple of thousand shots were fired into the tents. One man was shot through the head, and a boy running down the street was shot through the foot; he fell, and attempted to crawl away, but the machine-gun followed him, until he had got five bullets through one foot and four through the other. Billy Keating, who hurried over to Harvey’s Run in an automobile, counted a hundred and forty-five bullet-holes in one tent.

  Not content with this achievement, next night the “death special” came again, with reinforcements; three other machine-guns, posted at commanding points, and more than a hundred deputies. They surrounded the colony, ordered out the strikers, and with kicks and blows and curses drove them down the road, herding them like sheep into a distant arroyo. Meantime the under-sheriff, with Schultz and a crowd of deputies, were searching the tents for arms. They tore up the platforms, they chopped open trunks with axes, and scattered the possessions of families in the mud. They confiscated about a dozen rifles and revolvers, and incidentally helped themselves to pocketbooks and jewelry and whatever else they fancied.

  It was to be the turn of the Horton colony next, so all rumors declared. There was especially bitterness against Horton, as it commanded the roads to half a dozen important mines, and was a strategic point for “picketing”. There was never an hour of the day that guards were not to be seen prowling about; at night you heard men shouting from the neighboring hills, cursing the strikers and threatening them with annihilation. It was impossible to find these men, but the men could always find the tent-colony, because of the searchlight; until a raiding-party of strikers, adopting Billy Keating’s suggestion, crawled up and shot this searchlight to pieces.

  The miners had few guns, and it was difficult to get more, because the stores in the coal-towns had been cleaned out by the companies. Some of the Horton men went down to Pedro, telling the towns-people of their plight, and begging from house to house for arms. They came back with rusty shot-guns, old pistols, little “twenty-two” rifles such as boys use to shoot sparrows. Mike Sikoria carried a muzzle-loading musket, which antedated the Civil War; he had got powder and buckshot for the weapon, but could not fire it because he had no caps! Rovetta and his Italian friends had not been able to get guns of any sort, but had armed themselves with pitch-forks and axes, and meant to charge upon machine-guns with these implements of industry.

  [28]

  These developments increased the difficulty of Hal’s position in the colony. He could not deny the right of these people to defend their homes; yet he wished to stand by his resolve to make his appeal to moral forces. And how could he do this, how could he make his personal position clear? He had become a leader here; irresistibly, in spite of himself, he had been pushed to the fore, and now the world held him responsible for the behavior of the strikers. Nor did he wish to repudiate them, to say, I have no part in their acts of self-defense. And on the other hand, how painfully easy it was for the strikers to misunderstand him. Oh yes, they would say, he’s a rich fellow; he’s only playing at striking! He’s willing to help us, when it comes to appealing to his rich friends, or getting his name in the papers; but when it comes to getting a bullet through him, or laying himself liable to a long term in jail, or maybe to being hanged—then he thinks better of it, naturally!

  In his own soul Hal suffered the qualms of the “conscientious objector”, whose way seems so easy—too easy! Yet it is not really easy; these qualms of the spirit are real things—as real as bullets or jails. To stand forth as weak-minded, a futile person, crying peace where there is no peace; appealing to moral forces, when there are no moral forces anywhere apparent! And when it would be so simple and so satisfactory to become a normal human being, to seize a weapon and go after those you hate! Yes, it takes courage and daring, even to believe in the existence of moral forces, in a community which seems to believe in nothing but bullets and jails, which presents itself to the eye of the soul as a mighty fortress of falsehood, pouring out upon its assailant a deluge of slander and abuse!

  Each day made it harder; each cry of distress that Hal heard, each face of pain that he saw! He must identify himself more completely with each victim, he must be sure that he suffered in soul as much as they suffered in body! Also he must explain himself to them, he must keep their respect!

  Mary Burke’s respect, for example! Mary was Irish, and the blood of ten thousand ancestors called out in her for a share in this shindy. When she thought about Hal’s attitude—yes, he was a gentleman, and this was “dirty work”, from which a gentleman shrank instinctively, whether he realized it or not. So Hal would have to argue with her; it was not really that—at least, he thought it was not that, he hoped it wasn’t! They would have long searchings of soul, trying to settle deep problems of philosophy under the shadow of Stangholz’s machine-gun!

  What was there, really, in this busines of pacifism? Mary wanted to follow the best light she had; she wanted to learn from Hal, to be as good as he was, in the moral sense. Should she, too, place her trust in moral forces? Or were moral forces, perchance, a luxury of the rich and respected? There was really a difference, Hal must admit. If anything untoward were to happen to the son of Edward S. Warner, it would make a fuss in the newspapers; whereas, who knew or cared anything about Tommie Burke’s lame foot, or the four teeth which had been shot out of Ike Klowowski’s jaw? Really now, did it not seem a farce to preach nonresistance to common working-people? It was like telling a man to submit himself to savages on some lonely cannibal island. The man died and was eaten, and that was the end of it; nobody knew about him, and nothing came of his action—save that some cannibals grew fat and hearty!

  Unless you believed in God, of course! Did Hal believe that there was a God, who watched what you were doing, and would do something to help you? And if so, what would He do? Hal saw that it was really a serious matter to preach brotherhood to the poor and lowly! Almost as serious to preach it in this far Western mining-country, as it had been to preach it in Judea, way back in the days of imperial Rome!
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  What Hal had to do was to nerve his soul to new moral efforts. To write more fervent appeals to the newspapers, and when the newspapers refused to print them, to have them printed at his own expense—or rather at the expense of his father! To sit up till all hours of the morning, mailing these appeals to his friends, and adding personal messages, more excited than good taste might seem to permit! To hurry off to Sheridan and throw himself, a sort of moral dynamite bomb, at the head of the little cowboy Governor!

  The Governor was still riding about in the coal-company automobile with Schulman, well guarded from dynamite bombs both moral and material. “You cannot see the Governor!” declared Old Peter’s general manager; and the general manager was, as has been said before, a person accustomed to managing—one of those “forceful” men, who look you straight in the eye as they speak, and whose sentences hit you like blows between the eyes. “No sir, the Governor is busy.”

  “How do you know he’s busy?”

  “I’m keeping him busy, if you must have it!”

  The two of them stood with clenched fists—there in the corridor of the American Hotel, outside the Governor’s rooms. When Hal would not go about his business, the Governor’s secretary came, and repeated the general manager’s words, as obediently as if he had been an office-boy. And finally came the Governor himself, hurrying past, with Schulman on one side and Atchison, chief clerk of the “G.F.C.” on the other, and one detective in front and two in the rear. And here was Hal, following along and arguing, while the Governor shook his head and almost ran, and one of the detectives rammed his elbow into Hal’s ribs, almost pinning him against the wall. A most undignified scene—and a most unsatisfactory moral effort!