The Coal War

by Upton Sinclair

  There were other indications of what was going on behind the scenes in General Wrightman’s headquarters in the American Hotel. There was the matter of automobiles, for example. An automobile has come to be, under modern conditions, indispensible to the maintenance of dignity; but the state had unfortunately overlooked the need of dignity on the part of its military officers. So Mr. Schulman came forward; the company had plenty of cars, and they were at the disposal of the militia.

  But these company cars were known to the strikers, who had many times been shot at from them; naturally it did not please them to see General Wrightman riding about in these cars. Still less did it please them to see the hated deputies sitting by his side: Jim Torrance, for example, a man who had come to the Harvey’s Run colony with a white handkerchief in his hand, and given a signal for the machine guns to open fire—what business had such a man sitting up chatting with militia officers? What business had Schultz, and Gus Dirkett, and Pete Hanun, the breaker of teeth, being intimate with the Adjutant-General of the state soldiery? When these automobiles whirled round street-corners and nearly ran down the children of strikers, the strikers became enraged. An automobile is, at best, a fosterer of class-consciousness; it might be called a symbol of the capitalist system, in that a few people get the fresh air and the scenery, and the rest of the world gets the dust and the bad smell.

  [5]

  Hal had many arguments about these matters with Captain Harding. Appie was reluctant to talk with his cousin, who was apt at any time to go “off his head”; but as matters went from bad to worse, it was harder for the young officer to contain himself, and from his remarks Hal was able to piece together a picture of the situation. There were decent men in the State Guard, and they were doing what they could, but they were being shoved aside and rendered helpless by the lower element in the organization.

  Company C had maintained itself in peace times as an exclusive institution; its members were young businessmen, its officers the élite of the city. But the work it had now to do was not the sort of work that gentlemen are accustomed to doing. Dicky Everson, for example, whose occupation had been “rushing the girls”, dancing until two or three o’clock in the morning; or Bob Creston, who had been practicing up to win a cup for an indoor tennis-club—what interest had such men in pacing about in the snow with rifles on their shoulders, chasing Greeks and Dagos away from coal-mines? It was not the sort of work that gentlemen did, it was the sort of work they hired other people to do for them; therefore Bob and Dicky suddenly resigned. And then went Billy Harris, who was in his second year at the law-school, and who stood to lose a whole year of his career. The parents and relatives of these men had influence, and could get them off, on one pretext or another; and so, day after day, the character of the company was changed. New men had to be found, and the recruiting officers must take the class of men who wanted a job at a dollar a day.

  Captain Harding was strenuous that none of the new men should be mine-guards; but in this he stood almost alone. The mine-guards were on the spot, a thousand and more of them, familiar with the locality, familiar with the weapons, familiar with the strikers they were to control. What more natural than to enlist them?

  But then—see how this appeared to the strikers! The very same brutes who had been abusing and terrifying the tent-colonies—they were to be clad in the uniform of the state, armed with the weapons of the state, and turned loose to behave worse than ever!

  When the report of these developments went out over the country, people refused to believe it; they did not wait to hear the evidence, they said such things were impossible. But the strikers had evidence of the sort which men never doubt, the evidence of their eyesight. When they saw “Butch” Andrews, one of those who had hid under the steel bridge and opened fire on Horton, strutting about the streets in khaki, they knew it was the same “Butch”. When he accosted Rovetta’s young sister on the street and called her a “ten-cent whore”, she understood that he had not changed his rowdy nature with his costume.

  And then the fellow Stangholz, who had taken charge of the machine-gun at Barela—Stangholz not merely taken into the militia, but made into an officer! Right off the bat, with no more training than he had got by swinging his “baby” about, and shouting that he would wipe out the God-damned sons-of—! A few days later there was some trouble at Barela, and in the papers Hal read a statement by “Lieutenant Stangholz”. The people at home would read this, and would be impressed—thinking of a West Pointer, perhaps! Who would dream that this “lieutenant” was a common bar-room rowdy, an adventurer who had been looting ranches with Mexican bandits?

  And then came a new development. The state was paying its militia servants a dollar a day, but the mine-guards were receiving three-fifty a day; and not even the honor of wearing a uniform, and being under the protection of the flag, would persuade a mine-guard to have his pay cut in that fashion. On the contrary, he wanted both wages, and the generous Mr. Schulman saw to it that he got them. And this, naturally, caused discontent among those militiamen who had not had the good fortune to begin on the mine-guard pay-roll. If some militiamen were getting four-fifty a day, why should others work for a dollar? The logic was inescapable, and Mr. Schulman caused it to be understood that all militiamen might have the extra pay for the asking. Captain Harding admitted to Hal that the offer had been made to Company C. As a body, the company rejected it with indignation, but there was nothing to prevent individual members from getting the money, and many were undoubtedly doing so. They were coming and going at the office of Schulman all day—privates and officers alike—in such numbers that the townspeople came to refer to the place as “military headquarters”.

  And before long even this was not sufficient; there arose uncertainty as to the ability of the state to pay its paltry dollar. No money had been appropriated by the legislature, and the State Auditor declared that he was without authority to issue warrants. The militiamen were indignant, for they did not like to have to wait for their dollar. At Sheridan a crowd of them assembled at night and burned the over-scrupulous Auditor in effigy. So the coal-operators came forward and offered to advance the money. But this Governor Barstow would not permit—it would not “look right”, he said. It had to be arranged that the coal-operators should advance the money to their banks, the banks should advance it to the Clearing Association, the Clearing Association should advance it to the State Auditor, and the State Auditor should advance it to the troops. The steps of this process were perfectly well known to the whole state; yet all seemed satisfied that “looks” had been preserved!

  [6]

  Once more there were troubles at the Horton tent-colony. The first of them was the experience of Cho, the Korean “rope-rider”, who had a brother somewhere in America, and was expecting a letter from him; he had ordered his mail forwarded from North Valley to Horton, but this had not been done, and now that the militia was in charge, he thought it would be all right to go to the North Valley post-office. He got in and got his letter, but when he tried to get out again, the men on guard would not let him pass the gate. Go to work, they told him—the strike was going to pieces in a few days. Cho got someone to write a letter to Hal, telling about his plight, and Hal went to the militia encampment to see his cousin.

  The men on duty at North Valley belonged to another company, said Harding; but he would see what he could do about it. He telephoned to the mine, and Hal listened to one end of a strenuous conversation. “You thought he was a strike-breaker, eh? Well, what if he was a strike-breaker? Is it your business to keep strike-breakers at work? How long have you been in the militia, anyway?”

  So there it was! The man who had held Cho was a newly-enlisted mine-guard; he had put on his militiaman’s uniform, and gone on doing what he had been doing before. And what was more significant still, Captain Harding had to do considerable arguing with the man’s superior officer before he could have orders given for the Korean to be let out. “None of my business?” he cried, into th
e phone. “And when the man lives at Horton, and everybody in the tent-colony knows he’s being held? You expect me to control them in the face of such conduct?”

  And then, a couple of days afterwards, a man dashed into the tent-colony, out of breath and wild with excitement. He was one of a group of seven hoboes who had been trying to beat their way to California, where it was warm. The freight-train had stopped beyond Horton, and men with clubs in their hands had gone through the cars, poking the hoboes out; they were lined up by a group of militiamen and informed that they would go, either to the mines or to jail. “Nothing doing!” said the young fellow who told the story. “Nix on the scab-business for me.” Whereupon they put a bayonet at his back and started to march him up to Barela. He made a dash for it, and after a chase of a mile or more he got away.

  Hal took that story to his cousin, and again there were interesting developments. Captain Harding would not talk frankly; somebody else had been responsible for the happening—somebody apparently had given orders over Harding’s head. There was a regular political “machine” inside the militia, and this “machine” blocked his efforts to punish the guilty men. The Captain was bitter about it, hardly able to face his cousin.

  A couple of days later Jerry Minetti came to Hal, blazing with wrath. Rosa had been insulted by one of the militiamen, and was in her tent in hysterics. So Hal went to his much-troubled cousin yet a third time—and this time it was Appie’s own affair, upon which he could take action without consulting anyone else. He went to the tent-colony and heard Rosa’s story, and then brought her and her husband to the encampment, and had his men lined up, and the guilty man pointed out and put under arrest.

  By which action he brought a hornet’s nest about his ears. What sort of way was that to treat members of the State Guard? To line them up like criminals, to be inspected by a Dago woman who was probably no better than the rest of them! The militia were used to lining up strikers and picking out criminals; to turn the tables about was to humiliate them and weaken their authority. Captain Harding was summoned to headquarters, and there was a terrible row; he almost got into a fight with Major Curran, one of the General’s right-hand men.

  Major Curran had his own way of treating strikers! He was a saloon-keeper politician from Western City, a heavy-set man with brutal features and a coarse tongue. Soon after his arrival in the field, four mine-guards coming in an automobile from the Mohican mine were ambushed by strikers and shot; whereupon the Major raided the tent-colony, and under pretense of searching for arms, drove the strikers away with violence and foul language, and turned their possessions out into the mud. He added insult to injury by allowing the superintendent of the Mohican mine to drive through the streets of the colony in a buggy and give commands to the mine-guard militiamen.

  When such things would happen, Hal would betake himself to his tent and write long letters to his friends: to his professor of economics, begging him to spend his Christmas holidays in Horton; to Adelaide Wyatt, begging her to start another disturbance in the Tuesday Afternoon Club; to poor perplexed Will Wilmerding, quoting Jesus and Isaiah on the subject of them that grind the faces of the poor. He did not write to his brother, but he wrote to Lucy May, and made sure that his letters were read aloud at the family breakfast-table. He wrote so many letters to Larry Pringle that for a while he saved the “Gazette” the cost of a correspondent in the field. Pringle would compose a red-hot editorial based upon Hal’s facts, and then Hal would telegraph for two hundred copies of the paper. Mrs. Olson, who knew how to use a typewriter, would sit up half the night writing letters for him, and Mary Burke, who had been nursing the sick and wounded all day, would cut up the papers and seal the envelopes.

  [7]

  All this time the Governor’s “policy” of keeping out strikebreakers was still supposed to be in force. But the operators were busy all over the country gathering strike-breakers, and the militia was doing everything to help ship them in.

  At the Hazleton mine, which lay close beside the railroad-track, the Trans-continental Express stopped unexpectedly one night, and twenty men were rushed into the mine under the very noses of the soldiers. And next day a steel car was taken in to the Northeastern, with all the shades drawn and the doors locked; too late the strikers learned that this car had been loaded with “scabs”, brought all the way from Pittsburg. A few days later one of these men ran away, and came to the tent-colony with a story revealing a brand-new device in the strike-breaking art. He had answered the advertisement of a company which had land to sell in the West; land which could be bought very cheaply, because it was coal-land, and only the surface rights were sold. The purchaser could pay for these rights by labor in the mines, so the advertisement stated; but when the would-be farmer got to the district, he found that the land he had bought had a surface of sandstone running up the mountainside at an angle of sixty degrees; also he found that he was in a stockaded fort with armed men at every exit!

  A week later two more victims of this scheme made their escape, both declaring that they had been beaten when they refused to work, and that another man had been shot and buried at night. Affidavits were made by these men, and John Harmon took them to the Governor, who sent the State Commissioner of Labor to investigate. It was this Commissioner’s duty to see to the enforcement of all the labor laws of the state, and he went up to the Northeastern in an automobile, and announced his identity and his business. But admission was refused to him; he was turned back, precisely as if he had been a reporter for a working-man’s penny newspaper! And this same thing happened to him at camp after camp, it continued to happen to him for weeks; when he appealed to the Governor, he was admitted to a few camps, but denied permission to speak to the workers! The Commissioner of Labor was a union sympathizer, and therefore an “outside agitator”, from Peter Harrigan’s point of view.

  When the strikers heard of events such as these, it was only natural that they should be disposed to enforce the law for themselves. There came a report of some strikebreakers coming to Barela, and the whole tent-colony streamed down to the railroad. Obeying orders from his superiors, Captain Harding had set a guard about the depot to keep the strikers away from it; but now came a swarm of women with weapons of domestic construction—baseball bats with spikes in them, butcher-knives tied on long poles, bread-rollers, scrubbing pails full of rocks. Shouting and cursing in twenty languages, they went straight through the militia cordon and lined up on the platform to wait for the scoundrels who would take the bread from their children’s mouths!

  Captain Harding came galloping up, and shouted to Hal and other English-speaking men. He had his orders, and he would enforce them. If there were any strike-breakers on the train, they would be turned back; but in the meantime the platform must be cleared, even if a battle was necessary. He was very angry, and evidently meant what he said; so Hal and the others set to work, and with many impromptu speeches and no end of shouting and shrieking, the coal-camp amazons were driven back, and the train came in. Sure enough, there were seven strike-breakers on board—and those strike-breakers did not get to Barela. But they got into the Mohican mine that same night, escorted by Curran, the saloon-keeper Major of Militia. Much comfort there was in that for the amazons of Horton!

  [8]

  Over these matters there were vehement arguments between Captain Harding and his cousin. Appie was keeping strike-breakers out of the mines under his control, because as a military man he held his orders sacred; but he was not ordered to bother his head about what Major Curran did, and he did not purpose to do so, because he was privately opposed to the Governor’s so-called “policy”. Besides being a militia officer, Appie was a young lawyer who took coal-company cases, and had the usual prejudices of his class. Labor unions were, or tried their best to be, combinations in restraint of trade, and as such they ought to be suppressed, or at any rate kept from being of any use to their members. That this argument made property of human labor, and so virtually admitted wage-slavery, was somet
hing the young officer could not be got to see. What would become of industry if workingmen were not protected in the right to take a job where they found it?

  Appie could not see that these strikers had any claim whatsoever upon their jobs. Hal showed him men among them who had toiled for twenty or thirty years in the mines—men who had lost their health, their parents, their children, slaving for the coal-companies; yet they had no share in the properties they had helped to build up, they had nothing to show for all these years but a few sticks of furniture and rags of clothing! Here was a boy whose father had worked thirty years in the mines, and in the end had lost his life in an accident caused by carelessness of the companies; this orphan had been arrested for picking up coal along the railroad-track—possibly the same coal his father had mined! His job as breaker-boy had been his one possession in the world. “And you say he has no claim on it!”

  “He gave it up,” said Harding, simply.

  The young officer had a vision of the tyranny which would result if labor unions were allowed to have their way. If they could call strikes and keep strike-breakers away, they could control industry, there would be no end to blackmail. He had stories to tell about labor union domination—absurd disputes that had occurred in industries controlled by people he knew. A printer who was not allowed to set type in his own establishment, because he did not have a union card! A building contractor who had been held up for a thousand dollars at a critical moment in his operations! What would Hal do about such things?