The Coal War

by Upton Sinclair

  Hal answered that he was groping his way toward a new solution. The present system did not give justice, whichever side won; so for the moment the sensible thing was to compromise, and in this case the only way to get a compromise was to keep the strike-breakers out of the mines. As it was, the operators refused all discussion; they refused even to be in the same room with the union leaders! Hal pointed to the morning’s news—the State Editors’ Association had called a meeting, desiring light on the strike, and had invited the union leaders and the operators to attend and set forth their sides. The union men had come, but had been invited to go away again—because Mr. Harrigan was outside, and refused to enter the room while they were there!

  Just now the “little cowboy Governor” had evolved a wonderful scheme to settle the trouble. For weeks he had been pleading with the operators to consent to meet somebody. If they would not meet the wicked union officials, the “agitators”, surely at least they would meet a group of their own workingmen, to hear their grievances and see if anything could be done toward remedying them!

  After much urging, Harrigan and his associates consented to this, and the strikers selected three of their number. The choice not being satisfactory to the operators, three more were selected; and these likewise not being satisfactory, a third attempt was made; until at last there came three actual bona fide strikers, brought up from the coal-fields to the Governor’s office, and set down to an all-day and all-night conference with the men who had ruled their lives since they were born.

  It would have been hard to offer a better proof of the workers’ need to be represented by some outside person, not dependent upon the operators for his job, than the pitiful struggles of these untrained and unlettered laborers with their masterful employers, skilled in controversy, and with every fact and every pretense at their fingers’ ends. As Billy Keating described it, it was a combat between three small, soft beetles, and three very large and tough long-horned rhinoceri. Every time a beetle would start to raise a feeler, a rhinoceros would put down his foot!

  How often the men tried to bring the discussion to an issue—and how often they were shunted aside, led down a side path, and bogged up in unessentials! They must not discuss the grafting of superintendents, for that was hearsay; when it turned out not to be hearsay, but first-hand knowledge, they must not discuss it because the superintendents were not present to defend themselves! “You understand, gentlemen,” said Beetle Number One, “that we are just simple miners. We are a bit awkward, and we have not got the same expression, and we would like a little consideration on account of that.” Then said the old Harrigan rhinoceros, “We will be glad to give it to you, but I do not think, gentlemen, that you need apologize.” Gentlemen they were, for this bewildering day and night; solemnly addressed as “Mister” by the great ones of the earth! The passage above quoted occurred in the course of a long digression, after which Beetle Number One remarked, “I started in, but I forgot where I was.” Poor beetle! It never occurred to him that this was the purpose for which he had been interrupted!

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  These farcical proceedings did not settle the strike; those who were in charge of the situation had never had any idea that they would. They had a quite different program—to cow and terrify the strikers, to weaken their spirit and convince them that the contest was a hopeless one. It was like a big dam, which they meant to undermine and bore full of holes; let the water get started through in one place, and you would see the whole structure collapse.

  Each day this purpose became more clear; and Hal and Jerry and Mary Burke and the little group of leaders at Horton braced themselves to efforts of resistance. They must hold their followers, plead with them, exhort them to endure; they must seek out those who showed signs of wavering, they must argue with them and cajole them. With each new outrage, they must console the victims, help them in their destitution, bind up their wounds, inspire them to fresh resolve. Above all, they must find new ways of appealing to the public, of reaching the mass of the people, who were deliberately kept ignorant of what was going on in this remote and unlovely coal-country.

  But it seemed as if efforts at publicity only served to exasperate the enemy, and excite them to fresh outrage. There came a case of an indignity committed upon a woman by a militiaman: such a flagrant case that the strikers made appeal to the civil authorities, who had the militiaman arrested. But this set General Wrightman almost beside himself with anger; he sent a squad of his soldiers and took the prisoner out of jail, and had him tried by a militia court and acquitted. This, of course, was serving notice upon the soldiery that they might do what they pleased, and they did not fail to get the meaning of the notice. A reign of terror broke out, worse than anything known before. The militiamen looted saloons, they danced in the streets with drunken prostitutes, they stopped women and young girls in broad daylight and inflicted obscenities upon them. They robbed and beat men on the streets of all the coal-towns; while merely to be seen talking to a strike-breaker was enough to earn a beating for a union man. How far the troopers went may be judged from the case of one miner who came into the district as a stranger, and asked a militiaman on the street where he should go to join the union. The militiaman “ran him in”, and he was brought before the General, and ordered locked up indefinitely.

  Under pretense of searching for arms, it became a regular custom for militiamen and guards to plunder the houses and tents of strikers. In one single raid upon the Italian colony of Mateo they robbed a dozen families of amounts which totalled five or six hundred dollars. The strike-leaders obtained affidavits from many people who had lost sums, varying from a dollar up to two hundred dollars, the savings of a life-time which had been stowed away in the bottom of a trunk. But when the matter was reported to General Wrightman, there was no satisfaction to be had. He promised to “investigate”; but if he ever did so, it did no good—the guilty ones were not punished, and the outrages went on. The General said it was impossible to get evidence; but meantime the thieves were spending the money right and left in the saloons and brothels of the town. One would have thought that here was an occasion for the Schultz Detective Agency to display its skill!

  The truth of the matter was, the General did not care what was done to the strikers. They were opposing him and making trouble for him, and so there was nothing too evil for him to believe about them. Each time the representatives of the strikers came to him with protests, they got a less cordial reception; the time came when their mere entrance into the General’s office became the occasion for a tirade of threats and abuse. “He’s got our guns away from us now,” said John Harmon, when he came back from one of these interviews. His strong features were working with emotion—so great had been the indignities heaped upon him.

  It happened that Fred Norris, one of the organizers of the union, met a strike-breaker in a restaurant in Sheridan, and talking with him in a friendly way, learned that he was disgusted with his job. “All right,” said the organizer, “come up to headquarters and join the union, and we’ll take care of you in the tent-colony.” The man followed the suggestion and went to the tent-colony; and when Schulman, general manager of the “G.F.C.”, got word of this and informed General Wrightman, the General sent for Norris, denounced him furiously, and had him put in jail. And there he stayed. Nobody could get to him, nor could he get word to anybody outside. There was no charge against him, there was no knowing what was to happen to him. He was a “military prisoner”, to use General Wrightman’s phrase.

  There were four Mexicans arrested, charged with assault. The warrants had been sworn out in the District Attorney’s office, and in due course one of the District Attorney’s assistants had the prisoners taken before the court and put under bonds. When the General heard of this he flew into a rage, ordered the Mexicans locked up again, and declared that he would have no courts interfering with his prisoners. He called up the offending assistant and cursed him, declaring that he had a good mind “to arrest the whole damned bunch.”
He actually sent a platoon of soldiers after Mr. Richard Parker, District Attorney of Pedro County, but that worthy was not about when they arrived. The assistant stood by his guns long enough to enter upon the record an important opinion—“Wrightman is not a military officer, he is a military ass!”

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  It was in the midst of events such as these that Jessie Arthur came back from Europe. She wrote Hal from New York; she would be home in a few days, and would he be able to spare the time from his strikers to come and see her? She had been terribly unhappy about the way he had treated her; for days she had stayed in her room in the hotel and cried, refusing to go anywhere. He must realize how hard things were for her, for her mother gave her no peace, and there were angry letters from her father and her brothers, telling how the strikers were rioting, and how Hal was disgracing both families by giving the rioters his support.

  The very sight of the tall familiar handwriting made Hal’s heart beat faster. He could see the brown eyes, filled with tears, the fair hair, suffused with light, making an aureole about the face. A wave of tenderness overcame him. Yes, he had really treated her badly; but she loved him, she was trying to understand him. He would accept her timid advance, he would go up to see her.

  But when the first wave of emotion had passed, Hal found himself thinking about Jessie with less happiness. He had put her out of his thoughts for several weeks; and now somehow when she came back she made trouble there. His thoughts had grown stern, hardly normal for a youth of twenty-three. He had cast in his lot with people who were braced for a life and death struggle, and he was growing familiar with the feelings of anguish and despair, with the sight of wounds and death. Somehow, in the presence of such things, a man’s standards of value change; things which in the old days had a spell for him lose the spell and leave him cold.

  Then too, he was working side by side with Mary Burke; her strong, erect figure was always before him, her willing hands were always at his service. Mary understood and shared his moods; she did not have to make any effort to do it, she did not have to be argued with. And so, every day, she came to fill a larger place in his consciousness. They were comrades and fellow-workers in a great cause, with no idea of anything else—so Hal told himself, and really believed it. But wise od Mother Nature will not permit two eager and healthy young people to be together all the time, and be nothing but comrades and fellow-workers in a cause—no matter how great the cause may be. Hal would look at Mary and think what a splendid girl she was, how true she was proving under this test; and then he would wonder what she was thinking about him. Was she altogether as satisfied with their relationship as she appeared to be? Did she never have impulses toward him, as in the old days? If she did, and was not letting him know it, it must be hard on her; on the other hand, if she had really become indifferent—well, it was not exactly flattering to a handsome and eligible young man. It was a certain thrill gone out of his life, a romantic interest he could not help missing.

  He looked back upon those old days at North Valley, when he had first met “Red Mary”, and she had bared her heart, and he had seen the primrose path of dalliance stretching before him in the soft summer moonlight. Those old days somehow seemed happy days now—such is the power of life to throw a spell over itself! But then Jessie Arthur had come to North Valley and taken possession of Joe Smith, the miner’s buddy, and Mary’s class-feeling had blazed up like a flame; she had drawn back, and from that time on she had given no hint of anything but friendship for Hal. She asked nothing about Jessie; so far as Hal knew, she did not know whether Jessie was at home or abroad. Mary was living for the strike; and if she had been engaged in a subtle plot to lure Hal’s interest to her, this would have been the wisest course she could have taken. A fine, straight girl, Hal would say to himself; a girl capable of forgetting herself! His admiration would be excited—and also his curiosity; he would be moved to spend hours with her, talking about the problems of the tent-colony and the cause.

  Hal never forgot the bitter words with which “Red Mary” had once laid bare to him the soul of the class-war. She was a drunken miner’s daughter, and he, who thought that he was really democratic, had shown that it was all play, that he was looking down at the working-people from a far-off height, across an unbridgeable chasm. This challenge came back to him every time he compared Mary with Jessie Arthur, as inevitably he was impelled to do. Was it so that he was in the deeps of him a snob—that he believed in those caste prejudices he was trying to force himself to fight? Was it true that a girl might have the soul of a Joan of Arc, and still be set one side all her life, because her hands were big and rough, because she spoke with a common brogue, and because no one had taught her the established way to hold a knife and fork? If so, then what was the use of a man’s calling himself a revolutionist? In the days of the contest over chattel-slavery there was a test whereby the skeptic was wont to challenge the sincerity of those who professed affection for the downtrodden—“Would you let your sister marry a nigger?” And for Hal the situation had come to be summed up in a similar formula—“Would you let yourself fall in love with a drunken miner’s daughter?”

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  There came a series of events which first postponed Hal’s trip to Western City, and then quite suddenly made it unavoidable. These events hinged themselves about the personality of one of the mine-guards, who from the beginning had played an important part in Hal’s affairs—Pete Hanun, the “breaker of teeth”. It had been Pete Hanun who had followed the miner’s buddy when he had come down from North Valley, to try to save the men imprisoned by the mine-disaster. It had been Pete Hanun who, with Jeff Cotton, had chased the buddy into Percy Harrigan’s car. And finally, it had been Pete Hanun who shot Tom Olson. Because of the prestige of this latter act, the “breaker of teeth” had become one of the leaders of the deputies, the right-hand man of Schultz; he had ridden about in the “death special”, “shooting up” one camp after another. Hal saw him several times in Pedro, walking down the street with his pal, Dirkett; each of the pair kept his right hand in the side pocket of his overcoat, where the muzzle of a revolver was plainly outlined.

  Such was the tension to which things had come in the coal-towns! And now suddenly the “breaker of teeth” met the fate he had so long been challenging. Stepping out of a cigar-store one evening, he was lighting a cigar, an operation which took his hand off his revolver, when someone stepped up and put a bullet into his head.

  No one saw the firing of the shot, but there was an Italian striker named Dinardo staggering by, three quarters drunk, and him the soldiers seized. They must have realized very quickly that they had not got the right man; but they must punish someone, for the sake of the moral effect. Pete Hanun had been a sort of officer among the deputies, and if he could be killed, no one was safe. It was resolved to make the killing an occasion for suppressing the “troublemakers” of the Horton tent-colony, of which Dinardo chanced to be a resident.

  Next morning, when Hal was in the headquarters tent writing a letter to Lucy May, his friend Rovetta rushed in, pale with fright; the soldiers were after him! “I no got anything to do with it!” he cried. “All time I was here in camp! Mrs. Olson know, John Edstrom know!”

  “What do they accuse you of?” Hal asked.

  “They grab Jerry! They grab Kowalsky!”

  “But what for?”

  “Nothing! Nothing! We don’t do nothing!” The young Italian was incoherent with terror.

  “But what do they say you did?”

  “They tell Jerry he help kill Pete Hanun! I was in next tent and I hear! I don’t kill nobody, I was here in tent all time!”

  “Why do they accuse you, Rovetta?”

  “I don’t know! He hit me that day in union hall when they make search! Maybe they think I got mad.”

  “Well,” said Hal, “if you were here in the colony, it should be easy to prove it.”

  He went outside of the tent, and saw two militiamen running up—one of them Lieutenant S
tangholz. “That Dago in there?” he demanded; and when Hal answered, they sprang inside and collared their victim.

  “Lieutenant,” said Hal, “this young man says he was in the tent-colony—he has witnesses to prove it—”

  “When we want your testimony, young fellow,” said Stangholz, “we’ll ask for it.” And with these words, and no more, they marched the frightened Italian down the street.

  In front of the Minetti tent was Jerry, with a soldier holding him by the arm; and Rosa, his child wife, having the new baby in one arm, and with the other hand catching at the militiaman’s sleeve, the tears streaming down her cheeks, her voice hysterical: “Mister, he don’t kill nobody! Who tell you such thing about my Jerry?” There were two other guards searching the tent; as Hal drew near one of them hauled out a trunk, dumped its contents into the dirty snow, and began throwing things this way and that. Little Jerry flew at the man, hammering his legs with his tiny fists; the man kicked him to one side, and Mary Burke caught him and held him, screaming and trying to get away.

  There came another guard with Kowalsky, a Polish miner, his wife and three children following behind clamoring. Why any man should suspect Kowalsky was beyond imagining, for he was a helpless and stupid wage-slave; but there was no use offering character-testimony, or even asking questions. The militiamen, having finished their search for papers or weapons, marched their three prisoners down the street and loaded them into automobiles and whirled them away.

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