The Coal War (12 page)

Everywhere was the same treatment of men who protested, the old story of “down the canyon with you”. “Men are fired as soon as it becomes known they are members of the union or have an inclination to be.” “If a man appears to be a union man he is fired.” “The boss found out I was a union man, and every time he gets a bad place he puts me in it, and as soon as I get it cleaned up he puts me in another bad place.” And so on, man after man, camp after camp, for fifty miles up and down the line! “They told me this was a free country,” said one English miner. “But I have found out that it is not a free country!”

[9]

On the evening of the first day the chairman announced that the convention would listen to an address by “Mother Mary”. There broke out a storm of applause, which swelled into a tumult as a little woman came forward on the platform. She was wrinkled and old, dressed in black, looking like somebody's grandmother; she was, in truth, the grandmother of hundreds of thousands of miners. The masters had put her in prison, sometimes they had beaten her, on one occasion they had shut her in a stockade with smallpox patients. But nothing daunted her spirit; when “her boys” called, she answered, even though it was all the way across a continent.

Hearing her speak, you discovered the secret of her influence over these polyglot hordes. She had force, she had wit, above all she had the fire of indignation—she was the walking wrath of God. Her address was what the cultured classes would describe as a “harangue”, but it suited “her boys”, it swept them to ecstasies of resolution. For so many years they had endured—now they would stand together and endure no more!

Her purpose was to lift the spell of fear which lay upon their souls. “Don't be afraid, boys; fear is the greatest curse we have. You fear because you don't know your power; but it is only because of your fear that you are powerless!”

She told about the strike in West Virginia, the fierce revolt in Cabin Creek. There had been a stone-wall built there, and no organizer dared go beyond it, or he would come out on a stretcher. But two young lads had come to her, and asked her to attend a secret meeting in that canyon. “The men came over the mountain with their toes out of their shoes and their stomachs empty; fifteen hundred men of every description gathered there. Some of these men looked up at me, as much as to say, ‘Ah, God, is there a grain of hope for us?' Others would look at the ground, thinking, ‘All hope is dead.' When I was about to close the meeting, I said, ‘Boys, let mother tell you one thing; freedom is not dead, she is only resting; she is sleeping, waiting for you to call.' The voices of those fifteen hundred men rang out, ‘Ah, mother, we will try to be true! Will you organize us?' They lost all fear, they came forward as one man. And when I organized them, I said, ‘Put on your mining clothes tomorrow, don't say a word about this; don't speak of it in the mines. Take your picks and continue to dig out the wealth; be good and don't make any noise about it.' But they were discharged, of course.”

There was a “lady” who had been keeping a rooming-house in North Valley; and last week the superintendent had said to her, “What are you going to do when the strike comes on?” She had answered, “I'll not feed any scabs.” And he had given her two days to move! “What do you think of that?” cried Mother Mary; and you heard a fierce murmur from the crowd. They would not feed any scabs—not they! Men who would steal other men's jobs in such a crisis, who would deprive their fellows of a hope of freedom and life! There was a strike of the brewery-workers in Sheridan, and Mother Mary warned them not to drink any beer that had been made in the town. “There are scabs in that beer!” said she.

[10]

On the second day, the convention listened to the report of John Harmon, with the list of demands which the policy committee had sent to the operators. The majority of the delegates were for a strike at once, but Harmon pleaded for delay. Perhaps there might yet be some concession; perhaps when the operators read reports of this convention, and saw how wide-spread and intense was the feeling of discontent, they would recede from their present position.

At least, they should have the opportunity; Harmon urged that they delay action for a week, and send one more letter to the operators. There was a hundred thousand dollars a week in wages at stake; there would be thirty thousand dollars a week in strike-benefits to be paid by the “big union”. With sums such as these involved, the officials in charge were not apt to fail in caution. A strike was like a war; when the fatal word had been pronounced, it must go to the bitter end, and no one who had had experience of its cruelties could be eager to speak the word.

The convention voted as Harmon asked; but Billy Keating, talking with Hal after the convention had adjourned, declared that the action was a mistake. It was only giving the enemy more time; there would be no concessions, the strike was inevitable. In his character of reporter, Billy met both sides; he had been that day in the sheriff's office, and seen the hard citizens who had come down in the train being made over into guardians of law and order. Many of these men, the day before, had cringed and slunk away at sight of a policeman; but now they had mumbled a magic formula, they had the powers of government on their side—and three-fifty a day and board in the bargain! There was a state law providing that no man should be a deputy-sheriff until he had been a citizen of the state for a year, and had lived sixty days in the county; but Billy had watched the sheriff-emperor violating that law in batches—twenty times a minute!

They were sitting in the lobby of the hotel, and saw a man go past—a tall, lean person, black-browed like a villain in a stage melodrama, dressed like a gentleman from the far South as he is imagined in romantic fiction. He peered about him through eye-glasses with thick lenses, and stared hard as he passed the two young men.

“Know who that is?” said Keating.

“No,” replied Hal.

“Can you guess?”

“It looks like somebody who thinks he's Sherlock Holmes.”

“That's Schultz.”

And Billy went on to picture the great strike-breaker in the sheriff's office, marshalling the deputies, giving them orders over the sheriff's head. Schultz was a powerful and sinister figure in the labor world; in order to find anything like him you would have to go back to the days of the Italian
condottieri
. Someone had told Billy about these hireling armies, and he had looked them up in the encyclopedia, and it was the very same thing; this Schultz might be a reincarnation of Francesco Sforza, of the fifteenth century! Schultz commanded a private army of five thousand men, horse, foot, and artillery; the whole of it could be shifted three thousand miles in a week, and wherever it went it took over all the powers of government. He paid his enlisted men three dollars and a half a day, and he charged the corporations whose work he did at the rate of five dollars for each man. So, said Billy, the profits of the business depended directly upon the amount of trouble there was; and from this grew the most sinister fact about this system of “Government by Gunmen”. Without exception these big strike-breaking concerns maintained a secret department, and while they were putting down violence with one hand, they were fomenting it with the other. In these coal-camps they had had spies among the miners for years; so that men who could present the best of credentials as strikers were occupied in inciting their fellows, putting murder into their hearts and revolvers and dynamite into their hands.

Which added peril to a situation already perilous enough. Union officials might plead as eloquently as they chose against disorder; but with eleven thousand strikers to handle, speaking more than a score of tongues, and scattered over hundreds of square miles of mountain country, it was not possible to censor every orator, nor to make sure of the honesty of every leader who might come to the fore. When you had, as you had in this district, knavery and oppression enthroned for a generation, with the deliberate bedevilment of every good instinct of humanity—then you had created a volcano of passion whose possibilities you could hardly imagine. Hal was soon to find what it meant to be a labor leader, held responsible by the public for everything that might be belched forth from such a volcano!

[11]

The convention adjourned, and Hal went up to Pedro in company with Jim Moylan. The union had opened a headquarters in Pedro, and a steady stream of discharged union men and strikers-to-be poured into this place. In the week before the strike practically all the delegates to the convention were turned off. The General Fuel Company had a clause in the lease to its houses, giving it the right to evict the tenant at three days notice; but in most cases they did not even give this time, but dumped the family and its belongings out on the street. The company was making a census of its men, asking them if they intended to strike; those who answered yes were turned off immediately. Under this cheerful system, it was hardly surprising that the company was able to publish in the newspapers a statement to the effect that ninety-five per cent of their men were opposed to a strike.

Hal went first to call upon his friend John Edstrom. The old Swede had never really recovered from his beating by the mine-guards; his kindly old face was more nearly the color of dough than ever, and his dark, sunken eyes made you think of a friendly skull. He was trying bravely to become self-sustaining, but he was a marked man in this district. Old and feeble as he was, the “G.F.C.” seemed to consider it necessary to have a detective keeping track of him everywhere he went.

The garret-room in which he lived had boards laid on the floor, and a curtain to divide off a portion, where the Minetti family cooked, ate and slept. Big Jerry had become a well-known organizer, doing work among the Italians in the town. Rosa had her new baby, another boy—the cutest little round-headed Dago doll that ever you laid eyes on, with sharp black eyes, and the softest silky black hair. The girl-mother was divided between rapture over this treasure, and terror for the fate of its wonderful father. Since the killing of Tom Olson, many organizers went armed; they were pledged to a defensive attitude, but it was not always easy to define what such an attitude should be. There were never less than half a dozen of the gunmen hanging about the door of the newly-opened headquarters, and when an organizer entered, these men would bristle like angry dogs. One could stand the bristling; but suppose one of them reached to get his handkerchief at that moment? They carried “handkerchiefs” of a large size, making a conspicuous bulge in the side-pockets of their coats.

Big Jerry would come home and tell about these things, and Little Jerry would listen, thrilled beyond utterance. He played all day at stalking gunmen with the little boy of the landlady; but they were always disputing, because neither wanted to be gunman! The Dago mine-urchin was blood-thirsty in his intentions, and it was comical to listen to his disputes with John Edstrom, who, for lack of a grown-up audience, would expound his pacifist philosophy to Little Jerry. The youngster was naturally in awe of this white-harired old man, whose stories of labor-strife he had heard so often; but he had a hard time comprehending the program of turning the other cheek to Peter Harrigan's gunmen. “Suppose one of 'em beat up my mother?” he would cry. And Hal would smile, hearing the echoes of an age-old controversy!

[12]

As Billy Keating had predicted, the operators paid no attention to the latest communication from the union, and so everyone knew that the strike was inevitable. The union leaders were making frantic efforts to get ready, especially to provide shelter for the tens of thousands they would have on their hands. The tents were still missing—and in September it is cold at night in these mountain regions! Hal, who had taken a great “shine” to the long tall Irish boy, Jim Moylan, and was trying to help him in every way possible, spent part of each day interviewing freight agents, and telephoning and telegraphing railroad officials. When his efforts broke against the system of interlocking directorates, he took to telephoning to Western City, and started a miniature war-boom among the awning manufacturers of that metropolis.

The strike was scheduled for Tuesday, and as early as Saturday and Sunday the great exodus from the camps began. All the way down the line for fifty miles the canyons poured out their human flood. They poured into the towns, thousands upon thousands of them; as one observer phrased it, it was the migration of a race.

It seemed as if the elements had entered into a conspiracy with the forces of capitalism, for the flood-gates of the heavens were opened on that day. Up in the canyons it was snow, in the valleys it was a deluge of rain mixed with sleet, which drenched everyone to the bone, and soaked all their pitiful belongings. The stream of wagons came into Pedro—farm-wagons, express-wagons, broken down carriages and hacks, even hand-carts—their wheels solid with thick, greasy mud, the piles of furniture and bedding dripping like trees in the forest. Here and there you saw faces peering out, faces of hollow-eyed and shivering children, of babies who seemed to have been suckled upon fear.

Jim Moylan and his college-boy lieutenant were in charge of headquarters that Saturday, and it was an experience never to be forgotten by any man. It seemed that everybody arrived late in the afternoon. The union had hired a hall, and to this the throngs came; there must have been three thousand people packed into the place—it was hard to see for the steam of so many water-soaked bodies. If you had anything to do with the union, you were besieged by fifty men and women at once, trying to ask you questions in what appeared to be fifty different languages. The Tower of Babel was the only thing one could compare with it; but there could have been no such desperate haste in the Tower of Babel, for if a stone was not got into place until the next day, it would not matter so much—it did not snow or sleet in that neighborhood, and there were no shivering women and children to be got under shelter.