The Coal War: A Novel

by Upton Sinclair

  So Hal was driven again to Will Wilmerding. He made an appointment, and took John Harmon with him to the clergyman’s study, and for an hour the three of them fought it out.

  “You complain,” Hal said, “how hard it is to be sure about these charges. I tell you one thing, Vagleman tells you another! Well, now, we ask you to come and see for yourself! How can you refuse that?”

  Looking at his friend, Hal thought that he was several pounds lighter since the coming of this crisis into his life. He took a long time to answer—so long that it might have been another prayer. “Mr. Harmon,” he said, at last, “I have been profoundly shocked by the charges made at your convention. But I am not at all sure that I am the sort of person you want for your investigating committee. If I should go, it would not be as a member of any partisan commission, submitting to any sort of partisan control.”

  “Of course not,” said Harmon. “We had no idea of such a thing.”

  “But I might find that your charges are exaggerated, Mr. Harmon. I might find one side as much to blame as the other. If so, I should consider it my duty to say so.”

  “Of course,” said Harmon, again.

  But apparently the other could not believe that Harmon meant what he said. “I have an idea of the sort of report that you and Hal want written, and I can’t imagine myself being willing to sign such a report. If you invite me, you must realize that you are running the chance of having a minority report.”

  “I understand that, Mr. Wilmerding.”

  “You wish me to go, on the terms that I shall use my own judgment and tell the truth as I see it?”

  “You will go on those terms, Mr. Wilmerding?”

  “Yes, I will go.”

  And Hal jumped up from his chair with a cry of triumph. He felt at that moment as if he had won the strike!

  [30]

  So anxious was the assistant rector of St. George’s to make clear his non-partisan attitude that he refused to travel to the strike-country with a disturber of the peace like Hal Warner. As a favor to his friend, Hal agreed to stay in Western City until the work of investigating was done! The five members of the committee—John Harmon was the fifth, for lack of anyone else—went to see Governor Barstow and obtained credentials, and then, journeying to Pedro, presented themselves before the Adjutant-General of Militia.

  Hal was told about this interview soon afterwards, and it was exceedingly funny. Here was Will Wilmerding, with his intense conscientiousness, his desperate determination to be impartial; and here was General Wrightman, with his “manners and ideals of a bandit-chief”! At the very outset he put his foot down. There existed a state of war in this strike-district, and he would not have civilians meddling with military discipline, asking questions of either officers or privates of the militia.

  The General announced this decision, and expected that to settle it; but to his surprise the clergyman attempted to argue the point. “How can we get the truth, General, if we only question one side?”

  “It will be entirely agreeable to me, sir, if you question neither side!”

  “But General, the Governor told us—”

  “Do you expect me to take your word for what the Governor told you?”

  “No, as it happens, you do not have to. The Governor has written here—will you kindly read it?”

  “I don’t care to read it, sir!”

  “Well, then, I will read it to you.” And the clergyman read—impressively, as a clergyman learns to read: “‘You will please give this committee every assistance within your power, to the end that they may secure what information they desire. Please have them furnished with any information you may have, or direct that anyone who has information shall give it to them.’ Surely, General Wrightman, there is no misunderstanding those words!”

  The General was tapping with a pencil on his desk—always a danger-sign. “I have given you my decision, sir.”

  “I understand, then, that you refuse to obey the orders of the Governor?”

  A silence.

  “I am informed that in a military sense the Governor is your superior officer. You refuse to obey his orders—and yet you talk about military discipline?”

  “Sir!” cried the Adjutant-General, “you are insolent!”

  Now when one has been for many years accustomed to standing in a pulpit and having a congregation listen in helpless respect to whatever the Lord may inspire one to say, one acquires a certain notion of one’s own importance. So now there was a lively scene. When the General shook his finger under the nose of the clergyman, the clergyman shook his finger under the nose of the General. “I know what is the matter with you, sir—I can see at once that you are a victim of military megalomania!”

  Apparently General Wrightman had never heard of this disease. He was taken aback, and the other rushed on: “Yes, sir! You dress yourself up in epaulets and gold-lace, and have a wholly exaggerated idea of your position, and of the deference that is due to you. You talk grandiloquently about ‘a state of war’ and ‘the duties and responsibilities of a soldier’. Well, sir, when I accepted this responsibility I took the trouble to consult an authority about constitutional law, and I would inform you that when you talk about ‘a state of war’ in this district, you are talking nonsense. There is no war here; there is no insurrection, there is not even a riot. You are doing police duty, and your position is that of a police-officer, in every way subordinate to the courts and the civil authorities of the state.”

  “All right, sir!” said General Wrightman. “If that is your notion, you are welcome to it. All I can tell you is that if you attempt to act upon it in this district, you will regret it.”

  “What, sir?” cried the other. “You threaten me? When I have come to this district with credentials from the Governor? Let me tell you, sir, that I am here for an important public purpose, quite as important as your own, and I will permit no military autocrat to intimidate me!”

  So the matter was left; the contestants drew apart, growling like two dogs which have been interrupted in the middle of their fight. The Reverend Wilmerding was so indignant that he was now willing for Hal Warner to come and assist the committee. John Harmon telephoned up, and Hal took the next train to Pedro.

  Meantime the clergyman had already got to work. He would be impartial, in spite of the Adjutant-General’s efforts to prevent him! He would ferret out all the dark secrets which the strike-leaders must be hiding from the public! Before anybody in Pedro knew who he was, he dodged away from the rest of the committee and began strolling about the streets, talking with the rank and file of strikers and with neutral citizens. Judge Vagleman had assured him so earnestly that the strikers were terrorized by agitators; now it was his duty to discover and expose this terrorizing!

  Sometime afterwards there was a Federal investigation, and Wilmerding told under oath what befell him on these expeditions. He picked out a likely-looking striker and began: “You don’t care for the union, do you?”

  “Care for the union!” was the reply. “What can we do without the union? We want our freedom.”

  “Well, but what do you mean?”

  “I mean that we can’t ask for anything without the union to back us.”

  “What do you want to ask for?”

  “My weights, to begin with.”

  “Your weights? How is that?”

  “Why, I mine coal and I don’t get it.”

  “You don’t tell me that?”

  “Sure I tell you that! You can’t know much about coalmining.”

  “How do you know you don’t get the weight?”

  “I know it because it’s my business. Don’t you suppose a miner can tell how much coal he loads? Where do you come from, anyway?”

  “From Western City.”

  “What’s your work?”

  “I’m a clergyman.”

  “Well, when you’ve read the Bible through enough times, you know what’s in it, don’t you? And when I’ve loaded a few thousand cars, I know wha
t a car weighs. A miner measures a car with his fore-arm; he loads her level or loads her high, and he can tell you within a hundred pounds what she’ll go. He won’t miss one time in a thousand. And here we work year after year, knowing that we’ve got to load three thousand pounds to get paid for a ton.”

  “I honestly didn’t believe it,” said Wilmerding. “But when I found that man after man—and not poor Slavs or Greeks, but Englishmen and Scotchmen, men with names as good as any of our names—told me time after time that there were short weights, then I was compelled to believe in their grievances.”

  In the same way he was compelled to believe in other grievances. He saw the drunken militiamen, carousing in the streets with their prostitutes; and one day, walking with John Harmon, he saw the mine-guard Dirkett assault and beat a young Polish boy. He wanted to interfere; he quite naively proposed to ask Gus Dirkett why he was beating the boy—thinking that Dirkett must have some profound philosophic reason which he would be pleased to explain to one ordained in the line of the prophets and apostles. He only desisted because Harmon assured him that people who asked questions of Dirkett met the fate of Tom Olson; and Harmon could give plausibility to his statement by pointing out the shape of a revolver in the mine-guard’s overcoat-pocket!

  [31]

  The committee got to work. The Reverend Wilmerding sat in a hotel-room, and hour after hour, day after day, witnesses came before him and gave testimony. Louie the Greek came, and Joe Prince, the negro, and Rovetta, just released after fifty-five days in hell. A few days later Johann Hartman was released—and Wilmerding took pains to get hold of this man before anyone else had a chance to tell him what to say! Tim Rafferty came, and Kowalsky and Mike Sikoria; Rosa Minetti and Mary Burke and Mrs. Bobek. Not only strikers—there came a Socialist lecturer and his wife, who had been thrown into jail, and an undertaker and his wife whose home had been invaded and wrecked in a search for arms; also two clergymen of Pedro, and the postmistress of Horton, and the District Attorney and his assistant. So on through a long list—a hundred and sixty-three witnesses in all, over four hundred thousand words of testimony.

  Hal would sit and watch the face of his “Uncle Will”. The clergyman could hardly contain his emotions; he was far more deeply stirred than the labor men, who had learned lessons of patience in the long, slow, heart-breaking struggle of their class. To a man like John Harmon, for example, these strike-outrages were an old story. He was used to reading labor-journals and convention proceedings and committee reports, in which such events were told over and over. In this one state the militia had been called out in labor-troubles no less than thirty-four times in eleven years; and it had always been the same militia, called out for the same purpose!

  But while Harmon was living in this world of realities, the clergyman had been living in abstractions, in comfortable maxims and formulas, religious, moral and legal. He had consulted “an authority upon constitutional law”—and had really and sincerely believed that the principles this authority had explained to him had some relationship to modern life. For instance, the maxim that a man’s home is his castle; he thought that applied in America—even to Hunkies and Dagos and wops who come to America to look for jobs! In the same way, it was a principle of law that a man could not be imprisoned to compel his testimony; Wilmerding had no idea that it is a universal practice of police-officials in America, not merely to imprison men to compel them to testify, but to inflict tortures upon them, in order to compel them to testify what the police-officials desire.

  The committee visited the Horton tent-colony. It happened to choose a day when the occupants of the tents were lined up under the guns of the soldiers, so that a search for arms might be made; and Wilmerding, strolling about the camp, climbed a little ridge to where Lieutenant Stangholz stood patting his machine-gun—his “baby”, as he called it—turning the weapon and sighting it, showing how from this place he commanded the whole colony. The clergyman started a chat with this mine-guard with the face of a bull-dog, who had seen cruel adventures in many lands, and delighted to tell about them. Wanton beyond belief was Stangholz—so foul-mouthed that a person of decent instincts writhed to listen to him. He hated the strikers with a fierce and blazing hatred; he poured out oaths and obscenities upon them in the fashion that his “baby” poured out steel bullets.

  While the committee was still in Horton, it chanced that a group of Stangholz’s troopers were riding down the road at night, and one of the horses stumbled over a strand of barbed wire. The rider was carried into the depot at Horton, and a few minutes later the Lieutenant rushed in. Without any investigation, he knew what had happened—some of those God-damned red-necks had set a trap for his men! It happened that Louie the Greek was standing in the station, having a pass, and the Lieutenant leaped upon him with furious curses, seized him by the throat and beat his head against the wall. He drew his revolver and was about to brain the man, when two other officers interfered and dragged him off. A minute or two later he broke loose and attacked a Greek boy upon the station-platform, beating him ferociously in the presence of many witnesses.

  Now the truth about this wire was definitely settled next day, when John Harmon went to the spot with one of the militia officers, and showed him that the wire had been cut quite innocently, in order to leave a short cut across a field. The wire was not long enough to reach across the road, nor even into the road; the horse had been thrown because it was off the road, on the prairie—and later the injured man admitted this had been the case. But these tedious explanations had no interest for Stangholz, who proceeded to teach the strikers a lesson by dragging down all the wire surrounding the tent-colony, rolling it up, together with the posts, in one tangled mass, and dropping it into the well from which the strikers obtained their water-supply.

  A couple of days later it chanced that Mrs. Olson, the school-teacher, was going to the train, and set out with her cousin, a young lad who was not a striker and had nothing to do with the colony. They were stopped and turned back, and so the young woman went to the militia-captain and obtained a pass. But when she presented this paper to Lieutenant Stangholz, he refused to honor it, and abused the woman; turning upon the boy, and shaking his fist in his face, he shouted in furious anger, “I am Jesus Christ! All my men on horses are Jesus Christs, and must be obeyed!” After that, the strikers had a nick-name for Stangholz; a name which compelled the Reverend Wilmerding to bow his head with embarrassing frequency!

  The Governor had declared that he was ready to act promptly upon presentation of adequate evidence; the clergyman was now so indignant that he consented to the committee sending a long telegram, detailing the Lieutenant’s behavior on these and other occasions, and asking that he be relieved from duty, pending a trial upon charges of unfitness. But the Governor did not take this action, nor any other action. He said that he would not condemn anyone in advance of a trial!

  [32]

  The committee remained on the scene for a couple of weeks, and then went back to Western City and made its report, which was a scathing indictment of the militia, substantiating every charge the strikers had made. The curious thing about it was that Wilmerding, who had been so dubious and full of cautions—he was the one who wrote the report and put in all the “brave words”!

  He arraigned the militiamen for arbitrary conduct; for drunkenness and debauchery; for abuse of women; for the torture of prisoners; for the invasion of homes; for the assaulting and robbing of strikers; for the maintaining of peonage in the camps. He spared neither the rank and file nor the officers. “Khaki and even gold lace and epaulets can not make a soldier,” he declared. “Think of a man really fit to be Adjutant-General of a state’s national guard angrily shaking his fist in the face of a grey-haired widow, whose offense was the singing of the union-song in her home, which she had owned for over twenty-five years!”

  “Some of the testimony,” continued the report, “relating to the meaner and more cruel forms of oppression, would be almost incredible were
it not corroborated both directly and by circumstances, and by the appearance and conduct of the witnesses; and were it not, moreover, confirmed by the commanding officer’s assertion of his privilege to infringe the most fundamental and sacred rights secured to men under Anglo-American law.” And again, “Whether a robber is drunk with liquor or with power, the effect on the person robbed of his liberty or his property is the same. Lawlessness begets lawlessness, and when subordinates of all ranks witness the violation by their superior officers of great underlying laws of civil society, they will naturally gratify their own low desires and get themselves what they can of the spoils of war.”

  One of the clergymen of Pedro who appeared before the committee had told of the public conduct of the soldiers with their prostitutes, of their “rushing the can” in the town-hall, of their drunkenness on sentry-duty. He told how he had protested to General Wrightman, who had answered by calling the accusations “lies”, and accusing the clergyman of “besmirching the uniform of the soldier”. “Robberies and holdups by militiamen,” continued the report, “the General disposes of in the same way; but the instances of this sort of valorous conduct are far too numerous, too varied in circumstances and scattered over too wide a territory to be so simply gotten rid of. They range from a forced loan of twenty-five cents; or whiskey ‘for the captain’; or a compulsory gift of three dollars; or whiskey, gin, cigars and champagne; or a ton of coal—to the downright robbery of three hundred dollars, and other considerable sums of money, with watches and other small pieces of property.”

  This report was transmitted to the Governor, who politely acknowledged the receipt of it and did nothing about it. It was briefly mentioned in the newspapers, and printed as a pamphlet and circulated by the miners. Hal Warner and Mary Burke and Mrs. Olson sat up nights for a couple of weeks mailing out marked copies all over the country.