The Coal War

by Upton Sinclair

  Hal announced that he would go; and great was the joy of Jessie, and the satisfaction of those two master-diplomats, Edward Junior and Garret Arthur, who met in secret at the club and drank high-balls in tribute to their own astuteness. They had got the young madman safe, for a few months at least; for of course neither of these capable and hard-headed young business-men had any idea of that “Europe” to which they were sending their patient. To them the name meant a place for boarding-school-girl tours, personally conducted, for honeymoons, and such play affairs; the home of a venerable thing called “culture”—cathedrals, guide-books, endlessly multiplied Madonnas. There would be Jessie, to administer to the patient the daily medicine of love, and Mrs. Arthur to watch his symptoms and report; surely a promising course of treatment for a youth gone mad on socialistic moon-shine!

  [19]

  There now began a whirl of excitement for Jessie. She would buy things in New York, of course, and still more things in Europe; but it was necessary to buy some things at once, in order to develop the holiday atmosphere. As for Hal, he had to see his radical friends and explain his decision, making them understand that he was not running away.

  In particular he had to explain to Mary Burke. Why should he have been so much embarrassed to tell Mary that he was going to spend a summer in Europe, studying the Socialist and Syndicalist movements? Was it because he was to be with Jessie Arthur? Or was it because he could not keep out of his mind the preposterous thought that Mary too would have enjoyed spending a summer in Europe, studying the Socialist and Syndicalist movements?

  Here is one of the inconveniences incidental to the adopting of revolutionary ideas by a member of the leisure-class—that the member can no longer take the most obvious things of his life for granted. Of course a man cannot change the system all at once; but he will change as much as he can—and feel uncomfortable because he cannot change more! If he is befriending a revolutionary parlor-maid, and trying to be entirely democratic, he will find himself asking why the daughter of a banker should go to Europe, while the daughter of a miner remains at home. Under real democracy, obviously the daughters of all men would have equal access to the opportunity of going to Europe; if the purpose of the going be a study of the Socialist and Syndicalist movements, then the question of who should go would be determined by some kind of competitive examination. But here there had been no examination; Jessie was going, because she had the money, and Mary was staying, because she hadn’t.

  But Hal found that Mary had not thought of anything like that; the parlor-maid was not that revolutionary! Her only thought was of him—that he was being lured away from his work. His family was getting him under the spell of Jessie, with her softness and her clingingness, her beautiful clothes and her expensive charms. They would have their way with him, they would tone him down!

  She did not say any of this; she would not mention Jessie to him. But there was pain in her face as she bade him good-bye. “Ye’ll not be forgettin’ the miners, Joe?”

  “No, Mary,” he answered, with conviction. “You don’t need to worry about that.”

  “They’ll be needin’ ye so bad, Joe! Perhaps they’ll call ye back.”

  “I made them a promise, Mary; just as you did. We’re going on working and studying, so we can give them the kind of help they need.”

  “Joe,” she cried, with passion, “sometimes I think it’s more than I can do to stay here, where things are beautiful and clean, and I have all the good food I want.” She turned to her mistress, who was in the room. “Don’t think I’m not grateful, Mrs. Wyatt; but ’tis bound to be so when ye’ve lived among people that never have enough of anything.”

  “I understand,” said Adelaide, gently.

  “Ye can’t get them out of your thoughts! The men ye know that go down into the pits, and may come out on a plank! Ye think of them, this time and that—now they’ll be going down in the cage, now they’ll be eatin’ their dinners, now they’ll be comin’ out. Ye tremble when ye pick up a newspaper—ye think maybe there’ll be a piece, somewhere off in a corner, about another mine-disaster, and some woman ye know will be lonely all the rest of her days, and her young ones will be hungry and cold! Think of them, Joe, the men that went back to work at North Valley, after the strike! They’re waitin’ for ye to keep the promise ye made! They’ll not forget ye, what ye did for them; they’ll think: ‘What’s he doin’ now? When’s he comin’ back to us?’”

  Hal did not fail to think of them; Europe would make no difference, he assured Mary. He pledged his faith anew—and then he went off to Jessie, to try to share her holiday mood, to admire her travelling trinkets! Jessie wanted him for herself, and Mary wanted him for the miners; the two of them pulled and tugged at his thoughts. A trying thing for a young man to be so very much in demand!

  [20]

  The day before the party set out for New York, something occurred to bring the miners and their struggle even more vividly into Hal’s thoughts. The mail brought a note from one of his workingmen friends, whom he had not heard of for a long while—Tom Olson, the organizer who had come to North Valley and given Hal his first impulse towards unionism. Olson was in Western City for a few days’ rest, and Hal went away early from a fare-well dinner-party at the Arthurs’ and spent half the night talking with the organizer.

  For three years Olson had been at work in the coal-camps, and not once had he been caught. But many times he had come close to it! It gave one a thrill, just to sit here in his home, for when he came, he had to steal in by night, and shave off his beard and change his clothes and his accent. His wife was a school-teacher, and told her friends that her husband was a “travelling-man”. Only one or two intimates knew the truth about him.

  Camp after camp the young fellow told of, the strange experiences he had had, the personalities he had encountered. Sometimes he was afraid to trust anyone, but would slip union literature into men’s dinner pails or their coat-pockets, and not stop to ask results. Sometimes advances would be made to him, and then he would have to make up his mind whether he was dealing with a bona fide workingman or a company spy. No less than three times he found himself sparring for an opening with another organizer, a man he had never hear of, and who had never heard of him!

  Olson was a fellow with a sense of humor, and knew how to tell his adventures. He would reproduce the manner and dialect of different personalities, so that you saw them before you. His pretty young wife would sit and listen, not trying to hide her pride in him. She was a miner’s daughter, and this fight was hers.

  Throughout the district, he said, there were now hundreds of men and women working to spread the union message. Few of them knew each other; even in the same camps there were separate groups, having no contact. Old Johann Harman, the secretary in Sheridan, was the only man who had a complete list—and he had it in his head! But some day the moment would come; these scattered rebels would spring up and discover one another, these frail strands would be woven into one cord!

  “When will it be?” Hal asked; and the other answered that it could not be put off much longer.

  “This summer, you think?”

  “I hope not. We’ve just had a big strike in West Virginia, and you know how it was smashed. Cost us a million dollars, and nothing to show for it.”

  “Well,” said Hal, “I’m going abroad, but I want to tell you, when the strike comes in this district, cable me, and I’ll take the next steamer. I’m telling my brother that, and my father, and everybody. I don’t mean to miss it!”

  “We’ll let you know,” said Olson; and the two of them shook hands on the bargain. The scene was stamped upon Hal’s mind indelibly—embodying to him the mystery of the thing which men call fate. Men walk blind-folded into the future; they grope in darkness, amid lurking destructions; and is there anywhere a power that foresees, that could perchance be persuaded to warn? Here, on this soft June evening, Hal parted with the organizer and his happy young wife; and the next time he heard the name of Tom Olson
was in a cablegram from Billy Keating, three months later, telling him that his friend had been murdered in cold blood upon the main street of Pedro, shot through the body by a coal-company detective, Hal’s old enemy, Peter Hanun, the “breaker of teeth”!

  [21]

  Mrs. Arthur and her charges set out for Europe by the Mediterranean route. They landed at Naples, and went up the slopes of Vesuvius, through the ruins of Pompeii, and out in a launch to Capri. Hal escorted them upon these jaunts; and then, while they were resting, he made a discovery. The peasants of this poverty-ridden region, victims of exploitation since the dawn of history, had come at last upon the road to power. They had combined into agricultural laborers’ unions, against the absentee landlords who spent the fruit of their toil in the cafés of Paris and the gambling-palaces of the Riviera. Having declared a strike, and been shot down by their own brothers and sons in army uniform, the laborers had put the funds of their union into the purchase of an estate, which they worked co-operatively. When the next harvest season came, and labor must be had at all hazards, there was plenty of labor for this co-operative crop—and a strike against the adjoining landlords! After a few seasons of such double-edged warfare, the landlords were glad to sell out for anything they could get; and thus step by step, the degraded peasantry of Southern Italy were raising themselves to the status of citizens in industry. And a prosperous industry, with modern machinery and unimpeachable credit—an industry founded upon the rock of labor solidarity!

  This was the most interesting thing in all Italy to Hal. In a little office in the business part of Naples were men from whom, with the help of an interpreter, he could get the full story of this revolution, with picturesque details of the strife. Why was not this enormously important story known in America? What power had been able to keep it from the knowledge of a press that boasted of enterprise, from magazine-editors who ransacked the world for “live” material?

  They went to Milan, and there Hal found that the glass-blowers had made the same discovery as the farm-hands, and were conquering the industry with this new double-edged weapon. Could anything be more fascinating, to a young man who, only a year ago, had been watching Italian workingmen ground up in Peter Harrigan’s profit-mill? Here was Jerry Minetti’s own home city; and here were artisans, proud, erect, masters of their own product and their own destiny, with the light of human brotherhood shining in their eyes!

  Hal’s revolutionary thinking had so far been conducted under Socialist auspices; and when you explained the Socialist scheme of things to a business-man, you always met one objection: to turn over industry to the control of politicians! To be sure, the Socialist argued that he meant to put into office a new kind of politician; but the American system of graft was so firmly established, it was hard for the man in the street to believe that people elected to political office could ever run any business but retail liquor.

  And now, here was a new method of bringing about the change; and not a matter of theory, but of fact—going on whether your theories allowed it or not! The person to run the industry was not the politician, who had never been inside a shop; it was the man who had worked in the shop all his life, who had done the real job of building it up! Co-operative ownership and democratic control in business! Local self-government in the factory, with representation in an assembly of the trade, and a congress of delegates from all the industries of the country to regulate terms of exchange among them!

  Such was the solution of the Syndicalist. Why, he asked, should the management of industry be committed to a legislature, elected upon a basis of geographical location? In a great city you might live all your life without knowing the people in the next apartment. But you never failed to know the men who worked in the shop with you! You knew who was honest, who was competent, who was really on his job! So there, in the democracy of toil, was the unit upon which to build the industrial republic, just as the political republic had been built upon the town-meeting.

  [22]

  Mrs. Arthur and her party moved on to Paris, and here again Hal found that the word of the hour was Syndicalism. The French workers had tried electing politicians; they had had soul-stirring revolutionary speeches made to them, but when it came to a big strike, the revolutionary politicians ordered out the military, just as the bourgeois politicians had done. To be sure, the Socialists repudiated those who had committed this crime; they put up new candidates, who made fresh promises, and were sure they would never sell out. But the workers were embittered, and Paris, the center of the world’s new thought, was swarming with the advocates of “direct action”.

  Hal tried his best to be interested in art-galleries and monuments; he went patiently and looked at the multiplied Madonnas, and walked through cathedrals with his head tilted backwards and a guide-book in his hand. But how could a man think about art, with the whining in his ears of pitiful beggars on the steps of these temples of submission? How could a man shut his eyes to the pitiful faces of starving children in the slums through which he drove? An American could not encounter such things without having his soul one cry of determination to save his country from these old paths of misery and oppression. The more Hal tried to contemplate the past, the more he found himself impelled to seek out the pale and undernourished men with restless, burning eyes, who had offices in obscure quarters and homes in slum-garrets, and who were building the cathedrals of the future, the mighty arches of labor solidarity, the towering spires of proletarian dream!

  Hal had as much French as is imparted in American colleges—enough to order a meal in a restaurant where the waiters speak English. Now, wishing to take part in revolutionary conversations, he hired a student-contributor to working-men’s papers, and the two of them went about jabbering. Jessie liked this young man, because he had a face full of melancholy, with a dear artistic little beard. Her boarding-school French did not admit her to the conversation; and this was just as well, for the young Frenchman’s revolutionism was of a kind that startled even Hal.

  Pitiful were Jessie’s efforts to follow her lover, to overcome her instinctive shrinking from the sordid and shabby, to understand his hostility to the elegant and refined! The Arthurs had brought letters of introduction to rich Americans, and were taken up by the “colony”, and even began to break into the diplomatic set. Jessie was invited to a thrilling reception at the embassy—and made the discovery that Hal had arranged to attend a congress of railwaymen!

  Now and then she went with him to these terrible places. In the Salle Wagram they listened to an address by Gustave Herve, who had just begun to recede from his position of anti-patriotism. His speech sounded wild to Jessie—but apparently it was too tame for this audience, for there was a constant clamor of protest, and at the culmination a man leaped upon the platform and began to exhort the crowd. A terrifying figure, with long black hair and a face of ashen grey, the pallor of prison; Malatesta, the anarchist, expressing his opinion of renegades and compromisers! His supporters danced about and howled; the supporters of Hervé rushed to the platform, there were scuffles, blows, chairs uplifted and hurled about. In the midst of the tumult the lights went out, there were screams, and then half a dozen shots. Hal fought his way out, with his fiancée fainting in his arms; and that was the end of revolutionary activity for the daughter of Robert Arthur!

  [23]

  Jessie kept this episode from her mother. But little by little the painful truth was becoming clear to both ladies that the trip abroad was doing Hal no good at all. They crossed the channel, but only to meet worse trouble. England was in the midst of an historic labor convulsion, the strike of the coal-miners. Here was Syndicalism in action—gripping the world’s second-greatest industrial nation by the throat! How could anyone go about doing tourist-stunts, while such an event as this was shaking civilization?

  So Jessie and her mother wandered alone among the tombs in Westminster Abbey, while Hal was in the Westminster Hotel across the street, where the delegates of the miners were meeting. He had brought let
ters from John Harmon, and his story won the trust of these men. There was one, especially, who made him a friend—a twenty-two-year-old miner from South Wales, whom Hal picked out for the future president of the industrial republic of Great Britain! Such a mind as this youth had, and such a will! Frank Bollett was his name, and he had been trained at the expense of the union at a labor college in London. Two years ago he had written a pamphlet, “The Miners’ Next Step”, which had been published anonymously and circulated among the workers of his part of the country. Now he had come to London to see to the carrying out of his program—“the Mines for the Miners”!

  Young Bollett seemed to have one hatred in all the world, and that for a politician. He did not hate the “masters”, any more than he feared them; the banded workers would settle with the masters very quickly—if only the politicians would keep their hands away! Whether they were capitalist politicians, or called themselves representatives of labor—only let them keep their hands away, and the workers would decide their own destiny!

  Hal went to a gathering one Sunday afternoon, in the home of a well-to-do sympathizer with the miners, and heard young Bollett pitted in impromtu debate against a member of parliament, the editor of a leading liberal weekly. How fascinating to see this great man backed up against the wall and speared through by the logic of a mine-boy!

  To the boy, who had faced the realities of industry, the only person who counted was the producer; he saw the problem from the producer’s point of view, he planned a society in the producer’s interest. But the editor was concerned about the consumer, he cried out for the consumer’s right. It was quite impossible to get him to see that in a just society there would be no consumer who was not also a producer; so that if you made certain that every producer got his full product, you could dismiss the consumer from mind altogether—and with him that elaborate machinery of bureaucracy whereby the liberal statesman dreamed to chain and bind the tiger of exploitation!