The Lawless

by John Jakes

  “Revolution’s the only answer,” Strelnik insisted. “The trade union movement is failing, too, and our paper should be honest enough to say it straight out!”

  “Failing, Sime? I don’t agree. The movement has three hundred thousand members!” They crossed at an intersection. Gideon fended off a chestnut seller who nearly ran him down with a pushcart. A drayman blocked by a police van swore elegant oaths.

  Strelnik scoffed at the point just made. “And the first time there’s a slowdown in production—the first time there’s a panic or a depression—they’ll quit the unions to scramble for available jobs. And in those jobs, promising not to belong to a union will be a condition of employment. All the bosses understand what Jay Gould meant when he said, ‘I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.’”

  True enough, Gideon knew. One of the major problems confronting the movement was a lack of unity and unanimity. The National Labor Union, a loose confederation of trade and craft locals, eight-hour leagues, and groups of last-ditch reformers, had been founded in 1866 with the idea of presenting a common front on behalf of all. It hadn’t worked. Craftsmen saw themselves as superior to unskilled laborers. Some workers were against admitting European immigrants—greenhorns, as they were called—to their unions. Almost all opposed the admission of blacks.

  Strelnik grew excited, thoughtlessly waving the cigarette in Gideon’s face. “I tell you, one of these days you’re going to learn a hard lesson! There’s only one way to deal with the bosses, and that’s ruthlessly. You’ll end up doing that, mark my word. The bosses will drive you to it.”

  “That’s nonsense,” Gideon began, but the little man bowled right by the objection.

  “They will, Gideon. They’ll exhaust your patience, your sense of fair play, your strength—everything. They have every resource on their side. Wealth. Public opinion. The willingness to play the hypocrite—why, you know they don’t abide by the law, but they always pretend you must. That’s the way they gain their biggest advantage! How can you even suggest it’s otherwise when American workers are still subject to arrest under conspiracy laws if they so much as mention a strike?”

  “Sime, if that happens, the arresting officers and the courts that uphold them are breaking the law. The idea that a strike is a criminal conspiracy was thrown out in 1842! The case of Commonwealth of Massachusetts versus Hunt specifically prohibited—”

  Strelnik interrupted with a rude sound that made Gideon laugh in spite of his annoyance. “Gideon, I’ve only been in this country since last year. But don’t try to tell me the conspiracy weapon is never used.”

  “Of course it’s used by dishonest judges.”

  “My very point! The bosses are hand in glove with government—especially the courts. We both know it.”

  Gideon didn’t argue. His companion was right. They turned down Fourteenth to the loft near the East River where Labor’s Beacon was written and put together twice monthly.

  “In fact,” Strelnik continued, “the courts are the very instruments by which the owners—and the damned middle class, for that matter—let it be known that they have a strong opinion of the labor movement. Namely—”

  He stuck out his thumb and inverted his hand.

  “I’ll tell you one reason that’s true,” Gideon retorted. “The public perceives those in the movement as a pack of mad dogs. They reckon we all want to follow Karl Marx’s program, and they certainly assume we’re the spiritual heirs of the Commune.”

  “Most of us are, most of us are!”

  Gideon shook his head. “Not I.”

  There was mock ferocity in Strelnik’s voice. “Then why have you got an avowed Communard working for you, may I ask?”

  “Because you’re blessed with a beautiful wife and a handsome son, and no self-respecting Southerner would permit nice folks like that to starve. Also because my brother wrote a fine letter of introduction in which he said you were mostly bark and not much bite.”

  The teasing infuriated Strelnik, who hated to be revealed as anything less than a practicing revolutionary. More soberly, Gideon went on. “Besides, I like to have you around because your ideas help me crystallize mine. Listening to you, I’ve decided what I really think about the Commune.” He wasn’t teasing when he added, “It was a disaster.”

  “I object! That’s the uninformed opinion of—”

  “Uninformed, hell. The Thiers government may have committed murder when the Commune was overthrown—”

  “They did!”

  “Let me finish, will you? The Communards resorted to murder first. To me it makes no difference that the Commune killed fewer than the Thiers crowd—or for a supposedly noble purpose. They resorted to murder so they’re equally guilty. But even if the Communards were morally immaculate, I still don’t believe in their program. I believe in capital, and property, and making a profit so long as you don’t exploit others to do it. I believe workers can win their rights within the system. I don’t believe they must tear it down. Resort to burning and butchery—”

  “Wrong,” Strelnik declared. Gideon started to argue, but their arrival at the narrow doorway of the loft building put an end to the dispute.

  Well, no matter. It would continue another time. Arguing was a fundamental part of their relationship, and in just a few months Gideon had grown quite accustomed to it. In fact it was like the wretched stenches that permeated the city—something that would be instantly missed if it were suddenly removed.

  He disagreed with virtually every point Strelnik had made. He most especially disagreed with Strelnik’s prediction that he would one day become so embittered that he would resort to violence.

  Violence was no stranger, to be sure. Sometimes, as a matter of survival, he had to resort to it to defend himself against hooligans hired to disrupt his speeches to workers’ groups. But an act of revenge against one of the bosses? An act of revenge brought on by failure and frustration?

  Unthinkable.

  ii

  A dark stair led up to the third floor of the commercial building in which Gideon had rented two rooms now crammed with old furniture, papers and books. The building was silent. All the other offices had emptied for the night.

  On the solid door facing the landing, the words LABOR’S BEACON glowed in gilt. The words were separated by a drawing of a switchman’s lantern shooting its beam right and left. The lantern appeared on the paper’s masthead as well. Having the name and symbol done in gold had been Gideon’s one extravagance when taking the quarters.

  He touched a match to a lamp wick, then raised a window to let out the smoke already accumulating. Strelnik returned from checking something in the other room where he kept his desk. He lit a second cigarette from the stub of the one in his hand as Gideon sat down at his own cluttered desk.

  Among the scribbled sheets of foolscap, old proofs, invoices, he saw his father’s Bible. He frowned. The small scrap of paper was still inserted at the sixth chapter of Judges.

  Jephtha Kent had been buried in the family plot at the small cemetery in Watertown, Massachusetts. The message he’d meant to convey by means of the Bible verse still eluded Gideon. He had gotten over the worst of the grief associated with Jephtha’s death, but he hadn’t gotten over the sense of having failed his father.

  To Gideon’s left, the wall was covered with bits of paper—ideas, quotations, notes to himself, and a few overdue bills—all hanging from nails. Some of the items were there to remind him to mention and promote certain ideas on a regular basis. One such was an eight-hour workday. The campaign to reduce the working day had been spearheaded by a Boston machinist named Ira Steward, a self-educated man, as Gideon was. Some anonymous poet had put the economic justification for the eight-hour day into a piece of doggerel, and it was this which Gideon had jotted down and stuck on a nailhead.

  Whether you work by piece or work by day, Decreasing the hours increases the pay.

  Some items were displayed on the wall because they expressed
his personal credo far more succinctly than he could. At its 1869 meeting, a small group of delegates to the National Labor Union had enunciated its policy of favoring equality among all workingmen in the form of an address to the convention. The majority of the delegates had refused to endorse the policy by resolution. Gideon had saved a key portion of the address because he agreed with it.

  What is wanted is for every union to help inculcate the grand enabling idea that the interests of labor are one; that there should be no distinction of race or nationality; no classification of Jew or Gentile; Christian or infidel; that there is one dividing line, that which separates mankind into two great classes, the class that labors and the class that lives by others’ labor.

  And on a bent nail there was one piece of paper that was Gideon’s source of encouragement whenever he was damned as a lunatic and got to wondering whether the battle was worth it.

  “Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.”—Goethe

  Strelnik puffed his cigarette, awaiting instructions. Finally Gideon said, “What’s left to do this evening? I mean besides the impossible task of convincing me that I’ll one day be driven to knock the brains out of some capitalist?”

  Soberly, Strelnik said, “Don’t laugh. You will be.”

  Gideon stopped smiling. Often there was a curious, sanguinary streak in his assistant’s conversation. Strelnik even hinted that he and Matt had been mixed up in some political trouble in Paris, right before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, and that the trouble was the reason the Strelniks, Matt and Dolly had fled to London. Gideon hadn’t had a chance to ask Matt about it, since his brother could not be home for Jephtha’s funeral.

  Gideon had sent a message to Matt on the new Atlantic cable. It was shamefully expensive—the minimum charge was $100—but fifteen words a minute could be transmitted via Newfoundland to the receiving station in Ireland. In the message, Gideon had urged his brother not to feel he must instantly embark for America; even the fastest ship would barely be under way by the time Jephtha was buried.

  Gideon did wish Matt would come home for a visit, though. His brother’s career seemed to be going well. The British Royal Academy had accepted a painting called Woman of Virginia for its exhibition this year—the first public recognition Matt had received. Yet Gideon sensed an underlying melancholy in his brother’s occasional letters. Dolly had left him for reasons Matt had never explained. And with every year that passed, he seemed to grow more cynical about his homeland.

  “Did you examine the returned copies of the last issue?”

  Strelnik nodded.

  “And you pulled the names off the circulation roster?”

  Another nod.

  “What else is there?”

  “Proofing that article about the Crispins.” The Knights of St. Crispin had been founded by shoe industry workers in 1867. A revolutionary machine, the McKay pegger, made it possible for factory owners to replace skilled help with greenhorns. The Crispins had organized to resist the trend. Theirs was a secret society, and with that Gideon had no quarrel. But it was also exclusionist. The Crispins openly attacked the notion that all workingmen were equal. To preserve the shrinking number of jobs in their industry, they no longer permitted the advancement of apprentices. They were not really brothers in the cause, but bitter and selfish men desperately trying to deny an inexorable future.

  “All right, proof it,” Gideon said. “Then you can go home to your son and that beautiful wife of yours. I only plan to stay long enough to finish up the editorial.”

  Strelnik bobbed his head and walked into the other room, smoke drifting behind him. Gideon reached for his pen but didn’t pick it up. The mention of Strelnik’s wife Leah had unexpectedly produced a feeling of melancholy.

  Gideon had never once let on to his father or stepmother, but for the past eight or ten months he hadn’t been going home to his own wife with the joy he’d once experienced. Ever since he’d started Labor’s Beacon, Margaret had grown more and more critical of his interest in the cause—something he found astonishing, since it was she who had originally encouraged him to study and write and take an interest in the world.

  He didn’t like to admit it, but he had begun to see certain disturbing signs in her behavior. They made him think of her late father. Willard Marble—the Sergeant, as he’d preferred to call himself—had been crippled in the Mexican War. After that he’d taken to drink. He’d spent his last days in a perpetual stupor.

  Lately Gideon had detected the smell of wine on Margaret’s breath when he came home in the evening. She normally drank very little. A glass of wine with a holiday meal was usually her limit. He was fearful she was resorting to the same mind-deadening nostrum that had turned her father into a raving sot. Even though she’d professed a hatred for the Sergeant’s behavior, Gideon had an eerie feeling she was emulating it, whether she was aware of it or not.

  Why? That was the tormenting question. He knew a couple of possible answers. She was upset by his work. And she was upset by the modest surroundings in which he insisted they live. She found their circumstances particularly galling because she knew there was so much money available now. When Jephtha died, Gideon had inherited four and a half million dollars, plus a quarter interest in both the Boston book publishing firm, Kent and Son, and the New York Union. Jephtha’s will had divided everything equally between Gideon, Matt, that damned Irishman Michael Boyle, and Jephtha’s second wife, Molly, who was now living permanently in Long Branch.

  Labor’s Beacon could attract no advertisers. Hence every issue lost money. But Gideon’s fortune was invested and managed by experts at the Rothman Bank in Boston. Using investment income alone, he was able to keep the paper going and at the same time provide a decent home for Margaret and the children in a good suburb. More ostentatiously than that, he would not live. To have done so would have created suspicions and doubt among the laboring men for whom he traveled, spoke and wrote.

  Molly nominally operated both the newspaper and the book company on behalf of all four owners, though in truth each firm was run by professional managers. Gideon had a standing offer from his stepmother to move into management of the Union, but he’d never even considered it. That upset Margaret, as did a certain inevitable danger in his work.

  Her displeasure had been making their household very tense lately. The mention of Leah Strelnik reminded him that he and Margaret hadn’t made love in five or six weeks. The thought of it produced a stir in his groin, then an unexpected and slightly embarrassing image in his mind.

  Julia Sedgwick. The late Louis Kent’s former wife.

  Louis, Amanda Kent’s only son, had gotten involved with Jay Gould and Jim Fisk in the ’68 Erie stock war. About that time, Gideon had confronted Gould and demanded postmortem benefits in the form of payments for the families of Daphnis Miller and another Erie worker. He’d managed to bluff the financier into making the payments secretly—just about the only occasion anyone had gotten the best of Jay Gould, Jephtha said later. Gould had needed someone to blame. Apparently he’d chosen Gideon’s relative, though there was never any proof of his being connected with what had happened next.

  On a street in a dingy section of New York, Louis had been stabbed by an unknown assailant. The attack had left him paralyzed below the waist. He’d slipped into a coma and died during the summer. Gideon had met Julia when she’d come to the funeral with her son Carter; she had gotten custody of the boy when she’d divorced Louis during the war.

  Julia lived in Chicago, was wealthy in her own right, and used her money to finance her work as a lecturer for the American Woman Suffrage Association—a cause nearly as unpopular as his. He recalled how impressed he’d been at their first meeting. He’d been taken with her poise, her intelligence, and most especially with her interest in public questions. It was an attitude in sharp contrast with Margaret’s. Once Gideon’s wife had been much like Julia, but now she was retreating from the wo
rld, seeming to want nothing so much as the security of a comfortable life with a husband who was in a prosperous and respectable business.

  Yes, Julia had impressed him. And not merely on an intellectual level. She was physically attractive. In a guilty way, he realized the attraction hadn’t lessened since that first meeting.

  “I say, Gideon—” Strelnik had spoken loudly. “The proofs are marked.”

  “Good, good,” he answered, coming out of the reverie. “Go on home.”

  “Don’t you think I should stay till you’re finished?” There was concern in the little man’s voice. Despite his arguments with his employer, Strelnik liked Gideon. The feeling was reciprocated.

  Gideon shook his head, trying to clear it of pictures of Julia Sedgwick even as his hands cleared a working space on the littered desk. Strelnik objected to the dismissal.

  “Listen, it’s safer with the two of us here. We got four more in today’s mail, don’t forget.”

  With exaggerated significance, he pointed to a small stack of letters on the desk. They totaled twelve now. Only three were signed, and the rest contained threats ranging from mild to maniacal. All the letters had come in response to an editorial Gideon had written in the last issue. He’d criticized the Washington railroad lobby directed by Henry Cooke, brother of Jay Cooke, who headed the huge New York investment banking firm bearing his name.

  More and more, it was becoming apparent that the railroad lobby was buying favors and preferential treatment from state legislators and jurists. Labor’s Beacon printed news of all trades. But the railroads were emerging as the country’s most important industry and thus received the most coverage.