The Coal War (23 page)

A week later two more victims of this scheme made their escape, both declaring that they had been beaten when they refused to work, and that another man had been shot and buried at night. Affidavits were made by these men, and John Harmon took them to the Governor, who sent the State Commissioner of Labor to investigate. It was this Commissioner's duty to see to the enforcement of all the labor laws of the state, and he went up to the Northeastern in an automobile, and announced his identity and his business. But admission was refused to him; he was turned back, precisely as if he had been a reporter for a working-man's penny newspaper! And this same thing happened to him at camp after camp, it continued to happen to him for weeks; when he appealed to the Governor, he was admitted to a few camps, but denied permission to speak to the workers! The Commissioner of Labor was a union sympathizer, and therefore an “outside agitator”, from Peter Harrigan's point of view.

When the strikers heard of events such as these, it was only natural that they should be disposed to enforce the law for themselves. There came a report of some strikebreakers coming to Barela, and the whole tent-colony streamed down to the railroad. Obeying orders from his superiors, Captain Harding had set a guard about the depot to keep the strikers away from it; but now came a swarm of women with weapons of domestic construction—baseball bats with spikes in them, butcher-knives tied on long poles, bread-rollers, scrubbing pails full of rocks. Shouting and cursing in twenty languages, they went straight through the militia cordon and lined up on the platform to wait for the scoundrels who would take the bread from their children's mouths!

Captain Harding came galloping up, and shouted to Hal and other English-speaking men. He had his orders, and he would enforce them. If there were any strike-breakers on the train, they would be turned back; but in the meantime the platform must be cleared, even if a battle was necessary. He was very angry, and evidently meant what he said; so Hal and the others set to work, and with many impromptu speeches and no end of shouting and shrieking, the coal-camp amazons were driven back, and the train came in. Sure enough, there were seven strike-breakers on board—and those strike-breakers did not get to Barela. But they got into the Mohican mine that same night, escorted by Curran, the saloon-keeper Major of Militia. Much comfort there was in that for the amazons of Horton!

[8]

Over these matters there were vehement arguments between Captain Harding and his cousin. Appie was keeping strike-breakers out of the mines under his control, because as a military man he held his orders sacred; but he was not ordered to bother his head about what Major Curran did, and he did not purpose to do so, because he was privately opposed to the Governor's so-called “policy”. Besides being a militia officer, Appie was a young lawyer who took coal-company cases, and had the usual prejudices of his class. Labor unions were, or tried their best to be, combinations in restraint of trade, and as such they ought to be suppressed, or at any rate kept from being of any use to their members. That this argument made property of human labor, and so virtually admitted wage-slavery, was something the young officer could not be got to see. What would become of industry if workingmen were not protected in the right to take a job where they found it?

Appie could not see that these strikers had any claim whatsoever upon their jobs. Hal showed him men among them who had toiled for twenty or thirty years in the mines—men who had lost their health, their parents, their children, slaving for the coal-companies; yet they had no share in the properties they had helped to build up, they had nothing to show for all these years but a few sticks of furniture and rags of clothing! Here was a boy whose father had worked thirty years in the mines, and in the end had lost his life in an accident caused by carelessness of the companies; this orphan had been arrested for picking up coal along the railroad-track—possibly the same coal his father had mined! His job as breaker-boy had been his one possession in the world. “And you say he has no claim on it!”

“He gave it up,” said Harding, simply.

The young officer had a vision of the tyranny which would result if labor unions were allowed to have their way. If they could call strikes and keep strike-breakers away, they could control industry, there would be no end to blackmail. He had stories to tell about labor union domination—absurd disputes that had occurred in industries controlled by people he knew. A printer who was not allowed to set type in his own establishment, because he did not have a union card! A building contractor who had been held up for a thousand dollars at a critical moment in his operations! What would Hal do about such things?

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!

[9]

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!”

[10]

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.