The Coal War (32 page)

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.

And meantime the Reverend Wilmerding was having scenes with his rector, and with the trustees of his church, and the host of his parishioners and friends. He was so desperate about the sights he had seen—he actually proposed to stand up in the pulpit of St. George's and preach about conditions in the coal-country! In the presence of Peter Harrigan and Judge Vagleman, and other directors and leading stockholders of the General Fuel Company! As a result, he was not allowed to preach at all; and when he went about the city, seeking other ways to reach the public, he found that all ways had suddenly closed tight. Everywhere word had gone about that the assistant rector of St. George's, hitherto such a favorite at Y.M.C.A. entertainments and church sewing-clubs and charity theatricals and Chamber of Commerce banquets and civic improvement conferences—that the said assistant rector had become possessed by devils, and turned suddenly into a firebrand and fanatic, an offender of good taste, a menace to law and order. Hearing about his plight, Hal wrote to his college-friend, Morris Lipinsky, who got up a Socialist mass-meeting, at which the clergyman was free to vent his insane emotions. And of course that finished the process of his social and clerical downfall; when decent people opened their newspapers and read that the once-popular assistant rector had delivered a harangue at a gathering of revolutionists and incendiaries—well, they set to work to let him know what it really meant to be ordained in the line of the prophets and apostles, who had been stoned and scourged and fed to lions and thrown into kettles of boiling oil!

[33]

At this time there fell in the coal-country what the strikers came to know as the “big snow”. There must have been two feet of it—the tents were buried, and men had to go out every hour or two while it was falling, and clear the roofs to keep them from being borne down. And this of course laid everybody helpless; the pickets could not get about on the roads, and their amazon auxiliaries could not get down to the depots. So General Wrightman saw his opportunity. He was still supposed to be enforcing the Governor's “policy” of keeping out strike-breakers from the mines; but it was humiliating to a military commander to have to make pretences to strikers; so now the General announced that Governor Barstow had “modified” his orders over the telephone. When the perplexed Governor stated that he did not know of having done anything of the sort, the General said nothing, but went ahead with his own “policy”, which was to see that all men who wished to go to work were protected in their constitutional rights—the constitutional rights of men who did
not
wish to work being meantime suspended. That was not the way the General put it, of course; he merely said that if the strikers continued to resist his orders, he would herd them all into a stockade, and not let anyone out without a military pass.

From that time on, the militia was frankly an agency for the breaking of the strike. The soldiers met all trains regularly and escorted them up to the coal-camps. All over the country hordes of ignorant foreign-speaking men were being hired, under the grossest misrepresentations, and brought to the mines and held for “debt”. So many escaped, so many circumstantial stories were sworn to, that there could no longer be any doubt about it. The deputies of the state commissioner of labor, endeavoring to protect these victims, were several times arrested, and finally barred from all the camps in the district.

Such proceedings could of course not fail to have a weakening effect upon the strike. Everywhere the mines were filling up with workers, the newspapers were publishing statements to the effect that the strike was broken and the mines in operation. The strikers' claims could with difficulty be presented, for most of their leaders were in prison, their headquarters had been raided, their papers suppressed. Under the circumstances, it was not surprising that a few of the weaker men lost heart and gave up.

One of these was old Patrick Burke. As liquor was banned from the tent-colony, Patrick was accustomed to disappear each week when he got his union benefits, and not return until he had spent them. But one week he did not return at all, and a few days later came the report that he had gone back to North Valley a scab. It was a terrible humiliation to his three children; but there was nothing they could do about it, no way they could get to the old man to dissuade him from his shame. The sheep in paradise and the goats in purgatory were separated by no wider chasm than the strikers at Horton and the strike-breakers at North Valley!

Mary Burke shed tears of shame in secret; but she went on with her work, trying to make up for the treachery of her father by extra diligence on behalf of the sufferers. There was a constant stream of wounded men provided by the militia, and Mary assisted these at all hours of the day and night. For weeks she would not leave the tent-colony at all; she had no pleasure outside, on account of the militiamen, who made her life a burden. It had come to be the generally accepted idea among these men that “Red Mary” was Hal's “girl”; and they did not see why she should be so exclusive with her favors. They made advances to her, and when she spurned them, they never lost an opportunity to insult and terrify her. They would walk behind her, discussing the flaming splendor of her hair and the shape of her healthy body. They would speculate aloud as to her price, and make her offers. Several times they caught hold of her and kissed her, and once three drunken ruffians in khaki seized her and tried to drag her into an alley.

[34]

And then still more trouble fell upon Mary. By way of protest against the violence of the soldiers, it was decided to have a procession of the strikers' women in Pedro. A number from Horton went to attend, among them Mary and her young sister. A parade started, with American flags and printed signs; but when it reached the post-office, there was cavalry barring the way, and when the paraders refused to turn back, the General rode in at the head of his troopers, driving women and children pell-mell before him. Some were trampled by the horses; one woman had her cheek cut open by a sabre, another had an ear slashed off. In the midst of the excitement, the General fell off his horse and landed on his back on the side-walk; and little Jennie Burke laughed aloud—would not any child laugh aloud to see an old red walrus fall off a horse? The General, wild with rage, climbed upon his steed again, rode into the crowd, and as the child was trying to back away, kicked her savagely in the breast.

Now “Red Mary” was Irish, and had an Irish tongue, and in that moment of stress she made use of it. “Arrest that woman!” cried the General; and the woman was dragged away, and herded into an alley-way with eighteen others—among them Mrs. Jack David.

The little Welshwoman had had nothing to do with the parade, so she claimed. She had her two children with her, one three years old and the other four, and they had been standing in the doorway of a store, watching the soldiers driving the women down the street. “Move on!” one of the troopers had commanded her, and she replied—somewhat indiscreetly, perhaps—“I don't have to.” Whereupon he seized her, twisted her arm behind her back, and beat her with his fist. “Shame! Shame!” cried the spectators; and Mrs. David assailed him with a new and ferocious weapon, her muff.

Now came General Wrightman, riding up to inspect the round-up.

“That's Mrs. Jack David,” said one of his subordinates.

“Oh, indeed!” said Wrightman. Perhaps she had been too free in public discussion of “tin willies” and “scab-herders”; or perhaps her husband's title of “general” was regarded as a challenge. “Take her to jail,” said Wrightman. “That red-headed one too!” And so Mary and Mrs. David and the two children were “military prisoners”!

And prisoners they remained, day after day. There was no way to tell how long they would remain, nor even what was the charge against them. It was at this time that Major Cassels, in a habeas corpus proceeding in Judge Denton's court, explained the theory upon which he was proceeding. “The question of the guilt or innocence of these people is a matter of no importance. It was deemed necessary, for purposes known to General Wrightman, to lock them up, and they will remain locked up until General Wrightman orders them released.”