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Finally I finished reading a book that I started last
November after my daughter Abby presented it as a birthday
gift: Big Trouble
by J. Anthony Lukas.
Usually I can devour a book in a day or two, but I ran
into trouble with Big Trouble
because Lukas wanders
all over the continent, often so far afield that you almost
forget the main narrative, and it's a narrative worth
remembering.
In 1896, Frank Steunenberg was elected governor of Idaho
with strong labor support. But when the miners of the
Couer d'Alene district went on strike in 1899, Steunenberg
sided with the capitalists and called for federal troops to
restore order
with martial law -- arrests without
warrants, imprisonment in primitive bull pens
without hearings or trials, forced exile.
Steunenberg left office in 1901, returned to his home in Caldwell, Idaho, and went about his life until Dec. 30, 1905, when a bomb, rigged to go off when he opened the gate to his yard, ripped him apart.
Suspicion soon focused on a man who turned out to be Harry Orchard -- a fellow responsible for, among other things, killing 13 non-union men with the dynamiting of the railroad depot at Independence in the Cripple Creek district of Colorado on June 6, 1904.
Orchard was a terrorist, and his career in Colorado and Idaho nearly a century ago demonstrates the general ignorance of the national media.
Recall all the Terror invades the Heartland
hyperbole after the bombing of the Murrah Building in
Oklahoma City nearly three years ago? In truth, the
American Heartland has ever been a domain of violence and
terror, from the expulsion of the Indians through the labor
wars to the present.
At issue in Idaho, though, was whether Orchard was acting on his own, or at the behest of the WFM, which saw Steunenberg as a traitor who had, after taking office, betrayed the men who supported his election.
Orchard confessed to the bombing, but said it was the result of his conspiracy with three WFM officers -- Charles Moyer, George Pettibone, and Big Bill Haywood -- all residing in Denver, where the WFM maintained its headquarters.
Thus came one of the most sordid actions ever committed by our state government -- Colorado colluded in the kidnapping of the three, who were grabbed in downtown Denver one night by private Pinkerton detectives, then placed on a Union Pacific special train that took them directly to Idaho.
And to further the cause of ridding the world of troublesome Federation members, Colorado capitalists like David Moffat contributed to a secret prosecution fund, a fund whose existence was of course denied by Idaho authorities.
This might be an early example of those
public-private partnerships
we read of these days --
a procedure that continued in Colorado until 1914, when the
state ran out of money to pay the National Guard at Ludlow,
and turned to the Rockefeller interests, which owned the
coal mines, for financing.
Federal courts upheld the kidnapping, in essence saying that even if the three were brought into Idaho illegally, that wasn't any of the court's business -- the fact was that they were in Idaho, and thus had to stand trial in Boise.
Thus began this century's first trial of the
century
-- the lead prosecutor was William Borah, a
mellifluous orator just elected to the U.S. Senate from
Idaho, with Clarence Darrow for the defense.
Right-thinkers of the time, like their counterparts
today, made accusations that the rabble-rousers were
attempting to ignite class warfare.
Haywood freely admitted that was his goal, but the
locution class warfare
brings to mind some questions
I once heard from a friend with attitude problems:
Assume there's some giant standing with his foot on my
neck. If I attempt to push the foot away, I'm accused of
fomenting class warfare. But if he increases the pressure,
it's just business as usual. They've sure got us scared of
the phrase 'class warfare,' don't they?
Well, indeed they do. One of the enduring mysteries of America is how we all know that there's a caste and class system in this country, but all pretend that it doesn't exist. If there aren't classes, then there can't be class warfare, and business as usual can continue.
And if Lukas had devoted the energy to pursuing that angle that he devoted to explaining hotels and theaters of that era, he might have written a great book, instead of a pretty good one.
But it does demonstrate that the good old days weren't all that good, that mining companies now pay decent wages not because they are run by philanthropists but because miners went to war for 40 years, and that Colorado's state government, when under corporate control, utterly failed to protect its citizens' rights.
All of this is well worth keeping in mind these days.
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