Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1997 by Timothy Noah

The term "glass warfare" has a quaint ring today; when used at all, it's only in the figurative sense -- more often than not by wealthy folks accusing someone of trying to take away their tax breaks. But "class warfare" was a deadly serious term at the beginning of this century, when it was frequently invoked by labor leaders to describe their struggles against capitalist bosses. It's the conceit of the late J. Anthony Lukas's final book that class warfare came close to crossing over from rhetoric to actuality in the Prolonged, bitter, and bloody confrontation" between capital and labor that led to the assassination of former Idaho Gov. Frank Steunenberg and the subsequent murder trial of the radical labor leader "Big Bill" Haywood.

It makes eminent sense that what was arguably the high-water mark of American socialism occurred in the ruggedly self-reliant West. As Lukas explains it, the West drew settlers seeking to escape civilization's shackles abroad and in more easterly parts of the U.S. Whereas today's self-reliant extremists tend to see government as the oppressor, their predecessors during the late 19th and early 20th century, the age of the great trusts, were more apt to see industrial capitalism as such; there were 37,000 strikes between 1881 and 1905. Whatever resentment of government existed mainly reflected the view that its strings were being pulled by capitalist titans.

The trouble was, for many, moving west proved a poor way to escape the brutal effects of the industrial revolution. Haywood, for one, spent a year of his youth as a cowboy and found it lonely, dreary work that "bore precious little resemblance to the myth cultivated by pulp magazines, dime novels, and Wild West shows." Then he tried homesteading, only to go belly-up in the Panic of 1893. After the federal government assigned Haywood's homestead to an Indian reservation, he went into the mines and joined the ongoing battle between miners, on one side, and the mine operators, railroads, and banks on the other.

Among the worst battlegrounds was the Coeur d'Alene region in Idaho, where labor unrest in 1899 led to noting and President William McKinley's dispatch of black troops to keep the peace, a gesture that in that time and place only heightened" class tensions. (In one of the best of the book's many lengthy asides, Lukas tells how the same 24th Infantry seized Cuba's San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War, only to have the credit given to Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders) The troops were brought in at the request of then-Governor Steunenberg, who bore the brunt of criticism against the imposition of martial law, which included the rounding up of men, women, and children into temporary prisons ("bullpens) fashioned from barns, boxcars, and the like. Six years later, Steunenberg having by then returned to private life in Caldwell, Idaho, died in an explosion triggered by the opening of his garden gate, which had been rigged with dynamite.

Steunenberg's assassination triggered a massive response by the governors of both Idaho and Colorado, prodded by (and in large part paid for by) the mine owners, who immediately pinned the crime on Haywood and two other top leaders of the radical Western Federation of Miners. Their arrest in Colorado, transfer to Idaho, and subsequent trial were all orchestrated by James McParland, an aging Pinkerton operative who'd become something of a celebrity for infiltrating and then helping to prosecute the infamous Molly Maguire labor terrorists; among other things, he'd been turned by Arthur Conan Doyle into a character in a rare Sherlock Holmes story set in the United States. The miners, in turn, hired Clarence Darrow to defend Haywood; the prosecution was led by the newly elected Idaho senator, William Borah.

Surprisingly little of Big Trouble is dedicated to figuring out the guilt or innocence of Haywood and his fellow WFM leaders. This is a minor annoyance in a book of nearly 800 pages. On the one hand, one sympathizes with Lukas's broader aim of recreating with great particularity a colorful and significant set of events surrounding the murder trial. Lukas does document quite well the dubious means employed to bring about a conviction, while making clear that Haywood was fully capable of ordering Steunenberg's murder. Neither side in this politicized dispute seemed especially interested in rooting out the truth; the mine owners clearly wanted to put the WFM out of business, while the Socialists and other union activists were interested only in what the trial said about the ruling class's hostility toward labor. To portray these events as more circus than mystery, as Lukas does, is probably true to their spirit. It also allows Lukas to present a marvelous procession of characters who were involved with the trial, including not only McParland, Haywood, and Darrow (whom Lukas portrays as somewhat hypocritical and vain), but also President Roosevelt (presented as a bit of a clown), Borah (a charismatic philanderer; apparently on of his conquests was Alice Roosevelt Longworth), Ethel Barrymore, Gifford Pinchot, and star baseball pitcher Walter Johnson. (The latter character, whose early triumphs were witnessed by Darrow during the trial, seems especially peripheral to the book's events, but Lukas had a famous passion for baseball.)