BIG TROUBLE: A Murder in a Small Western Town
Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America
By J. Anthony Lukas
Simon & Schuster, 875 pages, $32.50
Big Trouble” is a big book, and it tells a big story, a story about the importance of class in American history.
The book focuses on the trial of William “Big Bill” Haywood for the murder of Frank Steunenberg, former governor of Idaho, blown up by a bomb rigged to the front gate of his home in Caldwell in December 1905. The confession of assassin Albert Horsley-better known by his nom de guerre, Harry Orchard-implicated Haywood and two other leaders of the radical Western Federation of Miners in a terrorist conspiracy. These three leaders were kidnapped by Pinkerton detectives in Denver and transported in a sealed train to Boise, where in 1907 Haywood was the first to be tried. Pitting prosecutor William E. Borah against defense attorney Clarence Darrow, the case became the first “trial of the century,” the subject of intense national attention and debate.
Author J. Anthony Lukas (who, sadly, took his own life last June) notes here that during work on “Common Ground,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning study of school desegregation in Boston, he found it difficult to disentangle the issues of class and race. In “Big Trouble” he seeks to illuminate the period in the American past when “collisions between labor and capital were reaching a critical intensity that might plunge the nation into ruinous class war.” He interprets the Haywood case as a “spectacular show trial,” with the prosecution pressing its view that union leaders were terrorists who had to be crushed and the defense arguing, in the words of one supporter, that the masses “cannot hope for justice from their masters.” Lukas not only provides a vivid narrative of the murder case but traces the elaborate web of human experience-what he calls the “social tapestry”-that combined to make this critical historical moment.
The book is the result of prodigious research in dozens of archives, newspapers and published contemporary accounts. There are nearly 60 pages of notes and 16-plus densely printed pages of bibliography. From these diverse sources, Lukas draws together engaging portraits of an astounding cast of dozens of characters: Steunenberg, who won election on a fusion ticket of Democrats and Populists in the 1890s but smashed union miners in the Coeur d’Alene district of northern Idaho after a notable incident of labor violence there. Haywood, who described himself as “`a two-gun man from the West,”‘ pulling his Socialist Party membership card from one pocket, his Industrial Workers of the World card from the other. Chief of Pinkerton detectives James McParland, who made his reputation in the 1870s by infiltrating and crushing the Molly Maguires, a secret society of Pennsylvania miners, and sought to cap his career by destroying the Western Federation of Miners. The book explores at length the intersecting worlds of miners, capitalists, socialists, politicians, reporters, detectives, actors, even baseball players. These meanderings may at first seem distractions from the trial itself, but readers are well-advised to be patient and allow Lukas to guide them on these excursions, for they amount to a grand tour of class relations in turn-of-the-century America.
“Big Trouble” documents the conspiracy of state and capital, in the words of one of Idaho’s prosecuting attorneys, “to rid the West entirely of (the Western Federation of Miners,) which has done so much to retard our progress, and which is a menace to our future.” In one of the book’s most interesting sections, Lukas follows the money that flowed from the mine, mill and smelter owners to fund the investigation by dozens of Pinkerton detectives and to provide bonuses to prosecuting attorneys. Idaho authorities adamantly denied it, but research in the Pinkerton archives convinced Lukas that the state received approximately $100,000 $1.8 million in today’s values. There was plenty of money to wine and dine the reporters of the Establishment press. The chief correspondent of The Associated Press cooperated by clearing his stories with McParland, and the man from The New York Times had an inside track to the trial’s judge. The message of the ruling elite was blunt, Lukas writes: “Here are the bodies, here is the money, please kill them for us.”
President Theodore Roosevelt, who suspected such collusion, worried that it would backfire, producing a public scandal that might ruin this opportunity to crush the radical union movement in America. But weighing in with his own intemperate statement condemning Haywood and his colleagues as “undesirable … citizen(s),” Roosevelt provided the political Left with a fabulous public-relations opportunity. In demonstrations held in many of the nation’s cities, tens of thousands of socialists, feminists and unionists marched in support of Haywood and the Western Federation of Miners, arrayed with buttons and banners declaring, “I am an undesirable citizen.”
With all this attention to context, Lukas probably could have done more to present the perspective of the miners. It is a significant historical irony that it was in the American West noted as the region of rugged individualism par excellence that working-class radicalism was strongest. He does provide some important clues. A Chicago reporter, William Hard, came closest to understanding this paradox. “(A)dventurous characters, going out into a new country and plunging in the virgin, everlasting hills,” he wrote, “have suddenly discovered that amid these primitive surroundings the modern industrial system is … found at its worst.” The disillusion produced by the disjuncture between expectation and reality was captured in a poignant anthem of the Industrial Workers of the World:
Your fathers’ golden sunsets led
To virgin prairies wide and clear
Do you not know the West is dead?
Now dismal cities rise instead
And freedom is not there nor here
What path is left for you to tread?
Your fathers’ world, for which they bled,
Is fenced and settled far and near
Do you not know the West is dead?
The sense that the frontier had closed, that opportunity for the individual had disappeared, that the West was “dead” lay behind much of the region’s radicalism.
Lukas finally brings us to the trial’s conclusion. To everyone’s surprise, the jury of 12 Idaho farmers, unconvinced by the state’s case, acquitted Haywood. Mine owners were bitterly disappointed, but so were many radicals, who believed they would get more mileage out of a conviction. Several months later the trial of the second miners’ leader ended similarly, and the state dismissed the charges against the third. “(T)he opposing camps in this nasty class war … fought each other to an exhausted standoff,” Lukas writes. He closes the book by rehearsing some rather weak evidence suggesting that Haywood and the others were actually guilty. It may be that this trip through the landscape of class in America at the beginning of the century now closing exhausted Lukas as well.
