Chapter XII: King Coal

I.

Once back in America, Sinclair was inevitably drawn into the field of agitation. From a winter in Bermuda, where he had written _Sylvia’s Marriage_, he returned to investigate the coal strike then going on in Colorado. It was a sufficiently dramatic episode in our industrial history; eleven thousand miners, with their wives and children, on strike and evicted from company-owned homes, were living in tent-colonies that had been raided and shot up by gun-men--and finally machine-guns had been turned on them, their tent-colony at Ludlow had been burned, and three women and fourteen children had been suffocated to death. Yet this news was being published only, with the most rare and meager exceptions, in the Socialist papers. Sinclair resolved to break this conspiracy of silence. Being convinced that John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was personally responsible for the tactics of the mine-owners, he went to Mr. Rockefeller’s office and asked that he meet and talk with an eyewitness of the barbarities with which the strike was being repressed. The interview was denied. Then Sinclair hit on the idea of inviting a group of people to put bands of crêpe around their arms and walk in silence up and down in front of 26 Broadway, the Rockefeller offices, in token of mourning for the dead women and children of Ludlow. Picketing, except in labor strikes, was then a new publicity device, though the suffragists afterward made it familiar. Reporters were informed of the plan, and were on hand next morning when the demonstration began, together with a great crowd. There were also policemen, who told the pickets to go away. They replied that what they were doing was not unlawful, and continued. They were then arrested. They were followed by reporters to the police station, and Sinclair was there interviewed. He explained the purpose of the demonstration, and told the entire story of the Colorado coal strike. Within a few hours the newspapers were on the street with the story emblazoned on the front page, with three or four columns of news of the strike, as contained in the interview. The device had been successful: the conspiracy of silence was broken.

The pickets were fined and, on refusing to pay their fines, were locked up in the Tombs. The newspapers sneered at this “pink-tea martyrdom”, as one of them described it, and said that the demonstration was actuated by “no genuine desire to effect a reform”, but only by “a morbid craving for notoriety”. Nevertheless the papers sent special correspondents to the coal fields, and the strike news continued to occupy the front page.

After Sinclair’s arrest, his wife took up the demonstration. She was not arrested, but a false report that she had been was sent out by the Associated Press, which brought her mother in alarm to New York, with the news that her father had disinherited her after reading the morning paper. She continued to marshal the demonstration for two weeks, and her husband reports that her habitual “Southern lady” airs awed the policemen so much that they kept everybody else off the sidewalk so that the silent parade she was leading should have room to walk up and down undisturbed. A Southern lady is accustomed to having her way; and when she decided that her husband had been in jail long enough, she serenely interrupted court proceedings to have that matter attended to. “In the South, you understand,” says Upton Sinclair, “anything from a court to a fire-engine will stop to pick up a lady’s handkerchief”--and it appears that the air of expecting such consideration is effective also in the North. But these public demonstrations, however much she might approve of them in principle, were so alien to her Southern tastes that after going calmly through each day’s ordeal she would come home at night and cry.

The investigation of the strike now took Sinclair to Colorado, where he undertook to attack the problem of news-suppression at its source, and succeeded in putting the Associated Press on its defense before the world. The whole story is told in _The Brass Check_. Returning to the East, he found that a group of radicals had been arrested for holding a street-meeting in Tarrytown, New York, whither Mr. Rockefeller had retired from the storm of publicity to the seclusion of his estate. Sinclair then went to Tarrytown on behalf of free speech, and, being forbidden to hold a street-meeting and unable to rent a hall, he persuaded a millionaire neighbor of Mr. Rockefeller’s to give him the use of an open-air theater for a meeting to discuss the “Ludlow massacre”. In the meantime the Broadway demonstration case had been appealed; and in due time the higher court had handed down its august decision, affirming the decision of the police magistrate, on the ground--highly instructive to a man who had been ridiculed and insulted for so many years by the newspapers--that “no citizen has a right to rebuke another citizen by subjecting him to ridicule or insult”. There was, however, a difference in these cases: Mr. Rockefeller was a millionaire.

II.

Returning to the literary life for a time, Sinclair edited, that summer, while living at Croton-on-Hudson, N. Y., _The Cry for Justice_, “an anthology of social protest: the writings of philosophers, poets, novelists, social reformers, and others who have voiced the struggle against social injustice: selected from twenty-five languages, covering a period of five thousand years”, with an eloquent introduction by Jack London (1915). And later he put his knowledge of the Colorado situation into a novel, _King Coal_, which was published in 1917.

_King Coal_ is perhaps as fine a labor novel as could be written under the disability of having a young aristocrat for its hero. The disability, moreover, is not so great as might be imagined in the light of _The Metropolis_ and _The Moneychangers_. This young aristocrat is, happily, different from the young aristocrat in those books. He is not so naïve, his morality is at least not so oppressively solemn, he is robust, high-spirited, humorous, and likeable; as the somewhat rebellious son of a coal-magnate, he gets a job, not in his father’s mines, for he would be recognized there, but in the mines belonging to the father of a chum, and not merely sees what is going on but takes an active part in the highly exciting events that happen, including the organization of a union, an abortive strike, and a mine-explosion. The working people in the book are, though minor figures, real enough to remind us that this book is by the author of _The Jungle_. The theme is really fictionized, not merely served up in journalistic hunks. The propaganda is implicit though all-pervading. There is even a shadowy but real “love-interest”, thus described by Georg Brandes in his introduction to the book:

“Most beautifully is this [the author’s poetic attitude] shown in Hal’s relation to a young Irish girl, Red Mary. She is poor, and her daily life harsh and joyless, but nevertheless her wonderful grace is one of the outstanding features of the book. The first impression of Mary is that of a Celtic Madonna with a tender heart for little children. She develops into a Valkyrie of the working-class, always ready to fight for the workers’ right.”

True and interesting as it is, it leaves considerable to be desired as fiction. The young aristocrat, even in this likeable guise, impedes rather than develops the labor theme. The story, told from the point of view of Red Mary, might not have been so clear an exposition of all the facts, but it might have been--it could have been--another _Jungle_. It does credit to the author’s intelligence rather than to his powers of human feeling. Even the great mine disaster is not, from the point of view necessitated by the choice of a sympathetic outsider as the central figure rather than one directly involved, a tragedy. But, in not attempting a more vital treatment, it does not fail. It is a minor, and on its own limited plane a brilliant, success.