J. Anthony Lukas's Big Trouble

...But the journalistic technique has weaknesses, too...

...McParland's notoriety as the man who busted the Molly Maguires...

...The struggle over industrial power was not even primarily a conflict between personalities, Darrow argued...

...It may be 875 pages long, but it absolutely refuses to explain itself...

...Furthermore, Lukas seems honestly to admire the derring-do of the Pinkerton men...

...Virtually every strand of the tale is here, rendered in exhaustive detail: the Pinkerton-orchestrated kidnapping of Haywood and his colleagues from their homes in Denver to stand trial in Idaho...

...The book sometimes reads as though Lukas felt he was the last person left who could do justice to all these characters, set all the facts straight, get this story right once and for all...

...he gives no suggestion what the purpose of his insistent hammering might be, no larger reason for his determined unearthing of stories that no one has cared about for fifty years...

...In this era of unprecedented middle-class contentment, masquerading as a recorder of patriotic trivia, he has set out to do nothing less than dynamite the American consensus...

...And he has written a hook that, in terms of its vast size, seems appropriate for the job...

...Class conflict is, almost by definition, a conflict that Americans forget...

...But faced with such a titanic task, one feels, Lukas occasionally loses his way...

...In Common Ground, the digressive style functioned beautifully to give his characters—average folk all—precisely the depth and rootedness that his social planners ignored as they devised their world-remaking schemes...

...where state governments routinely toss the enDISSENT / Summer 1998 1O1 tire male populations of pro-union regions into concentration camps (called "bull pens...

...Lukas's almost frantic effort to nail down every factual loose end stands in curious contrast to the methods and narrative techniques of the social historians who ordinarily deal with subjects of this kind...

...and the murdered ex-Governor Frank Steunenberg himself, elected with Populist votes but later earning the hatred of labor for his ruthless suppression of an 1899 strike—was once as well known and as divisive to Americans as the Dreyfus Affair was to the French...

...This is, of course, the credo of the social historians, and perhaps this is also what makes their accounts of events like these so dust-dry...

...He can die if this jury decrees it...

...Who cares how things got to be the way they are...

...is that he played for a town in Idaho at the time of the trial...

...There are others and these others will come to take his place...

...That the superstars— the kick-ass trial lawyers, the prominent sleuths, the colorful editors, the U.S...

...Perhaps the book's bulk, its exhaustive and needless detail, its massive sifting of data, is simply an assertion, a defiance of forgetting: these things did happen...

...It's as though, after completing Common Ground, his masterful 1985 account of racial conflict in Boston, he was compelled to write an even bigger book on the biggest conflict of them all: the great, secret ur-conflict of class...

...And while it is easy to dismiss the lesser works of social history for their lack of narrative dash— think of all the dry, number-heavy speculation about farm life in the eighteenth century, all the pages of interpretation built on church attendance records or on euphemisms in someone's diary—one ignores the central premises of social history at one's peril...

...the drama of struggle and justice denied that only rarely makes up the plots of Hollywood movies...

...where hijacked trains and dynamited plants and citizens' militias are fairly commonplace...

...the great defense attorney Clarence Darrow...

...where the American left is something found just as easily on the high plains of Kansas and the silver fields of Idaho as the coffee shops of New York City...

...The America of Big Trouble is on the verge of explosion, a place where savage battles between workers and the hired armies of management occur so regularly and in so many different places that they become difficult to distinguish...

...Worse, as Lukas widens his narrative net, the technique sometimes he102 DISSENT / Summer 1998 comes pointless: he spends a number of pages relating the saga of baseball pitcher Walter Johnson, whose only relationship to Haywood et al...

...The episode and its leading characters— the fiery Haywood, who seemed like class war incarnate...

...Alien to notions of boundless future opportunity and subject to the American disease of instant forgetting, class has become the story of persecution that somehow never catches the imagination of contemporary audiences...

...From the banalities of Titanic to the pious equations of the neoclassical economists, we are believers all in the national myth of opportunity...

...senators, the society swells—really aren't the only game in town...

...we can conceive of class in no other way than as a temporary setback to be overcome with a winning smile, a particularly servile manner as we arrange the plates on the table, a diligent judiciousness choosing our lottery numbers...

...yes, it actually happened...

...In this light there's something distinctly heroic about Big Trouble, the late J. Anthony Lukas's dense, 875-page account of the 1906— 1907 kidnapping and trial of Bill Haywood and two other leaders of the Western Federation of Miners for the murder of a former governor of Idaho...

...the massive, nationwide protests that followed President Theodore Roosevelt's 1907 declaration that Haywood and Eugene Debs were "undesirable citizens...

...Labor history having roughly the status in the official annals of American consciousness as tales of abduction by space aliens, Lukas's painstaking and accessible recounting of these episodes must bring a certain feeling of vindication to devotees of the subject...

...the machinations by which the state of Idaho coaxed money from mine owners to bankroll its case against the labor leaders...

...Louis Adamic's depression-era book Dynamite, a lively but now-forgotten history of American class war, set out, like Big Trouble, to demonstrate for mainstream readers that America was hardly the land of classlessness and social consensus that its official myths proclaim it to be...

...Lukas, though, seems only faintly aware of the standard interpretations of the period...

...By the end of Big Trouble, though, the digressions just drag...

...Stranger still, the book's characters themselves seem to counsel against the journalistic, personality-centered approach...

...Operative for operative, hired gun for hired gun, bought juror for bought juror, perjured witness for perjured witness, conniving lawyer for conniving lawyer, partisan reporter for partisan reporter, these cockeyed armies had fought each other to an exhausted standoff...

...superstar strikebreaker James McParland...

...And, indeed, the America Lukas describes is unrecognizable from the blithe tales of progress and inclusiveness that make up our official national history...

...The book's most remarkable narrative device is a sort of compulsive comprehensiveness, a tendency to digress extensively in order to explain every unfamiliar detail, to retell every associated fact, to meditate on every character connected with the case...

...DISSENT / Summer 1998 103...

...Although works of social history often obsess over obscure particulars, they usually do so insofar as these support or call into question larger theories about the past...

...Informing so much of our national life, it is at the same time the social divide we will not permit ourselves to mention...

...where the rule of law itself is suspended whenever capital is put in danger...

...The fate of Great Men mattered little to the critical issues at hand...

...but, oh, gentlemen, do not think for a moment that if you hang him you will crucify the labor movement of the world...

...What makes class conflict such a dynamic element of history is precisely the fact that it went on—and it continues to go on—regardless of the conclusions reached by any juries, the results of any strikes, or the fate of any particular leaders...

...Strangely, Lukas's earlier writing succeeded by embracing the social-history sensibility...

...This is a country where class war was once as common as celebrity feuds are today...

...He finds evidence to suggest that Darrow won the case by bribing a crucial witness...

...Against this irresistible tide of forgetting Anthony Lukas has performed a gargantuan act of remembering, has tackled what is simultaneously the biggest social cleavage of all and the great American unmentionable...

...the rise of The Appeal to Reason, the Kansas-based socialist newspaper whose circulation could hit several million on special occasions...

...The technique was obviously designed to buttress the book's primary assertion: that there was pervasive class conflict across the American economic and cultural landscape, and it reached to here and to here and to here, and it touched this person's life, and this person's, and this person's...

...But if the general audiences of 1931 were, amid a brief bout of poverty-induced sanity, willing to grant some modicum of validity to Adamic's thesis why, yes, there is class conflict in America...

...where Populists are radicals and Socialists run newspapers...

...Lukas's assumptions and techniques are those of a newspaper writer, and his journalistic style gives the book an oddly sphinxlike character...

...But the digressive style serves as often to dilute and obscure the book's powerful main narrative as it does to enliven it...

...the hideous tales of industrial battle in Coeur d'Alenes and Cripple Creek...

...Today, though, even as the class divide becomes a crevasse and as American workers experience the working conditions of a hundred years ago, the Steunenberg-Haywood affair is as distant as the War of Jenkins's Ear...

...Nor is Big Trouble a pro-labor volume in the automatic, unquestioning way that has often rendered labor writing so unreadable: Lukas's narrative style is dispassionate, even cold, a feeling of aloofness made emphatic by the horror of the events he has chosen to describe...

...those of our own day seem to regard this modest idea as some sort of intellectual treason...

...Often one feels that Lukas has simply thrown restraint to the winds, given up trying to distinguish when to write and when just to let something pass without elucidating its every facet...

...THOMAS FRANK is editor-in-chief of the Baffler magazine and author of The Conquest of Cool...

...Of what concern to us are the problems of workers a hundred years ago...

...He poohpoohs the zanier rhetoric of Debs and company, gravitating always to the less fervid reporting of the mainstream newspapers of the day...

...Consider, for example, the odd statement that concludes the book: Finally, the opposing camps in this nasty class war sputtering along the icy ridges of the Rocky Mountains had just about canceled each other out...

...Republican Senator William Borah, acting as prosecutor for the state of Idaho...

...0 NE HAS TO admire the audacity of Lukas's project...

...Add to this the national myth of pastlessness and the American problem with imagining class becomes even more acute...

...He can die if die he must...

...For the capitalist side at least, the exacting of wealth is an almost organic bit of the economic environment, as subject to exhaustion as gravity...

...Lukas makes none of the broader conclusions that historians traditionally give to justify their researches...

...The best-known passage of Darrow's famous closing argument in the Haywood trial was a powerful evocation of the transcendence of class conflict: "William Haywood is no better than the rest...

...By rejecting Darrow's admonition, Lukas permits himself to write a compelling tale...

...Other authors have made the same point, of course...

...At other times the digressions descend into self-parody: Lukas begins a chapter by introducing the possibility that Steunenberg was murdered in retaliation for his brutal suppression of an 1899 miners' strike, retreats from that to a description of Idaho's physical dimensions, and by the end of the page has retreated from there to a narrative of "events 1.2 billion years ago," when geological activity, which he follows just as he might a movement of troops or a fashion preferred by the Idaho elite, produced the gold, lead, and silver that brought the miners to the region in the 1890s...

...That a nice story does not a history make...

...To be sure, readers may be exhausted by the time they reach this line, but "exhaustion" seems precisely the wrong word for what has gone on in America since 1907...