Tony's Final Chapter
Noah, Timothy
Tony’s Final Chapter An epic account of when class war meant just that By Timothy Noah THE TERM “CLASS WARFARE” has a quaint ring today; when used at all, it’s only in the fig-...
...The miners, in turn, hired Clarence Darrow to defend Haywood...
...To portray these events as more circus than mystery, as Lukas does, is probably true to their spirit...
...Lukas hints at the end of the book that Haywood probably was guilty, a conclusion I’d tentatively drawn by then, but he doesn’t do much to make the case...
...Surprisingly little of Big Trouble is dedicated to figuring out the guilt or innocence of Haywood and his fellow WEM leaders...
...Tony’s Final Chapter An epic account of when class war meant just that By Timothy Noah THE TERM “CLASS WARFARE” has a quaint ring today...
...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...
...It makes eminent sense that what was arguably the high-water mark of American socialism occurred in the ruggedly self-reliant West...
...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...
...It was a tragic end to a brilliant career in journalism that reached its apex with Lukas’s previous book, Common Ground, one of the finest works of nonfiction narrative of the last half-century...
...the mine owners clearly wanted to put the WEM 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...
...Then he tried homesteading, only to go belly-up in the Panic of 1893...
...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...
...there were 37,000 strikes between 1881 and 1905...
...TIMOTHY NOAH is a senior writerfor 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...
...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...
...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...
...News & World Report and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...
...Big Trouble is a book most first-rate journalists would be proud to have written...
...but if Lukas died with that delusion, it only makes his death more tragic...
...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...
...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...
...apparently one of his conquests was Alice Roosevelt Longworth), Ethel Barrymore, Gifford Pinchot, and star baseball pitcher Walter Johnson...
...the prosecution was led by the newly elected Idaho senator, William Borah...
...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...
...Though far from perfect, it adds luster to the memory of Lukas as one of the great journalist-historians of this era...
...As Lukas explains it, the West drew settlers seeking to escape civilization’s shackles abroad and in more easterly parts of the U.S...
...this is mentioned in passing late in the book, and the witness who testified to hearing it is never identified in the narrative...
...Among the worst battlegrounds was the Coeur dAlene region in Idaho, where labor unrest in 1899 led to rioting and President William McIGnley’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 hders...
...On the one hand, one sympathizes with Lukas’s broader aim of recreating with great particularity a ccllorful and significant set of events surrounding the murder trial...
...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...
...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...
...Despite a wealth of near-photographic detail about certain parts of the trial, Lukas gives short shrift to the allegation that Haywood had said Steunenberg “should be exterminated...
...The trouble was, for many, moving west proved a poor way to escape the brutal effects of the industrial revolution...
...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...
...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...
...This is a minor annoyance in a book of nearly 800 pages...
...I don’t believe anyone commits suicide over writing a bad book...
...Lukas killed himself a few months ago after reviewing the galleys...
...Frank Steunenberg and the subsequent murder trial of the radical labor leader “Big Bill” Haywood...
...in some stretches it is livelier and more incisive than Common Ground, and in many ways-most obviously, its vivid rendering of events that Lukas can only have read about-it is more impressive...
...Conflicting theories about whether the assassin, Harry Orchard, was Haywood’s gun for hire, seeking to save his own neck by implicating Haywood, or simply insane, aren’t satisfactorily fleshed out...
...But although less disciplined and ultimately less successful than its predecessor, Big Trouble is not a failure...
...reportedly, he viewed the book as a failure...
...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...
...Neither side in this politicized dispute seemed especially interested in rooting out the truth...
...But the mystery surrounding this book that most readers are likely to wonder about concerns the author himself...
...On the other hand, uh, whodunit...
...Whatever resentment of government existed mainly reflected the view that its strings were being pulled by capitalist titans...
Vol. 29 • October 1997 • No. 10
