The Coal War by Upton Sinclair

revolutionist!

[3]
    In the office of the United Mine Workers John Harmon sat at his desk—a man Hal had come to know well, and for whom he had a deep admiration. Harmon was a miner born, his Scotch parents and grand-parents having been miners as far back as he knew. At home Hal had been taught to think of a labor leader as a noisy and pushing person, thriving upon trouble; but Harmon was exactly the opposite of that—gentle of manner, slow-spoken, patient, with a quiet humor which you might miss at first. He was a man of big stature, with features so regular that they might have served as a model for a sculptor. He was not a man of imagination; he did not appreciate his own role, he could not tell his own story—but you knew that he was a solid man, who weighed the consequences of an action before he took it, and having once set forward, seldom needed to change his course.
    The miners had chosen him for their best; but he was not good enough for the operators of this district, it appeared. If he had been a bandit-chief, they could not have spurned him more haughtily. In vain did he devise methods of adjustment, in vain did he write letters to the operators, individually or collectively, calling their attention to the discontent of the men, the violations of law and even of common-sense in the camps. The letters remained unanswered, and Peter Harrigan and his associates remained unaware of the existence of such a person as the executive of the miners’ international.
    They objected to the character of the members of the union, so the newspapers said; but Harmon pointed out that it was the operators who determined this. There could be no qualification for membership in a miners’ union, save that the man was a worker in the mines. It the union was not representative of all the workers, whose fault was it—considering the methods used with anyone who sought to increase the membership?
    Harmon spoke of the murdered organizer. Hal knew Tom Olson, there was no need to say that he had not been a man of violence, that he had not been in Pedro for any purpose of violence. And as for Pete Hanun and Gus Dirkett, the coal-company detectives who had shot him down in cold blood—they were out on bail, roaming the streets and terrorizing the miners with the very same guns which had done the murder! There would be a trial, some day, but everyone knew the farce it would be. “Alf” Raymond, the sheriff, would be the man who selected the jury; they would put on the stand a couple of Mexicans, who had perhaps never been in the state before, but who would swear they had seen Tom Olson draw a weapon; and on that testimony the jury would acquit the gunmen. They had been doing such things for thirty years in that “Empire of Raymond”, as Pedro County was called.
    No, said Harmon—and his voice trembled with feeling-there was no sincerity in the contentions of the operators. The reason they would not recognize the union was because they could make better terms with the individual man, could exploit his labor more effectively. They were doing it so effectively that the task of the union leaders was to stave off revolt; and it really seemed as if the other side must know this, and be bent on forcing the issue. Only that morning there had come a telegram from Jim Moylan, who was in the field, telling how thirty-seven men, with their families, had been thrown out of Castleton camp for having attended a union meeting in the canyon.
    There was nothing to do but get ready for the struggle. The union had just lost a strike in West Virginia, and the same detective agencies which had crushed it, the same strike-breakers, even the same machine-guns, were being shipped to the West. The union had countered by shipping the tents in which the West Virginia strikers had been housed; but in this effort they had struck a snag. Gunmen and machine-guns had come through on time, but tents had been mislaid. They had been