A WOBBLY TOME

The book is the valedictory of the former New York Times reporter who won both a Pulitzer prize and a National Book Award for Common Ground, a journalistic account of the Boston school integration furor of the 1970s. Lukas killed himself earlier this year at the age of 64, shortly after finishing this new book. He had suffered from depression for years.

No one can fully know another’s personal demons; however, a friend attributed his suicide to fear that Big Trouble would be roughly handled by critics. That’s doubtful. Big Trouble is in a tradition beloved of prizegivers and it surely will be awarded one or two — for its progressive interpretation of a slice of the American past and/or in memoriam to the author.

The book is subtitled “Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America,” and as a general thing it is well to be suspicious of books invoking the American soul. Its pivotal event is the assassination of Frank Steunenberg, the 44-year-old former governor of Idaho, on the evening of December 30, 1905. A bomb rigged to his front gate detonated as he returned to his home in the town of Caldwell.

Eventually, three leaders of the Western Federation of Miners, most notably Bill Haywood, were tried for having had the assassination carried out by agents of the union — a union sufficiently radical that Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor maintained a careful distance from it.

Haywood’s defense was headed by Clarence Darrow, the country’s most celebrated lawyer. Investigation of the killing was led by a renowned detective, James McParland of the Pinkertons, who undercover had been instrumental in breaking up the Pennsylvania terrorists called the “Molly Maguires.”

The actual assassin was Harry Orchard (two named accomplices were never charged). Nabbed by McParland, Orchard told everything except his weight at birth. His confession implicated Haywood and the two other union officials.

Prosecutors were convinced immediately that the Western Federation of Miners was behind the Steunenberg murder. During bitter mining wars in the state in 1892, Steunenberg as governor, though considered politically moderate, had sent troops to control the strikers.

In his introduction, Lukas writes that while working on his Boston school- integration book, he realized that class as much as race was involved (which isn’t exactly a remarkable insight). He decided for Big Trouble “to pick this [class] thread from a social fabric so professedly egalitarian” as this country’s.

He chose the 1899-1907 period in the Rocky Mountain states, a time when there was fear that conflict between labor and capital was reaching “a critical intensity that might plunge the nation into ruinous class war.” The class theme, Lukas felt, was pertinent now “when the gap between our richest and poorest citizens grows ever wider.” That is debatable, not to put too fine a point on it, but it is the party line.

A major problem with Big Trouble is that Lukas facilely divides the turn-of-the-century landscape of a dynamic and complex society into one of wage slaves versus plutocrats — no middle term in his equation. Thus, he ignores the most remarkable fact of the capital consolidation of those years, especially in the West: the permeable nature of “class” in America and the dramatic growth of the middle class that sustained one of history’s dramatic economic and cultural evolutions. Fitful and ragged as that evolution was, it precluded the sealed socioeconomic compartments necessary to produce genuine class warfare.

Certainly there was a pulsating vein of concern about the possibility in those years. Certainly, too, the clash of labor and capital was intense, harsh, and often violent — the Haymarket riots, the Pullman and Homestead strikes, and Colorado’s Cripple Creek mining eruptions among the nastiest.

The active and articulate anti-capitalist hive of the time, however, as Lukas notes, was so internally fractious and antagonistic that unity of action was moot against the arsenal of money and power at the command of capital. Both sides, in other words, played very rough.

But, in addition to the asserted theme of class warfare, the book is vastly out of proportion because of the excessive canvas upon which Lukas splashed his paint. He was clearly a tenacious reporter. His research was prodigious. But J. Anthony Lukas was a bird dog that could not hold a point, feverish to locate every quail in the county.

For example, at one point he goes into tedious length, in the neighborhood of 12,000 words, on the history and politics of blacks in the military, including a detailed account of the Spanish-American War, the use of allblack regiments during the 1890s mining strikes, and the vicious resentment against the units sent to Idaho after the Steunenberg murder. This is interesting stuff, germane to his book — but severely overdone.

There are similar divagations on the prominence of private detective agencies such as the Pinkertons in those years. There’s a long section on baseball, pegged to the great Walter Johnson’s early career in Idaho during the period. There are 5,000 or so words on development of America’s railroads and their technology. As further narrative sinkholes, there are extended biographical profiles or sketches of (it seems) half the residents in Idaho in these years, those in any way involved in the murder case, and those who simply attract the author’s interest. A short list includes: Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt; E. H. Harriman and Ethel Barrymore; magazine editor S. S. McClure, newspaperman William Allen White, socialist Eugene Debs; Gifford Pinchot, the forest conservationist; and Hugo Munsterberg, one of the early psychologists to dance his jig in a criminal law courtroom.

As the book makes its way to the end, the defendants go through a three- month trial and Darrow’s 11-hour summation to the jury. Haywood was found not guilty. A few months later a jury cleared a second union official, while charges were dropped against the third. Orchard himself was convicted, his death sentence commuted to life, and the bomber died in the Idaho penitentiary in 1954 at the age of 88.

But were Haywood and his union colleagues innocent? Haywood would, of course, become even more radical as a Wobbly leader and eventually flee to the Soviet Union, where he died and was buried in the Kremlin beside John Reed. Lukas in an epilogue excavates from his research some circumstantial bits and pieces that fairly persuasively suggest that the jury got it wrong.

Big Trouble almost defies the reader to slog through the disjointed narrative. Too bad, because there’s a good reportorial yarn here, if not a solid historical treatment — if an editor had reduced Big Trouble by two or three pounds.