By Ken Stern 

Spokane’s 1910 free speech battles

Book review: ‘The Cold Millions’

 

January 13, 2021



How cold has your family been? Hopefully, they are not suffering in this pandemic year, or even your lifetime, but reflect on your family however many generations they have been in America, or perhaps throughout your family’s history: For how long has comfort been the norm?

In 1909 in the Skagit Valley, in Seattle, in Spokane, would your ancestors have hopped freights and hitched rides in the back of wagons as day laborers, with all the possessions they owned rolled up in their blanket slung over their backs?

Many of them probably did, as did countless unknown others. Award-winning novelist Jess Walter, Spokane-based and with a grandfather who rode freights and whose father supported his union and believed in fairness, re-creates Spokane’s 1909 and 1910 free speech riots in “The Cold Millions,” published last year. Immigrants, socialists, unionists and Wobblies battled. with the police, private detectives and hired assassins, the former for fair hiring and decent wages, the latter to maintain the status quo, literal hired guns of robber barons..

Teenage brothers Rye and Gig Dolan are at the center of this historically-based novel. Gig, the bright, charismatic and handsome older brother, is soon in jail, pulled off a soap box while advocating for free speech. Rye becomes the center of story, though all he wants is a job that will earn him savings to buy a house with a garden out back for the two of them.

Ryan’s story is told in the third person, but a rich cast of characters weave in and out in their own first person chapters, providing glimpses of their lives, as far back as when the Spokane Indian Jules was a boy in 1864 and forward to the novel’s last days, in 1911, when Spokane Police Commissioner John Sullivan is assassinated in his home, a shot from a rifle fatally wounding him.

The history is accurate, with the events unfolding in 1910 and 1911, when intermittent day workers were terribly cheated by hiring houses run by lumber mill and mine owners. Some workers were members of the one big Union, the International Workers of the World.

Elizabeth Flynn Gurley, a 19 year-old union organizer of national renown, came from our east and was arrested for speaking.

But Walters fictional characters are as complexly drawn. Ursula the Great, also golden throated, is a cougar tamer on the vaudeville stage who nightly entered the beast’s cage and tamed him before a full house of cheering men.

And the bad guys are each bad in their unique way. The mine owner Lem Brand, so rich and not trusting, hires independently two private detectives to infiltrate the union. “Detective” was a euphemism for assassin. Their targets were organizers. Walter recounts a history we refuse to learn, both of our past and of the present moment: The powers-that-be kill in the name of the law, blame the victims and are exonerated.

It is through Rye’s eyes, and mind, that the story unfolds. The title comes from his being brought to the palatial estate of the robber baron Brand. Rye is hit with the pain of the unfairness of life, recalls his family, parents and siblings dead, dying much too young, only his brother alive, and he in jail.

He reflects: “All people, except this rich cream, living and scraping and fighting and dying, and for what, nothing, the cold millions with no chance in this world.”

But Rye, thrown into the center of the fight, has rich adventures, taking a ticketed train ride to Seattle to deliver Flynn’s manuscript to a union newspaper, which breaks the story of the Spokane jailings to the outside world. Both assassins develop relationships with him, but he survives while they die as they lived, violently.

This good tale of class warfare is of a simpler time, when divisions were clearly economic-based.

 

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