The Cold Millions
By Jess Walter
Harper, 352 pp.
★★★★★
An old labor song asks, “Which side are you on?” Not everyone is taken with The Cold Millions by Jess Walter. It’s often a tough book. If you believe America is and has always been, a middle-class society, Walter rubs reality in your face. Some (all-too-young) bloggers are unaware that this historical novel is indeed “historical.” It takes us to Spokane in 1909, the center of one of the more traumatic labor uprisings of its day: a free speech battle led by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
Spokane was a classic boom town. A burgeoning timber industry and the discovery of rich deposits of gold, silver, and lead extending from eastern Washington into Idaho’s Coeur d’Alene region swelled Spokane’s population from 350 to 104,400 in 30 years. Do not imagine for a nanosecond that the need for laborers meant decent wages or respect for working people. Spokane was also a place in which a relative handful of investment capitalists grew fabulously wealthy, built a nouveau riche enclave for themselves and bourgeois supporters, and considered their workforce as no more valuable than mules, shovels, or dynamite. For the hoi polloi, Spokane was burlesque and vaudeville halls, brothels, flophouses, bars, job sharks, and hobo camps. Naturally, it bred socialists, anarchists, and assorted other radicals. Bet on the fact that not all of the dynamite will be used to blast rock, but don’t assume you know who will be using TNT for nefarious purposes. Spokane was also home to private industrial armies, labor spies, crooked cops, and agents provocateurs.
Walter’s novel is built upon fictional characters who interact with historical figures. It centers upon two orphan brothers from Montana, 16-year-old “Rye” (Ryan) and 23-year-old “Gig” (Gregory) Dolan, who join the legions of drifters in search of work. By the time Rye catches up with Gig in Spokane, the latter is already a Wobbly (member of the IWW) and is devoted to a cause neatly summed by a line in the Preamble of the IWW Constitution: “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.” Rye is better educated than his brother, though Gig is working his way through War and Peace in a self-improvement campaign. Rye’s hope that he and Gig can also improve themselves economically is challenged by local cops who routinely treat working stiffs and drifters as trash to be beaten for sport. Victims include their gentle friend Jules, who is part Native American, and a tramp named Early, who advises them to stop listening to IWW fantasies, embrace anarchism, and resort to violence.
That’s not their way. Gig has his eye on Ursula the Great, a burlesque singer who performs with a mountain lion; and Rye meets Lemuel Brand, a mining tycoon, and doesn’t quite know what to make of him or life from the top rail. When the free speech conflagration breaks out, they must figure out which side they are on. In brief, the IWW strategy–which worked brilliantly elsewhere–was to defy local ordinances banning large rallies. Wobblies saw it as a violation of the First Amendment and recruited out-of-work laborers to hop railroad cars and flood the streets. Wobblies mounted soapboxes, gave speeches, were arrested, and were thrown into jail. Success came when it cost cities so much to feed the prisoners that ordinances were repealed, strikes continued, and employers were forced to negotiate. That’s not how it went down in Spokane, where elites reacted with unspeakable brutality.
Another reason why some have struggled with The Cold Millions is that Walter wants readers to do their homework. He uses period lingo, IWW slang, and labor terminology without translating it. (They’re usually obvious from context, but there are phrases that might send you to Google.) Walter also expects you to sort fictional characters–such as the Dolans, Urusula, detective Dal Daveaux–from real ones like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Frank Little, Clarence Darrow, Joe Hill, and Wesley Everest. One should read up on the IWW and its free speech battles–Flynn was later a cofounder of the ACLU, then a communist–but you can get by if you think of everyone as either real or a composite of historical figures.
Walter is a superb writer who knows how to spin a tale. He enhances The Cold Millions by interjecting lots of which-side-are-you-on dilemmas and wrapping them in an unorthodox mystery. All of these–plus his use of the falls on the Spokane River as an inanimate character–keep readers off balance. Walter’s sympathy for the underdog earns him comparisons that I and other reviewers have invoked: John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and John Steinbeck. It is a thrilling read deliberately written in a retro style reminiscent of the aforementioned.
Walter gets history right, not just in the broad strokes but also in the background details. Reading The Cold Millions is simultaneously a lesson in early 20th century labor struggles, gender dynamics, anti-immigrant animus, technological development, and class consciousness (emergent, undeveloped, and/or buried). Think of The Cold Millions as a title with multiple meanings. If the novel discomforts you, ask, “Which side am I on?”
Rob Weir
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