The Coal War (5 page)

[11]

The original seed of this evil had been Morris Lipinsky, the Russian Jew. Prior to coming to Harrigan the only Jews Hal had known had been Jesus and Heinrich Heine; and somehow he had not connected them with the members of their race in Western City—the Abrahams of the clothingtrade and the Isaacs of the “show business”. Lipinsky was under-sized, sharp-faced, and painfully apologetic; it was rumored that his father, the escaped Siberian exile, kept a stationery shop in some obscure quarter. The son labored under a constitutional inability to pronounce the letter w, and without reflecting about the matter especially, Hal had set him down as “impossible”.

But early in the sophomore year Lipinsky came to Hal's rooms, and timidly explained that he was making an effort to interest some of the students in the subject of Socialism. Hal was obliged to admit that his ideas of the subject were of the vaguest. Lipinsky began to explain; and Hal was surprised to see a shrinking and apparently inferior little Hebrew become suddenly lighted up with enthusiasm. He was a person with a secret religion, it appeared; and Hal, who was used to this in Judea, hardly knew what to make of it in Harrigan!

It happened that Hal himself was in a state of transition at this time. He had been brought up a member of St. George's, but he had ceased to believe the creed of his church, and what was more important, he had come to doubt its practical efficiency. Under Will Wilmerding's guidance he had taught Sunday-school to a class of urchins, gathered with considerable difficulty from the poorer quarters of Western City. He knew that these urchins were going out to face the temptations of a community in which the vice-interests were in alliance with police and politicians, a “machine” subsidized by the great public service corporations; could he feel that he was giving an adequate equipment for life, teaching about Moses in the bulrushes and Jonah in the whale? On the other hand, he could not very well teach them about graft in Western City, because the heads of the interests which subsidized this graft were the pillars of the church in which he taught!

Morris Lipinsky had faced such facts as these, and he had a remedy which he was willing to stay up all hours of the night explaining. He mentioned incidentally that there was an organization of college men interested in spreading such ideas, and might it not be a good thing to have a lecturer come to Harrigan? Hal offered the use of his rooms, and there was a meeting attended by some twenty students, who had brought to their attention the neglect of a most fascinating subject in the curricula of American colleges. The lecturer suggested the disturbing possibility that there might be some connection between this neglect, and the source from which the funds of American colleges were derived. And when some of the students wished to go on with this fascinating subject, their project met with a reception which caused them to recall this suggestion of the lecturer. They proposed to organize a “study chapter”, but the chancellor of Harrigan put his foot down; he would not have the name of Harrigan associated with Socialism!

So throughout the precincts of the college broke out a lively controversy. Young men and women who had had no remotest desire to study Socialism took part in vehement discussions as to whether they had a right to study Socialism if they wished. Even one or two of the professors spoke up. Surely it was an unusual thing to forbid college students to study! Between athletics and fraternity life, it was so difficult to get them to study anything!

Hal and Lipinsky took counsel, and called on the chancellor with a new and subtle proposition. The authorities would not permit a “Socialist” organization; but what if the students should meet to discuss, not Socialism, but social problems in general? Surely the authorities would not forbid that! Seeing the authorities begin to weaken, Hal pressed his advantage, stating that he intended to invite friends to his rooms to discuss social problems, unless this procedure was expressly forbidden.

So once a week there was a gathering of students, and a discussion so exciting that it was sometimes difficult to get rid of the discussers. Even the professors took to coming, and taking part in the proceedings on equal terms with their students. A brand new experience to these gentlemen—to see American college boys taking ideas seriously enough to get angry over them! The time came when Hal's rooms would hardly hold these gatherings. The most aloof and fashionable men in the student-body, pillars of fraternity-life like “Bob” Creston and Laurence Arthur, were first drawn in by curiosity and then drawn out by arguments, until you might hear them defending themselves and their privileges under the very thinnest veils of economic formula!

[12]

The climax came near the end of the year; when Dan Hogan, the notorious “I.W.W.” leader, happened to be in Western City. The brilliant idea occurred to these young collegiate revolutionists that the students might be interested to know what the “I.W.W.” had to report about the state of the country. So first they invited him—and then they announced that he was coming.

Never would Hal forget the scene in his rooms that night; a cultured leisure-class audience, packed like sardines in a box, and a one-eyed, battle-scarred old veteran of the class-war, backed against the wall facing them. He had not wanted to come, he told them; he had no interest in leisure-class audiences, no faith in them; he was only wasting his breath, talking to them about things they could never understand. But the boys had insisted, and so here he was; he stood like a mangy old bear at bay, growling at them for their blindness and indifference to the horror of the life of millions upon whose toil they fed. He told them what he had seen and known—not because it was any use to tell them, but because his mind was full to bursting with it, because his soul was shaken to the deeps with it.

It was facts that “Big Dan” told; no one could doubt that they were facts, no human imagination could have invented such things! He told of starvation and oppression; he pictured masses of men and women driven to desperation, flaming out in blind revolt, crushed into submission by club and bayonet and machine-gun. He told of prison-hells where men were driven insane, of bull-pens where men, and women too, were beaten and starved and frozen, or left to die of loathsome diseases. He told of the brutality of police and soldiery, of the corruption of courts and juries—the whole enormous, relentless machine of oppression which was “government” to the man underneath. He pictured the long agonies, the sacrifices and martyrdoms of labor's nameless and forgotten heroes. He did not plead for them—he was too powerful for that; in the midst of his most moving cry of despair, of yearning for deliverance for his people, his scorn and fury would flash out again. He would hail the mighty hosts of labor, marching to their final and inevitable triumph! His voice would rise like a trumpet-call to this battle of the morrow.

The news of this meeting spread like wild-fire through the college; it spread farther—to the trustees, to the politicians, to the Chamber of Commerce. The chancellor sent for Hal, and in a state of the wildest agitation denounced this outrage on college dignity. The college had barely escaped a hideous calamity; the Western City “Herald” had got hold of the story, and it had required the influence of one of the wealthiest of the trustees, exercised over the telephone at midnight, to avert this horror from the classic shades of Harrigan. There would be no more stuff about “free speech” in colleges; this undignified and unacademic propaganda would come to an end forthwith!

Nor was this all for Hal. He was summoned to Western City by telephone, and made to listen to a discourse from his brother Edward.

Two years previously Hal's father had suffered a paralytic stroke, and his doctors declared that excitement of any sort might cost him his life; so Edward had taken over the affairs of the Warner Company—and incidentally, the duty of lecturing his younger brother. Hal was free; he had all the money he wanted, and only one thing in the world was asked of him, that he should not bring disgrace upon the family name. Did he realize that the one-eyed old ruffian whom he had received in his rooms and invited to supper in a college dining-hall had barely escaped hanging for a cowardly assassination?

“I know that,” said Hal. “I know also that a jury found him not guilty.”

“Stuff and nonsense!” cried Edward. “Let's talk straight to each other. Are there any of Hogan's own followers who don't believe that he did the murder?”

“I don't know as to that,” said Hal. “I haven't had a chance to meet his followers. Have you?”

Edward scorned this attempt at repartee. All the world knew that Hogan's organization was carrying on a campaign of terrorism and blackmail, and that Hogan was the driving will of it. Hal might talk about the sufferings of miners, but Edward could answer by picturing the desolation in one American home. He knew the family of Dan Hogan's victim; the son was a member of their college fraternity, a class-mate of their cousin, Appleton Harding. How would Edward feel, how would Harding feel, having to meet this young man in business and social life—and he knowing that Hal Warner had been publicly giving aid and support to the man who had blown up his father with a dynamite bomb?

Hal thought about these complicated problems when he should have been thinking about Greek and trigonometry. In his mind the matter boiled itself down to one question—was modern industry lifting the worker, or was it degrading him? Was it disciplining him and fitting him for wider responsibilities, or was it beating him down, making him unfit for citizenship? There was the heart of the controversy, and upon the answer depended the attitude one should take.

And Hal saw that however much both sides might differ, they were in agreement on the point which concerned
him
. Dan Hogan's scornful words were burned into his brain: “You, living easy lives, getting the pretty thing you call culture—what do you know about the slaves of your mills and mines? You belong to some higher order of beings, who have the right to eat your fellows!” And on the other hand were the men of affairs—his brother, Jessie Arthur's brothers, his cousin, “Appie” Harding—all calling him a theorist and a dreamer, taunting him because he was raised on books. What did he know about the cares of employers, the difficulty of handling large bodies of ignorant and jealous men?

Hal saw that whatever position he took, he could not maintain it until he could say that he knew something of his own knowledge. And so little by little there formed itself in his mind the concept of his Great Adventure. He would devote his summer's vacation to a course in practical sociology—“field-work”, as it was called. He would put behind him his comfortable home and his leisure-class friends; he would take the clothes of a workingman, the name, the manner of speech, above all the purse of a workingman, and go into one of the centres of industry and see the labor problem for himself.

Because of the arguments he had had with Percy Harrigan, he chose for his experiment one of Old Peter's mountain fortresses. He saw all the evils of which Dan Hogan had told; and when the mine disaster took place, and he saw men penned up and left to die, he set out to rescue them—and so quite suddenly, what had begun as a sociological experiment was turned into a battle of the class-war. Before that battle was over, Hal had made pledges to his fellow-workers which he knew would change the whole future of his life.

[13]

Back in college again, Hal was trying in vain to persuade himself that he was interested in the Greek enclitic, in the membership of fraternities and the “line up” of a football team. There came letters from the coal-country—from Mary Burke, giving details of the war of bludgeon and revolver which the companies were waging against organizers; from Mrs. Jack David, telling how union literature in half a dozen languages had been smuggled into North Valley and distributed; from Mike Sikoria, the old Slovak whose “buddy” Hal had been, telling how he had sought a job in four camps in succession, and been met with a fist in his face; from Johann Hartman, secretary of the union local in Sheridan, telling of the “kangarooing” of Little Jerry's father.

How was it possible to preserve the academic ideal, the “passionless pursuit of passionless intelligence”, with such images as this in a man's mind? Hal became more than ever a disturber of the classic halls of Harrigan. He got some of the rebels together, and forced the issue of free speech, proposing the organization of a “Social Study Club”. When this project was vetoed by the chancellor, there was another controversy, more vehement than before. Somehow the facts were whispered to Hal's friend Billy Keating, a reporter on the Western City “Gazette”, which spread the whole story upon its front page, and called for a mass-meeting of citizens to protest against the state appropriation of money for coal-company colleges! So the chancellor weakened again, and there was a gathering in Hal's rooms every Friday night—not a “Socialist” gathering, but one which discussed unacademic questions, and in a manner far from passionless. It was pledged to have no outside speakers, but there was no way to keep the spirit of a one-eyed old labor-agitator from coming to cast its shadow over the proceedings!

In the Easter holidays Hal went home, to get the reaction of these events upon his relatives and friends: more especially upon the Arthur family.

He was very much under the spell of Robert Arthur's beautiful daughter. She was the thrill and rapture of first love to him; mysteries lurked in her fair hair, swift emotions chased one another across her features, like shadows of April clouds across a mountain lake. In chaste and secret whispers he heard in her presence the voice of new life, craving to be; as for Jessie, when she saw him after long absence, she went faint with excess of happiness.

He came to her as a young hero, robed in light. But now this light was dimmed, and the April clouds threatened showers of tears. Laurence Arthur had “told on” Hal, how he was making himself president of a club of “rough-necks” and “goats”, leading a revolt against good society at Harrigan!