The American: A Middle Western Legend (35 page)

By the early hours of the morning, when the shape of the election became apparent, Altgeld's face was deathly white. Darrow was somber, and Schilling was voiceless and hopeless. Only Joe Martin attempted to simulate cheer; only he kept pointing out that they had expected a stuffing of boxes, that they had expected every dirty move known to the game, that they had at their disposal only too few watchers, only too few tellers, and that they had fully intended to fight a fraud.

“But it's not a fraud,” Altgeld said dully. “I know how large a fraud can be built. Three votes to our one on the Democratic side, two to our one for the Republicans—”

As the vote mounted, as the enormity of Altgeld's defeat was hammered home, harder and harder, Schilling moaned, “Where are the people?”

In the small hours of the morning, Altgeld's independent vote had passed forty thousand, with almost every precinct reported and told. For the Democrats, Harrison was close to the hundred and fifty thousand mark, and Carter, the Republican, had passed one hundred thousand. Altgeld went through the formality of conceding defeat. Crushed, Darrow said his goodbys and went home. Joe Martin cut a fresh cigar, and Schilling sat in a big chair, crumpled and beaten as an old bag of clothes. Emma brought them coffee, and they drank it in silence. No one mentioned sleep or home. They wrapped themselves in their own gloom.

Finally, Schilling managed to say, “The working people voted. You can't tell me they didn't vote. If someone tries to tell me that, I will not believe it.”

“For Christ's sake, George, believe it!” Altgeld snapped.

And Martin asked, “What do you make of it, Pete?”

“Nothing but what's there. It's better to believe a dream than to believe the fact. I suppose those who followed Debs voted. But tell a man in packing-town that his six dollars a week will buy him more under me than under Carter or Harrison. They just got no reason to vote, no damned reason at all.”

PART SIX

The Restatement

In its effect upon this individual or that one, the news of Altgeld's defeat was most varied. In the Union League Club, for example, his going down produced hardly a ripple; for they were close enough to the mechanism of things to have no doubts as to the outcome, and they had never believed that this upstart rebellion would produce more than the handful of votes it did. On the other hand, those old-line Chicago politicians who had worked with Altgeld in the past and responded to his masterly direction were somewhat saddened that he had been fool enough to buck a machine, to the building of which he himself had contributed. They felt that his sickness had affected his mind, and they also felt he had been badly swayed by his radical associations. There were those, like Gene Debs, who understood very fully the meaning of Altgeld's defeat, and there were also those who wept when the news came.

Lucy Parsons wept, and she had not wept in a long, long time. Lucy Parsons' struggle was a long one; it went on into the future, and it had no ending. She had thought to herself in the beginning, when the blinding shock of her husband's death began to wear off somewhat, that no man dies completely—that no man, no matter how small, no matter how unimportant, no matter how insignificent, dies so completely that something of him is not left to go into the lives of others, a word, a gesture, a smile, more or less, something that enters the stream of human life and adds to the continuity of all living, all struggle and all hope; and certainly what her husband had been was in the lives of many men, in her own life, in her children's lives. Out of that concept, it seemed to her only natural, obvious and direct, that she should attempt to take up her husband's work and carry it through. She recognized what a tall order it was, and how poorly she was equipped. She had her children to care for and to raise; a living, no matter how small, had to be earned for herself and for them; and she could not rest until her husband, who had died upon the gallows like a common murderer, stood forth before the world with his name cleared and his purpose plain. To add onto this an agitator's career was not a comfortable action, but comfort was something she neither looked for nor expected.

She was a stubborn woman, and when her purpose was laid down and made plain, she followed it through. As the years passed, she became one of the fixtures of Chicago streets. She was to be found here and there, first in one place and then in another, with her little stand set up, and the pile of books which contained her husband's thoughts and writings displayed. Visitors to Chicago, tourists, curiosity-seekers from one or another European city, were advised to be sure and see Lucy Parsons before they left, much as they were advised to see the stockyards. Those people who thought about it were amazed by the persistence of this small, dark woman, whose face still retained traces of beauty, but most of those who saw her did not think much about it, except to be as satisfied as one is to view the wife of a notorious man who came to his end on the gallows.

But this was only a part of Lucy Parsons' life. Another part was her children, whom she loved so passionately, and who represented the continuance of her husband's flesh and blood as they grew into maturity. And still another part was her organizational work, through which she attempted to carry on what her husband had done. She spoke at union meetings; she was to be found on almost every picket line in the Chicago area; she would stand for hours at night in the bitter cold, distributing leaflets; she would trudge the streets, selling copies of the socialist paper. She was stolid, tireless, and as strong as a piece of tempered steel; perhaps the part of her which was American Indian contributed toward this, and there is no doubt that as time went on she came to resemble more and more those forebears of hers who had pitched their teepees on the treeless plains from time immemorial. Her face became lined and the bones made strong ridges as the flesh fell away; sun and weather darkened her skin; her eyes reflected that inward peace with time which so many Indians make, and which gives them such enduring patience; and her voice reached back for the soft, drawling inflection which was as much a part of her people as anything else.

The men who worked with her came to accept the fact that Lucy Parsons was what she was, in so many ways stronger than they were. They used her strength because she offered it without ever asking for pity, and pity was one of the few things that made her deeply angry. Otherwise, she was calm, and apart from her family displayed little emotion. She studied constantly, reading-during every spare moment she found, and even Debs admired and was amazed by her grasp of the labor situation in America.

II

From the day Altgeld pardoned the three Haymarket prisoners, Lucy Parsons watched him. She read all that he wrote; she read the stories the newspapers printed about him. She would give precious hours to go to some meeting where he was speaking. Step by step, she followed his battle against Grover Cleveland, and she had furious arguments with friends of hers who did not trust him, and who insisted that whatever the label, a politician was a politician. And finally, when he came forth on his independent ticket, she knew that her hopes and her dreams were justified. She remembered one night, about six months before the Haymarket incident, when her husband came back from a heartbreaking trip into Pennsylvania. For once, his mood was black; he seemed not so much beaten as worn thin, and he said to her:

“Where do we go, Lucy? Everywhere, the people plead and there's no one to tell them what to do—no one to lead them. I don't mean someone like me, I mean someone with power and dignity and office, to stand up and make cause with the worker. If there was even one man in congress, one man to say, follow me.…”

Albert Parsons had gone down to Coal Center on the Monongahela River, one person and alone, to see if there was any hope of organizing the miners. A thing was happening in Coal Center that had happened and would continue to happen in one part or another of America; but when it happened, those involved would isolate the area from the rest of America; it would burn out where it started.

Coal Center was a fairly new place; it had come into being on top of the railroads' insistent demand for fuel; and as more and more track was laid down, as the country grew, Coal Center mushroomed. America grew up on the black gold.

At first, in what later became Coal Center, there were only a few farms. This was an area up the river, about fifty miles from Pittsburgh, and it was the beautiful Appalachian hill country, where the mounds of earth lay like the upturned bellies of fat sows, where rippling brooks trickled down to the rich bottom meadows, where the cows found good grazing on the hillside, where a man could have, not too much, but enough, meat and drink out of the earth, and sometimes a deer to be killed in the pine woods.

Into this place, a hundred years before, had come the Scotch-Irish landless; they were tall, hard men who pushed into the Indian country and built themselves houses of logs and earth, and cleared the forest away for farms. They were men with a fierce sense of liberty and independence, and in the Revolution they, who were called
the woodsy folk
, took their long hunting guns, formed themselves into a brigade, and fought in the Pennsylvania line of the Continental Army for six uninterrupted years. They did not go back to their plowing and planting, and during those war years, there was great suffering in the Monongahela Valley. But finally, the war was done; they went back to their farms, and the bucolic progression of their lives began once more. Generations passed, and they raised up their sons and daughters, and sons and daughters buried their parents in the good Pennsylvania earth. They remained basically the same Scotch-Irish stock, for the many succeeding waves of immigration passed over the Appalachians, looking for the richer and easier western prairies, and as their numbers increased, they cleared more of the land. Some of them went away to the cities, but many remained. They lived simple lives; in their churches they followed the same stern Protestant faith that their forefathers had brought to America, and in their churchyards the stones were marked with recurring names, Stuart, MacGregor, Cameron, Lynn, MacKee, Williamson, Angusson, McDonald, Bruce—those and a dozen more names, over and over, from generation to generation. Sometimes, flood interrupted their lives; sometimes war, sometimes a plague of disease; but they were a sturdy stock and they endured and increased.

And then, in the late sixties, it was discovered that there was coal under the green buttocks of their hills. That wasn't merely a local manifestation; a similar process went on in Ohio, in Illinois, in Wales, in Belgium, and in Germany. But to these Pennsylvania farmers, it was local and unique. Men came into their valley and bought land. Overnight there was more hard money present than the valley had known in a century, and good money was paid to those who would work in the shafts—more cash for a week's work than a farmer saw in a whole year. And with that money, a man could buy incredible things, slick-action guns to replace their old squirrel rifles—and who could live without such a gun, once having seen it?—bright goods for dresses, sweet candy, canned goods with a different taste, upholstered chairs, such as no one in the valley had ever owned, high-heeled shoes for the women, ready-made dresses, and so many other things that it would be impossible to list them all. Not only that, but one did not have to make a difficult trip to Pittsburgh to buy; no sooner had the company begun to sink the shafts than they opened stores right there in the valley, and the stores had stocked shelves six feet high. The first farmers who had sold out to the coal company walked around with pockets that bulged with cash and silver, and after they had bought everything they could see that they wanted, they still had money left, so the company opened a bank for them, and men from the company spoke to each farmer, convincing him why he should deposit his money in the bank.

The farmers in the hills and up and down the valley heard the news and flocked in to see; when they saw what their neighbors had bought, they turned green with envy, and all the way back to their farms their wives nagged about what the others had and they didn't have. Days went by and they resisted their wives' nagging, but even so they were remembering the fine new Winchesters, the beautiful hunting boots, the silver spurs, the checked shirts, the Stetson hats, the cases of rings and brooches and necklaces—because a man wants to give things to a woman he cares for, and when his neighbor gives and he can't, it eats into him.

Then men from the company made their way into the hills. They had a proposition for the farmers, a proposition that was beautiful to hear and simple to understand. There were days when a farmer had a little time on his hands; suppose they signed up to work in the shafts on those free days? They would be well paid, and the company was willing to give any farmer who signed a contract an advance bonus of fifty dollars. Of course, it was not really a bonus; it would be deducted from their pay, but slowly, just a few dollars a week, and look how high the wages were! What farmer could resist such an offer as this; not only did they sign, but their sons signed, and every company agent rode out of the hills with pockets bulging with contracts. So the hill farmers came in and bought as well as the valley farmers, and, soon after, they came in to work in the shafts. And what the company men had said was true; they were well paid for their work in the shafts; only a dollar or two was deducted to repay the original debt. Not only that, but when a farmer had to go back for plowing, the company man in the store opened a big ledger and said, “Sign here, and you can have anything you want on long-term credit.”