LUKAS'S TALE OF LABOR VS. OWNERS IS AN EPIC CLASH

Author: By James Green

Date: SUNDAY, October 5, 1997

Page: C1

Section: Books

To illuminate the class question, Lukas chose a momentous event in labor history -- the prosecution of three mine-union leaders for the dynamite murder of Idaho's former governor, Frank Steunenberg, at the gate of his home on Dec. 30, 1905. Their ``spectacular show trial'' -- the first, Lukas says, in which lawyers targeted ``the larger jury of public opinion'' -- drew frenzied press attention, worried President Theodore Roosevelt, and aroused working-class America. In Boston, hardly a radical labor town, a rally for the defendants on the Common attracted a throng estimated at 100,000, swelled further by a march of 12,000 unionists who ranged, a Globe reporter wrote, from ``sturdy teamsters,'' who had just lost a bitter strike, to ``garment workers, trig and trim in their spring suits.''

``Big Trouble'' begins on that snowy day of the murder as Steunenberg leaves for a walk around his hometown of Caldwell, a stroll Lukas uses to take us up many intriguing alleys while he illuminates the victim's world, a small-town America threatened by ``corrupt forces'' and the relentless ``encroachments of class distinction.''

After setting the stage, the author uses hs impressive skills to portray the actors. There is one-eyed, hard-headed ``Big Bill'' Haywood, the labor radical who would stand trial for plotting Steunenberg's murder with Western Federation of Miners president C. H. Moyer and a union adviser. There are the two great lawyers, Clarence Darrow for the defense and the charismatic progressive William Borah for the prosecution. There is the Pinkerton Agency's James McParland, the Sherlock Holmes of this story, a man infamous in labor circles for infiltrating the Irish Molly Maguires during the anthracite-mine wars of the 1870s. Brilliantly cunning, McParland vowed to revive his reputation as ``the Great Detective'' by capturing the governor's murderers.

And there is Harry Orchard, an itinerant miner and former union member, arrested soon after the bombing with incriminating evidence in his hotel room. After McParland persuaded Orchard to turn state's evidence, this confessed dynamiter charmed everyone who interviewed him in his cell and became a highly celebrated witness when he implicated Haywood and his union associates in the bomb plot.

Orchard testified that the ``inner circle'' of the Western Federation in Colorado ordered the murder of Idaho's former governor as an act of political revenge. Steunenberg, even though he had been elected with labor support, called in federal troops to the mining camps of the rugged Coeur d'Alene Mountains after armed unionized miners occupied the region in 1899. An infantry regiment ordered to the war zone carried out orders to suppress ``the entire community'' for the ``crime'' of unionism. Troopers herded the entire male population into a ``bull pen'' in what the union press called a ``reign of terror.'' The miners' union never forgave Steunenberg for ordering the ``clean-up'' of the Coeur d'Alenes.

It is a long journey we take with Lukas to the trial of the governor's alleged murderers in Boise (which begins 500 pages into the book), but we are traveling with a guide possessed of awesome descriptive skills. Even when a detour seems too long (for example, a side trip with actress Ethel Barrymore, who happened to attend the trial), the author usually returns to the main line of his narrative just in time.

In one memorable passage, the vehicle moving us along is actually an engine -- a special locomotive roaring out of Denver with its human contraband: Bill Haywood and his union brothers, brazenly kidnapped from their bedrooms by Pinkertons and law officers, determined to put them on trial in Idaho. ``Belching coal smoke, reeking of hot metal and valve oil, it highballed for the Wyoming border behind the traditional twelve-point stag's antlers attached to the locomotive's headlights.'' This wonderful description continues for 10 pages as Haywood and his comrades are sped across breathtaking landscapes to their fate in Idaho, a state which their captors swore they would never leave alive. But after ``the trial of the century,'' in which the prosecution relied solely on Harry Orchard's testimony, a jury of frontier farmers spoiled ``a good hanging'' and acquitted the radical union men.

In re-creating the drama of the Haywood trial and the temper of the time, Lukas covers ground familiar to historians, but he does so impressively, in a way that captures the significance of this event and the conflicts that led to it. Some readers may be surprised by the terrible violence associated with union organizing and also enlightened about its causes. At a time when few study labor history, when few recall the bloody sacrifices made for workers' rights, a book like ``Big Trouble'' by a writer of Lukas's stature will fill a void in the national memory.

Lukas's turn from journalism to history is not entirely successful, though. He often reproduces dialogue from old memoirs and documents as though it had actually been recorded verbatim. The journalist's keen eye for juicy quotes is sharper than the historian's eye for authenticity. In weaving a ``social tapestry'' around the trial, Lukas seems to have read all the relevant documents and published histories of the period, including many on obscure subjects. In the writing, however, he sometimes indulges too much passion to share his historical discoveries, large and small.

It is clear that Lukas carefully studied the labor and socialist movements: He certainly captures their spirit and the character of their colorful leaders. But he did not examine the lives of workers very closely. In an enormous book about class conflicts, we learn less about working-class people and their values than about the ruling elites and their minions -- those who conspired so swiftly and effectively to kidnap Haywood and his union brothers, just as they did to suppress the labor movement as a whole.

In one of his last interviews, Lukas expressed frustration about being unable to answer certain questions about class in this book -- for example, the seeming paradox of working miners who yearned for middle-class comfort but fought their employers like oppressed wage slaves. Though the author failed to explain the complexities of class identity, he succeeded in other ways. We didn't need Anthony Lukas to be a social theorist. We needed him to be what he was: a gifted storyteller, a superb reporter, and a brilliant illuminator.

He writes boldly of a murder trial as ``a great national drama in which the stakes were nothing less than the soul of the American people.'' In ``Big Trouble'' he describes a people with a divided soul, a society riven by class. He tells a ``big story'' with grace and passion, and in telling it he does, as he hoped he could, ``illuminate the class question at a time when the gap between richest and poorest citizens grows ever wider.''