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The town of Pedro stood on the edge of the mountain country; a straggling assemblage of stores and saloons from which a number of branch railroads ran up into the canyons, feeding the
coal-camps. Through the week it slept peacefully; but on Saturday nights, when the miners came trooping down, and the ranchmen came in on horseback and in automobiles, it wakened to a seething life.
Upton Sinclair, King Coal
At the railroad station, one day late in June, a young man alighted from a train. He was about twenty-one years of age, with sensitive features, and brown hair having a tendency to
waviness. He wore a frayed and faded suit of clothes, purchased in a quarter of his home city where the Hebrew merchants stand on the sidewalks to offer their wares; also a soiled blue shirt without a tie, and a
pair of heavy boots which had seen much service. Strapped on his back was a change of clothing and a blanket, and in his pockets a comb, a toothbrush, and a small pocket mirror.
Upton Sinclair, King Coal
"Dutch Mike" was the name this person bore, for reasons he did not explain. He was a black-eyed and dangerous-looking rascal, and when the subject of mines and mining was broached, he opened up the
flood-gates of an amazing reservoir of profanity. He was through with that game--Hal or any other God-damned fool might have his job for the asking. It was only because there were so many natural-born God-damned
fools in the world that the game could be kept going. "Dutch Mike" went on to relate dreadful tales of mine-life, and to summon before him the ghosts of one pit-boss after another, consigning them to the
fires of eternal perdition.
Upton Sinclair, King Coal
"When you've had a job for a while, you'll know that the law in a coal-camp is what your boss tells you." The hobo went on to register his
conviction that when one man has the giving of jobs, and other men have to scramble for them, the law would never have much to say in the deal.
Upton Sinclair, King Coal, "Dutch Mike" on the law in a coal camp
Next to the mules, his torment was the "trapper-boys," and other youngsters with whom he came into contact. He was a
newcomer, and so they hazed him; moreover, he had an inferior job--there seemed to their minds to be something humiliating and comic about the task of tending mules. These urchins came from a score of nations of
Southern Europe and Asia; there were flat-faced Tartars and swarthy Greeks and shrewd-eyed little Japanese. They spoke a compromise language, consisting mainly of English curse words and obscenities; the filthiness
which their minds had spawned was incredible to one born and raised in the sunlight. They alleged obscenities of their mothers and their grandmothers; also of the Virgin Mary, the one mythological character they had
heard of. Poor little creatures of the dark, their souls grimed and smutted even more quickly and irrevocably than their faces!
Upton Sinclair, King Coal
On Sundays, the only time he ate by daylight, the
flies swarmed over everything, and he remembered having heard a physician say that an enlightened man should be more afraid of a fly than of a Bengal tiger. The boarding-house provided him with a cot and a supply of
vermin, but with no blanket, which was a necessity in the mountain regions. So after supper he had to seek out his boss, and arrange to get credit at the company-store. They were willing to give a certain amount of
credit, he found, as this would enable the camp-marshal to keep him from straying. There was no law to hold a man for debt--but Hal knew by this time how much a camp-marshal cared for law.
Upton Sinclair, King Coal
A little way up a slope stood a school-house, and another small one-room building which served as a church; the clergyman belonging to the General Fuel Company denomination. He was
given the use of the building, by way of start over the saloons, which had to pay a heavy rental to the company; it seemed a proof of the innate perversity of human nature that even in spite of this advantage,
heaven was losing out in the struggle against hell in the coal-camp.
Upton Sinclair, King Coal
There was a part of the camp called "shanty-town," where, amid miniature mountains of slag, some of
the lowest of the newly-arrived foreigners had been permitted to build themselves shacks out of old boards, tin, and sheets of tar-paper. These homes were beneath the dignity of chicken-houses, yet in some of them a
dozen people were crowded, men and women sleeping on old rags and blankets on a cinder floor. Here the babies swarmed like maggots. They wore for the most part a single ragged smock, and their bare buttocks were
shamelessly upturned to the heavens. It was so the children of the cave-men must have played, thought Hal; and waves of repulsion swept over him. He had come with love and curiosity, but both motives failed here.
How could a man of sensitive nerves, aware of the refinements and graces of life, learn to love these people, who were an affront to his every sense--a stench to his nostrils, a jabbering to his ear, a procession of
deformities to his eye? What had civilisation done for them? What could it do? After all, what were they fit for, but the dirty work they were penned up to do? So spoke the haughty race-consciousness of the
Anglo-Saxon, contemplating these Mediterranean hordes, the very shape of whose heads was objectionable.
Upton Sinclair, King Coal
Thus, as always, when one understood the lives of men, one came to pity
instead of despising. Here was a separate race of creatures, subterranean, gnomes, pent up by society for purposes of its own. Outside in the sunshine-flooded canyon, long lines of cars rolled down with their
freight of soft-coal; coal which would go to the ends of the earth, to places the miner never heard of, turning the wheels of industry whose products the miner would never see. It would make precious silks for fine
ladies, it would cut precious jewels for their adornment; it would carry long trains of softly upholstered cars across deserts and over mountains; it would drive palatial steamships out of wintry tempests into
gleaming tropic seas. And the fine ladies in their precious silks and jewels would eat and sleep and laugh and lie at ease--and would know no more of the stunted creatures of the dark than the stunted creatures knew
of them. Hal reflected upon this, and subdued his Anglo-Saxon pride, finding forgiveness for what was repulsive in these people--their barbarous, jabbering speech, their vermin-ridden homes, their bare-bottomed
babies.
Upton Sinclair, King Coal
The land belongs to the company, but the landscape belongs to him who cares for it.
Upton Sinclair, King Coal, Hal to Mary Burke
Hal knew that the mountain air
in this region was famous for its dryness; he learned now that the quality which meant life to invalids from every part of the world meant death to those who toiled to keep the invalids warm. Driven through the
mines by great fans, this air took out every particle of moisture, and left coal dust so thick and dry that there were fatal explosions from the mere friction of loading-shovels. So it happened that these mines were
killing several times as many men as other mines throughout the country.
Upton Sinclair, King Coal
So Hal came face to face with one of the difficulties of mine-operators. They gathered a population of
humble serfs, selected from twenty or thirty races of hereditary bondsmen; but owing to the absurd American custom of having public-schools, the children of this population learned to speak English, and even to read
it. So they became too good for their lot in life; and then a wandering agitator would get in, and all of a sudden there would be hell. Therefore in every coal-camp had to be another kind of "fire-boss,"
whose duty it was to guard against another kind of explosions--not of carbon monoxide, but of the human soul.
Upton Sinclair, King Coal
So it was with check-weighman--as with scrip, and with company
stores, and with all the provisions of the law to protect the miner against accidents. You might demand your legal rights, but if you did, it was a matter of the boss's temper. He might make your life one damn
misery till you went of your own accord. Or you might get a string of curses and an order, "Down the canyon!"--and likely as not the toe of a boot in your trouser-seat, or the muzzle of a revolver under
your nose.
Upton Sinclair, King Coal
Such conditions made the coal-district a place of despair. Yet there were men who managed to get along somehow, and to raise families and keep decent homes. If one had
the luck to escape accident, if he did not marry too young, or did not have too many children; if he could manage to escape the temptations of liquor, to which overwork and monotony drove so many; if, above all, he
could keep on the right side of his boss--why then he might have a home, and even a little money on deposit with the company.
Upton Sinclair, King Coal
To his amusement he found that in the eyes of his
Irish friends he was losing caste by going to live with the Minettis. There were most rigid social lines in North Valley, it appeared. The Americans and English and Scotch looked down upon the Welsh and Irish; the
Welsh and Irish looked down upon the Dagoes and Frenchies; the Dagoes and Frenchies looked down upon Polacks and Hunkies, these in turn upon Greeks, Bulgarians and "Montynegroes," and so on through a score
of races of Eastern Europe, Lithuanians, Slovaks, and Croatians, Armenians, Roumanians, Rumelians, Ruthenians--ending up with Greasers, niggers, and last and lowest, Japs.
Upton Sinclair, King Coal
There
fell a sudden silence in the Rafferty home. Even Hal was startled--for this was the first time during his stay in the camp that he had heard the dread word "union" spoken above a whisper.
Upton Sinclair, King Coal
Hal told himself with satisfaction that he was now to do the real work of coal-mining. His imagination had been occupied with it for a long time; but as so often happens in the life
of man, the first contact with reality killed the results of many years' imagining. It killed all imagining, in fact; Hal found that his entire stock of energy, both mental and physical, was consumed in enduring
torment. If any one had told him the horror of attempting to work in a room five feet high, he would not have believed it.
Upton Sinclair, King Coal
It was impossible for any one to work so hard and keep
his mental alertness, his eagerness and sensitiveness; it was impossible to work so hard and be an adventurer--to be anything, in fact, but a machine. Hal had heard that phrase of contempt, "the inertia of the
masses," and had wondered about it. He no longer wondered, he knew.
Upton Sinclair, King Coal
Hal had come here, as one goes upon the deck of a ship in mid-ocean, to see the storm. In this ocean of
social misery, of ignorance and despair, one saw upturned, tortured faces, writhing limbs and clutching hands; in one's ears was a storm of lamentation, upon one's cheek a spray of blood and tears. Hal found himself
so deep in this ocean that he could no longer find consolation in the thought that he could escape whenever he wanted to: that he could say to himself, It is sad, it is terrible--but thank God, I can get out of it
when I choose! I can go back into the warm and well-lighted saloon and tell the other passengers how picturesque it is, what an interesting experience they are missing!
Upton Sinclair, King Coal
So far he
had been an observer of conditions in this coal-camp. He had convinced himself that conditions were cruel, and he had pretty well convinced himself that the cruelty was needless and deliberate. But when it came to a
question of an action to be taken--then he hesitated, and old prejudices and fears made themselves heard. He had been told that labour was "turbulent" and "lazy," that it had to be "ruled
with a strong hand"; now, was he willing to weaken the strong hand, to ally himself with those who "fomented labour troubles"?
Upton Sinclair, King Coal
Hal was now started upon a new
career, more full of excitements than that of stableman or buddy, with perils greater than those of falling rock or the hind feet of mules in the stomach. The inertia which overwork produces had not had time to
become a disease with him; youth was on his side, with its zest for more and yet more experience. He found it thrilling to be a conspirator, to carry about with him secrets as dark and mysterious as the passages of
the mine in which he worked.
Upton Sinclair, King Coal
Here, in the midst of want and desolation, with his family broken and scattered, and the wolf of starvation at his door, he could look back upon the
past without hatred of those who had ruined him. Nor was this because he was old and feeble, and had lost the spirit of revolt; it was because he had studied economics, and convinced himself that it was an evil
system which blinded men's eyes and poisoned their souls. A better day was coming, he said, when this evil system would be changed, and it would be possible for men to be merciful to one another.
Upton Sinclair, John Edstrom in King Coal
"Mary,"he said, "did you ever read about ants in Africa?" "No," said she. "They travel in long columns, millions and millions of
them. And when they come to a ditch, the front ones fall in, and more and more of them on top, till they fill up the ditch, and the rest cross over. We are
ants, Mary."
Upton Sinclair, King Coal
"All last year we let the professors of political economy hand out their theories to us. But somehow the theories didn't seem to correspond with the facts. I said to myself, 'I've got to check them up.' You
know the phrases, perhaps--individualism, laissez faire, freedom of contract, the right of every man to work for whom he pleases. And here you see how the theories work out--a camp-marshal with a cruel smile on his
face and a gun on his hip, breaking the laws faster than a governor can sign them."
Upton Sinclair, King Coal
"If you don't buy the politicians, you wake up some fine morning and find that
somebody else has bought them."
Upton Sinclair, King Coal, camp marshal Jeff Cotton
"The world can't stop moving just because there's been a mine-disaster," said the Coal King's son.
"People have engagements they must keep."
Upton Sinclair, King Coal, Percy Harrigan
And Mary found a magic word. "We'll have a union!" she shouted. "We'll get together and stay
together! If they refuse us our rights, we'll know what to answer--we'll have a strike!"
Upton Sinclair, King Coal
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