The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 42

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Seattle’s IWW Hall was half the size of Spokane’s—cramped above a Pioneer Square dry goods store, stage half hidden by beams. The room was dark and smoky, a bog of beards and hats, legs crossing and uncrossing. Rye sat with Gurley in the front row as a local speaker went first—a snerfling, erming lumber bum who couldn’t put three words together—Rye unable to concentrate without imagining the whole town with the same flu bug.

Back in Spokane, Gurley had assured the union men she would leave the agitating to others, but throughout the day Rye saw this was impossible. In meeting after meeting, she swept into the room and took it over, whether it was filled with socialists, suffragists, or society women. She got thirty dollars here, fifty there, and a commitment of four women to come to Spokane and help feed the union men. All leading to the main event that night in the IWW Hall, flyers in Pioneer Square announcing: “The Rebel Girl E. Gurley Flynn (Jones) Speaking Tonight 7 p.m. on Spokane Free Speech War.” Onstage, the local organizer was finishing: “Erm, I said my peace, and now the person you come to hear, Mrs. Jack Jones, previously known as, snerf, that fiery girl rebel out of New York and Chicago, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.”

She came out to musty applause, purposefully striding toward the crowd like she might dive in, her toes stopping at the stage edge. She leaned forward. “Listen,” took a few breaths, “brothers and sisters, have we ever seen such trying times?”

She went through a list of outrages, fifteen-hour workdays and women dying at their sewing machines, men crushed in cave-ins while their families got nothing, copper kings and shipping magnates living like royalty while poor workers couldn’t even afford a flop bed, families in tents and hovels, workers given no rights and tossed aside when they were too broken or sick or old to work.

“Listen,” she spoke softly, so the crowd had to lean in, “I know you believe in a better world—” Then she raised her voice and sat them back in their chairs. “But belief without the will to fight is nothing! And I’m here to tell you the fight is here! Now! In Spokane!” She gestured at Rye and he stood. “This is sixteen-year-old Ryan Dolan, beaten and jailed for trying to speak, for imagining his hard work might one day get him a foothold in this life. He came here with me today to plead for your help and help for his own brother, a political prisoner in a Spokane jail—”

They’d rehearsed this part, Rye facing the crowd and telling his story as he always did, starting, “We woke in a ball field—” and continuing to the mob’s attack, Gig’s beating and arrest, his own arrest, the sweatbox, rock pile, bread and water, and then getting out, finding out his friend Jules was dead and that his brother was facing six months in jail, maybe more, for doing nothing more than standing on a crate and singing. And that was why he was here, raising money to hire “the great Clarence Darrow” to help get Gig and the others out of jail.

“Thank you, Ryan.” She gave him a nod that he’d done well, and he returned to his seat. She’d added Jones to her name on flyers and posters, but it was all Gurley onstage now, striding about in her big black coat to hide her pregnancy, and which made her appear to float, ethereal, fine dark features on a thin pale face. “This is the fight, brothers and sisters! And it’s not just in Spokane!” She worked the space like a boxer, corner to corner, perched forward as though looking through a high window. “It is anywhere these robber barons own the land and the industry and the agency that sends you to work there! Anywhere men and women are forced to live on the street. Anywhere a handful of copper and timber kings steal the wealth created by the labor of tens of millions and then beat and arrest the very men they’ve robbed for simply asking why!”

Rye had seen his brother jawsmith, and he’d seen Walsh talk an angry crowd out of busting up a job agency, he’d seen storytellers like Jules, and traveling quacks and palmists, and he’d seen the dazzling center fielder Billy Sunday keep a thousand hobos rapt with his jokey preaching (“Goin’ to church don’t make you a Christian any more than goin’ to a garage makes you an automobile”).

But he’d never seen the likes of Gurley up there.

The crowd was nodding, perched to erupt, but Gurley wouldn’t pause, and she rode their murmuring yeses to a rising chorus. “Brothers and sisters, look around this room, at our bodies, our blood, the fuel for their machine! We can use the same fuel to start a movement! These bodies! This blood! To demand fair pay! Basic medical care! Rights for women, Negroes, Indians! To demand nothing less than the American right to speak out against corruption! Against greed and unfairness! Join us on the front lines, donate money, help young Ryan Dolan and his brother, for when we’ve won in Spokane, we’ll bring the fight here, to Seattle, to San Francisco and Fresno, to Portland and Minneapolis, we will fill a room like this in every building on every block in every city in every state in this country! And our righteousness will spill into the streets,