So once again the Cartoonist is drawing the Eagle.
He has a knack for birds, better than any of the big salary boys, and the Chief knows it. The trick is to make them express themselves with their feathers. The Chief wants not only to rebuke the Spanish and his competitors, but to remind the readers that we need a good scrap, that this won’t be American against American, no — if certain people would just get out of the way we could step out and take our place among the Great Powers.
The Eagle, spear and arrows clutched in its talons, strains its wings as it attempts to soar skyward despite the chain around one leg, with Pulitzer and Senator Hanna and a couple of the other naysayers hauling back on it, heels dragging the ground as the mighty raptor threatens to lift them all away. His Pulitzer needs some work, a decent enough likeness but not sufficiently craven. The Eagle’s feathers, if you had to put it into words, are proud but angry. Uncle is there already, speaking to his companion yet to be drawn, President McKinley.
SHE’LL FLY IF YOU LET HER
— Sam is saying. The Chief wants the President to be uncertain but dignified. He also wants to try a small boy, an onlooker, off to one side and very much upset by the spectacle, labeled OUR FUTURE WARRIOR or something similar. The terrible effect of peace-mongering on tender minds. The Eagle is looking with furious concentration at a trio of distant islands, Cuba, Porto Rico, and Guam, each with a palm tree and a Spanish flag sticking up from them. Adding China, though in tune with the ambition of the picture, might be confusing.
And maybe Sam should have a rifle.
SALVATION
Hod rides the Utopia back to Seattle with the other beaten men. They are a sorry-looking collection, frostbit sourdoughs with empty eyes and greenhorns fleeced before they even got to the fields, a few who probably made a small pile and blew it in town and can’t face another winter freezing their lungs and hacking the ground. The fog, constant up on deck, is a relief. Men appear in it, flick a glance at the state of Hod’s face, then turn away without meeting his eye. There is no brotherhood on this ship, each defeated stampeder minding his own troubles.
Hod has been down before, but never this alone. He misses the Army.
It started in Butte with hungry men. First the Gold Trust had their way and repealed the Sherman Act, then Amalgamated tossed Hod and hundreds more like him out of their pits.
“There’s a man named Coxey,” went the word in Finntown and Dublin Gulch, “gonna make it right. He’s got a plan.”
FREE SILVER! said the banners at the Union Hall. GOLD AT A PREMIUM, LABOR PAUPERIZED!
“May Day in Washington,” said the laborers with gleaming eyes. “Every damn American needs a job gonna tromp on Grover Cleveland’s flower bed. That don’t wake this government up nothing will.”
The plan was that the Government, which was the railroads and the mining outfits and the Rothschild bankers who had lured them out West to build their fortunes then dumped them like a gaggle of Chinamen, that Government, would pay them, the Workers, a decent wage to build roads, to dig canals to water the dry Western states and territories, and everybody would come out the better for it. Hod was younger then, just barely off the farm, but even he knew it was a desperate dream. But it was big, big as the Depression that had one man out of four walking the streets and feeling like shit on a bootheel.
“Coxey plans to leave on Easter,” said Bill Hogan, little Bill Hogan who’d never led anything bigger than a mule team but was as straight as they came and when voted General of the Butte Contingent said “Thanks, fellas, I’ll try to live up to it.” There were a bunch of them there who’d been in the same stope with Hod at the Orphan Girl — Hack Tuttle, Orrin Wheatley, Curly Armstrong — all shouting out and stamping their feet when the resolution to march was passed.
Of course marching to Washington was easy for Coxey and his troops, back east in Massillon almost to the Pennsylvania border. The Butte men could walk Coxey’s route twice over and never leave the state. The Northern Pacific said they wouldn’t haul a mob of tramps on their road even if every one of them paid full fare. Which neither Hod nor any of the other jobless men in Local Number One possessed.
And so it was that one night in the middle of April a dozen or so of the troops who’d been railroad hands snuck into the yard and convinced the watchman it was only patriotic that they liberate an NP locomotive and six open coal cars, plus a boxcar for supplies, and that he not inform his masters until the sun came over the Hill. The train stopped a quarter mile out of the yard and Hod was one of three hundred Commonweal soldiers to scale the coal-car sides and drop down into the grimy interior. Their cheers echoed off the insides of the car while they gathered steam and began to highball east.
Wild train coming your way, said the telegraph message sent ahead. Stay clear of our tracks.
It was cold, without a roof and with the train barreling across the scrublands, but with fifty men crammed together and the thrill of defiance running in their veins the night sped by.
The Union forever! Hurrah, boys, hurrah!
Down with the bosses, up with the stars!
— they sang—
Yes we’ll rally round the flag, boys, we’ll rally once again
Shouting the battle cry of Silver!
It had been the banks and their tight money that drove his old man off the farm, town people putting an arm around his shoulders and cooing into his ear till he took the loan and then there they were out in the yard with Sheriff White behind them, saying how it was just business and you had to be prudent with your finances. His own father, Esam Brackenridge, working for wages at the granary till it killed him with shame.
My country tis of thee
— they sang—
Once land of liberty
Of thee I sing
Land of the Millionaire
Farmers with pockets bare
Gypped by that cursed snare
The Money Ring
He’d never quite understood how they worked it, no matter how many speeches he heard and meetings he sat through. That was part of the con, of course, making it impossible for a simple toiler to follow, wrapping it in a gauze of words and laws and proclamations and economic ciphers, but somehow he knew somebody was getting rich without lifting a finger, and here they were, honest hardworking American men, without a pot to piss in or a window to toss it from.
We are — joining — Coxey’s Army—
— they sang, miners and teamsters and railroad men, tillers of wheat and builders of bridges, Northerners and Southerners and men born, like Hod, in the far West—
We are — marching — on to glory
We will — camp in — Cleveland’s backyard
On the first of May!
There must be some good men there, they thought, that flag they sang about must stand for something and if only they could bring the truth to Washington, truth in the flesh of a hundred thousand working men from every corner of the land, it would put the greenback boys on the run and there would be work and bread and pride enough to go around. Hod wasn’t sure of their names, but there had to be good men in the East, wizards of finance, who could do something.
Wild train coming.