San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Early struggle for workers’ rights resonates today
Jess Walter has a keen eye for the current zeitgeist, even when he transports readers to a bygone era. In his seventh and best novel, “The Cold Millions,” his cinematic, intricate story of Progressive Era union activists feels familiar in 2020.
In 1910, Rye and Gig Dolan ( ages 16 and 23) are tramps who hop freight trains and live on day work in Spokane, Wash. The brothers’ differing natures amid union protests, free speech actions and anarchist rebellions are at the heart of a stirring novel. While Rye longs for a stable home, Gig, an idealist in the middle of reading “War and Peace,” has been fired for union agitating. He’s also fallen for Ursula the Great, a vaudevillian who performs with a live cougar and is intimately involved with a nefarious mining magnate named Lemuel Brand.
Rye and Gig join forces with fellow tramps Jules and Early, while police have been rousting vagrants. During a confrontation with officers, anarchist Early takes a swing at a police sergeant, and the group barely manages to escape arrest. Early disappears, but Gig and Rye end up behind bars anyway: At a protest against a corrupt deal between the city and job agencies, the brothers get arrested along with 500 other demonstrators.
After Rye is released, reallife labor leader and feminist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn invites him to speak to workers about his story and raise money for a lawyer. But the mining tycoon Brand calls him into a secret meeting, at Ursula’s behest, and offers to get Gig out of jail early if Rye provides intel about Gurley Flynn’s plans.
Desperate to help his brother
“The Cold Millions”
and too naive to understand that Brand means to harm the movement, Rye hits the road to talk to workers. When Early shows up and joins the tour, it’s unclear now whether he’s to be trusted — he might be on Brand’s payroll, too, or looking for an excuse to get violent. The novel builds to a stunning climax in which brotherhood is tested.
While its refracted, nonlinear narrative centers on early progressive fights, “The Cold Millions” feels timed perfectly to this moment of stark income inequality, where the crevasse between billionaires and workers widens and activism increases.
Walter marshals a motley, fascinating cast of characters so finely drawn that they lift from the page. Detective Del Dalveaux, for instance, “( speaks) with the western remnants of a British accent, like something fancy covered in dust”; and when Gurley talks to laborers, “( she works) the space like a boxer, corner to corner, perched forward as though looking through a high window.”
Swelling with empathy for the underdogs ( but never too preachy), Walter’s novel reveals people caught in the enormous sweep of history as they strive to better their circumstances. When Rye is disillusioned about a man he trusted, he thinks, “Somewhere
there was a roomful of wealthy old men where everything was decided. Beliefs and convictions, lives and livelihoods, right and wrong — these had no place in that room, the scurrying of ants at the feet of a few rich men.”
“Millions” is about men who feel like ants, but their tragedies are softened by a farsighted hope. I haven’t encountered a more satisfying and moving novel about the struggle for workers’ rights in America.
Anita Felicelli is the author of the short story collection “Love Songs for a Lost Continent” and “Chimerica: A Novel.” She lives in the Bay Area with her family.