Too many facts, not enough feeling
In King Coal, Hal Warner, a college graduate and son of a millionaire, decides to work as a coal miner as a sort of sociological experiment. All his life he has lived off the sweat of his father’s laborers, and now he wishes to see how laborers live. Appalled by the miners’ working and living conditions, he soon becomes a labor organizer working to unionize the miners. Much class conflict ensues between the workers and the mine-owning oligarchs and their minions, which brings us to The Coal War. In this sequel, the miners go on strike. The mine managers bring in scab workers, which leads to violent altercations. The governor calls in the state militia to keep the peace, but the militia soon turns out to be essentially mercenaries working for the mine owners. Hal’s participation in the conflict escalates from encouraging the miners in their strike efforts to leading them into armed battle.
The main problem with The Coal War is the same fault that plagued its predecessor: the fact that Sinclair views the events through an upper-class protagonist, rather than through the eyes of the workers themselves, as he did so well in The Jungle. The Coal War is slightly more palatable than King Coal simply because Hal isn’t slumming it in the mines any more. Rather, he adopts the more realistic role of a well-intentioned reformer, which is more believable for his character. What’s not credible, however, is the stark good-vs.-evil contrast between the saintly strikers and their draconian antagonists. For example, the militia men are all rapists, while the miners wouldn’t even dream of premarital kissing. After reading enough Sinclair books, one gets the idea that the author was a pretty straight-laced fellow himself, which reflects upon the heroes of his books, who are hampered by a gentlemanly Victorian propriety long after the end of the Victorian era. Writers like Jack London or Emile Zola lent more realism to their labor novels by acknowledging that shades of gray existed on both sides of the class conflict.
Sinclair no doubt based the violent incidents and tyrannical cruelty depicted in this book on real-life persecution suffered by strikers in Colorado. The problem is he catalogs way too many instances, to the point where the book reads like a desensitizing laundry list of atrocities. Just a few of such incidents, imbued with some emotional power and pathos, would have been far more effective, as demonstrated by Zola’s Germinal or Frank Norris’s The Octopus. Sinclair also writes about the woes of the miners with an odd tone of flippancy and sarcastic humor, as if to say “Wouldn’t you know it? Isn’t that just like those oligarchs!” The effect is similar to listening to late-night talk show hosts make jokes about the Trump administration while Mexican babies are locked in jail or insurrectionists are storming the Capitol. To his credit, Sinclair does manage to deliver an education on American labor history in The Coal War, but it’s a rather misconceived and tone-deaf vehicle for imparting this history lesson.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
No comments:
Post a Comment