The Cold Millions

Got this from my mom - the verdict from her and one of her book clubs was a hearty thumbs up, and I agree! I will say that she and I are both predisposed to have liked it. The context of the novel is union activism in Spokane in the early 20th century: she's a labor lawyer, and I just relocated from there. Walter is very adept at blending facts about that history and geography with his fiction, and the details (some of which I knew, some of which I didn't) really resonated with my love-hate relationship with the locale (e.g., small details like the names of bars that have been reincarnated in recent years, a building I used to work in makes a cameo appearance, and how strange it is that the courthouse is across the river from other important municipal buildings, big chunks of history like George Wright's evil genocide of Spokane and local Indigenous people and their horses [a road named after him only got renamed in 2020 to honor Whist-alks, a Spokane woman who contributed to the resistance to his violent oppression], and things in between, like how a part of the country that created Taft, the wickedest city in all of America for a few short years before burning up in a literal ball of flames, shaped the region's culture [truly, the history of Taft is a wild ride I recommend]). Anyway! Enough about my feelings about the inland northwest. Walter is quoted in an interview as intentionally using the economic and social strife of this time as a commentary on our own, and to his credit, those echoes are loud and clear without feeling didactic. The threads from multiple narrators were skillfully interwoven, I appreciated that the characters were just people without either pure saints or sinners, and this is the sort of book that I read always feeling driven to know how the story ended.

16 year old Rye Dolan and his older brother Gig are a part of the cold millions, two orphans among the thousands of wandering labourers looking for work at the turn of the century. We find them in Spokane Washington, Gig's head filled with the righteous fire of the Industrial Workers of the World or the Wobblies. They're a labour movement looking to organize mine workers against corrupt employment agencies, the brutal tactics that steal their wages and the dangerous work they're subjected to. The Wobblies gathered in protest and hundreds were subsequently beaten and jailed in brutal, inhuman conditions.

It's slow going for the first half with countless character digressions and backstories. The book seems almost unwilling to set clear stakes and move forward but Walters is just setting the scene and building tensions across a slew of characters. It's when Rye is released from prison that things start to pick up steam. Freed on account of his age, Rye finds himself travelling with the “East Side Joan of Arc” the “she-dog of anarchy” a feisty union organizer and labor activist who happens to be 19, pregnant and very real. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was very much a leading member of the Industrial Workers of the World and would go on to be a founding member of the ACLU.

We have a rich mining magnate, double-crossing agitators, thuggish police officers, a burlesque actress, and lots of murder and mayhem to close the book off. Rye is caught in the middle of all of it all but as Gig wrly notes; “We were flies buzzing around the heads of millionaires, fooling ourselves that we had power because they couldn't possibly swat us all.” Disinformation campaigns, the downtrodden working against their own better interests, moral compromises and the heavy gravitational pull of the wealthy sounds just as familiar a century ago as it is now. A great read but one I couldn't help but wish was a little tighter in the telling.