Sweet Thunder Read online

  Will they never learn, the inkslingers who crop up periodically to decry commercial success and general prosperity? A succession of so-called opposition newspapers have talked themselves to death in trying to pit labor and capital against each other, instead of celebrating the American way of wages and profits going hand in hand. This latest journal of misinformation, with a name that suggests it has its head in the clouds, we predict will shortly follow the others into oblivion.

  Amid hoots and cries of derision at that, Armbrister humorously shook the paper as if to make any more invective fall out, and when none did, cast the Post into the nearest wastebasket.

  During the celebratory commotion, Jared batted my shoulder as if slapping on a brevet of commendation and soundly told me, “Well done, Professor.” I reciprocated by saying I could not have written what I did without his disclosure of the copper company’s secret set of legislative proposals. He slipped me a glance not without political guile; he was learning fast. “We’ll see what other surprises we can come up with,” said he. During this, I became aware of an outbreak of restlessness down at my side. Bright-eyed, Russian Famine whispered up to me. “What’s pantaloons?”

  “Britches that are too big,” I gladly defined our adversary as well as the item of apparel.

  “But that’s awful, what it said,” Rab was bursting with indignation, whirling from Jared to me seeking outraged response to match her own. “‘Journal of misinformation,’ phooey. ‘Head in the clouds,’ my foot. Mr. Morgan, why on earth are you looking like you’ve been paid a compliment?”

  To try to settle her down, Jared called Armbrister over. “Jake, am I right that we won the first round because they were only shadowboxing?”

  The green eyeshade bobbed. “That load of horse pucky in the Post is a fragrant example of the low journalistic art of Afghanistanism. Going as far afield from the topic as the map will allow.” His expression took a saturnine turn. “The SOBs are afraid to even say ‘legislature.’ So we have to make them. Won’t you, Morgan?”

  And so I went to my typewriter and set off the newspaper war.

  5

  It is legend locally that President Theodore Roosevelt, in plain view at a window table in the Finlen Hotel, heartily ate a steak as the admiring citizenry of Butte looked on. Not so well remembered is what he wanted for dessert: hearts of monopolists, sauced with justice. It was the late, great Teddy who dubbed them, let us not forget, “malefactors of great wealth.”

  There is no wealth greater, in this city and state and far beyond, than that of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. Nor is there a malefaction—mark it well: the word comes from Latin, malus meaning “bad, ill, evil” and facere meaning “to do”—more unjust than the grip of the copper colossus on the legislative process of the Treasure State.

  An appetite for change, anyone?

  GRACE WAS EVEN MORE RIGHT than she knew, in remarking that my calling had been found, or as I preferred to think of it, I had been searched out by a fitting profession at last. For I stepped forth from Horse Thief Row and down the sloping streets of Butte to the newspaper office each day with a hum in my heart and words flowing in my head. Oh, I was aware of the old bromide that an editorial writer does nothing more than observe from the high ground until the battle is over, then descend and shoot the wounded on both sides. But that was not the Butte fashion, not the Thunder style. I was proud that from the first inked copy off the press, I, or at least Pluvius, was in the thick of the crusade against the Anaconda Copper Mining Company and its despotic power over the mines and the city and the state. And if I could enlist the lately deceased trustbuster Teddy Roosevelt into the cause, so much the better.

  Grace dramatically read my latest Thunder salvo to the suppertime audience, Hoop and Griff chewing along in agreement, while Sandison sat back in judgment.

  Finished, she stretched to pass the newspaper back to me across the huge dining room table, where the five of us spent mealtimes like picnickers at a wharf. “That should give them indigestion at Anaconda headquarters, if that’s what you wanted.”

  “Well put, madam.” Sandison turned to me. “Taunting doesn’t get the job done in the end. When do you get down to brass tacks?” Hoop and Griff perked up their ears at the phrase.

  “All in good time,” I said with the air of invincibility fitting to an editorialist. “It is a matter of tactics.”

  • • •

  How often does a name fit so perfectly it cannot be improved on? From the very start, the atmosphere around the Thunder held that tingle of anticipation that the air carries before a rain. The spell was contagious. With its aroma of ink and paper and cigarette smoke and its staccato blurts of writing machines and jingling of telephones, the newsroom was a strangely exciting place where nothing definitive seemed to be happening, yet everything was. A newspaper is a daily miracle, a collective collaboration of wildly different authors cramped into columns of print that somehow digest into the closest thing to truth about humankind’s foibles and triumphs there is, i.e., the draft of history, and no day had yet come when I was not profoundly glad to do my part.

  The staff, a high-spirited bunch, raucously welcomed me into their number. In the newspaper world, you can be a boozehound, a Lothario, a grouch, a moocher, almost anything, and if you can sit up to the keys of a typewriter and play the English language as if on a grand piano, you are prized. So it was with me, none of the usual journalists’ peccadilloes attached to my person, and my prose as quick as my fingers—Armbrister never had to hover over me near deadline—was abundantly acclaimed. Moreover, my reputation in the newsroom grew when there was confusion at the copy desk over Thomas Cromwell and Oliver Cromwell, and I rattled off the couplet that distinguished the ill-fated royal minister from the later Lord Protector: Tommy bowed before the king and lost his head / Ollie stood tall and the king lost his instead. One of the old hands working the rim cackled and called out, “What are you, a walking encyclopedia?” As a brand-new journalistic enterprise the Thunder lacked a morgue, a newspaper’s library, and after that I was often called on to fill in. Routinely an outcry from somewhere in the newsroom would be heard, such as “Quick, Morrie, who was the inventor of the guillotine?” and I would furnish the answer. Some wag soon modified Morrie to Morgie, a conflation of name and role that I rather liked, and I felt thoroughly established in the fellowship of the press.

  Meanwhile, it was up to Pluvius, among my wardrobe of names, to wage battle with the Post and by implication its puppet masters high atop Butte and loftier yet on Wall Street. My editorial-page opposite number went under the inane nom de plume of Scriptoris. The fool; he was self-evidently a writer, or at least a typist. Why waste the Latin? That aside, the journalistic exchange of insults was something like the stutter step when you meet someone in your path and each moves in front of the other.

  The Post:

  That organ of propaganda trying to pass as a newspaper seems not to know even the basics of the mining industry, that smelter smoke is the smell of money.

  The Thunder:

  Also of lung disease, the leading cause of death among miners and their families.

  The Post:

  The latest diatribe from that ill-named broadsheet down by the district of ill fame disputes the right of the largest employer in the state to make itself known in the halls of the legislature. We ask you, what is wrong with proper representation of management and capital in civic debates?

  The Thunder:

  Representation is one thing, colonial domination is another. Anaconda has made Montana the Congo of America.

  • • •

  Yet, in this gloves-off fight, part of the foe was always out of reach. A villain is supposed to have an identifiable face, the more prominent the wicked features, the better the target. Against this classic rule, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company wore the most impassive mask in America: that of Wall Street. Oh, there were names, fearsome one
s—the Rockefellers and Henry Rogerses of the dragon’s nest of all monopolies, Standard Oil—attached to its corporate ownership, but those kept their distance from Butte and bloody deeds in the streets; and their hirelings, while notorious enough locally, comprised a shifting cast of characters there in the loft of the Hennessy Building. “Quin and I agree on that much—you never quite know who you’re dealing with, they come and go like shadows,” Jared spoke from experience in round after round at the bargaining table over wages and safety conditions in the mines, negotiations that seemed to have no end. The only thing to be counted on was that up on that top floor, men in celluloid collars worked to keep the copper collar tight on the workers of the mines and the rest of society that constituted Montana as well. Faceless as it was heartless, Anaconda to all appearances could be attacked only by barrage, as the Thunder was doing, yet any thinking person pined for the one sure blow that would bring a giant down.

  “You’re doing your part like a real fighter,” Jared applauded my free-swinging editorial style. “Just what we need.” He now had to divide himself between the ongoing Butte struggle and the legislative session under way in Helena, and the double effort showed on him. His dark, deep Welsh eyes seemed to hold more than ever, calculations on two fronts active behind his gaze when he came by the newsroom to confer with Armbrister and me.

  “Unlike Ulcer Gulch, it at least sounds like something is getting done around here,” he ruefully contrasted legislative life with the contrapuntal rhythms of typewriters and telephones around the trio of us in session at the editor’s desk. Three and a variable fraction, actually, as he had Russian Famine along, fresh from selling the Thunder on the street as the newest of our newsboys, while Rab attended to some after-hours task at the detention school. The lad was in motion even standing still, wiping his nose with the back of his hand, taking his cap off and putting it back on, restlessness accentuated by indoor confinement. Absently stopping him from playing with the spindle where Armbrister spiked the overset, stories waiting to be used, Jared thought out loud to the other two of us.

  “It’s pretty much as we figured, a lot of legislators don’t move a muscle without orders from the top floor of the Hennessy Building. But you’d be surprised how many don’t like it that way. I get the feeling there are quite a few, maybe enough to do us some real good, who’d turn their back on Anaconda if they thought they could get away with it.” His quickness of thought always surprised me. “What’s the Latin for that, do you suppose, Professor?”

  “Mmm, perhaps most aptly, Ad rei publicae rationes aliquid referre. To consider a thing from the political point of view.”

  “To be scared to death of a kick in the slats from the voters,” Armbrister translated more aptly yet. “But how do we get them panicked enough in Ulcer Gulch to ditch Anaconda?”

  “That’s the trick entirely,” Jared granted. “We’ll need to come up with something that’ll do it, later in the session, when I learn the ropes a little more.” Uncomfortably realizing how much he was sounding like a politician, he made a face. “Some of the old bulls in the cloakroom gave me the wink on how to get anything done in Ulcer Gulch, which is to take it easy, take my time. Save anything big for my maiden speech, is what it amounts to. Oh, I know”—he raised his hands against Armbrister and me reacting as newspapermen were bound to at any letup whatsoever in the campaign against Anaconda—“it’s going to be hard for all of us, holding our fire.” His face took on the rigid set of a combatant who had learned that in the trenches of the western front. “The waiting is always the worst part.” Then he was back from the past, taking the edge off with what could pass for a grin. “In the meantime I have to watch out for what happens to maidens, don’t I.”

  Russian Famine worked on that while the others of us laughed in manly fashion, then Jared sobered into his publisher’s role. “Don’t get me wrong, the Thunder and the Professor’s editorials read like Holy Writ to me, but I wonder if we’re getting across to people, or is that going to take until Judgment Day, too?” He jerked his head toward the Gibraltar always to be conquered, the Hill. “I made the rounds through the tunnels at chow time, and I hate to say so, but more men had their noses into the funnies than the editorial page.”

  I winced at that, but Armbrister merely lifted his hawklike shoulders. “That’s what we’re up against in this business. Morgie can write in purple and gold and still not get them away from Krazy Kat.”

  Truer words were never heard, according to Famine’s rapid nods. “Krazy’s my favorite,” he piped up in a voice as thin as the rest of him. “Boy, Ignatz Mouse really knows how to throw a brick, and Offissa Pupp always after him, that’s good stuff. I even read the funnies some in school,” he confided to us in man-to-man fashion, “if Mrs. Evans don’t catch me.” Armbrister’s sardonic expression said, There, see?

  The boy’s testimonial made me think. “Perhaps what’s lacking is some compelling entertainment of our own.” I asked Armbrister, “Those small items that fill in the bottom of a page—what are they called?”

  “Fillers.”

  “Exactly, those. Just suppose we were to use that space instead for brief submissions from the miners in their native languages. Say, oh, Finnish one time and Italian the next and on down the line, day by day. Jokes, sayings, bits of song. Perhaps call it ‘Voices from the Hill.’ It might draw their eyes to the editorial page.”

  Jared turned to Armbrister. “Jacob, what do you think?”

  What the editor thought could be read in his grimace. “It’d be a hell of a headache to deal with in the page makeup. But you’re the publisher.”

  “I guess I am. We’ll give it a try.” Jared already was half laughing. “Any contributors close to home you happen to have in mind, Professor, just for instance?”

  • • •

  And so we entered the period of what I think of as the skirmishing before the decisive battle, daily editorial blasts of whatever caliber I and my opposite number at the Post could come up with, heavy artillery yet to be brought to bear. In the set of reflections where a person reads his or her life, I would not have traded that experience for anything, nor, as it turned out, would anything have persuaded me to repeat it ever again.

  The home front, so to speak, was seldom quiet during this. It is scarcely fair to say the Sandison mansion was a white elephant. More like a woolly mammoth, hard to know where to attack. Palatial to live in, mostly—the music room with its Mikado wallpaper aside—the spacious residence simply demanded this, that, and the other be done to it, upkeep without end. The furnace tended to balk, the plumbing to gulp. A stair tread somehow would work loose in the night, necessitating a storm of hammering by Griff and Hoop the next morning. The rain gutter over the front stoop sagged in a V under the weight of icicles, daggers of ice as if to challenge Ajax. The ladder work it took the pair of them to repair it practically constituted mountaineering. Grace indubitably had a point about the manse needing them. The best I could furnish was support of another sort, that countenance of a natural-born home owner, even if the snail analogy did keep creeping up on me.

  Accordingly, the day I came in after work and saw that the dining room table was not yet set, I made myself hum with apparent unconcern while I went to the kitchen to investigate.

  Grace was so engrossed in the volume open before her on the meat block, she didn’t hear me enter the room. Assuming she was looking up a recipe, I cheerily called out, “Hello, chief cook and bottle washer. What’s for supper?”

  Her head snapped up as though I had broken a hypnotic spell. “Nothing, yet,” she moaned, casting a frantic look across the kitchen at the clock. “The time got away from me.” She gestured helplessly at the open pages. “Oh, Morrie, it’s those books of his. I was just curious about what you and His Nibs see in them all the time, so I took one down to read a little. And now I can’t stop.”

  I edged near enough to peek at the prose. Dickens. I might ha
ve known. “My dear, let’s trust that David Copperfield will prove to be the hero of his own life, at least long enough for us to put some food on the table, all right?” So saying, I traded my habitual daily complement of newspapers for an apron. “I’ll whip up some ham omelets and scalloped potatoes, how’s that sound?”

  “Music to the ears.” Bustling toward the larder, she gave me a grateful peck on the cheek in passing. “What would I do without you, Mr. Morgan? Here, I can at least peel the spuds.”

  We busied ourselves at the meal preparation, side by side. As the potato peelings flew, Grace regained herself. “Morrie? Now I have to ask you about some reading of your own. That paper.” She pointed the paring knife at the tabloid of shouting headlines that lay atop the comparatively quiet Thunder. “I didn’t say anything during baseball, when you tracked down the Sporting Whatsis even in London. Or football, when you would snatch up a copy as soon as we got off a boat or train. But this time of year? Please tell me you’re not doing something like betting on racing or”—she wrinkled her nose—“boxing.”

  “No, no, worry not.” I hastened to justify the Sporting News. “Basketball, the winter sport. See there, the University of Chicago overwhelmed Northwestern, thirty-four to twenty-six. As a loyal alumnus, I am true blue to the Maroons, in a manner of speaking. I always follow their sporting exploits.”

  Which was true as far as it went. The fuller explanation, which I was determined to spare her, was that I was keeping a careful watch on the aftermath of the Black Sox scandal. The ballplayers involved were getting the worst of it, banned from major league baseball, but so far the gamblers behind the fixed World Series were evading prosecution, not the outcome I devoutly wished for. If the fixers ever entirely escaped entanglement in the case, their criminal minds might well turn to the fortune lost to some mysterious bettor in the Montana hinterlands, the kind of curiosity I could not afford in more ways than one. That encounter in San Francisco showed that if Bailey could seek and find me, it was hardly beyond the capability of the Chicago gambling mob. My hope had to be that the gangsters were kept busy staying one jump ahead of the investigating authorities long enough for the so-called autumn classic of 1919 to fade into the history books. Time was on my side, at least.