“Rye turned back to watch the sunrise over the Selkirks - a smoky red gash where someone had set a fire to get a job fighting it. Last year, Rye might have paid to get a shovel on that blaze, but Gig had gone and joined the IWW, the union fighting the corrupt employment agents who charged a buck for job leads.”
I’m Betty Martin and that’s a quote from the beginning of Jess Walter’s newest novel The Cold Millions. It’s 1909 and times are tough for the cold millions, the millions of unemployed who live out in the cold while the wealthiest spend their days in warm personal libraries and clubs devising ways to suppress the unions and keep wages low.
Rye and Gig are brothers traveling the rails together and picking up whatever odd jobs they can find until Gig becomes active in the union. During one demonstration both brothers are arrested along with five hundred others, brutally beaten by the corrupt police and deterred from their first amendment right to speak publicly about labor inequalities.
Walter wrote in his acknowledgments that there are “a few relevant philosophical questions rattling around these pages, as well as some “real” historical figures - among them the great labor organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.” Flynn is only nineteen in this story as she travels from Spokane to Seattle to gain support for the causes of free speech and fair wages for the “cold millions.” As the jacket says this book features “an unforgettable cast of cops and tramps, suffragists and socialists, madams and murderers.”
If you’re looking for an engaging read about “brotherhood, love, sacrifice, and betrayal set against the the panoramic backdrop of an early twentieth-century America” then you must read The Cold Millions by Jess Walter.
