Fiction As Fact: Struggling For A Decent Life

IN A RICHARD WHEELER NOVEL, set in the copper mining bonanza of butte, Montana in the 1890s, a miner's wife if barely able to feed herself and her three children after her husband is killed in a mining accident. Multi-millionaire copper kings own the mines, and pay the miners bare subsistence wages for endless hours of back breaking, grueling toil, toil which often cripples or kills them with sudden accidents, but eventually kills them all, with black lung disease, consumption, and other forms of cancer. It takes hundreds of years to destroy the tyranny conferred upon the lower class by those with wealth, power, and privilege. it is a battle still being fought today, but particularly virulent in the late nineteenth century, as America's booming post civil war industrial revolution, in the context of government subsidies for business owners and neglect of worker's rights and welfare, engenders a labor union movement which sweeps across the industrial complex, and is met with government sponsored violence and repression. Throughout America, workers were routinely killed in strike breaking violent retribution in the late nineteenth century. The skinny, half starved miner's widow becomes aware of the socialist movement sweeping out of Europe and across working class America. She joins the movement, and receives pamphlets describing for the workers the forces arrayed against them which produce their dire, impoverished, slave like condition. "Red Alice", as she is called in Wheeler's novel "The Richest Hill On Earth", goes into forbidden miner's bars, delivering her pamphlets, making her argument for more aggressive action by the miner's union, the Western Federation of Miners, and urging common cause with the social labor movement. The filthy, coughing miners, sipping their ail after ten hours of drudgery, are receptive to her ideals, but fearful of corporate retribution in the event their tame union becomes too vocal in demanding fair treatment. Then, as now, neither major political party represents the interests of the working class, being controlled by the wealthy elite. Red Alice understands the need for a third party, one which advocates for the poor working class, just a people today recognize the same need. At the end of the novel, the entire copper mining industry is consolidated into the Rockefeller Standard Oil trust, and Montana and its state government come under the control of east coast billionaires. A meeting of the millionaires in Butte celebrates monopolistic consolidation as being in everyone's best interests by producing a greater general prosperity, devoid of the inconveniences of free market competition and frivolous lawsuits of those opposing the cartel clogging up the judicial system. as the wealthy elite leave the building, there stands Red Alice, out in the cold, barely able to cover herself with clothing, holding a crudely lettered sign which reads: "capitalism is theft". A Rockefeller man asks who she is, and his attorney informs him that she is really nobody, of no real concern to anyone. If any of this sounds familiar, it should.