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tale . . . that gradually illuminate[d] the fault lines

across the face of turn-of-the-century America."12   For

Lukas and many sympathetic reviewers, that fault line was

class.

As Lukas reported, the WFM employed threats, assaults,

and massive vandalism to shut out miners who refused to

join the union.  Yet other reviewers concentrated their

moral indignation on Steunenberg's efforts to restore order

where local authorities had stopped trying.  Typical was

the review by labor historian Sean Wilentz for the online

magazine Slate.  While WFM militants were heroically

"defend[ing] themselves and their jobs with rifles and

dynamite," according to Wilentz, "timber magnates and mine

owners deployed armed Pinkertons and strikebreakers as if

they were baronial armies."13

Lukas acknowledged that most of the nonunion miners

involved were already working in the mines, and were

chased out by the WFM at the beginning of the strikes.

They were not the vanguard of the mine owners' "baronial

armies," as Wilentz described them.  They were innocent

bystanders told to get out of the WFM's way or be crushed.

Steunenberg's response to the WFM's violence was an

act of political courage.  In asking for federal troops,

Steunenberg must have realized that he would be considered

a traitor by union officials with whose support he was

elected governor on the Populist-Democratic ticket of 1896.

Still, acting against his own political interests, he

sought help from Republican President McKinley.

Restoration of order by the federal troops was met

with moral outrage at least equal to that focused on the

WFM.  In the New York Times, Richard Lingeman, senior edi-

tor at the Nation, contrasted the "violent acts by strik-

ers," which he chose not to focus on, with the acts by

federal soldiers "ordered to round up miners--more than

1,000 of them--and herd them into detention centers, the

hated `bullpens' used by militias in previous strikes,

where they were held under atrocious conditions."14

In his review for the New Republic, New Deal scholar

Alan Brinkley mentioned the dynamiting of the mine owners'

machinery but did not mention the violence directed toward

the nonunion miners.  In great detail, however, he

described how soldiers "abruptly rounded up nearly 1,000

miners--snatching some of them from family dinners--and

herded them into an empty barn and a group of boxcars.

Many of them remained there for weeks, even months, with-

out formal charges being filed against them."15