The Cold Millions

 By Jess Walter

Harper     2020

352 pages     Literary Fiction

Let me just say at the outset that there is no way I can do The Cold Millions justice in a book review. It was my favorite book of the year, but so different from my usual books that I hardly know where to begin.

Spokane Washington in 1909 was the scene of a major labor rebellion. The Dolan brothers, Gig and Rye, have arrived in the rough-and-tumble city looking for work. They have been traveling since their parents died, and at this point Gig is in his early 20s and Rye is just 16. Rye just wants to find a place to sleep and a job to buy some food, while charismatic Gig sees in the union movement a place to make a difference, and he actively seeks out the danger of the moment. Rye follows along primarily to protect Gig from danger. When the rioting begins, Gig and Rye are both arrested and sent to jail. When the police discover that Rye is only 16, they release him, and he finds himself pulled in several directions by forces both good and evil. A remarkable  woman enters the scene and helps get Rye out of jail, promising that she will help get Gig out of jail as well. Her name is Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and she is a Communist labor organizer. She rescues Rye and brings him with her to several places where he serves as her prop in the socialist speeches she makes at every stop. 

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was a real person, and when Rye meets her, she is 19-years-old, has left her husband in Montana to embark on her Industrial Workers of the World union-building campaign. Oh, and did I say that she was pregnant. Believe me, in 1909, no one knew what to do with a 19-year-old pregnant woman union organizer. She is an incredible character in the book as she must have been in real life. In later years, she was the founder of the ACLU.

One of the great gifts of the book is Walter’s introduction to an amazing array of well-developed characters, from corrupt cops, to Ursula the Great, a vaudevillian who performs with a live cougar, to a powerful mining magnate who wants to stop the labor movement in its tracks. Every type of character that one can imagine in this rough and tumble world shows up and becomes fully developed by Walter’s skillful writing. 

The plot itself is a page turner. The reader is filled with dread for Rye and Gig, but especially Rye because of his youth and vulnerability. He is tossed and turned by the upheaval around him, when all he really wants is to find some stability in his life. I knew nothing about the labor movement of the early years of the 20^th century, but Gurley Flynn had rabble-roused all over the upper part of the United States, including the Iron Range of Minnesota, a place I know well. The unrest seems oddly reminiscent of the Civil Rights era of the 1960s and the divisions of the current day. Was this one of the author’s intentions? Perhaps.

In all, The Cold Millions is not an easy read, but it is extremely engaging. Here is a sample paragraph:

“They woke on a ball field—bums, tramps, hobos, stiffs. Two dozen of them spread out on bedrolls and baskets in a narrow floodplain just below the skid, past taverns, tanners, and tents, shotgun shacks hung like hounds tongues over the Spokane River. Seasonal work over, they floated in from mines and farms and log camps, filled every flop and boardinghouse, slept in parks and alleys and the pavilions of traveling preachers, and, on the night just past, this abandoned ball field, its infield littered with itinerants, vagrants, floaters, Americans.”

I don’t know when I have read a novel so skillfully written with such forceful characters. I highly recommend it.

Here is a terrific review in the New York Times.