Overview
Hailed as "toweringly important" (Baltimore Sun), "a work of scrupulous and significant reportage" (E. L. Doctorow), and "an unforgettable historical drama" (Chicago Sun-Times), Big Trouble brings to life the astonishing case that ultimately engaged President Theodore Roosevelt, Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the politics and passions of an entire nation at century's turn.
After Idaho's former governor is blown up by a bomb at his garden gate at Christmastime 1905, America's most celebrated detective, Pinkerton James McParland, takes over the investigation. His daringly executed plan to kidnap the radical union leader "Big Bill" Haywood from Colorado to stand trial in Idaho sets the stage for a memorable courtroom confrontation between the flamboyant prosecutor, progressive senator William Borah, and the young defender of the dispossessed, Clarence Darrow.
Big Trouble captures the tumultuous first decade of the twentieth century, when capital and labor, particularly in the raw, acquisitive West, were pitted against each other in something close to class war.
Lukas paints a vivid portrait of a time and place in which actress Ethel Barrymore, baseball phenom Walter Johnson, and editor William Allen White jostled with railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, socialist Eugene V. Debs, gunslinger Charlie Siringo, and Operative 21, the intrepid Pinkerton agent who infiltrated Darrow's defense team. This is a grand narrative of the United States as it charged, full of hope and trepidation, into the twentieth century.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Lukas's impressive but flawed excursion into early-20th-century Western America is an even more ambitious project than his 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning epic, Common Ground, which chronicled the Boston busing wars. His work on the earlier book, he reports here, led him from the American dilemma of race to "the twin issue of class." Thus he sought a story that would illuminate a time when American class tensions were large and in the open. This book is an exhaustive retelling of the 1905 murder (in the Idaho town of Caldwell) of former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg (an enemy of labor), the trial of the union men accused of the crime, the context of the Western labor conflict and the passions the case provoked nationally. Melding prodigious research with energetic writing, Lukas delves deeply into a case that deserves notoriety as it involved the quasi-official kidnapping from Colorado of defendants like union leader Big Bill Haywood, coverage by an enormous corps of reporters and the courtroom presence of defense lawyer Clarence Darrowwho gained a surprising acquittal for the accused. Perhaps handicapped by inevitable distance from his characters (unlike in Common Ground), Lukas animates his tale with regular digressions, the history of private detectives, the background of an Army general Steunenberg called in to quell labor unrest, socialist factions in New York, a theatrical road company in Idaho and the emerging sport of baseball. While interesting, the digressions tend to obscure the central narrative. Lukas resurrects a fascinating case too long lost to history and even offers informed speculation that the defendants were guilty. However, the book doesn't take the opportunity to link the class questions of this era to subsequent clashes, and the profusion of detail may deter readers expecting the emotional punch of Common Ground. 100,000 first printing. (Sept.) FYI: Lukas committed suicide in June.Library Journal
A multiple award winner, both for his work in the New York Times and his book, Common Ground (LJ 8/85), Lukas examines the turn-of-the-century murder of Idaho's former governora case that drew in everyone from President Roosevelt to Supreme Court Justice Holmes to the young Clarence Darrow.Booknews
Beginning with a meticulous account of a 1905 murder in Idaho and the subsequent framing of radical labor leaders for it, the author of Pulitzer winner follows the many leads from the scene to explore such aspects of the period as the cult of the private detective, the rise of the reporter, the heyday of the theatrical road company, the development of modern psychology, the growth of the conservation movement, the vogue of societies such as the Odd Fellows and Elks, the allure of grand hotels and Pullman cars, and the competitive fervor of sports. He traces at least one strong motive through several turns to the taking of San Juan Hill by the African- American 24th Infantry (not Teddy Roosevelt). Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.Gary Wills
This book is to "true crime" stories what War and Peace is to most war novels. It not only gives us the crime of the era, but the era as a crime. -- The New York Review of BooksJames Green
We are traveling with a guide possessed of awesome descriptive skills....Lukas covers ground...so impressively, in a way that captures the significance of this event and the conflicts that led to it. -- The Boston Globe BooksKevin Starr
Vast, detailed, colorful, at once analytical and driven by a story line in the best manner of journalism....Big Trouble succeeds as literature as well as history. -- The Wall Street JournalRichard Bernstein
A stunning, monumental achievement by a journalist and a writer of rare talent and vision. --- The New York TimesSanford D. Horwitt
Brilliant....Big Trouble reminds us now that there was a time in this century...whenordinary Americans were acutely aware of the links between social inequality and simple justice or the lack thereof. -- San Francisco Chronicle Book ReviewKirkus Reviews
From the recently, tragically deceased author of Common Ground (1985), a brilliant but flawed portrait of class warfare in early- 20th-century America.Two-time Pulitzer awardee Lukas's ostensible subject is the 1905 assassination of former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg and the subsequent trial of three officials of the Western Federation of Miners, accused of ordering Steunenberg's death in retaliation for his role in the military suppression of a violent 1899 strike in Idaho's Coeur d'Alenes mining district. This is merely a jumping off point, however, for a ramble through the thickets of America's industrial, political, social, and cultural structures at the turn of the century. When Pinkerton operative James McParland (one of the book's many titanic personalities) emerges as a key player in the prosecution's efforts to convict William Haywood, Charles Moyer, and George Pettibone, Lukas pauses to recap the history of private detective agencies—in England as well as America. When Clarence Darrow enters as a defense attorney, we get 28 pages of biography before rejoining his clients in Idaho. The story of the army regiment that put down the Coeur d'Alenes unrest; the character and career of each major reporter covering the trial; the fractures within the Socialist Party—Lukas crams all this and much more into a massive, unwieldy text. Many of the digressions are fascinating, all of them showcase the author's superb analytic gifts and powerful prose, but Lukas fails to distinguish the relevant from the merely intriguing. The background material unquestionably gives depth to the book's grim depiction of a nation enmeshed in virtual civil war, with capital and labor equally willing to employ unsavory tactics and the government almost always on the side of the big boys. Without the aid of a coherent story line, however, the narrative ultimately suffocates in excessive detail.
Provocative, maddening, deeply disturbing—a fitting epitaph for a man who in everything he wrote asked Americans to look at their nation's unvarnished reality.