Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets off a Struggle for the Soul of America.

Big Trouble

J. Anthony Lukas Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 754 pp., $32.50

"Too much of a good thing can be--wonderful," Mae West is reputed to have said. That isn't necessarily so, at least when it comes to the last book written by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tony Lukas. This tome tells the story of the 1905 assassination of a former Idaho governor and much--too much--more.

Lukas, who committed suicide on the eve of Big Trouble's publication, earned his reputation as a driven reporter and painstaking researcher during a 10-year tenure at The New York Times. He is perhaps best known for Common Ground, his acclaimed book on school desegregation in Boston. In Common Ground, the product of seven years of research, Lukas described the Boston busing wars through portraits of three very different families, each of which was deeply affected by the race and class conflicts of the 1970s.

Big Trouble also is the result of nearly a decade of prodigious research. But this ambitious undertaking--subtitled A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets off a Struggle for the Soul of America--takes on far too much ground and lacks the compassion and flow of the earlier work.

The central story of this nonfictional account is complex. Shortly after Christmas in 1905, Frank Steunenberg, already five years removed from his term as governor, was killed by dynamite rigged to a wooden latch that opened the gate in front of his Caldwell, Idaho, home. His assassin was arrested shortly after.

The controversies that form the basis for Big Trouble, however, began years before. Steunenberg had stirred feeling throughout the region when, as governor, he requested federal troops to control an insurrection by miners in Idaho's Coeur d'Alene district. When the former governor was murdered years later, politicians and the region's influential mine owners concluded the crime had been orchestrated as an act of revenge by leaders of the Western Federation of Miners, a powerful union.

Union leaders, including William "Big Bill" Haywood, were charged with orchestrating the murder. Their defense team was led by none other than Clarence Darrow, and the 1907 trial, which lasted nearly three months, attracted national attention.

Virtually every prominent turn-of-the-century American had an opinion about the case. President Theodore Roosevelt branded Haywood and his codefendants "undesirable citizens." The expression became a self-professed catchphrase for unionists in the Socialist movement and for leaders of the nation's organizers of the disenfranchised.

The very apprehension of Haywood and his colleagues, choreographed by a Pinkerton detective named James McParland, created a scandal. The suspects were in Denver and could not be extradited because they were not considered fugitives from Idaho. So McParland abducted them in the middle of the night and sent them to Idaho on a special Union Pacific train with orders to stop for no one.

Haywood's lawyers claimed their client had been kidnapped and appealed the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court turned a blind eye to the patently improper extradition.

All this, and the class conflicts between key players in the prosecution and trial, could make for riveting reading. Instead, Lukas's encyclopedic work simply overwhelms the reader. The author's fascination with detail detracts considerably from the story. For example, his long descriptions of Clarence Darrow digress into discussions of mid-19th century Ohio (the state of Darrow's birth), the lives of Darrow's former associates, and the histories of the institutions with which Darrow had contact.

An aside that Darrow was a Chicago baseball fan yields a dozen pages on turn-of-the-century pitching phenomenon Walter Johnson. Yet, Lukas never mentions whether Darrow ever saw Johnson hurl a ball.

Famed actress Ethel Barrymore's brief appearance in Idaho produces another dozen pages on her life and yet more on the history of American theater.

With all these digressions, this book about the "Trial of the Century" doesn't get around to introducing the trial until page 549. In sum, Big Trouble tries to do too much. It would have been enough for Lukas to describe the manipulations of the lawyers, the hired guns, the partisan reporters, and the self-promoting politicians against the backdrop of union conflict and the trial. Instead, the author seems to have been driven to include all his research in detail. By bringing too much to the fore, Big Trouble ultimately leaves too little remembered.

Laura Ariane Miller is a partner with the Washington, D.C., office of Nixon, Hargrave, Devans & Doyle.