Big Trouble.

BIG TROUBLE J. Anthony Lukas Simon and Schuster, $32.50, 875 pp.

A prize-winning reporter, the late Anthony Lukas had a determination to get the story with all its complexities and ambiguities, a quality that informed his account, in Common Ground (Knopf, 1985), of families caught up in Boston's desegregation crisis. In Big Trouble, the same relentlessness led him to broaden a chronicle of class conflict and murder, with the celebrated trial that followed, into the echo of time past, a grand and wandering epic with occasional thunders.

At the end of 1905 in Caldwell, Idaho, Frank Steunenberg, an ex-governor and local entrepreneur, was assassinated by a bomb that exploded when he opened his front gate. Suspicion fell on an out-of-towner, who (out of many aliases) came to be known as "Harry Orchard," and who--having unaccountably hung around after the murder--proved to have kept incriminating evidence in his hotel room.

Coming into the case, the Pinkertons' "Great Detective," James McParland, was convinced from the beginning that Orchard had acted for an "inner circle" of the militant Western Federation of Miners (WFM). He had grounds as well as prejudices. Industrial conflict at the turn of the century was often violent, especially in the West, and Steunenberg was regarded by labor as a Judas: elected on a mildly prolabor platform, he had come down heavily against striking miners, ousting prolabor local officials, proclaiming martial law, and permitting mass detentions. In any case, aided by an avuncular manner and hints of a reduced sentence, McParland persuaded--and helped--Orchard to write a confession in which he admitted to being a contract killer for the WFM. (Orchard did avoid the death sentence, but died in prison in 1954.)

The pretrial legal process was scandalous, even in the balmier atmosphere of that era. The key WFM officials--Charles Moyer, George Pettibone, and, preeminently, "Big Bill" Haywood--were extradited from Colorado in what came down to a legal kidnapping. The mine owners paid much of the cost of prosecution and the state's leaders (including the newly elected Senator William E. Borah, the most eloquent voice for the prosecution) lied about the evidence against the WFM officials, deceiving, among others, President Theodore Roosevelt. The pretrial maneuvering also had a comic side: after a lot of dashing about, with dark mutterings about bribes and threats, the state was left without corroboration for Orchard's story. And T.R., who rarely spoke softly, despite his own saying, called the defendants "undesirable citizens," provoking enough labor and socialist solidarity to pay for a defense "dream team," including Edmund Richardson and Clarence Darrow.

The trial left more room for heroes. Lukas lets his readers see Darrow with all his incongruities--an eloquent but indifferent lawyer, willing to cut moral and legal corners; a champion of the downtrodden who demanded a very high fee; a paragon to the Left who was contemptuous of women and most ordinary people, and whose sophomoric theorizing was mostly shaped by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Still, warts and all, Darrow moved the jury. And the judge, Fremont Wood, though privately convinced of Haywood's guilt, was conspicuously fair-minded, giving the jury instructions that strengthened the defense's case. Ultimately, the jury, troubled by the lack of corroboration, didn't trust Orchard's accusations against Moyer, Pettibone, and Haywood; surprising both sides, the jurors put their inclinations aside and decided on the basis of the evidence and the law. In the end, as they say, the system worked.

In Lukas's almost obsessive telling, the details of this saga are cherished and treated as occasions for digression, so that his canvas is Rubens-like, lavish and voluptuous, but always bordering on excess. I enjoyed Lukas's comments on the place of hotels in turn-of-the-century culture (and his fondness for Boise's grand Idanha Hotel), along with his account of local baseball, where Walter Johnson was taking toddler-steps toward immortality. And if, when Ethel Barrymore appears, Lukas goes on a bit about theatrical road companies, it's worth it to learn that Miss Barrymore, with a professional's eye, saw through Darrow's "props" and melodrama, fixing instead on the jury--"wonderful-looking men ... used to looking at great distances," she describes them, rightly convinced of their integrity. Still, there are limits: while readers need to be reminded about racism in labor politics--the expectation that white strikers would not fraternize with black troops, and vice versa, made African-American soldiers seem ideal strike-breakers in the Idaho mines--Lukas doesn't need twenty pages on the history of those black units and the life of their commander, Henry Clay Merriam.

For all his attention to the saplings in his forest, moreover, Lukas slights at least one tall tree. Talking about detectives, Lukas goes back to the seventeenth century; he writes pages on McParland's career; he observes that the Pinkertons, particularly, were an antilabor vanguard, adept, among other things, at the use of agents provocateurs. But in explaining the jury's distaste for McParland, Lukas fails to mention the Populist platform of 1892, which denounced the Pinkertons as a "hireling standing army, unrecognized by our laws." In a state where populism had been strong and Populist sensibilities stronger, McParland, as Barrymore might have recognized, was playing to a tough house.

Yet nothing is more peculiar about Lukas's story than its ending. Chasing one of his byways, Lukas followed his themes and characters to the bombing of the Los Angeles Times by the McNamara brothers, less than five years after Steunenberg's death. In his researches Lukas found a pseudonymously written letter by an embittered, erratic Socialist reporter, George Shoaf, that--as part of an attempt at extortion--implied that Haywood and his associates were guilty of Steunenberg's murder. This letter, added to the rest of the evidence, apparently persuaded Lukas, and he may have been right: Haywood was no prince, and the WFM felt desperately embattled. But, other problems aside, it isn't clear why the union should have waited until five years after Steunenberg had left the governorship to punish his treachery. Lukas, in fact, hints at a more proximate motive, the unraveling of a scheme to evade the 160-acre limitation on federal timber lots. Though eventually acquitted, Borah himself was indicted, but the Justice Department's lawyers identified Frank Steunenberg as the "leading spirit and chief organizer of the conspiracy," and it seems at least plausible that Steunenberg was killed to protect his co-conspirators. By taking Shoaf's letter as decisive, Lukas gave us less the measure of the evidence than of his own disappointment.

Finally, Lukas's emphasis on the peculiarities of turn-of-the-century America runs the risk of making his book into a memoir of dark but quaint times, safely distant from our own. Labor today doesn't appeal to dynamite as the equalizer in industrial warfare; labor-management conflicts are better mannered, and the rhetoric of class is taboo. What has not changed, however, is the imbalance between capital and labor: Unions cannot aim at the destruction of management, but management can and does set out to destroy unions--even if these days it threatens more subtly, with downsizing and outsourcing and part-time workers. In collective bargaining, the scales are weighted against labor unless government tips them back toward fairness, a support notable for its absence in recent decades. In that sense, Big Trouble teaches an all-too-contemporary lesson about the foundations of civic equality.

Wilson Carey McWilliams teaches political science at Rutgers.