The Man Who Never Died by William M. Adler

Author:William M. Adler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

SALT LAKE CITY was bracing for war: an incursion by Kelly’s Army of the Unemployed, a roving band of Wobblies under the command of “General” Charles T. Kelly. In early March, the army set out for points east from San Francisco, a bellwether city for both staggering unemployment—at least forty thousand were jobless at the end of 1913—and what the IWW regarded as an indifference to widespread “want and misery.” Some fifteen hundred recruits had traveled first to the state capital, Sacramento, where Governor Hiram Johnson, a Progressive Party leader, had sneered at their demand for relief and redress.

“Rained on and starved out,” as one writer on the road with Kelly’s desperate troops observed, the Army nonetheless decided to take its grievances all the way to Washington, D.C. It would follow the path of Jacob Coxey’s Army of the Unemployed, which had hiked to Washington from all corners of the country during the depression of 1894. (General Kelly had been an officer in Coxey’s Army.) For Kelly’s Army, the road to Washington cut through Salt Lake City, where, as the Deseret Evening News assessed it, “not only the authorities but also the local laboring men” were “arrayed against them.” There were at least eight thousand jobless in Salt Lake—the carpenters’ union alone reported in March that fewer than 250 of its 600 members were working. Yet neither the carpenters’ local nor any other affiliate of the American Federation of Labor intended to offer Kelly’s men so much as a meal. “We have enough of unemployed right here in our own ranks and men who have their homes here to take care of without borrowing trouble in the care of shiftless outsiders,” an ironworker said.

And that was before the Evening Telegram broke the sensational story of the supposed real intentions of Kelly’s Army. Its cross-country expedition was not aimed merely at forcing society to “look facts in the face”—to take notice of the “starving amid plenty,” as an IWW publication put it. Rather, Kelly was preparing to carry out a plan reminiscent of, and as shockingly audacious as, John Brown’s famous antislavery raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. As the Army approached Salt Lake, the Telegram, citing the findings of the California National Guard, reported that Kelly’s men were on their way east to seize the federal arsenal at Rock Island, Illinois, “in order to equip an army of five hundred thousand men with arms and ammunition for a revolution against the government.” (Emphasis added.) The unemployed but dauntingly armed force would then commandeer the railroads out of Chicago and rush toward Washington, “where it would have the Federal Government at its mercy.”

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