‘The Cold Millions’ a labor of love from Jess Walter

At 23, Gig enjoys this life. He decamped from the bitter family home in Montana as a teenager and loves his freedom. He has lately, though, acquired a responsibility: his only surviving family member, baby brother Ryan. “Rye the last, all of eight years old when his da dropped dead on the steps of a tavern, the very definition of Irish hell: dying walking into a bar.”

Rye is 16 now. He adores his handsome, charming brother and is thrilled to be on the road with him. He’s also intrigued by his brother’s growing involvement in the labor movement, which in Spokane is focusing on “job sharks,” who charge workers like the Dolans a dollar (a day’s wage then) to place them in jobs, then get them fired a week or two later so they can bring in new hires and score another buck.

The city’s police force meets the workers’ speeches and marches with swift brutality. Walter writes a heart-stopping set piece about one of the police riots that ends with both Dolan brothers jailed in appalling conditions. Rye is freed much sooner than Gig, partly because of his age and partly because of an enigmatic entanglement with Lem Brand, one of Spokane’s flamboyant millionaires.

“Brand’s wealth,” Walter writes, “came from silver-mining the Coeur d’Alenes and the rather broad range of vices his workers spent their money on — cathouses, saloons, hotels, opium dens, and theaters in Spokane’s tenderloin, positions he held behind a series of paper partners. ‘Lem likes to say that every dollar that goes out in payroll,’ Ursula said, ‘comes back through bed, brothel and booze.’ “

Ursula, aka Ursula the Great, is the connection between Brand and the Dolans. She performs a popular and astounding strip-tease act inside a cage with a live cougar, and both Gig and Brand are smitten with her.

Ursula is not what she seems to be, and neither are several of the other characters Rye falls in with in his quest to get Gig out of jail. Some of those are fictional, but a number of them are real people Walter weaves into his story.

The most vivid of these historical figures is Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Raised in New York by activist progressive parents, she was honing her skills as an orator by the time she was 10. Along with her striking Irish beauty — delicate features, fair skin and a mane of black hair — those skills earned her several nicknames: In progressive newspapers she was “the East Side Joan of Arc,” in the New York Times a “she-dog of anarchy,” everywhere known as Rebel Girl.

First arrested at age 15, Elizabeth is, by the time Rye meets her, a veteran of union organizing all over the country, married and pregnant and all of 19. She is fiery, fearless and impatient with sexist boundaries. When she arrives in Spokane and a union official wonders whether she should be allowed to speak, she laughs. “Mr. Davis, with all due respect, I have given speeches from Maine to Montana, and I have never once been allowed to speak.”

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