The Coal War Quotes

“When wilt thou save the people? O, God of Mercy! when? Not kings and lords, but nations! Not thrones and crowns, but men! Flowers of thy heart, O God, are they! Let them not pass, like weeds, away! Their heritage a sunless day! God save the people!”
― Upton Sinclair, The Coal War: A Novel

“You needed the strike to back up the ballot, and the ballot to reinforce the strike. Thus Syndicalism and Socialism were two feet, and the wise man did not hop on either foot, he walked on both—and he kept his eyes open in addition!”
― Upton Sinclair, The Coal War: A Novel

“For ours is a government of “checks and balances”, and we pride ourselves upon the difficulties we throw in the way of getting anything done by our authorities. We believe in “individual initiative”—which means the power of great wealth to get done what it wishes for itself.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Coal War: A Novel

“There was a struggle going on for the sympathy of the public; and in this contest the operators had all the advantages. They could publish whatever they pleased in the papers, not merely their arguments, but their news; they had unlimited funds to be used in propaganda, public and private.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Coal War: A Novel

“Could not Hal see that the respite the strikers were enjoying was a pure gift from the Governor of the state? It depended upon his order against the bringing in of strike-breakers. So long as he enforced that order, he was using the power of the state to give victory to the strikers; while if he rescinded the order, he would be using the same power to give them defeat.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Coal War: A Novel

“Such was the condition here—brought about automatically by the strike. The cleverest and most capable person in this tent-colony realized that he was nothing by himself, he was able to do nothing by himself. When he sang a song about brotherhood, he had a real feeling about a real fact; it was true that the man who stood by his side and sang was his brother, bound to him in sufferings, in fears and in triumphs. And this was a tremendous discovery, something which you could only understand by experiencing it, and which then you could never forget.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Coal War: A Novel

“There was no escaping this. Could any man of sense persuade himself that the privileged classes were doing or ever would do anything to compensate the masses for the misery and despair in which they lived? No, in this world of economic anarchy it was no matter of justice, it was a matter of power; some had the things by which others had to live, and they sold these things for a price, and enforced the price by the clubs of policemen”
― Upton Sinclair, The Coal War: A Novel

“The person to run the industry was not the politician, who had never been inside a shop; it was the man who had worked in the shop all his life, who had done the real job of building it up! Co-operative ownership and democratic control in business! Local self-government in the factory, with representation in an assembly of the trade, and a congress of delegates from all the industries of the country to regulate terms of exchange among them!”
― Upton Sinclair, The Coal War: A Novel

“To be sure, the Socialist argued that he meant to put into office a new kind of politician; but the American system of graft was so firmly established, it was hard for the man in the street to believe that people elected to political office could ever run any business but retail liquor.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Coal War: A Novel

“These coal-camps were places of terror such as one read of in Russia; situated as they were in remote mountain recesses, everything in them belonged to the company—the stores, the saloons, the schools, the churches, the homes of the miners. They were “closed” camps—that is, no one could enter them without a pass from the company, not even a doctor or a priest. Sometimes they kept out the state mine-inspector and his deputies.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Coal War: A Novel