The Cold Millions

“‘For if you gaze long enough into an abyss—’

‘The abyss gazes back,’ Early said. ‘And that’s me, friend. The abyss smiling back.’”

Early Reston is characterized by this allusion to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his 1886 book Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche’s quote elaborates on the warning that men may become monsters in the process of fighting them, which Early seems to embrace in his self-description. Early later modifies the quote to say that he is not only the abyss gazing back, but “smiling” back, suggesting that he delights in his darkness, foreshadowing his later reveal as an antagonist.

“And the idea that you could make men equal just by saying it? Hell, it took only your first day in a Montana flop or standing over your mother’s unmarked grave to know that equal was the one thing all men were not. A few lived like kings, and the rest hugged the dirt until it cracked open and took them home.”

Rye outlines his disagreements with the principles behind unionism in this passage, which characterizes him further by recalling his backstory. Rye’s experience of his mother’s death has left a deep impression on him, influencing his perception of the way people’s lives are shaped. He feels there is no way that someone like Lem Brand could ever face death the way he had, which is why Gig’s philosophy strikes him as being absurd.

“‘One man to a boat,’ Jules said. ‘We all go over alone.’”

Jules provides this insight when he is prompted for his opinion on the equality of men. The answer comes at the end of an anecdote about a childhood experience which not only foreshadows The Kid’s interlude in Part 1 but also points to a cynical form of individualism that considers all men fundamentally responsible for their own lives. This will resonate with Lem Brand’s more idealistic call to individualism in Chapter 15, where he leverages that essential loneliness to encourage Rye to pursue his aspirations.

“There is no world but this one. And all we want is to be seen in it.”

The Kid is acknowledged by the young Jules just before the former goes over the edge of the waterfall. It is a moment of resignation that resonates with Rye’s reflections on life and death in the first chapter, but it is also a hint at The Transformative Power of Solidarity, which calls for those who are aware of the suffering others to witness them and speak truth to power. Solidarity allows the oppressed to live on knowing they are not alone, just as The Kid will know that his death will not go unnoticed.

“Ryan J. Dolan of Nothing, Nowhere, having neither house nor bed, nothing a person might call a possession, somehow had a lawyer. Rye wondered if that, more than waking on a ball field or eagles or George Washington’s hair, was what it really meant to be an American.”

Walter makes a cutting statement about American identity, dismissing traditional cultural symbols in favor of one that centers legal representation as the crux of the American experience. Walter suggests that ideally, America should give everyone the chance to put forward their defense, even if they cannot do it themselves. He emphasizes The Personal Impact of the Wealth Gap by underlining Rye’s lack of possessions, but he also shows how the right to legal representation gives him a fair shot to preserve his freedom.

“I have always found the waiting worse than the beating. Death comes for everything, but only spiders and men make you wait for it.”

Jules makes a chilling comparison between men and spiders. By suggesting that spiders wait to bring one death, he taps into fears that spiders harbor sinister ideas that humans can barely begin to understand. Ironically, he claims, this is what makes them more like humans, and humans are even more malevolent when they can cause others to anticipate death.

“But our fish are gone now, I said. The dams keep them away. Now our river is shit and trash and wash from the mines. On the ground, they drove all the game away with hammering and sawing, they cleared the hillsides of berries to build more houses—they killed the world and called it progress.”

Jules describes the way colonization destroyed his people. He describes a series of terrible outcomes—from the disappearance of the fish and the animals to the pollution of the river—resulting from the colonial settlement of the Pacific Northwest but shifts perspective at the very end to show how the settlers viewed that destruction differently. It is a profound summation of colonization as a historical pattern, showing how many territories and peoples have been destroyed in the name of “progress.”

“People expect a story to always mean the same thing, but I have found that stories change like people do.”

Jules makes an interesting observation about the similarity between stories and people. He suggests that the meaning of stories can mature over time in the same way that people change as they grow older. This not only foreshadows the differing interpretations of his anecdote about The Kid but also Rye’s interpretations of the events of his life, which shift from hopeless to warm and nostalgic in his old age.

“I think he came to believe it was better to choose your life, and that even choosing your death was better than letting someone else choose your life.”

Interestingly, Gemma’s interpretation of The Kid’s death clashes with the meaning Jules supplies in Chapter 3. Jules’s interpretation had been cynical, focusing on human beings’ essential loneliness. Gemma’s interpretation, on the other hand, focuses on free will, suggesting that the ability to choose how one dies preserves one’s self-determination, the most fundamental thing each person has.

“Life is slow until it isn’t; Rye wondered if that was what people meant by fate, life speeding up like the view from an express train. Or maybe fate was a fancy motor car driven by a silent man in white gloves, for once Rye climbed in, there was no choice—you held on and rattled over cobblestones and streetcar tracks, around horses and carriages, nothing to do but shrug and think, So this is it, one day on a ball field, next a sweatbox, then snuggled into the leather backseat of a pup-pupping automobile with Ursula the Great.”

Rye’s attempts to interpret “what people meant by fate” are marked by two similar images. The first uses an image that Rye has become accustomed to in his many train rides with Gig. The second, however, taps into his present as a way of collapsing the time between those two images. It literalizes the speed of his life by juxtaposing two experiences of motor-powered travel from his life, both of which suggest that he has no control over where he is going. He is simply riding along, whisked away to the next stage, which, in the case of the present, is concretized by Lem’s offer of employment in the following chapter.

“He described everything with such care (‘a footbridge made from Amazon rosewood assembled with no nails or screws’), it was as if he’d built it with his own hands.”

Lem Brand often tries to pass himself off as a simple man, which this passage demonstrates subtly. Rather than simply have Lem describe the footbridge with painstaking detail, Walter also provides a simile that ironically underlines his actual relationship to it. He is implying that Lem most likely hired others to assemble it for him and takes credit for it by describing it with such care.

“All people, except this rich cream, living and scraping and fighting and dying, and for what, nothing, the cold millions with no chance in this world.”

This passage provides the title of the novel, identifying the cold millions as those who are scrambling and struggling for nothing. They are contrasted against “this rich cream,” referring to Lem and his consortium, even as he and Rye enjoy the warmth of his library. The passage is the culmination of Rye’s reflection on Lem’s wealth, which overwhelms him to the point of weeping. He had never been able to imagine such displays before, but now that he has visited one, he almost feels cursed with the knowledge that only a few people in the world can live this way at will.

“I want you to have it, too. I want you to have every opportunity I had. With them, nobody gets a chance at anything.”

Lem’s pitch to take his side in the war between Spokane’s upper classes and the union hinges on this appeal to Rye’s individualism. He tries to convince Rye that he has a chance to access the same opportunities Lem had, willfully ignoring the fact that many of his opportunities were given to him at birth. Lem’s lifelong wealth proves that his last statement is a half-truth: As long as he tries to protect his wealth, no one gets a chance at anything.

“A woman owns nothing in this world but her memories—a shabby return on so steep an investment.”

Ursula the Great begins the story of her life with something akin to a thesis statement. It not only characterizes her as someone who has lost so much in her life that all she has left are her memories, but it also establishes a small arc for herself to choose whom she will give her memories, and by extension, her life. When she comes to Gig at The Phoenix Hotel, she chooses to tell him everything she can about her life; she places herself in a state of absolute vulnerability and intimacy with him.

“Should I ask Jack Jones and Vincent Saint John to wait a few months for the revolution while I took my exams in comportment and had my final piano recital? Or perhaps my mother preferred I stay home and marry a Newark bookkeeper who would spend the rest of his life fumbling at my skirts while I learned to boil cabbage?”

In this passage, Gurley describes the two directions her life is being pulled in: activism or domestic life. Her character arc hinges upon this dichotomy as she is forced to reckon with her reliance on her husband and her independence as a young female activist in a world that mostly undermines and underestimates her efforts. By the end of the novel, she resolves not only to carry on independently but to reject a life with Jack, who has spent the entire narrative waiting for her to come home.

“Give money to a monkey and he’ll fill his cage with bananas. Give the same money to a dim American and he’ll build a show library every time.”

Del makes an underhanded observation about Lem’s library in this passage. He contrasts monkeys with “dim Americans” by showing how the former would use money to buy something functional while the latter would use it to buy something that affirms their status. Earlier in the novel, Lem had professed his ignorance as to whether War and Peace was part of his collection. Del’s observation affirms and further characterizes Lem as an inauthentic person.

“My romanticism is my great weakness, Ryan.”

In this passage, Gurley admits to the overwhelming influence of her own idealism, which she has practiced to a fault. Idealism is a value that suggests hope, but Gurley realizes with the frustrated hope of her husband’s support, especially after the robbery in Taft, that perhaps her hope is false and has led her to more danger than it has to opportunities for victory. It is a sobering moment of self-awareness for her character, and much of the remainder of her arc deals with how she can manage that idealism to support her personal goals.

“It occurred to him that he’d kept it for another reason. He’d convinced himself that as long as he didn’t spend the bill, maybe he could deny what he’d done, betrayed his friends.”

In The Cold Millions, money not only symbolizes purchasing power but also allegiance in the struggle between Spokane’s upper classes and the union. This passage shows how Walter deploys this symbol, allowing it to function as a reminder of the guilt Rye feels for siding with Lem. He holds on to the $20 bill but hides it for fear of affirming the side he decided to choose by telling Lem about Early Reston.

“‘Son, you should know, these gloves are not going to be nine dollars warmer than the gloves at the Emporium.’

‘Yeah,’ Rye said, ‘maybe they will be to me.’”

This passage deploys an observation on wealth, luxury, and The Personal Impact of the Wealth Gap. The salesperson offers Rye a $10 pair of gloves, all the while cautioning him about less expensive gloves sold elsewhere. Rye insists on buying the gloves, however, indicating that perhaps they could assure him that his lot in life has changed. He wants to experience the life of luxury that Lem values so much just to see if it is any different from the life he has led thus far.

“The stories are like his names—every possibility and combination. Or he’s just a thief who doesn’t care about anything. That’s Willard’s thinking—that he’s in it for the sport. Or the money.”

Early Reston is a fundamentally unknowable character. Although he supplies details of his life, Lem and Willard deny the validity of his statements, offering the character interpretation provided in this passage. If Early’s true motivations for inviting disaster are unclear, it invites the possibility that he is doing it simply for the thrill of seeing how much his actions impact the world around him.

“From the first days of grammar school, I was haunted by an adage the nuns had us copy on our slate boards: There but for the grace of God go I.”

Gurley describes herself with an allusion to the 16th-century English Reformer John Bradford watching prisoners be led to an execution. The quote in this passage is meant to resonate with Gurley’s privilege, showing how it prevents her from suffering the fate of those in poverty. On the other hand, it charges her with the responsibility to do something with her social position before she becomes the target of oppression. When Clegg comes to arrest her in the raid, she revises Bradford’s statement to acknowledge that her oppression under the police has come.

“Somewhere there was a roomful of wealthy old men where everything was decided. Beliefs and convictions, lives and livelihoods, right and wrong—these had no place in that room, the scurrying of ants at the feet of a few rich men.”

Just before he reunites with his brother, Rye crystalizes his understanding of the social power the upper class holds over the entire world, affirming The Personal Impact of the Wealth Gap. It echoes another moment earlier in the novel in which Walter literalizes the image in this passage by portraying Lem among a group of his peers, whom he calls the consortium.

“In the days after Gig left, Rye began to see that he was living in a particular moment in history.

Maybe this was obvious to other people, but it had never occurred to him. It was a strange, unwieldy thought, like opening a book and seeing yourself in its pages. Seemingly unrelated events—meeting Early Reston at the river that day, the free speech riot, Ursula the Great taking him to meet Lem Brand, traveling with Gurley Flynn, smuggling her story out to Seattle, maybe even Gig’s disappearance—these moments seemed linked, like events leading up to a war. And he supposed that was what they were in, a war—this skirmish between the IWW and the city was part of a larger battle fought in a thousand places, between company and labor, between rich and poor, between forces and sides he wasn’t sure he had understood before.”

Rye’s cynicism grows out of a sense of total defeat; he believes that his inability to free his brother from prison defines his inability to affect anything in his life in a meaningful way. That sense of defeat, however, is allayed as he begins to read Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and he comes to understand that history is much bigger than his experience. It also establishes Gurley’s advice in the Epilogue about savoring the victories they manage to achieve by showing that his defeat does not encompass the larger struggle.