Power (23 page)

“For whom?”

“Anyone who values his sanity. There are places that don't have much to offer, but Pomax is unique. It has nothing to offer—nothing but dirt and grime and poverty. It's a country slum. Do you know, Al, we don't even have a public library here. We have one movie house. A week after the strike starts, they'll close it up. No money for admissions, no money to rent films. We have seven pool parlors and three churches. I've been to towns upstate half the size of Pomax where they have twenty churches. Nothing grows here, not corn or culture or religion.”

“But you live here—your family.”

“No. No, I'm from Chicago. I live in Mrs. Ellen's boardinghouse on Cooper Street. Four blocks, if you have nothing better to do.”

“I have nothing better to do.”

We walked along the dark, dimly lit street. The diggers had disappeared. The town was deserted, utterly deserted. The clouds had gone, and it was a clear, starry night.

“You'll be bringing your family out here?”

“I haven't any.”

“Oh? I thought you were married.”

“I was.”

“Divorced? Ah, it's none of my business. Ignore me, Al.”

“My wife died a month ago.”

“Oh. Oh—I'm so sorry, Al.”

I said nothing. I never felt any impulse to argue with people who offered sympathy, even when they couldn't possibly feel any. It was at least a human gesture in a world not overstocked with human gestures.

“Why did you come here?” she asked suddenly. “This is no place to forget anything.”

“Why did you come here?”

“It's a job. I worked for the union in Chicago. They had to close the office there. So I came here. I didn't have much to forget or remember.”

“Neither do I.”

Then we walked along in silence. I left her at the boardinghouse and went back to the hotel. My first day at Pomax was over.

 

12

For the next ten days, with the exception of a single Sunday afternoon that I took for myself, I lived and worked at the Union Building, subsisted mainly on black coffee and sandwiches, and returned to my hotel at night for a few hours' sleep, a change of clothes, and a bath. I had witnessed strikes before this, but I had never been a part of one and I had never worked within the mechanism of a strike. It had always appeared to me that when a labor union called a strike, it was a comparatively simple procedure. The men stopped work; they organized picket lines; and they proclaimed their demands to the world. I had never really considered the fact that nothing in so vast and far-reaching an effort as a national strike just happened; it had to be watched, pushed, nursed, co-ordinated. The pay checks of thousands of men were blotted out. That was 1924, and most of the miners who went out on strike were poverty-stricken before the strike ever began. Their larders were empty, their clothes patched and worn. In Illinois, as in West Virginia, at least half of them wore no shoes. Far from having savings, many of them had not seen hard cash in years, being permanently in debt to company stores and company housing.

And these were conditions that hardly varied at all from state to state. The technical blueprint of the strike projected a situation where the local unions, who clung to their autonomy with fierce possessiveness and suspicion of the national organization, would cover their own needs for at least the first ten weeks of the strikes. But already on the third day of the strike, pleas for financial aid were pouring into Pomax. Mark Golden, sitting like a tortured demon over the union funds, would be torn to figurative shreds, as he attempted to guard and husband the union's shrinking bank account. Ben Holt, Jack Mullen, Fulton Grove, and the other union officials had already begun their own attacks on the precious store of money that spelled the difference between disaster and success. Faced with incipient revolts of various distant locals, locals claiming that they were unable to bring off the strike, endure it, stand the fury of operators and company police, and faced with the intransigeance of the Associated Miners, under Empek and Brady, they began a process of juggling strength and balancing forces. They played a vast chess game in which they were outnumbered, outmatched, and outclassed, and they played it with bluff, front, and arrogance.

In addition to this, they had the local situation in Egypt, the key strike of the thousands of miners in the incredibly rich bituminous fields of southern Illinois, the practical business of organizing relief stations, soup kitchens, and the whole complex table of command that supervised the closing of the various mines, the establishing of pickets, and the endless discussions with the operators, the state legislators, the local mayors, and the governor of the state.

For my part, I learned quickly. I had to. I had to learn not only to deal with my own material but to prevent myself from being pulled in five different directions, drafted as an assistant for anyone who needed an assistant—and sent off to do whatever errands had to be done. I learned the fine difference between truth and necessity. I learned how to deal with reporters who demanded,

“Just how many men are out on strike, Cutter?”

“Three hundred thousand.”

“Now look, you know that's a lot of crap, just as we do. You never had three hundred thousand men working. And the story goes that half the mines are still working.”

“That's not true. As far as the northern states are concerned, the mines are closed. No coal is being dug.”

“How about New Mexico and Colorado and Wyoming and Montana?”

“It holds there too. The mines are closed.”

“And how long do you think you can stay out?”

“As long as we have to.”

“And what about the Arrowhead Pit? They're digging coal there.”

The full truth was that they were digging coal in a great many places where we claimed none was being dug. The strike was far from total, even in the northern states; but the Arrowhead Pit was right under our noses, five miles outside of Pomax, a great excavation where the first local large-scale stripping operation was under way.

Today, a vast and increasing amount of coal is mined by stripping, as opposed to the older method of tunneling. In stripping, the overlay of earth and rock is stripped away by steam shovel and earth mover; rock is blasted and removed; and the black pay vein of coal is wholly exposed from above. As tons and tons of earth are removed, a wide craterlike opening in the earth is formed, and finally the steam shovel bites into the virgin coal, tearing it loose half a ton at a gulp. The method has all the advantages of a machine operation, but with the drawback of requiring an enormous capitalization in advance—and is based, of course, on modern earth-moving machinery. In 1924, the method was unusual and partly experimental—and looked upon sourly and suspiciously by both the miners and the union. The Arrowhead Pit, outside of Pomax, was an attempt at truly large-scale strip mining, based on what was considered then to be the largest steam shovel in the world.

Though no coal was being moved out of the Arrowhead Pit, the shovel had continued to work since the first hour of the strike, digging the coal and stock-piling it. At first, Ben Holt was of half a mind to allow Klingman, the operator in charge of Arrowhead, to continue to dig, so long as no coal was moved. On the second day of the strike, we learned that Gus Empek of Associated Miners had enrolled the shovel men, the truck drivers, and bulldozer operators into the Associated Miners—which union was still against the strike and claiming their right to work. Until now, the Associated Miners didn't have a member within twenty miles of Pomax. Arrowhead gave them their first opportunity and foothold.

The newspaper people kept pressing me with the question of whether we had worked out a separate arrangement for strip mining—and I dwell on this because of the subsequent sequence of events at Arrowhead Pit. It seems incredible today that the very name of Arrowhead is forgotten to all but labor historians; then, shortly, it was to become known to almost every person in the United States; but that was still in the future, and my own problem was to convince the newspapermen that we had made no separate deal with the strip mines. I was trying to sell the world a picture of a national strike called by the Miners Union and effectively carried out—the mines closed, the diggers firm in rocklike unity; and the picture simply was not true. Ben Holt and the others felt, however, that the projection of this picture was of prime importance. I, in turn, was carried along by my hasty immersion in the excitement of my first strike, the long days and sleepless nights, the thousands of miners crowding into the Union Building each day, their drawn, earnest faces, their determination, the picket lines I saw at the collieries I visited, the soup kitchens and relief stations. I accepted it because I wanted so desperately to become a part of it, and the more I worked with Ben Holt, the more my admiration for him increased. I accepted his views, his dreams, his decisions, and I tried, somehow, to convey them to the press.

And to tell the whole truth, I enjoyed the sense of immediacy, of urgency and struggle, the feeling of being an integral part of a great body of men fighting, in a sense, for their right to survival. I enjoyed the feeling of excitement and importance—and of belonging. I had been bitterly alone since Laura died, but in a way I had been alone since my discharge from the Army in 1919. I had walked in the city as a stranger and worked on the
Mail
as a stranger. I had made no friends that I regretted leaving behind me; and no strings were ever permitted to penetrate my veneer of the sharp, wisecracking young know-it-all of the twenties and tie me to anything. Now, I was able to let my defenses drop. I had people around me who valued me, and I was a part of something. When a committee of the state legislature came down from Springfield to investigate the strike, Ben appointed me their guide for one afternoon, leaving it up to me to say the right thing and do the right thing. And when I missed fire, as I often did, he seemed to understand.

 

13

During the first weeks after the strike was called, I took only one Sunday afternoon for myself. A combination of the need to get away from the Union Building for a few hours and a desire to see the Arrowhead Pit led me to borrow an old bicycle Abner Gross kept chained to the gutter pipe at one corner of the Pomax House. Gross and I had become good friends. I learned that he had been a drummer boy in the Civil War with the 5th Illinois Infantry—which put him into his early seventies. I had thought he was younger. He was a storyteller and I listened well and enjoyed the listening; also, the union was the best and only customer for the private dining room and the apology for a ballroom that graced the Pomax House. Gross worshiped the
Spoon River Anthology
, and when he discovered that I knew half the book by heart, our bonds were sealed.

He had told me that the bicycle was mine any time I wanted it. After lunch, I set out along the dirt road that led to Arrowhead. Once the dismal shacks of Pomax were behind me, the road led through a pleasant wood of second-growth birch.

It was a fine spring afternoon, cool but sunny, with the yellow-green of the budding birches giving this part of Egypt a strange and improbable beauty. For two miles, except for a muddy little stream, there was nothing but the birches; then there was a stretch of farms, poor farms with fields of new corn and pens of skinny brown pigs; then open country with the ragged edges of shelf rock showing. Here, where there was no overlay of glacial soil, the thick bituminous seams lay sometimes as little as fifty feet below the surface and never much more than three hundred. Now and again, one saw a dark hint of outcropping coal, and finally in the distance the piles of rock that marked the Arrowhead Pit. No one was working the mine today. It was deeply silent, and there was no one in sight except another bicyclist, who stood with her wheel at the lip of the crater, where the road bent for its first wide curve down to the bottom.

I dismounted and walked my own wheel toward her, and as I approached, she turned around and I saw that it was Dorothy Holt—but in appearance so young and fresh that I had to look twice; and she smiled at what must have been a foolish, gaping face.

“Hello, Mr. Cutter,” she said. “How nice to meet you here!”

I nodded and muttered something in response. Her honey-colored hair was drawn back and tied with a yellow ribbon. She wore a white shirt, a suede vest and an old riding skirt, long woolen socks and moccasins. Somehow, by the miracle of the spring day, the sunshine, the bicycle, and a yellow ribbon, the grave mother of three children had become a young girl. It was a magic I did not try to analyze; it reminded me of Laura and of every other girl I had seen wonderfully in spring sunshine, and it made my heart ache with a pain I had avoided during these past days of frantic activity and work.

“I'm not a ghost, Mr. Cutter,” she smiled. “I must explain that I come from a family of suffragettes, and I exercise the right of a woman to revolt and demand her privileges. That is, I exercise it on Sunday afternoons when the weather is good. They give me four hours for myself, and I use it to explore the backwaters of the Nile, and I am rapidly becoming an Egyptologist. Now isn't that perfectly silly? I don't know why I said it—except that I feel so good when I am able to get away by myself like this, and there is never anyone around to whom I can say anything foolish.”

“I didn't think it was foolish,” I said lamely.

“Oh? You are very kind.” She waved a hand toward the open crater. “This is our famous Arrowhead Pit, Mr. Cutter. But then I am sure you know that.”

I nodded. “I rode out here to see it.”

“And isn't it something to see?” She began to walk her wheel across the rough ground that formed the lip of the excavation. “There's something dramatic and exciting about it. I've been out here half a dozen times, I guess, and I never get over the sense of excitement in seeing it. That steam shovel looks so small down there, yet they say it's the largest one in the whole world—larger even than the shovels they used to build the Panama Canal. And those trucks—do you remember, when we were children, what an event the sight of an automobile was! Who ever thought that we would see anything like these Mack trucks—they haul ten tons of coal, twenty thousand pounds—” She was outgoing, ingenuous, and apparently delighted that she had someone to talk to. She was a woman, a mother, with the enthusiasm and the unaffectedness of a schoolgirl who had suddenly become the possessor of a great fund of fascinating information. I tried to estimate her age; she was twenty-seven at the time, but in spite of the three children, I felt that she was much younger. All this struck me even more sharply because on that night when I had dinner at her house, I was left with a sense of a somber, almost tragic person, not in any evidence that I could then put my finger on, but subtly. Now there was no trace of that.