Power (29 page)

“When a thousand crazy men are shooting in the dark, they can't bother to be chivalrous.”

He said that he and the others would be back by nine in the morning. When I asked him what our position would be, he replied that our position was plain enough. The union leadership had done everything in its power to persuade Klingman and his men to leave the mine. They had refused. The union had absolutely no part in what followed. Then he said, “Wait a minute, Al.” I heard a whispered conference at the other end, and then,

“Al, what about the communists?”

“What about them?”

“Do you suppose they were involved?”

“Ben, I don't know any communists. I didn't know there were any in Pomax.”

“All right,” he agreed. “Play it carefully and cool as it comes. Don't make any statements. Tell the press that I'll have a statement and put them off.”

“I'll try,” I said. “Ben, I'll try.”

Then he offered a few words of praise. That too was in the nature of Ben Holt. A few words of praise from him made you forget all that had led up to the praise. You felt proud and rewarded—or at least you felt that way if you were young enough.

Lena came back into the room, to tell me that she had disconnected the switchboard for the moment. Calls were coming in steadily by now, from Springfield, from the state police, from Washington, from the United Press and the Associated Press. She didn't know what to do. Did I?

“No, I don't,” I admitted. And then I asked her about the communists.

“Not in Pomax,” she said. “Not that I ever heard of, Al. There are a few in the union, but not enough to even make a ripple. Why do you ask?”

I shrugged it off and said that we'd have to open the switchboard and try to do something with the calls. Then I got Oscar Suzic aside and told him to keep his mouth shut about Lena and myself being out at Arrowhead. As far as he was concerned, he knew nothing about it.

From then on, it got worse and worse, and it was three o'clock in the morning before we were able to close up the building and get some sleep. By then, we had managed to get an ambulance from the county hospital out to Arrowhead, and we had also learned that three men and one woman had survived. They were all badly injured, and it was not believed that the woman would live through the night. She died the next day, as did one of the men. Two of the men, both of them drifters from Chicago, flophouse alcoholics, survived. Klingman and his foreman, Jackson, both died in the crater. Back in the hotel, I left word to be awakened at seven. Then I fell on my bed, too tired to take my clothes off, and for a few hours slept the sleep of utter exhaustion.

 

23

As I walked from the hotel to the Union Building the next morning, I saw the first detachments of the National Guard debarking from the train at the station; by midday, Pomax was a town under military occupation and the Pomax House host to an increasing congregation of reporters from all over the state and many more from outside the state. By nine o'clock, Ben Holt, Jack Mullen, and Fulton Grove were back in their offices, and by ten, Fulton Grove was telling an audience of reporters that the bloody slaughter out at Arrowhead was the work of communist agitators. When I put it to Ben and asked him how he could allow that kind of tripe to be handed out by Grove, he replied that so much was said about the communists already that a little more couldn't possibly hurt. I refused to include the charges in my own press releases, coming officially from the union, and we had a bitter argument about it. The argument was never finished, for that was a day of unending turmoil. Several of the newspapermen had somehow gotten wind of my being out at Arrowhead the night before, but I refused to affirm or deny this. Meanwhile, the bodies from Arrowhead were brought into Pomax, where an empty barn was converted into a mortuary. Rumor had it that two of the miners had been killed and several more wounded, but the bodies of these two were buried quietly and not publicly identified until months later.

Through that day and the days that followed, the union held firmly to its position, that we had tried to prevent trouble in the only way we knew, and that, failing there, we had no part in what followed. Police Chief Lust insisted that he had no knowledge of what happened at Arrowhead until it was over, that no calls for assistance had come into the police station, and that if, in any case, he had tried to stop the incident, he would have been leading his men into disaster as well as violating his territorial restrictions, since the mine was well out of the town limits. This last was debatable, since Lust had certain county privileges in an emergency, but he stood on it because it helped to support his general position.

Strangely enough, the chief effect of the Arrowhead Slaughter was felt outside of southern Illinois, particularly in Pennsylvania where it led to an immediate and brutal assault on the striking anthracite and bituminous miners, an assault that eventually smashed the strike and broke the power of the union in Pennsylvania. In those weeks that followed, Ben and I went to Pennsylvania five times, but we could only be witnesses to deepening poverty and increasing brutality. One after another, the pits opened, some with union miners who left the union, some with strikebreakers brought in from the South.

In Egypt, the strike held much longer, the miners drawn together in a dark and bitter unity. From the first day, they shared the guilt of Arrowhead and swallowed it among themselves and pressed it deep into their flattening bellies. Reporters and investigators roved town, but they could find no one who knew anything of what had happened the night before, or who had taken part in it, or who had spoken to anyone who had taken part in it. So far as the people of Egypt were concerned, the Arrowhead Slaughter had never happened, no one had killed anyone, and if there were dead men, the cause of their death could not possibly be ascertained; so far as the miners were concerned, they had been home with their families, as the women and children testified.

Angry and frustrated, the newspapermen turned on me. I spent almost an hour at the mortuary because both Lust and Colonel Sevard, who commanded the National Guard detachments, insisted that someone from the union be there. I was supposed to identify bodies, but the only two I could recognize were Klingman and Jackson, and when they forced me to stare at the shattered remains of the men who had been blown to pieces by the dynamite, I mentally cursed Ben Holt and the day I had ever met him. The newspapermen were there, and they said to me, “Come on, Cutter, you were a working newspaperman, so give us a break and open up this goddamn business. What do you want us to do, take it all out on the union! Someone killed these men.” I agreed that someone had killed them. The National Guard colonel was hating my guts, and he said that if he had his way, I and Ben Holt and the rest of the union officers would be hanging from the rafters of the same barn.

As yet, no one had come forward to identify bodies, or claim them or swear out a warrant for the arrest of anyone. Klingman lived in Chicago; whether he had relatives or not, I don't know; Jackson was out of state; almost all of the others were drifters and the kind of women that don't have families. It was a heartbreaking and terrible thing to see the bodies laid out as they were, but sadder to realize that in death, these people were as alone as they had been in life. They were strikebreakers and hired gunmen and flophouse drifters, but they were also the flesh of what had once been human, and I had no defense or retort when Sevard snarled at me, “Why don't you look at the women, Cutter? I want to see your face when you do. All the little birds around here say that you watched it happen. Did you lead it, Cutter? I'm told you were a big man in the war. Is this your idea of war, Cutter?”

Five weeks later, in Pennsylvania, thirty miles from Pittsburgh, I stood looking at the bodies of five miners beaten to death by coal-company police. But one didn't cancel another. Ben and I stood and looked at what had been a miner's family—that was a year later—and five children were skin and bone, dead from starvation in the United States in 1925, but still nothing canceled. Mullen roared at me that same evening, “For Christ's sake, those dames were hookers, the lowest kind of hookers!” It didn't balance any better.

I got out of that place of death, with the reporters crowding around me and pleading for a break, and I don't know whether I hated myself in my present position any more than I hated what I had once been—a working member of the press. The man from the Chicago
Tablet
said, “Let me tell you this, Cutter—you give us nothing, we give you nothing, not one inch. We'll cut your goddamn heart out—you and that lousy union of yours.”

They did. That evening's
Tablet
carried the banner headline: MASS MURDER IN POMAX, and below: OUTRAGE WITHOUT PEER IN AMERICAN HISTORY, and the story under this read:

Last night, in Pomax, Ill., in an act of savage revenge that has no equal in our past, the miners of Pomax County gunned down a hundred miners of a rival union. The men who were killed, in a slaughter reminiscent of the Indian wars, were trapped in the Arrowhead Pit, an open-strip mine about five miles outside of Pomax. Of the hundred, only two survived. Five women, trapped in the pit with the miners, were also shot to death.

Local sources say that over two thousand armed miners took part in the attack, which adds the bloodiest chapter to the already bloody history of that part of the state known as Egypt. Almost every dead man was found to be carrying a membership card in the Associated Miners Union, a rival union to the larger International Miners Union. So far no clear-cut evidence has been unearthed to prove that the attack was mounted and carried out under the aegis of the International Miners Union, but the implication can hardly be avoided. Highhanded, powerful Ben Holt, president of the International Miners Union, who has already gained national notoriety in his constant defiance of law and order, disclaims any and all responsibility. Vice-President of the IMU, Fulton Grove, charges communist inspiration for the outrage. But it is more likely—

And so forth and so on. The other papers took the same line, some more strongly than others in the matter of direct accusation. A New York City tabloid said:

Justice can only be served by the indictment of the entire Pomax County membership of the IMU, on charges of murder in the first degree. Force must be met by force—if it means an armed federal invasion of Pomax County.

Another Chicago paper limited its charges to Ben Holt and the union leadership, thus:

“Ben Holt and the men around him must be made to stand trial for murder, and to prove under oath that they are innocent of this dastardly and heinous crime.”

Thereby reversing the stipulation that a man is innocent until proven guilty.

At that time, I would have said that anything could happen as a result of this and I was pretty certain that a great deal would happen. The last thing in the world that I looked forward to was for nothing to happen, so far as Pomax and the miners of Pomax were concerned. But nothing happened. The state government was in an uproar over a series of scandals that had been coming to light during the past three years; the local judge and district attorney were up for reelection, and in Egypt, nine men out of ten who voted were miners. No indictment was ever brought forward, nor—not so strangely—did Gus Empek or Joe Brady make any statements or accusations. They were too deeply involved, and they preferred to wait their time. In any case, having so few members to begin with, their union was perishing more quickly than ours.

For a few weeks, the papers made the most of the Arrowhead Slaughter, and then other news became more important. It is surprising how quickly the whole matter was forgotten, but then other things were also forgotten. I once did some calculation on the decade of the 1920s, totaling up the number of miners killed by police, company police, private detectives, and strikebreakers. This total came to three hundred and forty-seven men, apart from those who died in mine accidents, or from rotten lungs or plain starvation. This too was forgotten in a surprisingly short time.

 

24

I guess no day was as long as that first day, yet it ended. Pomax had become a peaceful, quiet town, most of whose inhabitants remained indoors, and toward evening rain started. Both the local district attorney and Police Chief Lust testified to their ability to maintain law and order, and by nightfall, an order had come from upstate for the National Guard units to be withdrawn. At the same time, other National Guard units were moved into the eastern part of the county, where three collieries, with the assistance of more than two hundred armed private police, began to mine coal. It was the first major break in the strike in Egypt, but not the last.

Early that evening, during the first lull in the day's excitement, Ben Holt called me into his office, asked me to sit down, and offered me a cigar. His desk was covered with newspapers, releases, telegrams, the remains of a sandwich, and half a container of coffee; and he himself was disheveled, his suit rumpled and shapeless, his shirt gray and limp with two days' wear. For some reason, I felt the beginning of age in him, noticed the increasing streaks of gray in his hair and the first fold of a paunch around his waist—very little as yet, but beginning. We lit our cigars, and then he leaned back in his chair, put his feet up on the desk, and stared at me in a moody, quizzical manner that was not without humor.

“Well, Al,” he said, “nothing but trouble since I first laid eyes on you. If I were superstitious, I might say you were bad luck.”

“You could say that, Ben,” I nodded. “You could also say that this whole rotten business of coal mining is bad luck—to anyone who touches it with a ten-foot pole.”

“I could but I wouldn't,” Ben sighed. “Hell no, I wouldn't. Was it Bobbie Burns who said that there is drama and meaning in the lives of kings and shepherds and not much of either in the lives of those who live in between? Or something of the sort. Don't knock coal, Al, because the dirty, filthy stuff is all the power and the glory that makes sense in the world today. I wouldn't want any other life.”