Power (30 page)

“You might think differently if you spent a little while at Flexner's barn, where the bodies are. Did you see that, Ben?”

“I don't have to see it, Al,” he replied softly. “I got just so many tears, and I'm not going to waste them on strikebreakers and hoodlums. I never liked Klingman alive, and he's no more to my taste dead. You could have all kinds of feelings about what happened out there at Arrowhead, but remember one thing, Al. The operators have their money, the police, and the National Guard and a cellar full of groceries at home. The miner's got only one weapon that counts, the strike, and when he sees that strike being broken, he's going to hit back. All right. What did happen out there at the mine? Tell me the whole story, all of it. Don't leave anything out.”

I told him the story, all of it, every detail, and he listened without interrupting. When I finished, he sat in silence for a while; then he said to me, very quietly and directly,

“Do you think I could have prevented what happened out there, Al?”

I thought about it for some time before I said, “I don't know.”

“But you're not sure that I couldn't have stopped it?”

“That's right, Ben. I'm not sure.”

“I guess I could have stopped it,” Ben said thoughtfully. “Maybe even short of bringing in the militia myself. I could have fought it out with the local leadership here. I could have threatened them, bullied them—and I could have gone out to the mine last night and fought it out on the spot. Oh, I don't say that I could have kept anything from happening. This isn't Pennsylvania. You can't come in here the way Klingman did and murder a miner's kid and walk out scot-free. It just isn't in the cards for Egypt, and things don't work that way. There would have been violence, but less of it and not the way it happened. But if I had thrown myself into it to stop it, all that would have been the end of my position here. You have to know miners to know about that—and you will, someday, but I don't think you do yet. One act of betrayal, one single act, and you're finished.”

If I had known him longer, better, I might have asked him why he needed the leadership of that union so desperately—what it meant to him. If I had been a little older, I might have carried out my original resolve, that I would walk into his office and resign. I did neither.

The following evening, the same question was brought up somewhat differently. I was eating dinner alone at the Pomax House, when Mark Golden, who had just returned from Pennsylvania, and Lena Kuscow came in and asked whether they could join me. As I dislike eating alone, I was pleased and begged them to sit down. We talked for a while about the incident at Arrowhead. Golden had already spoken briefly to the district attorney and would see him again the next day, and I was relieved to hear that a possibility existed that no charges would be brought against anyone. “It's a very complicated business,” Golden said. “Not only the boy being killed by the guards around the mine, but for a week before the actual attack on the mine, the guards had fired at anyone whose appearance they disliked. The laws of trespass do not include the right to shoot indiscriminately at any passer-by. The whole question of selfdefense enters into it, and there are some interesting local statutes here that go back to the pre-Civil War days. Lena told me what happened out there, and that's one thing that can't be changed. But to let it destroy the union and everything these miners have fought for, well, that's something else entirely.”

“Why is the union so important to you?” I asked him. “I mean that seriously—I mean I'm asking it because I'm puzzled. I don't really understand. I do understand to a certain degree about Ben and Mullen and Grove and Suzic—they were miners. I've listened to Ben talk about his life, his experience as a breaker boy, what he's seen in the mines—but you and Lena here, you're not miners—”

“And what about you, Al?” he interrupted. “Did you tell Ben you're leaving?”

“I'm not leaving.”

“Then what keeps you here? Pomax is the bottom of creation. Your pay is miserable. What keeps you here?”

“That doesn't answer my question, because my own reasons are too complicated. It has to do with my wife and who she was and how she died, and with Ben and with other things. I'm younger than you are, Mark—and I stay on this job from day to day. I don't like to walk out of anything when the going gets rough. Maybe I'll be here next week and maybe I won't, but I don't feel about the union the way you do.”

“No, I don't suppose you do,” Mark nodded. “You see, all of us—Ben, Lena, and myself—we came out of the bottom. We came out of the hopelessness of poverty, and what is worse, out of the hopelessness of ignorance. It's hard to describe that to someone like you, Al, not because you had so much—I can pretty well guess what your background was like—but because you were a part of something that made sense and had meaning, with roots in the past and some kind of connection with the future. We didn't have that. No roots in the past, no connection with the future. I was born in 1878, on Hester Street, on the East Side of New York, and I was born at home, in a lousy, ancient wooden tenement, because there was no money to pay a midwife, much less a doctor. I don't intend to bore you with my life history, and I don't know how much sense it would make to try to explain what it means to be a Jew in an East Side ghetto, with a father who died over his machine when I was ten years old and a mother who coped with five children and tuberculosis. Like Ben and the others, I survived, I got an education, I went through City College and I became a lawyer. But I didn't relish the law of survival. Three of my brothers didn't survive. That's not unusual, Al. Lena here was one of a family of seven children. Three survived. Her father worked in the slaughterhouses in Chicago, and sometimes he didn't work. One of her brothers starved to death—yes, in Chicago. So survival isn't all that it's cracked up to be. I survived and read law and passed my bar, and I eventually became a part of a very estimable and successful firm of lawyers. In 1912, I made over thirty thousand dollars, and I was beginning to collect a fine portfolio of securities, as well as other investments calculated to make certain that I never slid back into the ghetto I had climbed out of. I also acquired a wife, who had never been faced with the necessity of putting the law of survival to a test. She was a beautiful woman, and I suppose that for a while she loved me, but my own trouble was in the past. I couldn't forget and I couldn't adjust, and because of this a number of things happened. My wife left me, and I left the law firm. My wife was well taken care of, and she bears me no malice and I bear her none. Indeed, I am grateful to her for curing me of the beginning of a penchant for collecting things. I took this job with Ben, because it's the first job I ever really wanted, and probably the first time in my life that I have ever been at least partly content. As for the union, which started this long outburst of mine—why, Al, to me it's simply an instrument for human dignity as opposed to the old-fashioned law of survival. I don't idealize it, I don't glamorize it, and in many ways, the men who were my partners in the law firm in New York were as decent and honorable as the men who lead this union. It's just that I sleep poorly as a part of a law firm and I sleep well as a part of a union.”

“And what happened at Arrowhead doesn't disturb you?”

“Of course it disturbs me, Al! It's a nightmare! I hate violence, I loathe violence! I think there's no cause that honors or justifies murder, whether it's illegal murder that's called crime, the judicial murder they call execution, the social murder called poverty, or the political murder that is so euphemistically called war and filed under the heading of patriotism. I look at all of them with equal loathing. But what happened at Arrowhead is an effect that is not without cause, and a precedent of cause and effect that reaches back through the whole bloody history of coal mining. That doesn't lessen or efface what happened, but it does put it apart from sheer barbarism and savagery, and it allows for understanding. The only way such things will stop happening is for the miners to have a union strong enough to allow them the dignity of living like human beings. I know as well as you what Ben's role in this was, and maybe I know Ben Holt a little better than you do. I don't judge him. He wants a union, I want a union. Men like myself don't build unions and lead others; men like Ben Holt do.”

 

25

For three weeks, I was in western Pennsylvania with Ben Holt, and for part of the time Golden was with us. Lena came down for a week to help us take depositions, and I remember one pleasant day the four of us spent in Pittsburgh, sharing a good dinner and then an excursion trip up and down the rivers in a tourist boat. It was a few hours of pleasure in what was essentially an unpleasurable time. Yet those days brought me very close to Ben Holt. I was with him constantly, day and night. We shared the same room in a miner's shack, and for twenty-four hours once, we shared the same cell in the Iron City jail. We worked together, which is, I suppose, the best way to know a man. A newspaper story of the time referred to me as Ben Holt's errand boy, and it was not without truth. I ran errands, but I also arranged interviews, handled the press, carried on correspondence, developed my diplomatic faculties with every type of law-enforcement agency, from policemen to company detectives, hired halls, and arranged meetings. It was a curious job, but there were times when I enjoyed it, and I prided myself that I was getting better at it. Among other things, at that time, I arranged for Ben to see an important coal operator in Pittsburgh. It was Ben's feeling that if one strong and powerful operator were to sign an agreement with the union, it would make an important opening wedge, and unlike some trade-union leaders of the time, he was not averse to talking with the owners. Every conceivable accusation has been thrown against Ben Holt except one—that he would make a deal with an operator to sell out his union; and because the thought itself could not take shape in his mind, he met with the operators frequently, argued with them, swore at them and denounced them in their own living rooms. In this case, the meeting was to no effect; but arriving at the man's offices before Ben did, I was invited in and had a few minutes alone with him. He asked me what my job was, and I tried to explain it to him.

“In other words,” he said, when I finished, “it's up to you to make the union taste sweet in the public's mouth and to keep the horns off Ben Holt's image?”

“Yes, that's part of it.”

“I like that, but you'll have one hell of a time. How would you like to work for me? Do for me what that cookie in New York does for John D. Rockefeller. I'll even give away the dimes.”

I shook my head.

“I'll double your pay.”

“No, thank you. I have an obligation to Ben Holt that I haven't worked off yet.”

“When you work it off, come and see me,” he grinned.

But a few minutes later, he and Ben were shouting at each other and threatening each other, and I think we both forgot his offer.

Back from Pennsylvania, I plunged into my work at Pomax. The strike did not formally end; bit by bit, it disintegrated, and one after another, the various locals of the union voted to abandon the strike and return to work. Summer came, as hot and bleak in Pomax as anywhere in the country, and Ben left for Colorado to attempt to salvage what remained of the union in the West. Life at Pomax consisted of hard work, dull evenings, and very little to look forward to; but in that same process, I learned a good deal about the coal industry, its history in America, its manner of development, and the attempt of its workers to create a union of some strength and consequence. I came to know the miners, and I had the feeling that after the Arrowhead incident, they began to trust me just a little.

As for the men who worked with me, I could never penetrate the strange shell that enclosed Fulton Grove or decide whether it was compounded out of reserve or stupidity. I fell into a working accord with Jack Mullen and the beginning of what was to be a long friendship with Oscar Suzic.

A month after the Arrowhead incident, when it became apparent that the union would not win the strike, the National Confederation of Labor denounced Ben Holt and the Miners Union. The denunciation was couched in insulting and angry terms, and I begged Ben to answer it in kind. Fulton Grove opposed me, and we had our first serious argument. The denunciation remained unanswered, and Grove and I continued on the coldest terms of forced cordiality.

I suppose that this period of my life was an important time of growth and change, even though so little happened. Yet there was one thing, and I can hardly avoid it. If this is a story of Ben Holt, it is also myself doing the telling.

Almost every Sunday, I was out on the bicycle, which Abner Gross had practically surrendered to me by the right of sole usage. I think I explored every road and track and path within ten miles of Pomax, but not until mid-July did I find Dorothy Holt again. I suppose there was never a time when I rode out without having in mind the possibility and hope that I would see her. This, I rationalized to myself. She was a charming person, and I was desperately lonely—and it was no more than that. I met her this time alongside a little pool or lake which, for all its stagnant and motionless water, made a shadowed and pleasant spot in the generally unlovely countryside. She had dropped her wheel, and was standing pensively by the water when I rode up; and she turned to me, and smiled, almost as if she had been expecting me. She had a quality of calm acceptance that never failed to astonish me, and although we had not seen each other for weeks, she simply nodded and said,

“How nice to see you again, Mr. Cutter.”

“It's all my pleasure.” I don't know whether my appearance showed it, but I felt as excited as a schoolboy.