Power (35 page)

I had been in Marietta attempting to negotiate a contract with a small coal operator named Jack C. Blaine. He was a rather nice, defeated man whose pit was being squeezed to extinction in a one-sided price war with two large railroads. Our negotiations turned into an attempt on my part to persuade him not to close down his colliery, which I finally succeeded in accomplishing. Since the total legitimate union membership in his area consisted of the thirty-seven miners he employed, and since he gave me his word not to force any yellow-dog contract—a contract in which they pledged to leave the union and not to rejoin—the result of our discussion was in the way of being a sort of negative victory.

When we had finished our negotiations, for what they were worth, he said to me,

“Cutter—how does your outfit manage to survive from year to year?”

“How do you manage?” I asked him.

“Hell, I'm a businessman. I have ways. I sign notes, and still have a few good friends who co-sign them. I deal with factors—I borrow against the coal before it's dug and pay per cent a month on the money. You know what they say, if you operate a pit, save a few miners to dig you out, because sooner or later you'll be in a damn sight deeper than the coal. The little guy is as much a relic as your trade union, Cutter. The railroads and the steel industry are the giants in the coal game today, and when they put the knife into me, I squirm. But I have ways. I have a few pieces of property, and with this and that, I just manage to keep my head up above the water. But I manage. You fellows—”

“We don't have to show a profit,” I smiled.

“That's no answer.”

“What else?” I shrugged. “In the old days, we rode in Pullmans and ate in the diner. Then it was day coach. I ride Greyhound now—”

“You've gone soft. The old-timers rode the rods.”

“They were pretty old timers. But we manage.” But it was an exaggeration to state that we managed. We were at a point where we barely survived, and that took some doing. Before 1929, there were thousands of miners who had left the union, but at least they worked. In the four years of desperate depression since then, fewer and fewer worked.

 

2

I mentioned the suit, because Ben Holt made a point of it that day when I returned to Pomax and walked into his office. He was sitting behind his desk, smoking one of his foul cigars, a little heavier, a little grayer; and when I dropped into a chair to tell him about my experience in Marietta, he waved my words aside, informing me that he wasn't one damn bit interested in what had happened out there. A week ago, he would have hung on every word, but now he was not one damn bit interested, not at all, and he told me to stand up.

“What?”

“You heard me, Al. Stand up.”

Watching him curiously, I stood up.

“Turn around,” he said.

“What's this? A fashion show?”

“When did you buy that suit?” he wanted to know.

“Five years ago. Maybe six. What difference does it make—”

“It looks it. It was a lousy, cheap suit to begin with. Also, your collar is frayed. You're a trade-union organizer, not a bum. It makes me sick to see you guys walking around here dressed like bums—”

“I think you got one hell of a nerve. Now see here, just where do you come off to rate me on my clothes! I'm no organizer, which you know damn well. I'm supposed to be research director of this wreckage, and it just happens that I have twenty weeks of back pay coming to me—”

“Take it easy, Al. You got another suit?”

“It's worse than this. Who are we going to entertain—the governor?”

Ben grinned, tapped the ash off his cigar, and grinned again, and let me stand there and wait, staring at me, and then put down his cigar, rose and walked around the desk to face me, and told me,

“Tomorrow, Al, at three o'clock in the afternoon, you and I have an appointment with the President of the United States.”

I nodded without really understanding what he had said, and made some remark about time and train connections.

“You didn't hear me, did you?”

“I guess I heard you, Ben,” I muttered.

“We're going by plane.”

“Yes. What does he want to see us about?”

“Coal. But you know something, Al, I want to see
him
about a lot of other things, indeed I do.”

 

3

Today, the kids don't comprehend it, although they comprehend other things that are as bad or worse, things like atom bombs and a world split in two so dangerously; but they don't comprehend how a country can stop, and most of them don't really believe it. They doubt that it ever actually happened, and if it did happen, they're not sure that it happened the way we tell it. Worse, perhaps, is that fact that so many who lived through it then have forgotten that it happened, or washed it out of their minds. It isn't plausible that in 1929, the greatest industrial country on earth found itself with half of its industry idle or soon to be idle. Five million unemployed became ten million and ten million became fifteen million, and the whole country began to be desperately frightened at what had happened to it, at the army of drifting, idle men who inhabited it, at the empty factories and empty houses—and at the whole communities of shacks and shanties and packing cases that sprang up around the old cities where these men and women and children, now broke and disinherited, had once lived. The country was frightened and tense and despairing. In the cities, on almost every corner, a man stood with a box of apples, which he peddled for a nickel each, but vast as this industry was, it didn't serve to take the curse off the great plants and mills that stood idle and empty.

The trade-union movement was, perhaps, worse hit than anything, for there had been little growth over the past decade, and now the respectable and genteel craft unions began to go apart at the seams, the plumbers, carpenters, painters, cigar makers and steamfitters and dressmakers tasting what had been the lot of the coal miners in the most normal of times. The fatted and arrogant National Confederation of Labor was losing its membership at the rate of eight or nine thousand a week, and a desperate industry joined with the economic conditions to hasten the death of the unions. A haphazard, frequently bloody, disorganized and virtually leaderless war between industry and labor spread through the nation. It was without direction and without conclusion, and for three years, we watched its progress with pity and hopelessness—a hopelessness that only slackened when a new president was voted into office. Then, suddenly, hope and direction appeared, not all at once and not very much of it—but a beginning.

In a way, the coal miners were hurt less than others. Not that pits didn't close, but the bottom is the bottom, and what was happening to other workers had been the ordinary lot of the coal miner for a decade. Almost untouched by the prosperity of the 1920s, he was less shaken than others at the disaster of the thirties. Hunger was not new; an empty belly was an empty belly—an empty larder was even more absolute. There could not be less than nothing, and he had lived with nothing for a long, long time. As for our union, the International Miners, it had experienced every conceivable disaster; smashed in lost strikes, ripped to pieces by internal disputes and yellow-dog contracts, reduced to poverty by the poverty of its membership, reduced in numbers until only a loyal, unshakable core of thirty thousand remained, there was little more that could happen to it. Coal had to be mined. Everything else might be dispensed with, but the country itself would perish if coal was not mined—the trains would stop, the lights would go out, the wheels would stop turning, and the cold would freeze the nation's heart into stillness and silence.

It was tragic, awful and hopeless, but by 1933, a bottom of sorts had been reached, and the hopelessness began to reverse itself. The new President of the United States awakened a sort of mystical desire and belief in the poeple, and within days of his taking office, he began to act against the paralyzing depression. His invitation to Ben Holt was only one of a great number of invitations to leaders of labor and industry—his conference with Ben and myself only one of an endless string of conferences, certainly far less important in his mind than his conferences with many others.

In later years, Ben would insist that from the very beginning and from before the beginning—meaning our meeting at the White House—he had planned for and anticipated what would come. I don't think so. I don't think that the President knew or that Ben knew—and certainly, I did not know. I had few anticipations and few hopes, and my dreams had slowed down. The years gave me nothing, and I looked forward to very little. If I didn't enjoy my work, I did not hate it, and my needs were small. Cursed with a good many things, I had at least been spared any real hunger for success or riches; and as the country plunged into the greatest economic crisis of its existence, I lost any feeling of singularity that I might have cherished. My poverty was a very common and widespread disease by the spring of 1933. Mark Golden went with me to buy a new shirt and a new tie. It was an unusual type of draft upon the union's bank account, and I suppose he felt that he should witness the expenditure and at least have something to say in the selection of the tie. We chose a blue tie with thin, diagonal white stripes, dignified and conservative. A suggestion that Ben and I be provided with new suits was vetoed. Not only was there insufficient time for suits to be properly tailored, but it was felt that the President should be aware that he faced representatives of the Miners Union, not the National Confederation of Labor.

 

4

Jack Mullen drove us to the airport, and Lena and Oscar Suzic came along, less because we were on our way to Washington to see the President than because officials of the Miners Union were going to ride in an airplane. We were pioneering. The increasing popularity of air travel had coincided with the shrinkage of our funds. Neither Ben nor I had ever set foot in a plane before, and in a manner of speaking, we were making precedents.

As I boarded the plane, I shared Ben's excitement—so evident in the way his blue eyes sparkled, in his quick, darting glance which took in all of the airport, the plane's exterior, its interior, the details of the seats, the seat belts, the other passengers, the pretty, smiling hostess, the pilots striding through to their compartment in the front. It was a small plane by today's standards, but large to us.

“While we dig like moles,” Ben whispered to me, “they've been opening the skies. Look at this. It's a whole way of life, and we didn't know it existed.”

I was leafing through my brief case, making sure that nothing we might need had been forgotten. It was stuffed with the history, the hopes, and the tragedy of coal mining. I had the record of every coal miner killed or injured over half a century, of every inadequate law for the protection of the miners—almost a genealogy of every ton of coal ever dug. I had statistics on employment and unemployment, on coal reserve and coal dug, on working pits and idle pits, working tipples and idle tipples, tunnel mines and strip mines. I knew exactly how many cutting machines were in use in the United States and Canada, how many steam shovels, how many drilling machines, and at least roughly the tonnage of accumulated culm the nation over, practical facts and esoteric facts. I was ready, at the merest suggestion, to locate every deposit of anthracite or semi-anthracite, lignate, sub-bituminous, high-volatine bituminous anywhere in the United States. I had at my finger tips comparative protein content in miners' diets over a period of thirty years, statistics on undernourishment, starvation, police brutality, yellow-dog contracts, union mines and non-union mines. I had reports on hospital beds available, medical care, miners' diseases, life expectancy, childbirth, and childbirth mortality. I had a list of almost every colliery in the country, the facts of ownership and some approximation of the conditions that prevailed there. I had graphs and charts tracing the rise of monopoly control in the coal industry, the enormous and increasing holdings of the railroads and steel mills.

Yet worried that something of key importance had been forgotten, I went through my brief case, asking Ben was there anything he could think of. He didn't hear me.

“Think of it, Al,” he said. “Seventeen hours by train—four hours this way. It pulls everything together—Montana to Pennsylvania, a few hours.”

“Ben, let's review what we have here.”

“The point is to own a plane. That makes sense, doesn't it, the union's own plane, always available to it?”

“Ben, the union can't afford to buy a new car. Will you look at this stuff?”

He glanced at the bulging brief case, and nodded, smiling thoughtfully. We were taking off. “You've got all you need, Al—all and a lot more.” He continued to smile. “You know, Al, it's going to be interesting from here on in. Damned interesting. What do you think of him?”

“Who?”

“The President.”

“I don't know. What can you think of someone who's president? I don't know him. He made a lot of promises.”

“They all make promises,” Ben said. “You remember, Al, you used to get sore at me when I'd talk about someone being born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Well, this one was born with a gold spoon in his mouth, a fat gold spoon with diamonds all over it. How much do you expect him to care about coal miners?”

“It doesn't necessarily follow. Hoover wasn't born with twenty cents.”

“No, it doesn't necessarily follow. But it's going to take some doing.”

Then we talked about it and around it, and made this plan and that one. What it all came down to was Ben's decision to play it by ear, look for openings and move carefully. Then we watched the clouds beneath us. We were flying over a strangely motionless and limitless world of white, sun-drenched clouds. We both loved it, I think, and Ben more than myself.