Power (39 page)

“You will,” Empek nodded. “The time's ripe. Al, it's so ripe it stinks. There never was a better time than this. When they think you're done and finished, then they're not looking your way—no, sir.”

“It's as good a time as any,” I agreed.

“Al—Al, tell me, you hiring organizers?”

I stared at him for a while, before I nodded and agreed that we were taking on organizers.

“Al, give me a job. I'm through with the Associated—I split with Brady and that bunch. Al, I'll work for fifteen dollars a week, smokes and food, that's all I need—Jesus Christ, I'll work for nothing, if it comes down to that. You know what this industry means to me—I spent my life with it. Al, I'm forty-seven years old—what have I got left? Ten years ago, my wife walked out on me. The hell with it, she said. She's not married to a man, she's married to a union. I need this, Al. I'm a good organizer, you know that, and I know coal from A to Z. So give me a break—”

“Wait a minute—wait a minute, Gus,” I broke in. “You know I can't hire you. Let's go in and talk to Ben.”

“He'll blow his top,” Empek said hopelessly. “Hell see me, and he'll come at me screaming.”

“Maybe he will maybe he won't. But I can't hire anyone without Ben's approval. If you're going to work here,” I said flatly, “you might as well know how this union is run. We got an executive board and we hold elections, but it's Ben Holt's union, and it moves the way Ben Holt wants it to.”

“Don't I know that, Al?”

“All right. Let's go in and see Ben.”

I went to the door and held it open, and Gus walked through. Lena and Mullen had just come into the outer office, and they stared at Empek as I led him through to Ben's office. We had just taken on another girl, a young kid called Ruth McClosky, to help Lena set up the organization patterns and to take care of Ben's correspondence. She had a new push-button arrangement on her desk to call Ben with, but when she moved to use it, I pushed her hand away and walked in, herding Empek in front of me and closing the door behind me. Ben looked up from where he sat at his desk, stared at Empek moodily for a moment, and then said,

“Sit down, Gus—tell me how you've been.”

Empek sat slowly, watching Ben. “Well, you know, Ben. It goes this way and it goes that way.”

“I heard how you broke with Brady and the others.”

“I had to, Ben,” Empek said, turning his hat in his hands, staring at the floor. “I had to. A man's got to do some things for his self-respect.”

Ben nodded and waited.

“I hear you're going out and organize?” Empek said.

Ben nodded again.

“I'm a good organizer,” Empek said.

“The best,” Ben agreed.

“Give me a job, Ben,” Empek said suddenly. “For Christ's sake, Ben, give me a job. I'll work for nothing. I'll work for cigarette money.”

“You make me sick,” Ben said. “You talk about self-respect, and then you come in here and plead with me and tell me you're going to work for nothing. What the hell kind of self-respect is that?”

“I was afraid you'd throw me out, Ben.”

“Then I'd throw you out. Where you been eating, Gus?”

“Soup kitchens.”

Ben went into his pocket for his wallet and pulled out a ten-dollar bill. “Here, take this and get something to eat that will stay with you. We're paying twenty-five a week, and this is against your first week's pay. Talk to Lena outside, and she'll tell you where you can find a room. It'll be maybe a week or ten days until we get moving, but there'll be something to do until then.”

Empek remained seated, staring at the floor.

“Well, what is it? You want the job, don't you?”

When Empek looked up, his face was wrinkled and quivering, his little eyes red and wet. He tried to talk, but he couldn't. Ben rose, walked around to him, and gripped his shoulder. “O.K., Gus,” Ben said, “sit a while and take it easy.”

“Thanks, Ben,” Empek managed.

“What in hell are you thanking me for? You'll get your neck broken and your hide beat off. So help me God, I could never figure diggers—a lot of crazy bastards.” And then he motioned to me, and we walked out, leaving Empek alone.

 

11

When we began, after that dinner at Ben's house, and fought it out on the executive board—giving it to Ben his way, as always—I would have said that it would take months to set up a complete organization pattern, hire over a hundred organizers, and set out to organize coal fields in twenty states of the country. But Ben laid out a schedule of three weeks, and actually we were ready to move in nineteen days. I have no clear memory of how it happened—except that after months and years of defeat and despair and frustration, we suddenly had a job and a goal. We worked day and night. I had wondered where organizers would come from—and to this day I don't know how the word got around; but it got around, and suddenly it was known in Chicago and Pittsburgh and Scranton and Denver and in a hundred towns and villages, and just as suddenly, for ourselves and our purpose, Pomax became the center of the country. Men poured in—men we had not seen for years and men we had never seen before, old men, bent, work-twisted, with thirty years in the pits behind them, young men without jobs or hope of jobs, diggers, trade unionists whose unions had died in the depression, steelworkers, auto workers, college students full of working-class dreams and socialist ideals, socialists, anarchists, old wobblies, and tough, organization-skilled communists.

We asked for only two qualifications, that a man should know something about mining and be able to organize. If he had that and was willing to be sent anywhere under any conditions, he was our man. If he was willing to be distrusted by the workers he went to, beaten up by the local police, threatened, hounded, and ready to work for twenty-five dollars a week, no expenses paid, he was our man. And it was surprising how many came, ready, willing, and eager.

A number of them were communists. Ben hated communists. “They are controlled,” he would say, but it went deeper than that, and basic to the matter was the fact that he could not control them. They were also useful, even when they were non-existent, for he could blame them, as he had, through the mouth of Fulton Grove, at the Arrowhead affair. They were the most useful of scapegoats for anything and everything that might happen, and they were also good organizers, often the best. About what they preached and stood for, Ben knew little or nothing, but loathed it without knowing it. It was the one religion, the single folklore that he could be openly and violently against, and since they were most often against him, the situation never improved.

But during our preparations at Pomax, a curious truce was declared. We needed enthusiasts, dedicated men, idealists, miners, professional trade unionists—but above all, we needed skilled, trained organizers, and without the communists there were simply not enough. Ben hired them, but he made his conditions plain. I remember one of the communists whose name was Lou Broderick, a man in his late twenties and a miner from western Pennsylvania. He had been active in his own local since he was a kid, and when he walked into the building at Pomax, we all knew him and who he was. He made no secret of it.

“You know what I think of you and your goddamn organization,” Ben said.

He nodded. “And you know what I think of you, Ben.” “All right. That's clear. When you finish this job, you're through. I wash my hands of you.” “If that's the way you want it, Ben.” “That's the way I want it. Take it or leave it.” He took it. Ben didn't understand why any more than I did. It was like a tool you took and used, without ever knowing what made it work; but in all justice it should be said that communists were not the only men Ben used and cast aside when he had no more need for them. He was in motion now, and nothing could turn him from his goal. He had only one measure, one yardstick—would it advance the process of organization?—and by that measure he gauged everything. His temper grew shorter, his manner more demanding, more imperious than ever before. Often, a certain sullenness took hold of him. He would not talk about anything but the organizing drive. When other matters were discussed, he remained silent. He was nervous and fretful, ate huge amounts of food rapidly and without any evidence of discrimination or appreciation, stuffed himself. Once, discovering that Jack Mullen had hired a man he despised, he turned on Jack and snarled,

“You fool! You goddamned horse's ass, can't you ever use your brains!”

No one talked to Mullen like that, and for a moment, watching them stand face to face, I thought they would destroy each other. But it passed. Mullen walked out of it in silence, and an hour later Ben was apologizing to him.

There was one night I walked over to Ben's house at about nine in the evening, taking some letters for him to sign that had to be posted the same evening. Lena Kuscow opened the door, motioning for me to be silent. From inside, I heard the sound of a violin accompanied by a piano, and when I walked into the living room, there was Mark Golden playing on the violin, and Dorothy at the piano. Dorothy had brought the piano with her when she married Ben, but I had never heard her play. Mark Golden with a violin was a complete surprise to me. Entranced, I stood there and listened, the whole audience Lena and myself. Ben was not there.

When they finished, we applauded, and Dorothy turned to me, smiling and delighted. “Do you like it, Al?” she wanted to know.

“It's wonderful. I just didn't know, Dotty—not about you, nor about Mark.”

“Neither did I,” Dorothy said. “Or if I did, I've forgotten. And Mark is very good, don't you think?”

Mark disclaimed the praise, and there was some talk about this and that, when I remembered the letters for Ben. They told me that he was up in the bedroom. As I went upstairs, they began another duet. In the bedroom, door and windows closed, Ben sprawled on his bed, in a rank haze, smoking a cigar and reading a newspaper. I knew better than to comment on the scene downstairs. I gave him the letters, and after he had read them through, he signed them.

“We got to get moving, Al,” he said. “We can't sit around on our collective ass.”

“We're getting there, Ben. As of tonight, we've hired over a hundred organizers.”

“It's enough. I want to get moving. I can't stand this place. It stinks. It's the asshole of all creation.”

“Take it easy, Ben. It's no worse today than it was a year ago.”

“It's worse—it's a year worse. Hell, this is no place for a union like ours to have its headquarters anyway. There's only one place for a national union to have its headquarters, Washington.”

“We couldn't afford to ship the furniture to Washington, Ben,” I said.

When I came downstairs, finally, Mark and Lena were leaving. I walked with them for a while. Lena said to me, “You should have stayed and talked to Dotty.”

I shrugged.

“You give me a bitter pain, Cutter,” she said.

“Let him be,” Mark told her. “Don't push trouble, Lena. Just wait for it, and it will come.” And to me, “What do you think, Al—are we going to be the proud employees of the biggest, richest union in these United States a year from now?”

“Sooner than that,” I replied. “I'm beginning to understand Ben Holt—a little.”

 

12

There is neither space nor need here to detail the endless hours of meeting we spent working out the blueprint of the organizing drive of 1933. Sufficient to say that again and again and again, we sat through half the night, planning our campaign as, I suspect, few battles in history have been planned—and slowly, steadily, if reluctantly, my respect for Ben Holt increased. His knowledge of coal mining was enormous, encyclopedic, and constantly surprising. I would guess that there were at least two hundred collieries he was familiar with out of direct, personal knowledge, and twice that many he knew by reputation. He knew the character, capability, and dependability of dozens of local leaders. He knew a hundred operators, how they should be approached, what their weaknesses were, what action they would take against organization. When, with him, we pooled our knowledge, we comprised an extraordinary picture and grasp of the industry—and we tried to leave little to chance.

The allocation of area was Ben's. He spelled it out at a meeting where the core of the organizing process were present—a young miner called Fred Soames, twenty-five, dark, serious, and the most likely successor to old Dan Jessup, who led the Pomax organization; Gus Empek; Jack Mullen; Oscar Suzic; Mark Golden; Lena Kuscow; Dan Jessup, sixty-nine now, but still vigorous; and myself. Ben explained to us that he had broken down the areas of coal production in terms of the number of pits and the difficulties to be encountered—and that in each case, we would have varying degrees of local assistance to call upon.

“First of all,” he said, “we'll take the Rocky Mountain area. Geographically, it's large, but in terms of production, it's the smallest area we have to deal with. That doesn't make it less dangerous or difficult—and it cannot be thought of for a moment in terms of any second-class citizenship. Now what I'm doing here now is tentative. I'm assigning Oscar to head up the drive there, and I'm going to give him fifteen men.” He turned to Suzic. “How does that sound, Oscar?”

“Pretty good, Ben. I want to think about it.”

“In some ways, that's the worst area,” Mullen observed. “You got half a continent out there, and some very nasty operators. That's a big chunk for Oscar alone.”

“Then he'll grow up out there,” Ben smiled. “What else? We use what we got. Some day we'll have a headquarters out there and a staff and half a dozen broads for Oscar to play with. Until then, he'll do it himself. But you, Jack”—he thrust a thick finger at Mullen—”you get the pivot of the whole thing, Illinois, Indiana, western Kentucky, Missouri, and Iowa, but the friggen heart of it is Illinois, right here, and going out from here. Here's the backbone. Everything else is flesh, but you give me a backbone like an iron ramrod shoved up this industry's ass, and I'll put the flesh on it.”