Power (2 page)

As I came down the stairs, Flecker was instructing the clerk in a voice as flat as metal. He broke off what he was saying to throw his glance at me and ask me who in hell I was. The look in his tiny blue eyes made me answer quickly and respectfully. Maybe I was a smart aleck, but one thing I had learned was a decent respect for a man with a gun and a very high regard indeed for an angry man with a gun. This man was hair-trigger angry, and boiling over with the venom inside of him; so I wasted no time, but told him who I was and took out my credentials and showed them to him.

“News? You'll find news here, all right. Just stay out of the way! Stay the hell out of the way!” I nodded, and he said to the man behind the counter, “Like I told you, my patience is thin—thin as spread spit on a hot day. So just wake those sons of bitches up and get them out of their rooms and out of this hotel. And keep them out!”

“Mr. Flecker,” the hotel clerk pleaded, “I can't do that, I surely can't. I work here. I don't own the hotel. The hotel is a public institution, and if I got rooms, I am obligated to rent out those rooms, I am.”

“You do like I say!”

“Mr. Flecker—”

“Oh, shut your goddamn mouth!” Flecker told him. “I don't want to hear no more from you, I don't. I'll be outside for one blessed hour—no more—and then if they ain't out, I come in and drag them out and then your hotel won't never look the same, so help me God, it won't!”

“I'll do the best I can, Mr. Flecker.”

“Just do what I tell you to!”

Then Flecker turned on his heel and walked out, his two deputies following him.

During the last of this exchange, a boy of thirteen or fourteen had come out of the door that led into the dining room, and now he stood staring at the hotel clerk with round, frightened eyes. The clerk motioned him over, and then said to him, quickly and quietly,

“Jemmy—you get out and find Ben Holt and tell him that there's murder going to be done unless he gets over here and puts a stop to it.”

“I can't do that.”

“What do you mean, you can't do that?”

“I don't know where Ben Holt is,” the boy pleaded.

“The devil you don't! The very devil you don't! Now look here, boy—didn't I give you a job bussing in the dining room? Your whole family lives off that three dollars a week you bring home. There are a hundred boys in this town would give their eyeteeth for your job, and you know that. Don't you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then do as I say! You got miner kin, and the miners know where Ben Holt is.”

“I can try, but I won't find Ben Holt.”

“You find him and tell him Sheriff Flecker has murder in his eyes. Tell him there's going to be murder done unless he talks to the sheriff. Go ahead now!”

The boy sucked in his breath, nodded, and ran out through the dining-room door. I went over to the counter and offered the clerk a cigarette. He accepted, and I lit his and one for myself. He thanked me and said that he wished he was a newspaperman—or anything, preferably to being a hotel clerk in this sick and dying and damned town. “Look at the situation I'm in,” he said. I replied that it was no use for me to look at it, because as far as I was concerned I couldn't make head or tail of it. I knew that the sheriff wanted to kill someone, but I didn't know who.

“Upstairs, Mister—? What did you say your name was?”

“Alvin Cutter,” I told him.

“Well, sir, Mr. Cutter, I got twelve operatives from the Fairlawn Detective Agency sleeping upstairs, and I'm supposed to go up to them and boot them out of their rooms and tell them that this hotel is closed to them from here on in. Now I ask you—is that reasonable?”

“Why?”

“Well, you heard Mr. Flecker, didn't you?”

Whatever else he might have said was interrupted by the sound of someone on the stairs. The hotel clerk looked up nervously, flashed a glance at me, and then sighed hopelessly. A man was coming down the stairs, followed by others. He was a short, compact man, with a bulldog face, and he wore a striped suit, pink shirt, white collar, and black tie. He and those men who had followed him down the stairs gathered around the desk, and the clerk addressed them in whispers.

I knew that something was due to happen; the air of the place was charged with what was intended to happen and what had to happen and it did happen; but I didn't want it to happen while I was trapped, so to speak, in a hotel lobby. I had seen the boy go out through the dining room, and now I took the same path, through the dining room, through the kitchen, and out of the back entrance to the hotel. There was a farmer's truck there, unloading crated live chickens; I hurried past, into an alley, and then I was on the main street, at one end of the hotel. Flecker and his two deputies were on the porch, waiting. Watching them out of the corner of my eye, I crossed the street to where the local druggist was opening his shop. There were a few people on the street now; they moved slowly, and, like myself, they watched Flecker and his deputies.

What followed happened quickly, and while my memory of it is fairly accurate, it might be a little more exact and to the point to reprint here the news story I filed later on this same day. The story follows, just as the
Daily Mail
printed it:

Hogan County, West Virginia. May 26, 1920.

Eleven men are dead, and a twelfth lingers between life and death as a result of a gunfight in this small West Virginia town.

Today, this reporter was witness to one of the most incredible gunfights in the history of a state that is not unfamiliar with private wars. The battle that turned the quiet main street of Clinton, West Virginia, into a scene of blood and horror took place during a sixty-second interval, early this morning. But the forces that led to this showdown were growing for a much longer time.

One does not have to have pro-labor sympathies to see the situation of the coal miners in Hogan County. An hour's walk around this community, in the heart of the richest coal country in America, convinced this reporter that the coal miners in Hogan County are not to be envied. A short conversation with any one of them leads immediately to the fact that at least part of their many troubles stem from the lack of a trade union of any kind.

This is a situation Benjamin R. Holt set out to remedy when he was elected president of the International Miners Union at the beginning of this year. Stating that there could be no job security for the unionized miners in Pennsylvania and Illinois, so long as West Virginia remained an unorganized area, he personally led a force of union organizers into Hogan and Mingo counties three weeks ago. They approached the local miners with the proposal that they constitute themselves a branch of the International Miners Union.

In defense of their own interests, the mine operators here announced that any miner under suspicion of meeting with IMU organizers or of supporting their attempts to organize a union, would be immediately discharged. These discharges began the day after Benjamin Holt arrived in West Virginia, and they have continued during the three weeks since then. Today, it is estimated that at least 75 per cent of the miners in Hogan County have been locked out of the mines.

The mine operators own most of the local stores and practically all of the miners' housing. Ten days ago, they cut off the miners' credit allowances at the food stores and began a program of evicting from their homes those miners who had co-operated with the union organizers. Here in Clinton, Sheriff James D. Flecker was given the responsibility of carrying out the evictions.

Sheriff Flecker, famous locally as the only survivor of the notorious Flecker-Curry feud, stated that he would uphold the law and carry out the evictions, but only if he had proof that the accused miners had actually co-operated with the organizers. When four days passed without any evictions, the coal operators charged Sheriff Flecker with deliberate refusal to carry out his duties as specified in his oath of office. They explained this attitude on the part of Flecker by the many family connections Flecker had with miners in Clinton, and demanded his resignation. When Sheriff Flecker refused to resign, the operators were forced to resort to other measures, and they brought into Clinton twelve operatives of the Fairlawn Detective Agency of Philadelphia. The operatives were skilled labor consultants, under the leadership of Jack Madison, who made a national reputation during the steel strike of last year.

Immediately upon their arrival in Clinton, the Fairlawn operatives began a program of evictions, and during the next four days, these evictions were carried forward at the rate of fifty a day. Yesterday, they attempted to evict Sheriff Flecker's brother-in-law, and they were halted by the sheriff at gunpoint. Eyewitnesses to this incident say that when one of the operatives made a gesture toward his pocket, Sheriff Flecker stated that if the operative drew his gun, he would not hesitate to shoot him dead. Whereupon, Detective Madison ordered his men to halt eviction procedures at this house. He warned Sheriff Flecker of the consequences of the sheriff's interference, to which the sheriff replied with foul and abusive language. There was a heated exchange of words, which ended with a warning by Sheriff Flecker for the operatives to leave town.

The following morning, Sheriff Flecker and two deputies, John Winslow and Steve Kennedy, all of them heavily armed with pistols and shotguns, went to the Traveler's Mountainside Hotel, where the operatives had taken rooms. Sheriff Flecker spoke to the hotel clerk and demanded that the Fairlawn operatives be locked out of their rooms and refused service at the hotel. The hotel clerk protested that such action was not in his power. Sheriff Flecker said he would wait outside of the hotel to see personally that his orders were obeyed.

A few minutes later, the twelve Fairlawn operatives, led by Detective Madison, came down from their rooms and were informed by the hotel clerk of the circumstances. Almost immediately, Detective Madison, whose courage had not been exaggerated, led his men out of the hotel to face Sheriff Flecker and demand his rights.

In a loud, firm voice, clearly hard by this reporter, who was watching proceedings from across the street, Detective Madison denied Sheriff Flecker's authority.

“My authority is here,” Sheriff Flecker answered, tapping the barrel of his shotgun.

“Not any longer,” said Detective Madison, “because I have a federal warrant for your arrest!”

With that, Detective Madison reached into his jacket pocket. Subsequent inquiry seems to prove that his statement about the warrant was bluff, and Sheriff Flecker states that Madison was reaching for his pistol. The full truth will never be known, for as Detective Madison reached into his coat pocket, Sheriff Flecker fired his shotgun directly into Detective Madison's face, killing him instantly.

What happened after that took place during a few seconds, and even an eyewitness cannot give an exact account. Both of Sheriff Flecker's deputies were carrying double-barreled shotguns, and a moment after he shot Detective Madison, they opened fire on the Fairlawn operatives, who were grouped closely together. They subsequently held that the operatives had drawn guns, but when the battle was over, only three operatives had drawn their pistols and only one of the three pistols was actually discharged.

As far as I could see, at least five of the operatives were killed with Madison when the shotguns were fired, and every one of the remaining six was wounded by pellets. Sheriff Flecker dropped his shotgun and drew his pistol, as did his two deputies, and the three of them began to shoot steadily. I saw one of the deputies put his pistol to an operative's head and administer the
coup de grâce
. Sheriff Flecker shot and killed two more men. In less than a minute, all twelve Fairlawn detectives were lying on the street in their blood, as terrible a scene of carnage as this reporter ever witnessed, either in this country or overseas during the last war.

Eleven of the men, at this writing, are dead. A twelfth operative lingers between life and death in the hotel, awaiting the arrival of a physician from the next town. The single survivor has three bullet wounds in the chest, and there is not much hope that he will live.

One of Sheriff Flecker's deputies, John Winslow, was wounded in the calf of his leg.

 

5

After I had filed my story at the Western Union office, I walked over to the building that housed the sheriff's office and the town jail. The eleven bodies were laid out on the sidewalk in front of the building, uncovered, as ghastly a sight as you would want to see. There was a considerable crowd around the bodies, men mostly—almost all of them miners, as I learned later—and some kids, and the crowd kept shifting and changing, as if no one could bear to remain there very long.

I pushed my way into the sheriff's office, which was even more crowded than the street outside. I noticed the two deputies, one of them hobbling on a bandaged leg. Sheriff Jim Flecker sat behind his desk, listening stonily to a half-hysterical man who leaned over the desk and alternately shouted at him and pleaded with him. This man, I learned, was Max Macintosh, the mayor, and as I pushed my way toward the desk, he was shouting,

“What you don't seem to understand, Jim, is that someone is going to have to answer for this!”

“I told you I'd answer for it.”

“You told me hell—you told me nothing. The state police are on their way over here. I'm the mayor. There are eleven bodies outside I'm going to have to explain! My God, man, you're not up in the hills! This ain't no feud where you can wipe out a tribe of people and notch your gun!”

“Oh, shut up!” Flecker burst out suddenly. “You make me sick!”

“Then you'll be a lot sicker,” the mayor said, and then, seeing the hard look of rage beginning to gather on Flecker's face, began to plead. The least Flecker could do, he pleaded, was to get together a set of sworn depositions to the effect that the shooting was actually a case of self-defense. Some men standing behind the mayor backed him up. Flecker listened, his eyes fixed on his desk; when he glanced up, I had pushed through to the desk, and he saw me and demanded to know who in the hell I was and what in hell I was doing there.