Power (37 page)

Suddenly, Mrs. Goodrich snapped at me, “Just how reliable are these figures, Mr. Cutter? I have an instinctive mistrust of statistics.”

“So do I, Mrs. Goodrich,” I replied. “These figures can be checked. I will leave the file here—we have other copies. I can only say that when I offer something like this to the President of the United States, I do not do so lightly. These are figures gathered by our own organizers and sympathizers, and we believe them sufficiently to stake the unions' reputation on them.”

“Then you still attempt to organize in the South?” the President asked, looking up from the file.

“I attempt to,” Ben nodded. “I still have to live with myself, Mr. President.”

“We all have to live with ourselves, Mr. Holt.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” Ben replied, as if swallowing his impatience and anger, “but the time element varies. I've lived my entire life with this. The men in my family did not die in bed—they died in the mines.”

“Do you have the facts on accidental deaths in the South?” Mrs. Goodrich put in. “Diseases—specifically, I mean?”

As I handed her those files, I said, “And would you like the figures on starvation, Mrs. Goodrich?”

The President glanced at me sharply and said, “Just what do you mean by that, Mr. Cutter? I won't have implications. If you have something, come out with it!”

I handed her the file, adding, “It is naturally incomplete. People have a habit of dying quietly in the mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia. But here are almost eleven hundred case histories, three hundred and twenty men; the rest are women and children. Names, towns, ages, and case history wherever that is possible.”

She almost tore open the folder, and she and the President stared at it dumbly. Ben threw me a single glance, but within it such a flicker of appreciation and pride that it wiped out every indignity I remembered from the past.

“You, sir!” The President lashed the words at Ben. “Do you mean to tell me that here in these four states, eleven hundred people died of starvation?”

“Only over the past three years,” Ben answered calmly. “There are the names, the facts, and the figures.”

“You seem very sure of these facts,” Mrs. Goodrich said to me.

“I am. Those facts are my business.”

“What I want to know,” the President said harshly, choosing Denny for his whipping boy now, “is why these statistics are not available to the government? Or are they lies?” Denny shook his head hopelessly, and the President said to Ben, “I don't think you would dare come here and attempt to hoodwink me, Mr. Holt?”

“I would not.”

“Mrs. Goodrich,” the President said, his voice icy in his need for control, “I want these facts checked. I don't want them disproven. These damned statisticians of ours can prove or disprove anything. I want them checked. If evidence is left out, I want that too, and I want to know why the Department of Labor has not informed me that during the past three years, eleven hundred coal miners and their dependents died of starvation. In these United States! I want to know where shame begins and where shame ends and how much of it we have to bear. And I want an information service in your department that can bring me as much information as this man Cutter. I don't think that's asking too much. Do you?”

Mrs. Goodrich shook her head. “I can tell you, however, why we haven't informed you of this. We didn't know about it. We've only been in practical operation for a few weeks. There's a lot to learn. Do you have anything else you'd like to show me, Mr. Cutter?”

The President stared at me morosely as I took another file from my brief case. “One more thing, yes, a list of the coal operators in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, and Ohio who have filed bankruptcy proceedings. Over twelve hundred during the past year, mostly small operators, family mines, so to speak.”

“Small businessmen,” Ben nodded. “I know every one of them—either by name or sight. Decent people who believe in this country and our way of life. Their reward for such belief was ruin.”

“You'll spare me the preachment, Mr. Holt,” the President said thinly, staring at our latest exhibit. “All right, here you are. You've presented your case—”

“Forgive me, only a small part of it.”

The President was not used to being interrupted in the middle of a sentence, and I was a little puzzled by the way Ben constantly and deliberately provoked a temper already exacerbated. Afterwards, he told me that his fear was that the President, at each particular moment, would accept our facts, lay them away wrapped in pity or sympathy, and propose a vague assuagement in a vaguer future. Ben's notion was that by provocation and irritation, he could force the President to throw the solution into his lap. Perhaps he was right, for now the President stared at him for a long moment, and then said in a voice of ice,

“A small part of it, yes. But you didn't come here for sympathy, Mr. Holt. You've spelled out the sickness. Now suppose you outline the cure.”

“There is only one cure.”

“Only one? Modesty appears to be one of your virtues, Mr. Holt.”

“No, sir, Mr. President—neither modesty nor immodesty enters into this. Mining is my life, the only thing I've studied and the only thing I know. And I tell you that the only cure for this situation is to make the right to organize workers into a trade union as unbreakable and sacred as the right of free speech. This will equalize the North and the South as producers, save hundreds of operators from bankruptcy, firm prices immediately, establish a uniform minimum wage and minimum price—and establish over-all the trade union as the enforcer of standards of fair price and fair competition. There is no other way to give dignity and the right to a decent existence to coal miners.” Ben hesitated a moment, staring directly at the President, then added, “There is no other way to save the industry either.”

Now, in silence, the President studied both of us thoughtfully, two men he did not like, two arrogant, almost insufferable men who had presumed to come as teachers instead of pleaders—knowing full well that with any other president they would have been shown the door long before now. He watched Ben curiously, thoughtfully, yet distantly, as if his mind were already elsewhere. He was tiring, I felt, and I also felt that no one in that room, myself included, was inclined toward sentimentalism. Should I except Ben? Mark Golden, in moments of great anger, would define Ben Holt as a “mental slob.” It was a filthy, nasty backhanded definition of a man, and you had to know Ben Holt a long time to comprehend the strange truth of it, not a validity in terms of contempt but a furious tag for something soft and gentle inside of Ben Holt, deep inside of him and well hidden. If we had laid eleven hundred corpses dead of starvation upon the desk of the President, only one person in the room truly wept for the dead—that was Ben Holt. An hour later, he would be using those same corpses cheerfully and cunningly, but now he wept for them; and when the President looked at his big, earnest face, he saw the face of an angry if unlovable prophet; and if he never understood this man, Ben Holt, that was not surprising. Few others did.

“You know what you're asking?” the President finally said.

“I imagine others have asked for it. I imagine you've thought of it.”

Without any emotion now, the President said, “Have you thought about the power such a law would put in your hands?”

“The world moves with power. Mine or someone else's. Now the southern operators have the power. If you break their power, you must give the power to someone else.”

“I think there are other ways,” Mrs. Goodrich said.

“There are no other ways.”

Denny spoke suddenly, “You can't just write such a law and pass it. There's never been a law like that. It would change every basic concept of America.”

The President watched Ben and said nothing.

“It would not,” Ben replied, a note of boredom in his voice now, and the thought in my mind of what a consummate actor he could have been, had his ambitions ever turned in that direction. “It changes nothing. We fought it through in the North. We have the right to organize—by common law, if you will, or by our own blood and guts. It will simply apply a civilizing influence in the South.”

“And if such a law is not forthcoming?” the President wanted to know.

“All right,” Ben nodded. “You leave us two choices. Give up. Let the industry die in the North. Our miners won't become slaves. The union can die, and the industry will die with it—”

“And the other choice?”

“To go into the South with guns. I tried that once. I'll never try it again, so it would have to be someone else's choice. I hate guns. That's not the way I work, and I don't believe in issues that are decided by armies. I don't like to see something like this destroyed. It's easier to pass a law.”

“Is it, Mr. Holt? A law has to be enforced.”

“Give us the law, and we'll enforce it.”

“I don't make the laws, Mr. Holt.”

“I think you do, Mr. President—your voice carries.”

“Very well, we'll see.”

“And that's all you leave me with?”

“Do you want a commitment, Mr. Holt?”

“I do, sir.”

The President shook his head. “You know I can't give you such a commitment, Mr. Holt. Let me say this: coal is the food and lifeblood of this nation, and coal will be dug. Of that, you may be sure. And you may also be sure that so long as I have a voice and a will, the men who dig coal will not die of starvation. But I make no commitments. We will both of us do what we can—and make no foolish promises or prognostications. Do you agree?”

Then, to all effects and purposes, the meeting was over. We remained there a little longer, and then we met separately with Mrs. Goodrich, leaving her our charts, statistics, and material. Denny escorted us from the White House, to where an official car waited to take us back to the hotel.

Not until we were in the car and in motion, did Ben permit himself a grin—a grin that seemed to spread all over his face and down through his body.

 

6

At dinner that evening, Ben asked me what I thought of the President. I replied that I didn't know exactly what I thought, except that here was an unusually complicated man, and Ben brushed this aside with the observation that all human beings were complicated. Since we were taking the morning plane back to Pomax and could now calculate our expenses, we had decided to allow ourselves a good meal at a sea-food place around the corner from the hotel. It was called Jacksons, and was justly celebrated, and for two and a half dollars apiece, we ate all the fish and chowder we could contain. Finished and sitting back with our cigars, I told Ben that it was much more important to know what he thought of us.

“That's no mystery,” Ben said. “He hated our guts.”

“Wait a minute, Ben—that's a hell of an observation.”

“Why? Isn't it true?”

“No. I was there too.”

“You've got to get over the beautiful glow of being invited to the White House and being talked at by the President of the United States.”

“Well, there's certainly no question of how you feel about him. I grant that.”

“What would you like, Al?” Ben shrugged. “You want me to love him? Did he ever do a day's work—I mean with his hands? That kind of Harvard aristocrat cuts no ice with me. He disliked me, and I disliked him. I prefer it that way. It's plain and clean and simple that way, and I don't intend to be loused up in any adoration-of-the-leader movement. As far as he is concerned, I'm a thick-necked coal miner, minus a haircut, wearing a suit five years out of style and a pair of four-dollar shoes. Not in a hundred years would he invite me to his house to do anything but fix the furnace, and I'm damned if I enjoy being at the receiving end of that long nose of his.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because it might be easier if you liked him.”

“Like hell it would. Let me tell you something, Al—we won the biggest victory there today in the past twenty years of mining, and we won it hands down. And, God damn it, we walked in there like men and we walked out of there like men.”

“Then you think we'll get that law?”

“I know we'll get it. We'll get it because he understands coal—and because he realizes that we're both boxed in and there's no other way out.”

Ben was right. Three and a half months later, the right of labor to organize and bargain collectively became a part of the law of the land. But in his own mind, there was never any doubt, and he moved ahead with absolute certainty, gambling everything we had on his faith in the way he had assessed the man in the White House. He had meeting after meeting, in Chicago and again in New York, with the leaders of the National Confederation of Labor, swallowing his contempt for them and pleading, shouting, threatening in the cause of a national labor act. We held interviews with the press, gave out stories on the question, testified before Senate and House committees, and finally, in Ben's house one night, took our own first steps in the direction that had become, almost maniacally, Ben's destiny.

 

7

I remember that night very well, because in the morning of the same day, Andy Lust, the chief of police, arrested a sixteen-year-old boy for theft. The kid's name was Sam Cofferman, and he was one of eleven children of an unemployed miner. He had walked into the grocery, green-goods, and general store that belonged to the Amsterdam Coal Company and had attempted to hold up the owner for the contents of the cash register.

Sam Cofferman was too young, too frightened, and he had a toy gun. Somewhere, he had read that under such circumstances, it did not matter whether the gun was real or not, but the storekeeper had not read the same article, and with the assistance of the clerk, he took the toy gun from Sam and sent for the police. The boy's father, Hank Cofferman, was angry and puzzled—for he was a good father who brought up his kids decently and had attempted to impress upon them that slow death from starvation or undernourishment was better than stolen groceries. Perhaps I have never totally understood this type of reasoning, but it was widespread and it held through the thirties, when it was put to a very severe test. When news of the arrest got to the father, Hank Cofferman came to us. I was with Mark Golden at the time, in Mark's office, and after we heard Cofferman's story, I took the liberty of telling the man that I thought it would come out all right. Mark himself never said a word, only staring at me glumly as I reassured Cofferman about the boy, stating that it would not come to trial and that we could effect his release.