Power (7 page)

“These evictions were carried out by hired detectives, the local authorities being unwilling to take the measures requested of them. An argument between these hired operatives and the local sheriff, James D. Flecker, resulted in the death of twelve operatives. Here, in this mountain hide-out, I have just been shown the bodies of fifteen persons, ten miners, a woman, and four children. It is alleged by Mr. Holt that these fifteen persons were killed in reprisal for the deaths of the operatives, and he bluntly accuses the mine operators of a planned campaign of murder and terror against the miners.

“Whatever the truth of this assertion, neither Mr. Holt nor the miners are taking the situation lying down. Well over a thousand armed miners are gathered at this hide-out, and they have sworn that they will defend themselves and their families to the death.

“‘We did not ask for this,' Benjamin Holt said. ‘It was thrust on us. Rest assured, we will defend ourselves.'

“Events have proved that Mr. Holt is not someone to be taken lightly. He has a vital, magnetic personality, and appears to command the total devotion of the coal miners. When I pressed for his motivations, he insisted that he had none apart from the welfare of the miners. Nevertheless, it should be noted that in the brief time during which he has been head of the union, he has managed to raise his yearly salary from three thousand to five thousand dollars. He is a well-educated and articulate man, but it remains to be seen whether he will accept conditions of warfare as a solution to his problems. If he does, then it may be that we are on the verge of actual armed conflict here in this state, for on both sides armies are gathering. When you have thousands of angry men under arms only a few miles from each other, then an incident is inevitable. This is something that only time will tell.”

Laura did not interrupt me while I was reading, and when I had finished, she stared at me in bewilderment. “You don't believe those things you wrote there, do you, Mr. Cutter?”

“I wrote it.”

“With your tongue in your cheek, Mr. Cutter?”

“Now that was uncalled for,” I protested. “You keep regarding me as a member of your faction. I told Mr. Holt otherwise. I am not here under any false pretenses.”

“You certainly are not!”

“Yet I wrote what I saw.”

“Did you? Is it only alleged that our people were murdered by the detectives? Who else murdered them? Did we, Mr. Cutter? And do you really think that the operators have the right to evict us from our homes when the mood takes them, simply because we have no leases?”

“The legal right, yes.”

“And who gave them this legal right, Mr. Cutter? Aren't there any moral rights?”

“You're putting me in a position that's unfair. I can't judge this thing. I can't judge its background. I'm not equipped to.”

“No. Not even to approve of starvation—or to disapprove.”

“That's not fair, Miss McGrady.”

“I am not trying to be fair, Mr. Cutter, any more than you tried to be fair.”

She would have it that way, and there was no moving her. If she did not convince me that it was necessary to change my story, I did at least decide to put off filing it until the following day. During the rest of the afternoon, I wandered around the farm, observing the preparations being made as the small army came into existence.

I spoke with Ben Holt once more, after the supper meal, which was as thin and unsatisfying as lunch had been. He acknowledged that Laura had told him about my story.

“Do you want to read it?” I asked him.

“No—no, Cutter. I don't want to read it. Write what you see, if that's the way you feel about it. I hear you feel that raising my wages from three to five thousand dollars is ambitious.”

“I remarked on it. It's a news item. Am I wrong in thinking that no coal miner ever makes five thousand a year?”

“I'm not a coal miner now, Cutter. I'm president of the union. If I live like a coal miner and act like a coal miner, I'm no damn good to them, am I?”

“I don't know, Mr. Holt. From what I've seen of their lives, I'd break my back not to be a miner.”

“Oh? Then maybe we should both thank God they don't feel that way. This country lives on coal or dies without it, Cutter—don't ever forget that. It eats coal the way we eat this stew, but it's nourished better. Someday, you'll understand that. Someday, I am going to take you into a coal mine. You'll open your eyes.”

“I didn't tell you, Mr. Holt,” I said slowly, “but there was some talk back in Clinton about arresting you and charging you with the deaths of those Fairlawn operatives. A man called Fulton Oswick was pushing for it. Do you know him?”

“I know him,” Holt smiled.

“And here in West Virginia—ultimately, I mean—will you win, Mr. Holt?”

“We'll win,” he said.

 

15

So I have set down, relying on yellowed clippings, old notebooks, and a memory far less dependable, the beginnings of my friendship with Benjamin R. Holt—a friendship that was to continue for the next eighteen years, when it was at least in part dissolved by certain events. I call it a friendship; others might call it something else. There were times when we needed each other, which makes for friendship of a sort, but there were more times when he needed me. Yet if I left him, I returned to him, so it may be that my need was the larger one.

I look at him through my memory somewhat differently than I regarded him then, thirty-nine years ago. His tolerance was calculated, which I did not know. He despised me, but he wanted a newsman to see things from his side, and I was the only reporter available. Yet to this day, I know no more about his real feeling for the miners than I knew then; and it is possible that he never knew much more than I did about that particular subject. What he felt about them then, at that moment, up on Fenwick Crag, was something he could hardly have stated more clearly than I could. Certainly he knew and comprehended entirely the sheer madness of the war that was shaping up between the armed miners and the growing army of private operatives, but he also knew exactly how far he would proceed with that war, and I did not. Years later, discussing it at a moment when his guards were down and when he was as relaxed as he ever became, I asked him what his purpose was. “You knew,” I said to him, “that you were moving toward the edge of madness—toward a tragedy so enormous that nothing exists for comparison.”

“I knew that,” he agreed. “When it finished, Al, we had six thousand men under arms. They had almost two thou sand opposing us. That makes for a pretty large war. I took a calculated risk there—a large one, but calculated.”

“Why?” I asked him. “To what end? You knew it would be called.”

“You don't understand, do you, Al?”

I told him I didn't—not then, not when it first happened.

“Because you don't understand coal, Al—and coal is the key to all of it. When you mine silver or gold, you are mining something which man values for its scarcity and which possesses all the fake values of scarcity. When you mine coal, you mine power, power—every kind of power, steam and gas and electricity. That black filth is the soul of our civilization, or of the farce that we like to call civilization, and without it civilization curls up and dies. Power. Coal is power and the key to coal is power. I learned that, and I never forgot it, and down there in West Virginia, it was stripped naked. I pushed the scenery out of the way and let them see the stage as it really was. They never talk to miners except in terms of life and death. I let them see that we could talk back in the same terms.”

“And if it had been war, Ben?”

He shrugged. “I play it by ear,” he smiled. “There's no use going back and trying to play it any other way.”

 

16

I said before that Laura became my wife, and while this is Ben Holt's story, there's still the end to what happened in West Virginia. My own involvement in that situation played out on the following day. Early in the morning, I was awakened by rifle fire, after no more than an hour of sleep; for I had slept in the open, shivering in one threadbare blanket. I learned that the first or outer guards, stationed about a mile down the road, had been attacked by a car of operatives out of Clinton. The detectives had then retreated two miles, where they made a stand, sending back to Clinton for reinforcements. By the time I began to move in the direction of the firing, a small but very real battle was in progress. A first-aid station had been set up about a mile from the farm. When I reached it, it contained four wounded men and a woman who had been shot in the right lung. The woman was Laura McGrady, and the bullet had caught her when she went down to the fighting to try to help those in need of first aid. She was badly hurt, and the other women at the first-aid station were of the opinion that she would die unless she was taken to a hospital. The nearest hospital was at Charleston, almost fifty miles away, and the road was blocked by the operatives.

It was my idea that if we put her in a car and I drove, the operatives would let us through. I argued that they would not kill a newspaperman, and that since they did not know what my influence with the
Mail
was—very little, in all truth—they would not make themselves responsible for a woman's death in my presence. Ben Holt had come on the scene then, and he disagreed. Laura's mother tipped the balance, and Laura's father agreed with her. Holt could hardly persist in his objections. He had too much of a debt to the McGradys. He gave in, and I got the car. Laura's mother came with us, and firing on our side was suspended to give us a better chance.

I approached the roadblock slowly in an old Ford draped with white rags, and then for fifteen minutes I talked as I never had talked before. I told them that Laura was dying, something I believed at the time, and that I would hold them responsible for her death. I pleaded, cajoled, and threatened, and finally they let us through.

There is little to tell after that. I drove to Charleston, put Laura in the hospital, found a room for her mother, filed two stories I wrote while waiting at the hospital for some news of Laura's condition, and then slept the clock around when I heard that she was out of danger and would recover.

I remained in Charleston for the next three weeks, the time Laura was in the hospital. During those three weeks, Ben Holt's forces swelled to six thousand men, an army that was ready to break the siege on Fenwick Crag and move in to occupy Clinton.

But the United States Army moved in first, occupying the town and the surrounding area. The miners were disarmed. Ben Holt and his IMU organizers got over the mountains to where a car was waiting for them, and then out of the state. The charges against them were eventually dropped. Jim Flecker and his deputies met violent deaths during the next twelve months, but who their killers were was never established.

Almost fifteen years were to pass before the West Virginia miners had a coal union.

PART
II

1

October 14, 1958

M
Y DEAR
A
LVIN:

Back here in Ringman, in Father's house, it is hard to believe that time has had its way with all of us. These are the good autumn days, the trees gold and red and brown, and from Father's study window, the great hump at Mt. Babcock is such a pile of beauty that it quite takes one's breath away. At first, the big old house was rather somber and musty, but Norah and her three children spent the summer here, and there is nothing like three high-spirited grandchildren to drive the smell of death and decay out of a place. Ben, Jr., was with us for two weeks, and I think his children were quite happy during that time, but his Susan and I are not as compatible as we might be. I always said that I would never be a typical mother-in-law, but that, I am afraid, is a pit no one truly avoids.

Now I am alone, but not lonely, if you understand, and I think you do. In any other place, it would be different, but I feel that I belong here in Ringman and certainly I am quite content.

Father's death was not such a blow, even coming as it did only a few weeks after Ben passed away. Father was a very old man—I am myself going to have a sixty-first birthday, in case you have forgotten—and the years were better to him than to most. I felt the pangs of his passing, but not real grief; and perhaps after watching me, dry-eyed at Ben's funeral, you will think me coldhearted. I wish it had been otherwise, Alvin; love and closeness are worth all the pain of the ultimate sorrow, and nothing death brings to those who survive is as bitter as to stand by the grave and know that the man who lies there is almost a stranger. No, not a stranger. You will know what I mean—I think you remember it all only too well—and the three weeks I then spent in the house in Washington were my own punishment. Father's death rescued me, not from grief, but from the loneliness and and the hopelessness that I remained with there in Washington. I had to go to Ringman; there were things to be taken care of, not the least of them, the house. I decided not to sell it, but to live here—and I think you will understand when I tell you that during the months since then, living here, I have been closer to Ben than during most of the twenty-five years before his death.

How strange, now, that you should want me to tell you about myself and Ben in the beginning! That was so long ago—another time and another world, and I wonder who will care now or be interested?

Not that you shouldn't be writing the book. Books were written about Ben while he lived, and I suppose other books will be written about him now that he is dead, and there are two professors at the University of Pennsylvania who say they will spend the next five years on a scholarly and definitive work about him. I have a letter from them, asking for material and my co-operation, and I see no reason to refuse. We both know what Ben's reaction would have been, but I see no harm in it. Nowhere in any of these books is there anything of Ben as he was, only what he did and the results of what he did, and there is no reason to think that this new scholarly book will be any different. But in your case, you want to write about Ben—and that makes it terribly hard, doesn't it? Because loving both Ben and me as you did—how much can you tell, truly?