Power (44 page)

“Ben—I know and you know, and that's what matters. We know exactly what these so-called ‘leaders of labor' are. We don't have to instruct ourselves and we don't have to instruct them or reform them. We're here for a purpose, and we stick to that. Will you promise me?”

Like a boy reprimanded gently by an indulgent father, Ben nodded. It was late afternoon now, and as we cleaned up, Mark told us that in all probability, we would be meeting with a sub-committee of four: Fulton Grove, who was a vice-president in line for the presidency at the next convention; Myron Stillman, whom the newspapers fondly referred to as “the grand old man of the labor movement” and who was seventy-six and bordering on senility and asked no more of life than to be permitted to sun himself at Miami for six months out of every year and play cards in his poshy New York apartment for the other six months; Joe Briggs, the oversized and not too bright president of the Woodworkers Union, who was reputed to be the richest man in labor if not the most honest and who was roundly despised by most of his membership; and finally, Arnold Clement, shrewd, calculating and tactically brilliant.

Stillman was the president of the Confederation, the other three were vice-presidents. Clement would have been in line for the presidency when Stillman retired—as he did at the coming convention—but since Clement had been mixed up with the Left a quarter of a century back, putting him outside the pale of the Confederation's requirements of respectability, and since Joe Briggs was as short on brains as he was long on size, Fulton Grove remained with aspirations and the best possibilities.

Mark held that Clement was the one to be convinced, Grove the one to be mollified. Briggs would go as the other two led, and Stillman, at worst, would fall into a patter of nonsense, which Ben was not to take umbrage at.

“Mark, stop worrying. I know that old idiot twenty years. He once said I was like a son to him.”

“He's a nice old gaffer, Ben, if you don't get him started worrying about his bonus and retirement pay. He believes he's going to live forever, and he doesn't want the organization defaulting on any of his pension checks. Fulton Grove, on the other hand, is something else indeed. You always considered Fulton a stupid prick—”

“Just a prick,” Ben shrugged.

“He's not stupid, and he has a sharp eye on the presidency. He's going to play everything safe and careful, and he won't want to play ball with us. So don't rile him, Ben.”

But when we met them, an hour later, on the terrace for cocktails, I could see that control was going to be a problem for Ben. It began well enough, and the introductions were pleasant, and each one of the four went out of his way to praise Ben's conduct of the organizational drive and to express his amazement at the results. Old Stillman said that he had known all along that Ben was destined to be a great labor leader, and he said that Ben was just like a son to him. But when Ben tried to get started on the business of the meeting, they pushed it aside and said that now was the time for relaxation. Business could come later. Then they ordered drinks.

The repeal of Prohibition the year before had not changed Ben's drinking habits. He had never been a heavy drinker, usually satisfied with a single drink before dinner except on those rare occasions when he tied on a load because at the moment he happened to hate the world too much to face it sober, and when he chose his drinks, he preferred bourbon. I had seen him drink everything from sugar alcohol to cut scotch, but he always returned to corn whisky. Now they ordered scotch for him, explaining that it was the thing to train his taste, since we no longer lived with cheap bootleg hooch. It was bad enough to order Ben's drink; when they talked about training his taste, I thought it was all over. But Mark leaped into the gap, and I kicked Ben and said a lot of quick, foolish things.

At dinner in the hotel dining room, they started the meal with cold lobster, with prime T-bone steaks to follow. Ben, who had built his shell of diamond-in-the-rough over a very solid core of education, experience, and sophistication, was sufficiently amused by the pretensions at work to suppress any comments on gluttony or extravagance. Clement considered himself a connoisseur of wines, basing his talent on three trips to Europe to attend international conventions, and he ordered champagne with the lobster and sparkling burgundy with the meat, three bottles of each at about ten dollars a bottle. Stillman did not enjoy the wine; he said it tasted like bad soda pop, but Joe Briggs poured it down a glass at a gulp, his great, sagging paunch apparently bottomless. Mark Golden, always in middling health and always watching his ulcers, only sipped at the wine. When Clement had urged him several times, Mark admitted that he had never faced just this combination of wines before, and that it took a while to come up to it. Clement said that Prohibition had robbed Americans of any real taste for wines. Europeans would no more sit down to a meal without wines than a meal without bread.

“I don't know,” old Stillman sighed, covering his mouth as the gas erupted. “I like this hotel, but the food is too rich, I think.” He belched again. “My doctor tells me to stay away from rich food, but a funny thing about getting on with the years, it don't do nothing to my appetite. How is your appetite?” he asked Ben.

“It stands up,” Ben said.

“If anything, I think I get a little more appetite with age.”

“My idea,” Joe Briggs said, “is to hold the next convention down here. I'm fed up with Atlantic City—up to the neck with it. Compared with this place, it's a monastery. I mean that I've had a bellyful of those run-down middle-aged broads who hang out at Atlantic City. I'll tell you something, Ben, this here place is a quail run. Just stand in the lobby and hold out a twenty-dollar bill, and they'll fall over each other as they come running. Beautiful. They got broads here that are the nicest things you ever laid eyes on. They got broads you wouldn't be ashamed to say was your own daughter—”

“Shut up,” Clement said wearily.

“What the hell is eating you?”

“One thing, no fights at dinner,” old Stillman told them. “No fights, no business, no arguments. Dinner is to be enjoyed. Relax. You'll live as long as me.”

For dessert, we had baked Alaska as big as a watermelon, and then brandy. I watched Mark Golden staring glumly at the parade of courses. His face was drawn, the hollows under his eyes darker than ever. His strength was limited enough, and he had used it all during the organizing drive, and now there was no resiliency. It happened with age. The trade-union movement could be a place where you lived forever, as Myron Stillman intended to do, or a place where you were old and used up all too quickly. I tried to remember how old Mark was—fifty-six, fifty-seven—he couldn't be that old, I told myself, not so quickly. By contrast, it was a fairly youthful man I remembered from the days when I first came to Pomax.

Finally, it was decided that we would go up to Stillman's suite and talk. I don't think Ben could have stood it much longer. Usually possessed of a very substantial appetite, he had eaten little and left the drinks almost untasted. That was not good. Food calmed his nerves. I would have felt better if he had stuffed himself.

We went up to Stillman's suite. He had a bedroom and a living room. Fulton Grove explained to me that because of the old man's age, they felt that he ought to be comfortable. A sort of tribute to his years of service at seventy-five dollars a day, with windows overlooking the ocean and a carpet on the floor an inch thick. He turned on the radio for us—a cabinet set that came with the room for only four dollars a day extra—so that we might appreciate its fine tone, while Carlton phoned down for setups. Joe Briggs pulled big armchairs up to the couch; as he said, we could talk better if we were not seated hard on the ass. When Ben took out one of his five-cent miner's consolations, they set up a howl and pressed a box of fifty-cent pure Havanas on him. He could hardly refuse. As Myron Stillman said,

“In a brotherly gesture, Ben, we share things. We sit here like brothers. Isn't it better we should discuss things like this, here in comfort, our stomachs full, our brains rested, with a fine environment like this around us? What could your heart desire now?”

“Only a good heart-to-heart talk,” Ben agreed, as he lit the cigar. He was working every muscle in his body to be amiable and gracious.

“And that's exactly what we're here for. Suppose we let Brother Arnold Clement tell you what we have in mind.”

We all knew exactly what they had in mind, but Ben nodded pleasantly, and we sat back as Brother Arnold Clement said to us,

“It's no secret to anyone here that we've had our differences in the past. My word, you couldn't run a movement like this without differences cropping up every day. But that's in the past. I say, forget the past, bury the hatchet. If you and Fulton haven't always seen eye to eye, well, that's over and done with. If you and I have had our arguments, well, we're both a little older, a little wiser. The past is done. Do you agree?”

“You couldn't say anything to make me happier,” Ben smiled.

Stillman said, “What did I tell you? Ben is like a son to me. He always has been like a son to me.”

“The long and short of it is this,” Clement continued. “You've performed a major miracle, Ben. You took a union that was written off and built it into one of the strongest unions in America. Our collective hat is off to you for that, and we could think of only one practical way of expressing our admiration. We're here to extend a hearty invitation to you to bring the International Miners Union into the National Confederation of Labor. What do you say to that?”

“You know what I say,” Ben replied. “My position has never changed. I stood for unity twenty-five years ago. I stand for unity today. For fifteen years, I fought tooth and nail against the principle of autonomy in the Miners Union, and I saw that principle tear our union to shreds and bring it to its knees. I rebuilt it—as a united union, and it will remain united. So when you talk to me about unity, I hear you and I agree.”

“Then we take it that speaking for your union, you consent?”

Ben took a deep puff on his cigar and then let the smoke flow slowly from his mouth. “Yes and no,” he answered.

“Yes and no?” Clement smiled. “That's a hell of a note when a straightforward proposal is made.”

“We'll let Ben explain,” Stillman said. “Don't push him. This is no small thing. This is a historic decision Ben is called upon to make.”

“I'm not trying to push Ben,” Clement told the old man. “Hell, anyone who's dealt with Ben Holt knows that you don't push him around.”

Ben leaned forward and said to them, calmly and directly, “I'll tell you exactly what I mean. Mark here, and Al and myself, well, we talked this over pretty thoroughly. We'd have to be kids not to know why you invited us down here; and the fact that we came—and we're still not out of our organizational difficulties, believe me—but the fact that we put everything else aside to fly down here indicates how seriously we take your proposition. But before we can give you a clear answer, I must lay some cards on the table. I don't want anything held back. I want to spread out the dirty wash and identify it. Right?”

Clement studied Ben narrowly, warily, but Stillman said, “Ben, if there's dirty wash, spread it out. I want to look at it.”

“Very well,” Ben nodded. “Let's get down to facts. Your Confederation consists of twenty-two craft unions with a total membership of about three million. Apart from the Miners Union, that's the bulk of organized labor in the United States. You have what amounts to an association of skilled mechanics—using the word in its old sense. You have unions and guilds that consist of plumbers, carpenters, woodworkers, steamfitters, cigar makers—skilled workers who form bits and pieces of an industry. In a shop where ten thousand men are employed under one roof, you might have no more than a hundred who belong to your unions—but the shop itself remains an open shop—”

“We know what a craft union is, Ben,” Fulton Grove said shortly, speaking for the first time.

“Of course you do, but I'm spreading out the dirty wash, as Myron asked me to do.”

“That's your dirty wash?” Clement demanded.

“Let's examine it. Maybe it's clean, but let's take a long, hard look at it. Your Confederation consists of twenty-two craft unions and only craft unions. But the International Miners Union is not a craft union. We include anyone and everyone who sets foot in the mine or the tipple or the breaker, no matter what his job is, no matter how skilled or unskilled he is. The mine is the union and the union is the mine.”

“Ben, Ben,” Clement said with controlled patience, “we've been through this industrial-union argument a hundred times. Why do we have to go through it again? It's not to the point here. You can't organize unskilled labor. You can't organize factory hands. You can't organize the men on an assembly line. They're laborers. You made the distinction yourself, mechanics on the one hand, laborers on the other.”

“And what are diggers?” Ben demanded, his voice hardening.

“You mean miners?”

“I mean diggers,” Ben said. “I mean men who crawl into a black tunnel every day, two, three miles underground, and then with their two hands they load ten tons of coal—”

“They're skilled craftsmen, Ben.”

“Horseshit!” Ben exploded. “That's horseshit, and you know it!”

“Ben, Ben,” Stillman begged, “I said no fights, no arguments. Here, we're trade-union brothers.”

“All right, Ben,” Mark Golden said comfortably and easily, “give yourself a rest and enjoy a good cigar for a change. My life mission,” he explained to the others, “is to ride herd on Ben Holt's temper. And it's a beauty. I earn my dollar, believe me—”