Power (45 page)

The cigar clenched between his teeth, Ben listened and remained silent. I breathed a quiet sigh of relief as Mark went on. “But there's still a good deal in what Ben says. The Miners Union is an industrial union, and if we argued all night, it wouldn't change the fact. We're not interested in dynamiters who work in oil fields or marble quarries—if dynamiters work in those places. We're interested in dynamiters who work in coal mines because they're members of our union, and if you were to organize a dynamiters' union, we'd fight you tooth and nail before we'd let you set foot in the coal fields. The same with steam shovels and bulldozers. There's a craft union to cover those operators, but when a man operates a steam shovel in a strip mine, he's got to be a member of the Miners Union or he doesn't work. The same with the mechanics who operate the breakers—they hold their books in the Miners Union. So the plain fact of the matter is that we have an industrial union and it works. So if you take us in, you take in an industrial union.”

“Now is there any argument about that?” Clement smiled. “If you set up a straw man, you got to knock him over. I say forget about straw men and let's get down to business.”

“Mark didn't finish,” Ben said.

They looked at Mark, who said, “That's part of it. It doesn't end there. Ben has an idea, and it's been driving him. I think it's the biggest idea in the world, but let him tell it.”

We all looked at Ben, who put down his cigar now and composed himself to be amiable, simple, and winning. It was not easy, but he did it and told them, “It's an idea, and it's big. It's not new—no idea this big is new, but it sticks up on the horizon now, and it's inescapable. Here it is. Today, in the United States, there are twenty million unorganized workers. I say organize them—into industrial unions like our union, the automobile workers into one great auto union, the rubber workers into a rubber union, the steelworkers into a steel union. Each industry into one great union cutting across every craft in that industry. The steel industry in particular is a life-and-death matter to us. You know how many coal mines the big steel companies own. It cripples us to try to negotiate with an industry that's half union and half open shop. But think of what happens when they're organized, unions so big that nothing on earth could shake them—packing-house workers, agricultural workers, glass-workers—great God Almighty, we'd have a labor movement then like nothing the world ever dreamed of! That's the idea I came here with. I can't do it—no one can do it except you. But you can. You have the resources, the money, the trained organizers, the prestige, and by golly, if you play your cards right, you'll have the President of the United States behind you. What do they say—that there's nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has arrived? Something like that. I tell you, you can do it—we can do it! Just agree to do it, and I bring the International Miners Union into the Confederation. Four hundred and fifty thousand miners. Men with a record of struggle that goes back a hundred years. A year from today, we'll have a million dollars in our treasury—five years from today a strike and organizational fund of ten million dollars and a union that's like an iron-ribbed ship. Will you do it? Will you shake hands on that?”

I had never heard Ben talk more simply, more directly, more eloquently. If ever he spoke from his heart and to the single point he believed in, it was then. He opened himself. He dropped his defenses. You forgot the girth, the sagging cheeks, the gray hair, and you listened to a young man on fire with his dreams.

You did and you didn't. They didn't. They listened to him. They heard him through, and then they sat in a silence that stretched on and on, until finally Fulton Grove cleared his throat and said, “I know him. I told you those would be his conditions.”

Myron Stillman sighed deeply. “Ben,” he said tiredly, “you knew what we would ask you. We knew what you would ask us. Why do you make things so difficult? Here, we're union brothers. We don't have to make things difficult for each other. We want you and your union in the Confederation. You belong to us. Come to us. That's all.” He belched and apologized. “I ate too much. It was the spirit of the evening.”

But the spirit, as he called it, had fled. Arnold Clement tried to ease the tension and prove to Ben that you could not organize factory workers. “We'll end up broke, Ben—all of us, you, us—all of us.”

“Broke! Arnold, for Christ's sake, you've got fifty million dollars in your treasury, and you tell me that you'll end up broke!”

“That fifty million dollars—and it's only forty-five million, not fifty—it's the heartblood of our organization. We're not the owners of that money. We are trustees, in a manner of speaking. And what is that kind of money, Ben, when you set out on a national organizational drive? How far will it go with twenty million workers? A few national strikes—”

“I organized the miners with twenty cents!” Ben said.

“Miners, Ben, miners. An auto worker is something else—hillbillies out of West Virginia and Kentucky who decided to get jobs in Detroit instead of starving in their scrubby hills—that's what your auto worker is. Are you going to organize some dumb Polack who hits a cow over the head with a hammer in a slaughterhouse? Is that your idea of trade-union material? I wasn't born yesterday, Ben. I've been around. I've worked with the lumberjacks up in the Northwest—crazy, wild-eyed bums—you going to make unions there? Or those niggers they're taking on in steel? You going to take some big, black ignorant buck out of Georgia or Alabama and make him into a trade unionist? Ben, you're dreaming. We can't afford dreams. We're practical men—labor leaders. That's why we are where we are. That's why we have three and a half million members. We have a lifetime of experience at this kind of thing, we're no mavericks. Myron here has put fifty years of his life into this organization—that's experience, Ben. That talks.”

“You wanted an answer,” Ben said thinly. “Now give me an answer. Do we have anything to discuss?”

“Not unless you change your conditions, Ben.”

“They don't change. Not so long as I'm alive.”

“There's no hurry, Ben. This is a nice place. Why don't you boys make up your minds to join us here for a week or two? Let the sun loosen the tensions. Live a little. We can take our time, and after a few weeks of relaxation here, you'll see things differently, believe me. You'll be our guests. It won't cost you a nickel. I'm no chaser, but it never hurts to vary the diet a little. There are some broads down here you'll feel absolutely no pain with. Then we talk easy instead of trying to decide everything in one night. What about it, Ben?”

Ben was sitting on the couch. Now he rose, towering over them. “Mark, Al,” he said, “let's get out of here. Let's get out of here before I say something to these pricks that I'm likely to regret.”

As we rose, Joe Briggs stumbled to his feet and advanced on Ben, yelling that no one was going to call him a prick and get away with it. Ben hit him. I know that Ben had some rough times when he was young, but this was the only time I ever saw Ben hit a man in all the years I was with him. Briggs collapsed onto the floor and sat there, a dazed expression on his face, his nose bleeding all over the inch-thick Carmine Plaza carpet.

We left Miami the following morning, after being awakened by the Associated Press at 5
A.M.
I declined to make any statement and refused to let them speak to Ben. To get free of the hotel, we had to push our way through a bank of reporters. How the story got out, I don't know, but the morning papers carried the headline:
BEN HOLT BELTS JOE BRIGGS. LABOR SPLIT BY ONE-PUNCH KNOCKOUT.
Like most headlines, it was somewhat less than accurate. You have to join something to split from it.

 

22

For the first hour on the plane, Ben sat and brooded in silence. Then, suddenly, he said, “They patronized us. Those lousy bastards patronized us.”

“So they patronized us,” Mark agreed. “The hell with it! Forget it.”

“How old is that suit you're wearing?” Ben asked me.

“I told you that once before.”

“We look like slobs—all of us.”

“Ben, knock it off,” Mark said wearily. “So we look like slobs.”

“There's no use telling ourselves we don't live in the same world they live in,” Ben reflected. “We do. Maybe nothing could have changed the way it ended, but if you ask me, we got Pomax written all over us. We think like Pomax and we act like Pomax.”

“What are you telling me, Ben?” Mark asked mildly. “That we have to think big?”

“We're not small-town boys, Mark. That's what I'm telling you.”

“All right. We're not small-town boys. We're important. We're a lot more important than those creeps at the Carmine Plaza. They're dead, and they don't know it.”

“Maybe we're alive and we don't know it,” Ben said.

“Maybe.”

“What have you got on your mind, Ben?” I asked him.

“We've got to get out of Pomax and we've got to act like what we are.”

“How do you do that?”

“We can pay ourselves what we're worth, for one thing. It's time we did.”

“All right,” Mark nodded. “How much are we worth?”

“I'm going to take fifteen thousand a year,” Ben said. “You take ten. We'll give Al eight.”

There was no response to that, and after a while, Ben said, “Well—what about it?”

“You're doubling your pay, Ben,” Mark said.

“So I'm doubling it. Am I worth it?”

“You're worth it,” Mark said. “I'm not worth ten thousand a year. I don't want it.”

“You're out of your mind. If I went to any big-time firm of lawyers, they'd ask for a retainer of twenty thousand dollars before they touched our business.”

“I suppose so. But I'm not a big-time firm of lawyers. I make five thousand dollars a year now, and I'm paid each week. It's enough. I'll tell you when I need more.”

“Al, what do you think?”

“I'm not thinking, Ben,” I shrugged. “You want fifteen thousand a year, that's your problem and you solve it.”

He solved it. In March, a month later, he raised his pay to fifteen thousand dollars a year. The following year, he increased it to twenty-five thousand dollars a year.

PART
VI

1

On a cold, bleak December afternoon, in 1937 in Washington, D.C., I met Mark Golden and Lena Kuscow at the offices of Kollman and Watts, a real-estate firm. Mark and Lena had been in Washington for the past week, trying to find and buy a building to house the headquarters of the International Miners Union. Failing in that, Mark made arrangements to rent a building as our temporary headquarters. A year later, plans were drawn for a new building, the one which today houses the union.

Kollman and Watts were the real-estate brokers through whom Mark had been working. We met there because I had been sent on an errand to Washington to buy Dorothy Holt a house. This was almost, but not entirely, as bald as it sounds.

Nineteen thirty-seven had been a tumultuous year. The country was still in the grasp of the great depression, and from coast to coast there had been an endless series of violent strikes against falling wages and bad working conditions. Almost all of these strikes had been wildcat affairs in nonunion industries, and now they had culminated in an enormous sit-down movement in the auto industry in Detroit. Thousands of workers in the biggest plant in the industry had laid down their tools, stopped the assembly line, declared a strike, and refused to leave the plant. Other auto workers, who had put together a thin skeleton of a union, sent a desperate plea to Ben to come and give them the benefit of his leadership and experience. Nine days before Christmas, he left for Detroit, telling me,

“Al, there's no way out of this and there's no way to make up to Dotty for the fact that I won't be spending Christmas with her and the kids. But there's one thing I want to do if it's humanly possible. For years now, I've been talking to Dorothy about moving the International from Pomax to Washington. Mark's down there now trying to find a building. Tell him to wind that up just as soon as he can, because I want him and you too in Detroit with me. This thing in Detroit is the biggest thing in the history of labor in this country, and if we come out of it on top, we've got what I always dreamed of—the beginning of a new kind of an association of industrial unions. But I must have Mark there with me—I need him, do you understand?”

I said that I understood. I understood better than he imagined.

“All right. Now here's what you do. Take a plane to Washington, and find a house for Dotty and me and the kids. A good house, useful, pretty, in the kind of a neighborhood Dotty would like. You have good taste, and you know what I mean.”

“You're not serious,” I said.

“I'm serious, Al. I don't mean for you to go ahead and buy the house. Just select one and get a good, large photo of it, so that I can give the photo to Dorothy for Christmas. Maybe she won't like it—”

“Ben, would any woman want a house someone else had picked out without even consulting her?”

“You're making too much of it. It's a gesture—a thought. If she doesn't want it, she'll find another house. We have plenty of time. But I want the picture—and then I want you and Mark in Detroit.”

Thereby, I was in Washington, sitting with Mark and Lena in the offices of Kollman and Watts, and going through a stack of glossy photographs of houses for sale, disgusted with myself, and not unaware of what we might expect from Dorothy Holt when the harebrained scheme was revealed to her. She would be infuriated, hurt, and bewildered, angry at Ben and despising me. I decided that I would deserve her contempt.