Power (5 page)

 

10

From the appearance of the lobby of the Traveler's Mountainside Hotel, you would have concluded that a convention was in progress. The forsaken hostelry in a forsaken town had come to life with a vengeance, and it swarmed with newspapermen, uniformed state police, and hard-eyed men in plain clothes who carried their left arms awkwardly over a bulge. Every seat in the dining room was taken, and the hotel's small store of cigars and cigarettes had already been exhausted. I met one or two reporters who knew me, and they wanted to squeeze me for what I had seen in the morning, but I was out of cigarettes and I used that as an excuse to put them off until later, pushed through the crowd in the lobby, and crossed the street to the drugstore.

Laura McGrady was just leaving as I entered, and when I removed my straw hat and bowed slightly to her, as politely as I knew how, she shook her head, smiled and said,

“You
are
a strange man, Mr. Cutter.”

“Strange? No, I don't think I am.”

“I'm sorry I was so provoked before. You have every right to be angry with me.”

“I could never be angry with you, Miss McGrady.”

The dialogue sounds strange and stilted and out of another world—which perhaps it was—as I read it now; but it seemed right then, and as she stood there, in front of the store window, she was very beautiful to me, very competent too, very sure of herself. She went on to say that she was glad we had run into each other again, since she had something for me that she had forgotten to give me. I begged her to wait until I bought my cigarettes, and she agreed. When I came out of the store, she gave me a mimeographed booklet containing a biographical sketch of Holt, which I folded and put into my pocket. After all, I had come out to do an interview with Holt, yet I felt let down and irritated. As she moved toward her car, we heard the whistle of an approaching train, and a moment later the light of the night train from Washington appeared in the distance. We paused at the car to watch it come into the station, and then Laura took my arm and whispered,

“Take me over there.”

I walked to the station with her. As she told me, it was rare for the evening train into Clinton to debark one passenger—and more than one almost unheard of; but tonight, an army of men poured out of the train—at least fifty or sixty, I would say, hard men with tight mouths. Seeing men like that in New York, where I had seen plenty of the same, I would have said that they were cheap hoodlums, two-bit punks and gangsters on the make and the climb; but they looked different here in this small mountain village, ominous and different and frightening. We neither of us spoke as we watched them, and when they were all off the train, standing on the platform in clusters and waiting for whoever had ordered them and would pay for them and meet them, Laura touched my arm and nodded, and we walked back to the car. The night, suddenly, was thick with fear, and I said that if she was afraid, I would ride back with her and spend the night at the camp.

“Afraid?”

“People are afraid.”

“I'm not afraid, Mr. Cutter. Not at all. Good night.” She had taken the crank handle and was moving to crank the car herself. I convinced her that I could perform at least that kind of service, and then I watched her drive off into the night.

On the porch of the hotel, I ran into Mayor Macintosh arguing with two men, one of them in the uniform of the state police. The other was a tall, vital-looking man with iron-gray hair. This one was saying to the mayor,

“No, sir, I will not lay it all on Sheriff Flecker. That's too easy, sir. I say that the man behind these killings is Ben Holt, and that he's the man we want. He has come into a peaceful, prosperous community, and he has brought us disruption, agony, and death. That's plain enough, Mayor.”

“Not when we have as many witnesses as we do to what actually happened,” the mayor protested. “This man”—pointing to me—”is a reporter from a New York newspaper. He witnessed the fight. Am I right, Mr. Cutter?”

I admitted that he was right, and he introduced me to Captain Sedge of the state police and to the tall man with the iron-gray hair, Fulton Oswick, a coal operator, the largest in the valley.

“The hell with what he saw,” Oswick said quietly and without anger, divesting his words of any offense they might have held for me. “He only saw the man who pulled the trigger. Don't tell me about hiring a gun, Mayor. I can give you lessons, as you know. We're talking about the man who hired the gun, and I think we both know who he is. He owes me something. Twelve lives. I got to collect. I want a warrant for Ben Holt's arrest.”

“I just can't put my signature to such a warrant,” Macintosh said stubbornly. “If you want a warrant for Flecker, that's something else. I'd have to think about that too, but that's something else.”

“Where is Flecker?” Captain Sedge demanded. “He's your responsibility, Macintosh. You should have put him under arrest.”

“How?” I began to revise my first opinion of Macintosh. He stood up to them. “How would I put Flecker under arrest? Would I arm myself? Shoot it out in a gun battle? I'm only asking you gentlemen to be reasonable.”

“Isn't that after the fact?” Oswick demanded. “I can't remember a killing like this in the whole damn country, not ever. Twelve men shot dead. And you ask us to be reasonable.”

“I hate to say this, Mr. Oswick,” Macintosh said, forcing up the words, his face reddening, “but there was killing on the books once you sent those Fairlawn detectives in here. Now you're bringing in a whole army. There's got to be killing.”

“And I got to protect my property!” Oswick snapped.

“I agree to that,” Macintosh nodded. “But I'm mayor of Clinton. No coal operators live here, only miners. It's a mining town. I'm hung onto that, Mr. Oswick. How long do you think I'll last once I sign a warrant for Ben Holt's arrest?”

“I'll give you all the protection you need,” Captain Sedge told him.

“Protection. We got the worst trouble this county ever saw, and you talk about protection.”

I left them then, and pushed through the crowded lobby and went up to my room. It had been a long day, and I was tired.

 

11

After I got into bed, I smoked a cigarette and contemplated the situation in Clinton and tried to make sense out of it and to understand how it was moving and where. My own neutrality put me in an ambiguous position. I was twenty-two years old and wise to the ways of the world I lived in; but this was by no means that world. Until I met Laura McGrady, I was indifferent to the situation of the miners; my curiosity was limited; and I resented being stuck on an assignment in an out-of-the-way mountain village. Meeting the girl had changed this only slightly. I was impressed with Ben Holt, but if I had gone back to New York the following morning, I would have forgotten him soon enough. I was conscious of forces building up, of conflict preparing itself, but the crux of the situation was confusing and annoying. I admitted to myself that a miner's life in West Virginia was not pleasant, but I felt at the same time that the miners were stupid and doltish—and to some extent deserved exactly what they got. I told myself that no one forced them to be miners and that no one prevented them from picking up and clearing out; and the more I learned about the unbearable poverty and tension of their lives, the less I respected them for enduring those conditions. If they lived in company houses, it was because they had taken the easy way out in the first place, and if they were body and soul in debt to company stores, it was because they did not have enough foresight and thrift to prevent such a situation from arising.

On the other hand, if men like Fulton Oswick used their own power to get what they desired, it was no more than right. Oswick owned the miners' homes; he had the right to say who should or should not live there. He hated the union and he was fighting it in the way he could fight best. If one objected to his action on humane grounds, then one interjected the question of humanity on most unlikely territory. I had not seen humanity or mercy as a profound or effective operational force, and I was not prepared to use it in my arguments with myself.

So my thoughts went. I finished the cigarette and decided that I would write the interview the following morning. But before turning off my light, I read the mimeographed biography of Ben Holt that his union had issued. I kept it and it follows verbatim:

BENJAMIN RENWELL HOLT

For release on April 1, 1920

Biographical notes

In keeping with its tradition, the International Miners Union has elected a coal miner as its new president.

Born on January 14, 1892, in the coal mining town of Ringman, Pa., Benjamin R. Holt is the youngest man ever to hold the presidency of his union. Of a coal-mining family, both his mother and father were of pioneer stock, Scotch-Irish on his maternal side and British and Welsh on his paternal side. His father and grandfather—paternally—were both miners and worked at the same Ringman Pits that Benjamin R. Holt entered at the age of twelve.

Until his twelfth year, Ben Holt was a student at the Ringman elementary school. That he was an extraordinary student is attested to by the fact that he had finished eight grades of primary school when his father's death forced him to enter the mines as the sole support of his widowed mother. There had been two older brothers—both killed in the Harkness cave-in of 1899.

His father was killed in 1904 in the tragic coal-gas explosion which is remembered as the Ringman Massacre. Along with Denby Holt, Ben Holt's father, 181 miners perished in a frightful accident that could have been avoided, had the mine operators only followed a few simple safety precautions that the miners had pleaded for.

Ben Holt has stated that the Ringman Massacre was one of the decisive events of his life. Together with his mother, he stood the deathwatch at the pit head until the last of the bodies was brought to the surface, a matter of over thirty hours. An indelible impression of the conditions under which coal miners worked and died was then left with young Benjamin Holt, who had seen the three men closest to him die in the mines.

During the following four years, Benjamin Holt worked in the pits at Ringman. He has never forgotten those years, for they forged a bond between him and the plain coal miner that can never be broken.

During those years, Ben Holt continued his studies, and at the age of sixteen, he passed the entrance examination for the State University, qualifying for a scholarship. This scholarship, together with the compensation paid by the Ringman Coal Company for his father's death and a part-time job, enabled Ben Holt to get an education and graduate with a college degree and with honors.

Shortly before his graduation, Benjamin Holt was singled out by a distinguished Pittsburgh law firm, with an offer of their support for his legal training and an opening to read law with their house. This, Mr. Holt declined, already determined to devote his life and energy to the betterment of his fellow miners.

A few weeks after his graduation, a second severe blow fell on Benjamin Holt. His mother, who had been his teacher and guide through the years, passed away. Thus, his closest family ties broken, Benjamin Holt decided to leave Ringman. For over a year, he traveled and worked in several western states. But always, his direction led him to share the fortunes of miners, to share and understand their problems. He worked in the gold and silver mines of Arizona. He also worked as a copper miner in Montana. While working as a coal miner in Colorado, he was trapped underground in the great Serpo mine disaster. Thereby, his early experience at Ringman was duplicated with himself as one of the victims.

As he was in the group nearest to the cage, he was one of the seven men rescued alive, and during the next twenty-four hours, he worked to exhaustion with the crew that attempted unsuccessfully to save the miners who perished. Once again, the tragedy that flows from bad working conditions and insufficient safety measures put its stamp upon Benjamin R. Holt.

In the winter of 1915, Benjamin R. Holt returned to Ringman, where he once again entered the mines. A few months later, he married Dorothy Aimesley.

In 1916, Benjamin R. Holt was elected president of the Ringman local of the International Miners Union. The following year, he was elected as the International Union's representative with the National Confederation of Labor, and during the two years he held that post, he worked incessantly to promote legislation, both state and federal, in defense of the coal miners.

His election to the presidency of the International Miners Union was with the largest majority gained by any candidate during the past decade.

 

12

I was up early the following morning, and at work in my room by seven-thirty. The
Mail
, which was among the several good New York City newspapers that did not survive the twenties, was an afternoon paper, and in those days the first edition of an afternoon paper was about an hour later than today. If I could put my story through on the wire at nine o'clock, I would be in time for the presses. I worked in my room, sitting by the window, and I had a clear view across the street to the station. The morning train had brought in another contingent of armed guards, almost a hundred of them by quick count; and they were being served breakfast from a truck converted into a short-order lunch counter of sorts.

My interview story was finished well before nine, and without stopping for breakfast, I filed it at the Western Union office. On my way back to the hotel, I stopped to speak to some of the new batch of detectives, as they termed themselves. But before I could get more than a few words in, a foreman type shouldered me away and demanded to know what in hell I thought I was doing. When I explained who I was, his apology took the form of an assurance that there was no news to be found here.

I objected to that. “When you bring hundreds of armed men into a town like Clinton, it's bound to make news.”