Power (36 page)

 

5

We checked into our hotel, washed, shaved, changed shirts, and took a cab to the White House. We did it all most casually, as if an afternoon at the White House were an ordinary affair with us, but underneath we were as excited and pleased as two kids. We had been a long time at the bottom—a long time focused on the bleak and dreary landscape of Pomax—a long time of losing. There was no guarantee that any tide had changed, but there was hope and anticipation.

We were halted at the big iron gates, our names checked, and then told to proceed. When we got out of the cab in front of the White House, we glanced at each other, suppressed our smiles, and approved of where we were and how we looked. I think we made an interesting pair, myself tall, skinny, carrying a bulging brief case, and Ben a massive pile of a man in his fleshiness, the youthful spring in his step not lessened, hatless, his big head crowned with a thick mop of iron-gray hair, his eyes as blue and coldly appraising as ever. He was forty-one then, myself six years younger, and the newspapers had taken to referring to him as the “brooding, wounded lion of the miners.” But he was neither brooding nor wounded that day, but confident and very much assured in his manner and bearing. When some newspapermen stopped us and asked for a lead on what line or direction the conference would take, Ben shook his head and replied, “No comment,” for all the world like an elder statesman who had been doing nothing else for years. He refused to appear impressed, troubled, or uncertain in any way.

We were rescued from the reporters by Johnson Denny, someone very close to the President, one of a tight circle of presidential assistants, and a man of reputed power and importance. He was just forty at that time, a tall, pipe-smoking man, scholarly in attitude, horn-rimmed glasses, and an air of dedication that was, perhaps, a little overworked at times. He took us into his own office first for a briefing, as he put it. We learned that you did not simply walk in and sit down with the President of the United States. There was a matter of protocol and schedule. He informed us on how the meeting would begin and end, and told us that we had exactly one half hour.

Ben exploded. “The devil you say!” he cried. “I've been waiting fifteen years for this, and you tell me that we have half an hour! We can't even begin to dig into this in half an hour, no, sir, not even a beginning. This is coal, sir! This is something basic to our entire existence!”

“I think the President knows that, Mr. Holt,” Denny said calmly.

“Does he? I think not. Let me tell you this, Mr. Denny. It was not worth our coming here for half an hour. And let me tell you something else. Half a million coal miners will not be impressed with the fact that the President of the United States can't spare more than half an hour for their problems.”

I watched Ben in amazement, nervous at first, and then beginning to realize that his manner produced results. If one man was President of the United States, the other was president of the International Miners Union, and from the very beginning, Ben Holt refused to admit that one job was less important than the other. He reminded Denny that he had supported the President, and he wondered how debonairly a man could deal with half a million votes, not to speak of the women—for he made the point then and there that a miner's wife voted as the miner voted.

“We're old-fashioned people, we miners, Mr. Denny,” Ben said, “and poor people too. It's not often that we can afford a new broom, but by God, when we buy one, we want to know that it sweeps clean.”

“Do you realize that man in there is the busiest man in the world?”

“I do,” Ben said, “and that's why we're here to see him. People with time to kill come to see me.”

Denny spread his hands and nodded. “All right, Mr. Holt. I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll pass a note to the President, mentioning your request that the meeting be extended. Then it will be up to him. If he wants to extend his time, he will. If he doesn't, there is absolutely nothing you and I can do about it. I can tell you this—if you interest him and he sees your problems as vital, the time question will not enter into it. Now, the procedure is this. We will go into his office in exactly five minutes. Understandably, the President will not rise. He will expect you and Mr. Cutter to shake hands with him, and then we will plunge right into the subject, no formalities, no small talk. You will find him a gracious and charming man, and I think you'll be surprised at the breadth of his knowledge. At the same time, he will not hesitate to question anything that may puzzle him. You may answer him frankly and directly.”

“I always do,” Ben said.

Denny wrote the note about the time extension, and we went to the President's office. I had seen many pictures of him, but they did poor justice to his strong, sunburned face. He was young then, filled with vigor, and giving one the impression that he delighted in his impossible and overwhelming job. Yet whatever he desired to make of his manner, he could not exclude a certain haughtiness. As strongly and as warmly as he shook hands, he somehow managed to maintain a curious curtain of separation between himself and the person he spoke to, and if it parted, it never disappeared.

“Sit down, please, gentlemen,” he said, glancing meanwhile at the note Denny had handed him. Then he said to the stenographer, “We'll be off the record until I indicate otherwise. Better that way, I think,” he concluded, glancing at Ben, who was watching him thoughtfully and with great interest. The stenographer was well trained, for I was to observe that a nod of the President's head was sufficient to place us on the record, a slight shake of his head enough to halt it. “I expected Mrs. Goodrich,” he said to Denny, and at that moment she entered, a brisk, sharp-faced gray-haired woman who was the Secretary of Labor. She nodded at the President, and took a chair next to Denny. They sat at one side of the desk, the stenographer at the other, Ben and I facing it.

“Well, Mr. Holt,” the President began, “I've heard a good deal about you. I guess that doesn't surprise you?”

“No, sir, it does not.”

The President smiled and said, “We do have this in common. Between the two of us, we've been called everything under the sun. How much of it was deserved, time will tell, but I suspect that in both cases, there is exaggeration. Sometime, we'll talk about that. Right now, we'll talk about coal.”

“That's what I am here for,” Ben agreed.

“Good. I can see that Mr. Cutter brought a large brief case, so you are probably armed with every fact on coal that one could conceivably require. But let's leave the statistics alone for the moment. If I were to ask you, Mr. Holt, to tell me in very few words what is wrong with the coal industry, how would you reply?”

“The industry is sick,” Ben said shortly.

“But isn't that true of almost every industry in America right now?”

“It is, Mr. President, but for other industries, it's a recent sickness. Ours is chronic. The coal industry has been sick for a hundred years”—the President nodded slightly and the stenographer began to put down Ben's words—”and this depression only sharpens the pains.”

“Why is coal different?” the President demanded.

“Because, sir, mining is different. The very nature of mining makes it singular, and it's always been that way. The miner digs a hole in the earth and crawls into it, and since the first mines were dug five thousand years ago, it's been a dirty, rotten, and different job.”

“That's not to the point,” the President said, with a slight show of irritation. “I want to know why you feel that coal mining today is basically different. You were talking about sickness. What is coal's particular sickness?”

“Slave labor,” Ben said flatly.

“Just what do you mean by that? I don't want slogans, Mr. Holt. Suppose we talk directly to the point.”

“That suits me, sir. The point is this. One of the richest deposits of bituminous coal in the United States, if not in the whole world, lies here in the East. Its northern extremities are the northern borders of western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, and from there it runs southward, through Pennsylvania and Ohio, encompassing most of the state of West Virginia, the whole of eastern Kentucky, a small wedge of Virginia, a thick slice of central Tennessee, and more or less the northern half of the state of Alabama. Now you can divide this vast area of bituminous fields by drawing a line parallel with the southern border of Pennsylvania. North of this line, with varying degrees of success, depending upon the time and the circumstances, we have been able to organize the miners into the union. Thereby, we have been able to maintain a certain level of wages, not very high, not very uniform, but enough for miners to live like human beings when they worked.

“South of this line, with a few exceptions, our union does not exist. The last time we made a large-scale effort to organize miners in this vast area, which stretches from Pennsylvania to Alabama, was in 1920. I went into West Virginia then, with a staff of union organizers, and we were met by armed thugs, whole armies of company police, and every imaginable type of violence. Thousands of coal miners were driven out of their homes, terror was resorted to, and finally an army of miners faced an army of company police, the two sides drawn up in what threatened to be an actual war—”

“Are those the facts?” the President said to Mrs. Goodrich.

“More or less. There was provocation on both sides, and finally army units were sent in to prevent an outbreak of what could have been localized warfare.”

“And since then, Mr. Holt?” the President asked.

“Since then, Mr. President, we have failed in every attempt to organize in the South. The result is that the southern miner is little better than a slave. The fact that he has been reduced to almost indescribable poverty, that he lives more like an animal than a human being, that he never handles cash but spends his existence in debt to the company store, and that he is the constant victim of undernourishment, pellagra, and beriberi—these facts are in the nature of a personal description and condition. They can be put aside. As far as the industry is concerned—”

“They can't be put aside, Mr. Holt,” the President interrupted.

“Sir?”

“I am not used to putting the personal condition of the citizens of this country aside, Mr. Holt.”

They were watching each other and measuring each other. In one way at least, in their manner of imperious command and self-assuredness, they were remarkably alike, but in every other way, they were as apart as the two poles, the President precise, restrained, controlled, his speech meticulous and clean as the bare, shining surface of his desk, his emotions as alert and as calculated as his voice, his interest in Holt dulled by a seed of distaste for the big, vital, fleshy man who faced him—and Ben Holt loose, relaxed, and wary at once, bristling inwardly at the closeness of an aristocrat, sensitive, seeking for an insult, a rejection or an innuendo where none was meant, defensive but unafraid, pulling over himself, bit by bit, now and through the time to come, that fierce, frightening cloak of pride that marked the digger from all others.

“Nor am I,” Ben answered slowly, his voice deepening, his eyes narrowing. “You asked me for the condition of an industry and an explanation of its sickness. What these miners in the South suffer is a badge of shame this whole nation wears; but the same treatment that turns their lives into hell is destroying the American coal industry. In 1928, when we were able to negotiate a contract under union terms, the miner got seven and a half dollars a day—nothing to write home about for the hardest work man has been able to cook up, but enough to keep body and soul together. Today, there isn't a mine in the country where we can negotiate such a contract. Today, it's a great victory to get four dollars a day, and the last operator who signed a four-dollar-a-day contract with me said, ‘Well, Ben, I might as well give you that extra dollar as give it to my creditors. I'll be bankrupt in sixty days anyway.' And he was, Mr. President—bankrupt before the sixty days were up. And why? I will tell you why, sir—because the coal operators in West Virginia and Kentucky and Tennessee and Alabama are paying their miners one dollar and fifty cents a day. Yes, sir, one dollar and fifty cents a day for ten hours of tunnel work. Fifteen cents an hour. There's no colliery in the North that can meet such competition, and within another two years there won't be a northern mine operator who doesn't face bankruptcy.”

There was no immediate reaction to this. The President sat there staring at Ben, and Ben met his look. The silence stretched before the President turned to Mrs. Goodrich and asked,

“Does your information bear this out?”

She riffled a folder on her lap, and said that to the best of her knowledge, southern wages ranged from two-fifty to three dollars a day.

“Can you back up your statement?” the President asked Ben.

Ben glanced at me, and I dug into the brief case. I handed a file to the President, explaining, “Here, sir, are a list of southern collieries employing, roughly, some sixty-seven thousand miners. That is, at peak production. At any given moment, employment figures may be less than one quarter of the total, but the operating personnel can be considered in terms of some sixty-seven thousand available miners. For the past twenty-four months, wages at these collieries have averaged from one dollar and twenty cents a day to one dollar and sixty cents a day—for a workday from eight to eleven hours. As far as the individual worker is concerned, monthly wages average in a spread from twelve dollars to seventeen dollars. We use the spread to compute our averages, since it gives a better picture than the single figure. You will find there the names of the collieries, the names of the owners, so far as we can determine, and the numbers of workers at minimum to full employment.”

The President's face was like stone as he opened the file and began to examine it. Mrs. Goodrich rose and stood next to him, looking over his shoulder. Denny glanced at his watch, scribbled a note and passed it to the President, who brushed it aside and shook his head angrily. Denny rose and tiptoed out of the room, and as the President and Mrs. Goodrich went over my figures, the silence deepened, broken only by the metallic ticktock of a tall clock in one corner of the room and by our breathing. Ben and I dared to glance at each other, and Ben nodded. Denny returned to the room, glancing at us as if to admit defeat. The half hour had passed.