Power

I stood at the station and watched the train jerk to a start, pick up speed, shunt away from me, and then crawl into a green valley cleft, as narrow and dark in the morning shadow as the gateway to hell. It is an old, lonely, beautiful and nostalgic sound, the tearing, straining motion of a steam locomotive getting under way, and the memory of it is as passionate and lost as the memory of a place like Clinton then, a dirty, ugly town in the bottom of a valley the angels made and the devils captured, but gentle now at half past five in the morning, full of spring mist, with the sun hitting the mountainsides in a blaze of springtime glory and leaving the valley bottom full of mystery and shadow.

I was all alone at the station after the single bag of mail had been hefted and taken away by a man in blue overalls. If history was at the point of being made here, then Oscar Smith was singular in his perception of the fact. I waited there at the station a few minutes, to see whether any place could actually be as silent and empty as this one; then I picked up my bag and walked across the street, past the little station building, to the main business section of Clinton.

There was one long street of stores, a hotel, and a dirty red brick, three-story office building facing the railroad station. In back of this, a twisting dirt road clawed at the mountainside, and there were the dwelling places of the town, rectangular, one-story boxes, six homes in each box, six entrances, red brick and tin roof, ten, twenty—perhaps fifty of them here and down into the end of the narrow valley. Up where the homes were, some windows flickered with light; the sun caught the top row of houses.

The Acropolis Cafe was in the process of opening, a short man with a black mustache sweeping the sidewalk in front of the place. I named him Nick and greeted him, and he looked me up and down with no pleasure and told me that it would be twenty minutes before he had coffee ready. I said I would wait.

Coffee took a half hour, because he was not in a hurry and whenever he looked at me he told me plainly that he was in no hurry and that he did not like me. Finally, he served me with coffee, fried eggs, and bread, and then he leaned on the counter and watched me eat and hated me.

“You come in on the train?” he asked me finally.

“That’s right. I’m a reporter from the New York Daily Mail.”

“A reporter?”

I nodded, and he stopped hating me and told me how rotten business was, and how it used to be at this time in the morning, every seat at the counter filled, himself cooking and a man to help him and a girl to serve the counter.

“Now,” he said, “business stinks, only there ain’t business. There is nothing. When coal ain’t mined here, there is nothing! Nothing! It is dead and it stinks dead.”

“No coal being mined?” I asked.

“None!”

“There must be something else people do in a place like this.”

“Nothing.”

“What’s the hotel like?” I asked him. He was a Greek. Then, in those days, there was a Greek restaurant more or less like this one in half the towns in America. Maybe in all the towns in America; I hadn’t been to all of them by a long count, and this was the first one in West Virginia and my first time in West Virginia too.

“The hotel stinks,” he said. “What do you expect in a place like this?”

I finished eating, paid forty cents for the breakfast, and asked his opinion about trouble. I made some stupid remark about the possibilities of a war, and he looked at me the way he had looked at me when he first saw me, a look full of hatred and distrust.

“Guys like you,” he said, “they make me sick.”

Then a baby began to cry from the back of the cafe. He dismissed me from his mind and his world, and went to the back of the store. I picked up my suitcase to leave, but paused to watch him open the door that led into a room behind his place. Through the open door, I caught a glimpse of the room, just a glimpse but enough to see that the room was filled with women and children sleeping side by side on the floor.

“The son of a bitch keeps a harem there,” I said to myself, and I walked out.

Years later, I repeated this story to Ben Holt, and I made no attempt to spare myself or depict myself as anything else but what I was. He nodded and said that it figured and was more or less what might have been expected in the way of my thoughts.

“Why?”

“Because,” he said, “you knew nothing. It wasn’t that you were ignorant as sin, but you wallowed in your ignorance. You loved it.”

“I was a kid with the limitations of a kid.”

“What’s a kid? Twenty-two years old? Is that your definition of a kid? You could be an old man carrying all the misery of the world at that age. What stopped you? It just happens that George Skopus, who owned that restaurant, had a heart as big as a house. He had the women and kids of five families sleeping in that back room of his, and eating out of his larder and wiping him out. And all you could think with your little mind was that he ran a harem. Six months later he closed up the restaurant. A year later he was dead. He was a saint.”

“I never knew you approved of saints.”

“I don’t. But I don’t approve of ignorant punks either,” Benjamin Holt said.

But that was five years later, years after this first time I went down to West Virginia to see him and write about him.

The room at the Traveler’s Mountainside Hotel was three dollars and dear at the price, but there was a sink in it; and I washed and shaved before I set out to find Benjamin R. Holt. As I came down into the lobby, an argument was in progress between the hotel clerk and three men. The hotel clerk was a skinny, bent man in his middle fifties. Obsequiousness had eliminated his features, his looks, his individuality. I suppose I knew what his name was then, but I have forgotten it; on the other hand, the name of the man who faced him, standing a little in front of two others, has been written down on the record as a small, hard part of the history of those times. His name was Jim Flecker, and he was the last local survivor of the famous Flecker-Curry feud that had helped to depopulate West Virginia for almost half a century.

This I learned later; now I saw a man six feet and some inches tall, lean, with a set, hollow face and an oversized underjaw that appeared to rest on the juncture of his collarbones. He had tiny blue eyes as cold as ice, and he wore the silver star of a peace officer on the flap of his left shirt pocket. He wore a large revolver in a holster on his right hip, and in his left hand he carried a double-barreled shotgun. The pockets of his brown denim pants bulged with shotgun shells. His age was somewhere between forty and fifty.

Of the two men who stood immediately behind him, his deputies, one was fat and middle-aged and the other was very young, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, with a face that reminded me of a snake. They both carried double-barreled shotguns.

As I came down the stairs, Flecker was instructing the clerk in a voice as flat as metal. He broke off what he was saying to throw his glance at me and ask me who in hell I was. The look in his tiny blue eyes made me answer quickly and respectfully. Maybe I was a smart aleck, but one thing I had learned was a decent respect for a man with a gun and a very high regard indeed for an angry man with a gun. This man was hair-trigger angry, and boiling over with the venom inside of him; so I wasted no time, but told him who I was and took out my credentials and showed them to him.

“News? You’ll find news here, all right. Just stay out of the way! Stay the hell out of the way!” I nodded, and he said to the man behind the counter, “Like I told you, my patience is thin—thin as spread spit on a hot day. So just wake those sons of bitches up and get them out of their rooms and out of this hotel. And keep them out!”

“Mr. Flecker,” the hotel clerk pleaded, “I can’t do that, I surely can’t. I work here. I don’t own the hotel. The hotel is a public institution, and if I got rooms, I am obligated to rent out those rooms, I am.”

“You do like I say!”

“Mr. Flecker—”

“Oh, shut your goddamn mouth!” Flecker told him. “I don’t want to hear no more from you, I don’t. I’ll be outside for one blessed hour—no more—and then if they ain’t out, I come in and drag them out and then your hotel won’t never look the same, so help me God, it won’t!”

“I’ll do the best I can, Mr. Flecker.”

“Just do what I tell you to!”

Then Flecker turned on his heel and walked out, his two deputies following him.

During the last of this exchange, a boy of thirteen or fourteen had come out of the door that led into the dining room, and now he stood staring at the hotel clerk with round, frightened eyes. The clerk motioned him over, and then said to him, quickly and quietly,

“Jemmy—you get out and find Ben Holt and tell him that there’s murder going to be done unless he gets over here and puts a stop to it.”

“I can’t do that.”

“What do you mean, you can’t do that?”

“I don’t know where Ben Holt is,” the boy pleaded.

“The devil you don’t! The very devil you don’t! Now look here, boy—didn’t I give you a job bussing in the dining room? Your whole family lives off that three dollars a week you bring home. There are a hundred boys in this town would give their eyeteeth for your job, and you know that. Don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then do as I say! You got miner kin, and the miners know where Ben Holt is.”

“I can try, but I won’t find Ben Holt.”

“You find him and tell him Sheriff Flecker has murder in his eyes. Tell him there’s going to be murder done unless he talks to the sheriff. Go ahead now!”

The boy sucked in his breath, nodded, and ran out through the dining-room door. I went over to the counter and offered the clerk a cigarette. He accepted, and I lit his and one for myself. He thanked me and said that he wished he was a newspaperman—or anything, preferably to being a hotel clerk in this sick and dying and damned town. “Look at the situation I’m in,” he said. I replied that it was no use for me to look at it, because as far as I was concerned I couldn’t make head or tail of it. I knew that the sheriff wanted to kill someone, but I didn’t know who.

“Upstairs, Mister—? What did you say your name was?”

“Alvin Cutter,” I told him.

“Well, sir, Mr. Cutter, I got twelve operatives from the Fairlawn Detective Agency sleeping upstairs, and I’m supposed to go up to them and boot them out of their rooms and tell them that this hotel is closed to them from here on in. Now I ask you—is that reasonable?”

“Why?”

“Well, you heard Mr. Flecker, didn’t you?”

Whatever else he might have said was interrupted by the sound of someone on the stairs. The hotel clerk looked up nervously, flashed a glance at me, and then sighed hopelessly. A man was coming down the stairs, followed by others. He was a short, compact man, with a bulldog face, and he wore a striped suit, pink shirt, white collar, and black tie. He and those men who had followed him down the stairs gathered around the desk, and the clerk addressed them in whispers.

I knew that something was due to happen; the air of the place was charged with what was intended to happen and what had to happen and it did happen; but I didn’t want it to happen while I was trapped, so to speak, in a hotel lobby. I had seen the boy go out through the dining room, and now I took the same path, through the dining room, through the kitchen, and out of the back entrance to the hotel. There was a farmer’s truck there, unloading crated live chickens; I hurried past, into an alley, and then I was on the main street, at one end of the hotel. Flecker and his two deputies were on the porch, waiting. Watching them out of the corner of my eye, I crossed the street to where the local druggist was opening his shop. There were a few people on the street now; they moved slowly, and, like myself, they watched Flecker and his deputies.

What followed happened quickly, and while my memory of it is fairly accurate, it might be a little more exact and to the point to reprint here the news story I filed later on this same day. The story follows, just as the Daily Mail printed it:

Hogan County, West Virginia. May 26, 1920.

Eleven men are dead, and a twelfth lingers between life and death as a result of a gunfight in this small West Virginia town.

Today, this reporter was witness to one of the most incredible gunfights in the history of a state that is not unfamiliar with private wars. The battle that turned the quiet main street of Clinton, West Virginia, into a scene of blood and horror took place during a sixty-second interval, early this morning. But the forces that led to this showdown were growing for a much longer time.

One does not have to have pro-labor sympathies to see the situation of the coal miners in Hogan County. An hour’s walk around this community, in the heart of the richest coal country in America, convinced this reporter that the coal miners in Hogan County are not to be envied. A short conversation with any one of them leads immediately to the fact that at least part of their many troubles stem from the lack of a trade union of any kind.

This is a situation Benjamin R. Holt set out to remedy when he was elected president of the International Miners Union at the beginning of this year. Stating that there could be no job security for the unionized miners in Pennsylvania and Illinois, so long as West Virginia remained an unorganized area, he personally led a force of union organizers into Hogan and Mingo counties three weeks ago. They approached the local miners with the proposal that they constitute themselves a branch of the International Miners Union.

In defense of their own interests, the mine operators here announced that any miner under suspicion of meeting with IMU organizers or of supporting their attempts to organize a union, would be immediately discharged. These discharges began the day after Benjamin Holt arrived in West Virginia, and they have continued during the three weeks since then. Today, it is estimated that at least 75 per cent of the miners in Hogan County have been locked out of the mines.

The mine operators own most of the local stores and practically all of the miners’ housing. Ten days ago, they cut off the miners’ credit allowances at the food stores and began a program of evicting from their homes those miners who had co-operated with the union organizers. Here in Clinton, Sheriff James D. Flecker was given the responsibility of carrying out the evictions.

Sheriff Flecker, famous locally as the only survivor of the notorious Flecker-Curry feud, stated that he would uphold the law and carry out the evictions, but only if he had proof that the accused miners had actually co-operated with the organizers. When four days passed without any evictions, the coal operators charged Sheriff Flecker with deliberate refusal to carry out his duties as specified in his oath of office. They explained this attitude on the part of Flecker by the many family connections Flecker had with miners in Clinton, and demanded his resignation. When Sheriff Flecker refused to resign, the operators were forced to resort to other measures, and they brought into Clinton twelve operatives of the Fairlawn Detective Agency of Philadelphia. The operatives were skilled labor consultants, under the leadership of Jack Madison, who made a national reputation during the steel strike of last year.

Immediately upon their arrival in Clinton, the Fairlawn operatives began a program of evictions, and during the next four days, these evictions were carried forward at the rate of fifty a day. Yesterday, they attempted to evict Sheriff Flecker’s brother-in-law, and they were halted by the sheriff at gunpoint. Eyewitnesses to this incident say that when one of the operatives made a gesture toward his pocket, Sheriff Flecker stated that if the operative drew his gun, he would not hesitate to shoot him dead. Whereupon, Detective Madison ordered his men to halt eviction procedures at this house. He warned Sheriff Flecker of the consequences of the sheriff’s interference, to which the sheriff replied with foul and abusive language. There was a heated exchange of words, which ended with a warning by Sheriff Flecker for the operatives to leave town.

The following morning, Sheriff Flecker and two deputies, John Winslow and Steve Kennedy, all of them heavily armed with pistols and shotguns, went to the Traveler’s Mountainside Hotel, where the operatives had taken rooms. Sheriff Flecker spoke to the hotel clerk and demanded that the Fairlawn operatives be locked out of their rooms and refused service at the hotel. The hotel clerk protested that such action was not in his power. Sheriff Flecker said he would wait outside of the hotel to see personally that his orders were obeyed.

A few minutes later, the twelve Fairlawn operatives, led by Detective Madison, came down from their rooms and were informed by the hotel clerk of the circumstances. Almost immediately, Detective Madison, whose courage had not been exaggerated, led his men out of the hotel to face Sheriff Flecker and demand his rights.

In a loud, firm voice, clearly hard by this reporter, who was watching proceedings from across the street, Detective Madison denied Sheriff Flecker’s authority.

“My authority is here,” Sheriff Flecker answered, tapping the barrel of his shotgun.

“Not any longer,” said Detective Madison, “because I have a federal warrant for your arrest!”

With that, Detective Madison reached into his jacket pocket. Subsequent inquiry seems to prove that his statement about the warrant was bluff, and Sheriff Flecker states that Madison was reaching for his pistol. The full truth will never be known, for as Detective Madison reached into his coat pocket, Sheriff Flecker fired his shotgun directly into Detective Madison’s face, killing him instantly.

What happened after that took place during a few seconds, and even an eyewitness cannot give an exact account. Both of Sheriff Flecker’s deputies were carrying double-barreled shotguns, and a moment after he shot Detective Madison, they opened fire on the Fairlawn operatives, who were grouped closely together. They subsequently held that the operatives had drawn guns, but when the battle was over, only three operatives had drawn their pistols and only one of the three pistols was actually discharged.

As far as I could see, at least five of the operatives were killed with Madison when the shotguns were fired, and every one of the remaining six was wounded by pellets. Sheriff Flecker dropped his shotgun and drew his pistol, as did his two deputies, and the three of them began to shoot steadily. I saw one of the deputies put his pistol to an operative’s head and administer the coup de grâce. Sheriff Flecker shot and killed two more men. In less than a minute, all twelve Fairlawn detectives were lying on the street in their blood, as terrible a scene of carnage as this reporter ever witnessed, either in this country or overseas during the last war.

Eleven of the men, at this writing, are dead. A twelfth operative lingers between life and death in the hotel, awaiting the arrival of a physician from the next town. The single survivor has three bullet wounds in the chest, and there is not much hope that he will live.

One of Sheriff Flecker’s deputies, John Winslow, was wounded in the calf of his leg.

After I had filed my story at the Western Union office, I walked over to the building that housed the sheriff’s office and the town jail. The eleven bodies were laid out on the sidewalk in front of the building, uncovered, as ghastly a sight as you would want to see. There was a considerable crowd around the bodies, men mostly—almost all of them miners, as I learned later—and some kids, and the crowd kept shifting and changing, as if no one could bear to remain there very long.

I pushed my way into the sheriff’s office, which was even more crowded than the street outside. I noticed the two deputies, one of them hobbling on a bandaged leg. Sheriff Jim Flecker sat behind his desk, listening stonily to a half-hysterical man who leaned over the desk and alternately shouted at him and pleaded with him. This man, I learned, was Max Macintosh, the mayor, and as I pushed my way toward the desk, he was shouting,

“What you don’t seem to understand, Jim, is that someone is going to have to answer for this!”

“I told you I’d answer for it.”

“You told me hell—you told me nothing. The state police are on their way over here. I’m the mayor. There are eleven bodies outside I’m going to have to explain! My God, man, you’re not up in the hills! This ain’t no feud where you can wipe out a tribe of people and notch your gun!”

“Oh, shut up!” Flecker burst out suddenly. “You make me sick!”

“Then you’ll be a lot sicker,” the mayor said, and then, seeing the hard look of rage beginning to gather on Flecker’s face, began to plead. The least Flecker could do, he pleaded, was to get together a set of sworn depositions to the effect that the shooting was actually a case of self-defense. Some men standing behind the mayor backed him up. Flecker listened, his eyes fixed on his desk; when he glanced up, I had pushed through to the desk, and he saw me and demanded to know who in the hell I was and what in hell I was doing there.

“I’m a reporter,” I said. “I told you that before.”

His face was cloudy with rage and frustration and the attempt to remember how this devilish day had begun. “How did you get here so quick?” the mayor wanted to know. I told them that I had been here, and then they wanted to know whether I had filed a story.

“Of course I did. Mister, this is news—the biggest news in a long time!”

“Then you better kill that damn story and kill it quick!” Flecker roared at me.

Looking back at myself then, at the whole incident and what it began and what would flow from it—looking back at the kind of fresh and ignorant kid that I was, I can take some satisfaction from the fact that I was not afraid or intimidated, but was able to face Sheriff Jim Flecker and tell him that the story wouldn’t be killed because it was already in New York and probably everywhere else in America, and that within a few hours the whole town would be swarming with reporters, and that the best thing he could do would be to talk to me as he might to a human being. I think he would have killed me if he hadn’t been restrained by the mayor and the other men present; and then the mayor took me outside and said that I shouldn’t mind Jim Flecker, since the state he was in was understandable and only to be expected. “This is a thing that happened,” he told me, glancing at the crowd around the bodies. “Great God Almighty, don’t we all wish that it had never happened at all! But you put two trains on the same track and start them off at each other at eighty miles an hour, and by golly something terrible’s going to happen, isn’t it?”

“What I would like,” I said, “is to look through the personal effects of the dead men so that I can get their names and addresses. Where are their personal effects?”

“With Jim Flecker, but for heaven’s sake let that rest for a while, Mister—?”

“Cutter.”

“Mr. Cutter—suppose you wait a spell, and I’ll see if I can’t get you what you need. Not that I’m trying to hide anything. What happened here can’t be hidden. But first things first—”

He was interrupted by people who wanted to speak to him; just about everyone present wanted to speak to that poor man, from the doctor, who reported that the wounded man in the hotel had just died, making the score an even twelve, to the undertaker, to the town clerk, who had just spoken to state-police headquarters.

Then a small boy pulled at my jacket and wanted to know whether I was Mr. Cutter. When I replied that I was, he told me that he had been sent from the hotel, where a long-distance call was waiting for me.

Instead of telling me what a fine story I had filed, Oscar Smith, who was calling from New York, suggested that I stick to reporting the facts instead of making judgments and pronouncements.

“Well, damn it all,” I began, “what kind of judgments have I been making?”

“Never mind that now. Did you interview Ben Holt?”

“Do you know what’s been happening here?”

“I read your story.”

“I haven’t even had lunch.”

He sympathized with me and suggested that I find Holt and get a story from him, and that I could send it in along with a follow-up on the gun battle. I left it at that and went down to the dining room of the hotel, where I had a sandwich and a glass of beer, and where a traveling man gave me his views on the gun battle and the rumor that the entire county would be placed under martial law, a rumor, incidentally, that had no foundation in fact. When the bus boy came to clear the dishes away, I told him who I was and said that he could earn a dollar by taking me to Ben Holt. He swore that he did not know where Ben Holt was.

The doctor who had been called in to attend the wounded man was eating lunch in the dining room, and I went over to him, introduced myself, got his name and address, and learned that the wounded man had bled to death before he arrived. “I drove twenty miles for nothing,” he said with annoyance. He was one of those men with no opinions and no attitudes. From the way he spoke, one would conclude that gunfights which left twelve men dead happened at least once a week.

His name was Phelps—Tecumseh Phelps—and, like others involved in that incredible sixty-second massacre, he went down into his own tiny niche in history, indexed and cross-indexed in the files where ancient newspapers are remembered. He was fat and tired, and he told me how bad his heart was, so bad that it was a plain wonder that he went on from day to day. “I could drop dead right here,” he said, “right now this minute, right here. Maybe it’s a medical miracle that I don’t. So you see, sonny, everything isn’t as simple and clear as you’d like it to be. I killed a half a day, by golly. And who’s going to pay my fee, that’s what I’d like to know. The mayor? I put it to him straight, and he says he has no responsibility for the Fairlawn detectives. So then I ask him how about this deputy’s leg I took a bullet out of and bandaged up. Collect from the deputy, he says. Do you know what I collected from that deputy?” I shook my head. “Guess,” he urged me. “Go ahead and guess, sonny.” I shook my head again. “Well, fifty-five cents—won’t even pay for my lunch here. Said it was all the money he had in the world. Can’t get blood from a stone, can you? Good heavens, sonny, this is the poorest town in the nation. Why, this town is so poor the sparrows tell each other to avoid it. You know what they say—nothing poorer than a miner, nothing poorer than a miner’s town. And now I got to go and take care of an infection in Ben Holt’s hand. You ever heard of Ben Holt?”

I nodded.

“I’ll collect five dollars for that or I won’t touch him. You can be sure of that.”

“Where is Ben Holt?” I asked, picking up his check.

“You don’t have to do that, sonny.”

“My pleasure.”

His eyes narrowed suddenly, and he asked me what I had in mind. He was not such a fool as he appeared to be, and I put it straight to him that my editor in New York wanted a personal interview with Ben Holt.

“You think he’s a big man? A comer?”

“My editor seems to.”

The doctor pursed his lips and nodded. “It could be. There never was no union down here. My own opinion is there never will be. Sure, I’ll take you along to Ben Holt, and let him bitch about it and be damned! He’s at McGrady’s place up on Fenwick Crag.”

It was a beautiful country of flat-sided mountains covered with a mat of verdant forest, and it was clad in the pale green of spring. It was a country that reminded me of the pictures I had seen of the Scottish Highlands, but without the damp and the mists; and the people who lived there were the descendants of others who had in the beginning come from the Scottish Highlands, bringing their own names and their place names with them. And if not for the pits and the piles of slag near them, the country would have been as wild as it ever had been; for it was bad farming country and almost no way for a man to squeeze a living out of it except to mine coal.

The doctor drove a Franklin, a good car for the mountains with its air-cooled motor—as he explained—and in it we labored up into the hills, up a dirt road past the red brick miners’ houses, where the locked-out miners sat on their front steps sullenly watching us, and past other company houses naked and empty, where the Fairlawn operatives had dispossessed the tenants, down into a valley scarred with idle pits, and up again into the hills they called Fenwick Crag. This road was as bad as a cart track, and it taxed the Franklin’s powers to the utmost. We were moving slowly up a sharp grade, when a man with a rifle stepped out into the road and motioned for us to halt.

He was a tall, skinny man, like so many of the men in that area, dressed in faded work pants and a cotton shirt. As cheap as the cotton pants and shirt were, they were patched all over; and he wore the badge of the miner, reddened eyes and dark lines of soot permanently engraved in his skin. He called out for us to stop, and when we did, he walked over to the car, looked at us carefully, and then said to Phelps,

“You the doctor?”

“I am. And what kind of damn nonsense is this, stopping us with that gun in your hands?”

“Who’s he?” motioning with the gun at me.

“Friend of mine. He’s a newspaperman, going to interview Ben Holt.”

Without taking his eyes off us, he shouted for Charlie, and in a minute or so, Charlie appeared from up the road and around a bend. He gave Charlie the facts, and then continued to cover us with his rifle while Charlie, enough like him to be his brother and similarly armed, went back to get Ben Holt’s opinion of the whole matter.

It was midafternoon now, the sun warm and pleasant, the little glade where the doctor had stopped the car full of the sweet smell of growing things and forest decay and the hum of insects and the pattern of insects dancing in the bars of sunlight. I wondered what would happen to me if Benjamin R. Holt had emphatic feelings against newspapermen, and considering what I had experienced of tempers and guns in West Virginia so far, I was not cheered by the thought. But from what I had learned, this was also Ben Holt’s first venture into West Virginia. He had been born in eastern Pennsylvania, in a small coal town called Ringman, and he had built his union and fought his way into its command in Pennsylvania and Illinois. Conceivably, he was reasonably civilized, yet I had some uneasy moments before Charlie returned and said that it was all right and that we could go ahead.

We drove about half a mile more before the road leveled off onto a sort of cleared plateau, a space of a dozen acres with an old frame house set in the middle of it, a small cornfield, a pen of pigs, and a garden. There was also a rough pasture, where eight army-surplus tents had been pitched. Two big cook fires were going, a whole young pig roasting over one of them, and here and there around the place were at least twenty men.

Some of the men at this place were native West Virginia miners, and others were union organizers that Ben Holt had brought in with him. Even apart from the way they dressed, you could not possibly mistake the one for the other. The miners’ features were etched with sadness and defeat. It was not anything of the moment, but out of their lives and the way they stood and the slow way they moved. They were stooped men, bent men. Their lives were spent working with their bodies bent and they had forgotten how to stand straight, and their heads were bent from the angry words of their wives and the rapacious appetites of their children. They were victims of a particular kind of starvation—something I learned much later—for a miner’s body burns food like a furnace burns coal, and what another man will fatten on, a miner will starve on. On and off through the years, I have watched working miners eat and never ceased to wonder at the enormous quantities of protein-rich food they needed for plain survival. I suppose that some of Ben Holt’s organizers had been miners once, but in a different world than Hogan County.

Phelps stopped his car in front of the frame house, and we got out. Some of the men moved toward us, and then the door of the frame house opened and Ben Holt came out onto the porch. That was the first time I saw Benjamin Renwell Holt, and it was a long, long time ago, a long time before people got into the habit of opening their morning paper to see what Ben Holt had done or what he intended to do. It is possible that he had a sense of the future then. I didn’t. He glanced at me with that quick, searching, half-contemptuous look that was to become so familiar to so many, and then his eyes passed by me to the doctor. For myself, I saw a big man of about thirty years—no, he was twenty-eight then—broad-shouldered, heavy, a large, square head on a bull neck, wide mouth, full lips, large, fleshy nose, and blue eyes as clear and placid as water. The expression was in the mouth, the tilt of head, the tension of the cheeks; only in moments of great anger did the eyes change. His hands were enormous, hamlike, one of them bandaged.

Even such a cursory glimpse of the man is retrospective, of necessity bolstered by hindsight. You see someone for the first time, and you see a large, heavy-fleshed man in motion, and not much more than that. His hand hurt him, and he was interested in the doctor then; pain can wall you away from anything. The doctor went inside with him, and I stood by the car and smoked a cigarette and looked around me at the headquarters that Ben Holt had made for himself in that curious West Virginia world that was half primeval wilderness and half coalpits and company towns where the miners worked and lived. This was the wilderness part of it, with the mountains looming above us on every side, walled in by a silence and beauty as old as the ages.

It was a big camp, the tents, piles of cut cordwood, boxes of canned goods heaped six feet high, and behind the frame house, four automobiles parked neatly side by side. There was an old barn behind the house; it leaned crazily from disuse and lack of repair. The McGradys were miners, not farmers.

McGrady’s wife and daughter were in the house; there were no other women at the camp. The men went about what they were doing, cooking, splitting wood, sitting around and chewing tobacco and talking or pacing aimlessly—but ignoring me. No one spoke to me or approached me. I realized that there were guards all around the camp, for men with rifles came in from the forest and other men with rifles went out to take their places; and it moved easily if raggedly, with no one giving orders or instructions.

In about twenty minutes, Phelps came out of the house, Ben Holt with him, Holt’s hand in a sling and with a clean bandage on it. Holt shook hands with the doctor, and then the doctor climbed into his car and Holt motioned a man over to crank it. “Good luck, sonny!” the doctor shouted at me as the motor turned over and caught. He drove off, leaving me with Ben Holt, who said,

“The old man talks a lot, but he knows his business. This damn hand of mine was driving me out of my mind, and that’s why you got a poor welcome, Cutter. Now we can go inside and have a cup of coffee and talk.”

If I sought to reconstruct that first meeting with Ben Holt out of memory alone, it would be full of the country smell of the old farmhouse, the late afternoon sunlight striking through the windows, and the motions of Laura McGrady as she brought coffee and bread and butter to us where we sat at the table. Laura was nineteen then, finished with almost two years at normal school, tall, full-fleshed, her hair long in two thick braids, and not beautiful the way a girl is on a magazine cover, but as beautiful, I think, as any strong, handsome girl can be in the flesh and blood and movement of youth. I don’t know that I fell in love with her when I saw her that first time, but I wanted her and the wanting continued, and a year later we were married.

So my own memory of meeting Ben Holt and going into the farmhouse and interviewing him is hardly to be trusted today. What I wrote at the time is plain and to the point:

Today I met Benjamin Renwell Holt, newly elected president of the International Miners Union. Our meeting took place at Mr. Holt’s organizational headquarters, a mountain hide-out, the name and location of which I am pledged not to reveal. There, in an old farmhouse, surrounded by mountaineer miners enlisted as armed guards, some of them carrying rifles of Civil War vintage, Benjamin R. Holt plans and directs the organization of an industry never before organized in the state of West Virginia. Backed by a few dozen union organizers from Pennsylvania and Illinois, he has declared war on the powerful and independent coal operators of Hogan and Mingo counties. And from the looks of Mr. Holt, a dynamic, alert ex-miner himself, they have found a worthy opponent.

In the stilted newspaper language of the time, it records the moment of our meeting and something of my own impression. If it fulfills nothing of an obligation toward truth, that can be explained by the nature of what a newspaperman must write, not the subtleties of response and emotion that men exchange with each other and with their environment, but the bald declaration of a fact that can be filed and indexed into categories of facts.

I sat facing a man who was alive, alert, and so filled with a sense of his own purpose and power that it spilled out of him. He never wholly listened and never wholly inquired; he was too much with himself; but even the part of himself that he lent to another made one feel him inescapably and respond to him. All his life, he used other people and they wanted to be used by him. This is not hindsight on my part. He used me then, immediately, because I had seen the bloody gunfight in Clinton. I had come to interview him, cynical about him, with no prepared respect whatsoever, yet I found myself flattered by his attention to what I knew and what I had seen. For the most part, during the course of his life, Holt did not make friends and enemies; he chose them for whatever his purposes were at the moment, and at this moment he wanted a newspaperman. Before we finished talking, he was calling me “Al.”

He wanted to know about the fight, and I told him the whole story. He made no comment until I had finished, and then he said softly,

“That stupid bastard Flecker. I hate killers! The pleasure of killing is a disease.”

I hadn’t thought of it that way, and I asked Holt, “Wouldn’t you say his sympathies were with the miners?”

“He doesn’t have any sympathies. He’s an animal.”

“He took your side of the fight, Mr. Holt. You’ll have to admit that.”

“I don’t have to admit anything of the kind,” Holt replied. “God save me from friends like Flecker. Murder isn’t our fight. Not one bit. Nothing but trouble comes from the kind of thing Flecker did. We would have dealt with those detectives in our own good time and in our own way.”

“Still you have your own armed guards, don’t you? If you carry a gun, then it means that you are prepared to use it.”

“Defense is one thing. Murder is something else. If everyone in this country who carried a gun used it, there’d be no one left alive. A gun is a simple thing, Al, but there’s nothing simple about this situation down here in West Virginia. What do you know about coal miners, Al?”

He was calling me by my first name, and I was pleased and flattered. His voice was rich and vibrant, and already then at the age of twenty-eight, he used his voice with all the skill and command of a trained actor. At that time, I was a sharp and cynical kid, but I could not have been bought for money; if I had anything that was strong inside of me, it was some sense of integrity in my work and in what I wrote. If Ben Holt had taken any other tack, it might have turned out differently, but he left me room to summon my own annoyance as I told him that I didn’t know a damn thing about miners and had never seen one before today.

“Who the hell has?” He grinned unexpectedly. “Nobody knows a damned thing about the miners except the miners. Nobody gives a damn for them except the miners. Let me tell you this—it has never been any different for five thousand years. Give or take a few centuries. That’s when men began to grub in the earth and dig metal, and that’s when a miner became expendable. Do you know what has changed?”

I shook my head.

“They killed them quick then. A miner was good for two years—or three. Today it averages out ten to fifteen.” Laura McGrady and her mother, Sarah—the mother in her middle forties then, but dry and old, her hands gnarled with arthritis—were listening and staring at Ben Holt, who said to Mrs. McGrady, “That’s right. It’s an old trade, Sarah. I read every word I could ever find that was written on it.” He turned to me. “I’m a miner, Al. You want to write about me, interview me—well, that’s the first thing to begin with. I’m a miner. It doesn’t begin with a man—it begins with the kid, he sucks it in, like the milk from a bottle, if he’s lucky enough to have milk in the bottle. He goes to bed with it and he wakes up with it. Other kids wake up in the daylight. The miner’s kid wakes up before the day breaks. You don’t have privacy in a miner’s house. He lies in bed and listens to his father dress in the darkness. The mother—well, she’s been up an hour, got the stove going and the pan on the stove and into the pan whatever there is. My goodness, was there ever a miner had enough to eat for breakfast, enough to take him down into the black belly of the earth and give him strength and courage, damn all the doors to hell—was there ever enough? Now you tell me, Sarah?”

She had been listening to him, her daughter next to her, listening to the controlled yet passionate flow of speech that was such a strange mixture of the ordinary and the poetic; and now she shook her head and replied, “No, Ben, never enough, not nearly.”

“Oh, I’ve seen miners that kept their bellies full for a while,” he said. “Sure, Al—there have been times when Pennsylvania miners worked long enough to stock up the pantry, but not in West Virginia. These people are first cousins to hunger. They’re the poorest, proudest lot in the country, so help me. Would you believe that these are the richest coal fields in the United States of America? Not to look at these lousy company towns here abouts—not by a long shot! But last year, mind you, 1919, they took seventy-nine million tons of coal out of these West Virginia fields. They undersold Pennsylvania and they undersold Illinois. Up there, most of the operators pay union wages. Down here—” He flung out his unbandaged hand in disgust. “You had a look at what’s down here.”

Trying to pin the conversation down to newspaper terms, I said to him, “You were elected president of the International Miners Union two months ago, Mr. Holt. I believe you’re the youngest president they ever had?”

“That’s right—if you count the years.”

“What are your immediate goals?”

“West Virginia. That’s simple enough, isn’t it? How long will we have a union in the North if the operators down here undersell the Pennsylvania and Illinois operators and put them out of business?”

“Then you think you’ll organize West Virginia?”

“I intend to try,” he grinned. His smile was large and warm and intensely personal, and he had the knack of making you feel that it was elicited by you and directed at you in approbation and flattery.

“What would you say your chances are?”

“Worse than they were yesterday.” His smile was gone now.

“In other words, that gunfight isn’t to your advantage?”

“Al, how could it be?”

“Well, the dead men were your enemies, so to speak, weren’t they?”

“No, they weren’t my enemies, not one bit. They were cheap, hired thugs, and there’s a thousand more to take their places.”

“Then you would condemn Flecker’s action?”

“Of course I would!” he snorted. “Do you think it can bring us anything but trouble? And let me tell you this—there’s going to be trouble now, more trouble than anyone will know what to do with. But it’s not trouble that the union asked for or that the miners asked for.”

“Don’t you see any way to solve this thing peacefully?”

He thought about that for a while before he said, “It could be solved peacefully. Any argument can. But one party’s got to give up something. They want us to give up everything and get out of the state, and I guess that would make peace.”

We talked for another half hour, and then he indicated that the interview was over. I had been making notes, and I told him that I would try to reflect his point of view honestly. He said that was all he asked. We shook hands, and he told me that he would have me driven back to Clinton.

The car was a Model T Ford that belonged to the Miners Union. I didn’t know then that Laura asked to drive me back. She did a good deal of driving for them, since she knew every road and cart track in the hill country. She was a good driver too, in her second and graduating year at normal school, and had supported herself through both years driving a school bus near Charleston—the West Virginia Charleston.

For a little while, coming down from Fenwick Crag, she was silent and attentive to her driving. The sun was low now, and the mountain road, between its walls of trees, was dark and deceptive. On my part, I began a conversation mentally half a dozen times, but whatever I thought to say became banal before I said it. I had slept poorly on the train the night before and been through a long day since then, and I was very tired. I had also been confronted with something totally new to me, met people whose existence I had been unaware of and indifferent to, and witnessed the violent death of twelve men. It added up to a good deal, and on top of that, I was sitting next to a girl I considered both beautiful and desirable. If I had known more about coal miners at that time—particularly coal miners in West Virginia—I might have reflected properly on what it means for a miner’s daughter to get through secondary school and two years of normal school. But my knowledge was limited—yet not so limited that I did not have an impression, at least, of someone different from the run of nineteen-year-old girls I had known.

Down off the rutted, winding road, we came into the open valley, with the upending sweep of mountains all around us. She was able to take her eyes off the road long enough to glance at me and ask me what I thought of Ben Holt.

“I don’t know—”

“Don’t you have to have an opinion, if you write an interview?”

“Not necessarily. I have my questions and his answers.”

“That’s not enough,” she said flatly. “You don’t understand this place, Mr. Cutter, and you don’t understand us. That’s nothing you can help. You’re an outsider, and you live in a world where coal miners are forgotten.”

“If they were forgotten, Miss McGrady, would I be here?”

“I imagine you’re here because your editor sent you here.”

“Yes—he sent me.”

“Not because he loves coal miners, but because he suspected that something like what happened in Clinton today might happen.”

“Well, it’s news,” I said. “He didn’t know what was going to happen. But he knew that Ben Holt had come down here to organize the miners—or to try—”

“Then it seems to me that he knew him better than you do, and you’ve seen him and spoken to him.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“At least he knew that this would be news,” she said testily. “He knew that Ben Holt would inject something here—something we needed desperately and which he could give us?”

“May I ask what?”

“A chance to live—instead of slow death. And a man who can bring that to you, Mr. Cutter, is a man you should be able to form some opinion about.”

Stupidly and bluntly, I said, “Are you in love with Ben Holt, Miss McGrady?” and her answer was no more or less than I deserved. She informed me that it was none of my damned business whether she was or was not. When I tried to apologize, she snapped,

“Don’t, Mr. Cutter. I asked to drive you back to Clinton because I am interested in writing and newspaper work, and I thought it would be pleasant to have an opportunity to talk to you. I see that I was mistaken. If you wish to include it in your story, I am not in love with Ben Holt. He has a wife and a child. He is also the kind of man you might do well to think about, and perhaps in time you will form an opinion of him. He’s a miner’s son. His father was killed in a mine explosion when Ben was twelve years old. He educated himself, worked in the mines from the age of twelve, got through college, helped build this union, and became its president. And his first action as president—his first—was to come down here to West Virginia and to tell the whole world that he was going to build a union here. Do you know what kind of a man it takes to do that?”

I remained silent, and after a moment, she continued, “I was only trying to help you form an opinion, Mr. Cutter. I am sorry to have ruffled your feelings. If you don’t take the first train out tomorrow but stay with us for a while, perhaps you’ll make some sense of what I said.”

It was just beginning to get dark when she dropped me at the drugstore across the street from the hotel. I had confirmed my suspicion that she was an unusual woman, but I did not find her less attractive.

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.

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.

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.”

“Who said they’re armed?”

I shrugged and shook my head, but he was firm on refusing to allow me to talk to them. “Twelve damn good detectives were murdered here yesterday, mister,” he said to me. “Do you want us to subject ourselves to the same thing? Not on your life. You want to talk—talk to these sonovabitch miners!”

Only there were no miners. The day before, the day I arrived, the streets of Clinton had been full of miners and their wives and their kids, but today not one of them was in sight, not a soul on the streets anywhere except the hard-eyed operatives who had been pouring into town. They were everywhere. They sat on the curbstones, swarmed over the hotel veranda, and pressed into the lunchroom and the drugstore; but there were no miners to be seen anywhere.

There was a garage in Clinton, and I walked over to it now. It was at the end of the business street, a ramshackle shed where a single mechanic was working under a car. He crawled out when I said “Good morning” to him, and eyed me without pleasure. He was a boy of eighteen or nineteen or so.

“I want to rent a car,” I said to him.

No comment, no reaction.

“You have a car for hire? Or a taxi service? Suppose I want to go somewhere. Could you drive me?”

“I got my work,” he muttered, turning away.

I told him that I was a reporter, and that made him pause. Then I got out my press card for him to look at. I pointed out to him that regardless of what he thought, Clinton, West Virginia, was at this moment the focal point of interest for the entire country, and was likely to remain so for some time to come. He might not give one damn for a reporter, but at least a part of the ultimate fate of the coal miners in Hogan County would depend on what reporters told of their fight.

Finally, he asked me, “Where do you want to go, mister?”

“Fenwick Crag—the McGrady place.”

He thought this over for a while, and then he nodded. “Cost you five dollars.”

I took out my wallet and paid him, and he said that he would be ready for me in half an hour. Then I went back to the hotel, paid my bill, packed my suitcase, and put in a call to New York. When I told Oscar Smith that I was checking out of the hotel and leaving Clinton, I thought he would explode. “Of all the damnfool, idiot notions!” he screamed at me. “There you are, by pure accident at the heart of the biggest story in the country, and you talk about pulling out! Either stay there or you’re out of a job!”

“You sent me down here to cover a war, didn’t you?”

“Forget that nonsense and stay where you are!”

“No, sir,” I replied, politely but firmly. “I think there is going to be a war after all. Everyone else will be here on the home front. I intend to be with the enemy forces.”

I explained all that I dared to explain. As far as I knew, someone might be listening in downstairs, and I didn’t want any trouble. At least he began to see my way of thinking, and if I got no blessing, at least I got a warning to file material and not to think that I could turn into a bum on his money.

I went downstairs to the lobby then. It was crowded, as it had been since the evening before, and at one side of it, on a couch and a few chairs, half a dozen women were sitting. A few were women; the rest were just kids, and they were all dressed badly and cheaply, their faces covered with heavy, raw make-up. The operatives in the lobby were around them, loud and clever and making a big thing out of them. Bill Goodman of the Times, who had checked in early in the morning, spotted me and my suitcase and wanted to know where I was going.

“Out,” I said. “I had enough of Clinton.”

He didn’t believe me, and kept pushing for some information. In turn, he described the extent of the operation here. According to him, there were some five hundred hired detectives, for want of a better name, in town already, and more coming. The batch of girls had just come in from Charleston, and they were the first of a large order necessary to keep the men satisfied. “They’re doing it the French way,” he said. “My word, I never seen anything like this before. They got an army occupying this town. What for? What are they up to? I heard of strikes and labor trouble, but so help me God, I never heard of anything like this before!”

“They just don’t want a union here,” I replied.

“That’s an understatement if I ever heard one. Where are you going?”

“Just around. I want to look at the pits and see what’s happening.”

“With your suitcase?”

“You never know where you’ll end up.”

“It’s damn funny,” he said, “that you got here yesterday before anyone ever knew that there was a place called Clinton on the map.”

“It’s one of those things,” I shrugged, and pushed my way through and outside. The car was in front of the hotel, the motor running, a battered specimen of a Maxwell, I think, and some of the operatives were examining it and trying to rile the boy in the driver’s seat. He was nervous, for which I hardly blamed him. He was a lone native in a town whose population had melted away, and a good many of these operatives or detectives appeared to have only remote kinship with the human race. From what alleys and gutters of New York and Chicago they had been recruited, I did not know, but they were not specimens to meet on a dark night.

I climbed into the car, threw my bag onto the back seat, and we started off down the street. We drove in silence until we were out of the town, and then the boy turned to me and said,

“Mister, if you ain’t a proper person to bring there, they’re going to kill you. I guess you know that.”

I didn’t know, but I said that I would take my chances.

“Me, too,” the boy nodded. “If they have to kill you, they are going to be mighty provoked at me.”

A different armed guard stopped us this time, and he wasn’t polite. His face was dark as thunder, and he cussed out the garage mechanic and demanded to know whether he didn’t have more sense than to bring a stranger, and a city man at that, up to Fenwick Crag. I talked quickly and firmly about Ben Holt being a friend of sorts, but the two barrels of the miner’s shotgun listened poorly. There was more discussion before he let us through, but finally he did.

Armed miners stood aside as we labored up the road, and the area around the farmhouse looked like an army camp. There must have been over a thousand men there, and it seemed like five thousand, and there were more tents, lean-tos, cooking fires, and some twenty-five or thirty old cars parked near the barn. Many of these miners must have been overseas during the war, for almost every one of them had some scrap of uniform, an army shirt, a tin hat, a cartridge sling—or khaki tape around the bottom of blue jeans, and most of them wore an arm band with the letters IMU stitched on it or marked on it.

As we rolled to a stop near the farmhouse, a miner who wore an officer’s cap came over to the car, which was already surrounded by curious and unsmiling men, and asked who I was and what I wanted there. I told him, and left just the implication that Ben Holt had invited me back. I got out of the car, assuring myself that I was not nervous and that there was nothing for me to be nervous about. Meanwhile, the man in the officer’s cap talked in whispers to the garage mechanic. I was relieved when I saw Ben Holt pushing through the crowd, but there was no welcome on his face, no pleasure, no mask of conviviality for a bright young newspaperman.

“I see you’re back, Cutter,” he said to me.

“Yes, sir.”

“Why?”

I decided to tell him the truth. It was a sensible beginning, and through the years that followed, I kept it that way. “There’s at least a hundred newspapermen back there in Clinton now. There’s none with you. Am I right?”

“You’re right.”

“So that’s my job. You’re going to make news, and I want to write about it.”

“Suppose I threw you out of here?” Holt said flatly.

I shrugged. “That’s up to you. I think you’d be making a mistake.”

“Why?” That was characteristic of Holt. If there was a chance for an explanation, he asked. “Are you on our side?”

“No. Not oh your side, not on their side.”

“Then, God damn you, mister, go peddle your lies somewhere else!”

“I don’t write lies, Mr. Holt. I put down what I see.”

He pursed his lips and stared at me for a long moment, and then he said softly, “What are you after, Cutter?”

“News. That’s all.”

“Crap and horseshit!” he cried. “News! What in hell is news! This is a country down here where men work like slaves and are treated like slaves! They pawn their souls to the company store, and there’s a mortgage on their kids when the kids are born. We came down here to organize a union—just that—just to organize a union, which is supposed to be a right that some Americans have. And from the day we arrived, the terror never stopped, five thousand miners locked out of their jobs and their homes, kicked into the fields and the woods, men beaten, men tortured, women whipped and raped—all that because we tried to organize a union. Have you written about that?”

“A little. I suggested some of it in the interview I wrote about you.”

He stared at me again, as if he were trying to see through me and into me, and then he told me to follow him, leading the way around the house to the barn in back. I looked for Laura but did not see her. There were men around the barn, most of them armed, and they stood apart, not for us but to let a group of women and children come out, gaunt, prematurely aged women whose last shreds of attractiveness had been washed away in grief. They had been weeping, but it was not an act that came easily to them. We went past them and into the barn, and there on the floor, fifteen bodies were laid out. Some men at the back of the barn were sawing and nailing wooden planks for coffins. I looked at the bodies. Ten were men, miners wearing their badge of trade in the black lines etched on their hands and faces, two were boys, one was a woman, and two were little children, girls. There were more women in the barn, and they sat huddled in silent woe.

“It happened this morning,” Holt told me. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Only Jim Flecker wasn’t a miner. Jim Flecker was a murderer. This is the way they tried him and sentenced him.”

I remained silent. There was nothing for me to say.

“Is this the way death should come, Cutter?” Holt asked me. “Should it come the way it does in the mines? Do you know how many miners have died in the past ten years? Do you have any idea how many tens of thousands? What are we! Jesus God, what are we? They slaughter cattle with more compunction. Are you still neutral, Cutter?”

“You showed me this. I’ll write about it.”

“That’s all?”

“I’m not Lazarus. I can’t raise the dead, Mr. Holt.”

“No, you’re not Lazarus.”

“How did they pick them?”

“Pick them? They didn’t pick them, Cutter. They drove out of Clinton this morning, a carload of them armed to the teeth, and they killed the first miners they found—or men. Those kids weren’t miners, those two boys. The woman was Sadie Stewart, those are her kids, and that’s her husband lying next to her. Her husband ran into their shack, and those hired heroes kept firing into the shack until a roach couldn’t have remained alive in there.”

“I will want their names, if it’s not too much trouble.”

Holt glanced at me sharply, then nodded. “All right, their names and anything else you want.”

They let me work in one of the tents. I had no typewriter with me, so I sat on a stool and put down the story in longhand in my notebook. One of the miners brought me lunch, a tin cup of poor stew that was a thin mixture of meat and potatoes and a slice of bread. It was nothing to grow fat on, but no less than what the others got. By three o’clock, I had finished my story; and I was standing by the tent, trying to think of some way to file it without returning to Clinton, when Laura came over and said hello to me. Her tone was not unfriendly. She wore a white IMU band on her arm, and a white cross was stitched on her dress at the breast. She told me that they were organizing a corps of nurses.

“Then it will be war?”

“This is our home, Mr. Cutter. This is our land.”

“I know that.”

“But you don’t believe in fighting for it?”

“This is the twentieth century in the United States of America. I don’t believe in private wars—no.”

“Then what should we do?” There was no mockery in her question.

“Use the law.”

“What law? This is West Virginia, Mr. Cutter. Their law is different here, what there is of it, and in Hogan County it belongs to the mine operators. We are used to starvation, Mr. Cutter, but not to being murdered in our beds.”

I nodded, and then for a little while we stood in silence, and then she asked me what I had written and whether she could see it. I said it was not secret, and would she like me to read it to her? She nodded, and I read as follows:

“May 27, 1920. Somewhere in West Virginia. I am the only reporter present at the secret base of the International Miners Union. Here, at the headquarters of Benjamin R. Holt, as strange a situation is developing as American labor ever knew. Mr. Holt, twenty-eight-year-old strong man and newly elected president of the Miners Union, came down here recently to organize a union of the West Virginia coal miners. He brought with him a corps of organizers, and their arrival in the coal fields was the signal for an outbreak of violence unique even for this part of the country—an area that well remembers the notorious Hatfield-McCoy feud as well as many others.

“So far as this reporter can determine, the first violence was triggered, not by the miners, but by private detectives brought in by the coal operators. The first response of the miners to the union was enthusiastic, and several thousand of them signed union cards during the first few days of organization. Then the operators began the eviction of such miners as lived in company houses and had co-operated with the union. Since none of these miners had valid leases, the operators were entirely within their rights, both in the evictions and in the subsequent closing of the pits. About 85 per cent of the local miners were affected.

“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.

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.”

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.