John L. Lewis

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John Llewellyn Lewis (February 12, 1880 – June 11, 1969) was a leader of organized labor who served as president of the United Mine Workers of America from 1920 to 1960. He was a major player in the History of coal mining. He was the driving force behind the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which established the United Steel Workers of America and helped organize millions of other industrial workers in the 1930s. After resigning as head of the CIO in 1941, he took the Mine Workers out of the CIO in 1942, then back into the American Federation of Labor in 1944.

Rise to Power

Born to a Welsh immigrant in Cleveland, Iowa, Lewis began working in the "BIG HILL" Mine in Lucas, Iowa as a teenager. He began working around the countryside as a "ten day miner" in the western United States and finally moved to Panama, Illinois with other members of his family. He joined the United Mine Workers and was eventually elected to the position of branch secretary. In 1911 Lewis began organizing for the AFL full time. By 1917 he had been elected president of the UMWA. Lewis quickly asserted himself as a dominant figure in what was then the largest and most influential trade union in the country.

Lewis was considered by some a despotic leader of the Mine Workers: he expelled his political rivals within the UMWA, such as John Brophy and Adolph Germer. Communists in District 26 (Nova Scotia), including Canadian labour legend JB McLachlan, were banned from running for the union executive after a strike in 1923. McLachlan described him as "a traitor to the working class". He nonetheless commanded great loyalty from many of his followers, even those he had exiled in the past.

A powerful speaker and strategist, Lewis used the nation's dependence on coal to increase the wages and improve the safety of miners, even during several severe recessions. He masterminded a five-month strike, ensuring that the increase in wages gained during World War I would not be lost.

Lewis challenged Samuel Gompers, who had led the AFL and its predecessors for nearly forty years, for the Presidency of the AFL in 1921. William Green, one of his subordinates within the Mine Workers at the time, nominated him; William Hutcheson, the President of the Carpenters, supported him. Gompers won. Three years later, on Gompers' death, Green succeeded him as President. Ten years later, during the struggle over the AFL's refusal to organize mass production workers, Green would be the target of some of Lewis' most stinging attacks while Hutcheson would be the recipient of a famous punch from Lewis that came to symbolize the dispute between the conservative AFL and the rebellious CIO.

In the Presidential election of 1940, Lewis supported Wendell Willkie, a Republican candidate, fearing Roosevelt's intention for American involvement in World War II. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the miners issued a no-strike pledge "for the duration" in support of the war effort. However, Lewis repeatedly violated the pledge, most notably in 1943 when half a million workers walked off the job. Public opinion was extremely angry and demanded new laws. President Roosevelt, a traditional ally of labor, felt he had no choice but to seize the mines. Even so, some steel mills closed for weeks and power shortages crippled production.

The 1950s

In the 1950s, Lewis won periodic wage and benefit increases for miners and led the campaign for the first Federal Mine Safety Act in 1952. Lewis tried to impose some order on a declining industry through collective bargaining, maintaining standards for his members by insisting that small operators agree to contract terms that effectively put many of them out of business. Mechanization nonetheless eliminated many of the jobs in his industry while scattered non-union operations persisted.

Lewis continued to be as autocratic as ever within the UMWA: until the passage of the Landrum-Griffin Act in 1959, the UMWA had kept a number of its districts in trusteeship for decades, meaning that Lewis appointed union officers who otherwise would have been elected by the membership.

Lewis retired as president of the UMWA in 1960 and was succeeded as president by Thomas Kennedy until his death in 1963, when he was succeeded by Lewis-anointed successor W.A. "Tony" Boyle, who was just as dictatorial, but without any of Lewis' leadership skills or vision.

Lewis died at his home in Alexandria, Virginia in 1969.

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John L. Lewis quotes

"I have pleaded (labor's) case, not in the quavering tones of a feeble mendicant asking alms, but in the thundering voice of the captain of a mighty host, demanding the rights to which free men are entitled."

(Asked about the number of communists and other radicals he had hired as organizers for the Steel Workers Organizing Committee) "Who gets the bird, the hunter or the dog?"

"The union miner cannot agree to the acceptance of a wage principle which will permit his annual earnings and his living standards to be determined by the hungriest unfortunates whom the non-union operators can employ."

References

• Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941 by Irving Bernstein (1969)
• Public Opinion, 1935-1946 ed by Hadley Cantril and Mildred Strunk. (1951)
• John L. Lewis: A Biography by Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, (1977)
• The CIO Challenge to the AFL: A History of the American Labor Movement, 1935-1941 by Walter Galenson (1960
• The CIO, 1935-1955 by Robert H. Zieger (1995)pt:John L. Lewis