John L. Lewis

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John L. Lewis (1880-1969), was an American labor leader who dominated the coal miners union (the United Mine Workers, UMW), 1920-1960, and created the CIO. He played a major role in helping Franklin D. Roosevelt win a landslide in 1936, but as an isolationist broke with Roosevelt in 1940 on foreign policy. Lewis was known as an aggressive fighter and strike leader who gained high wages for his membership while steamrolling over his opponents. Lewis was one of the most controversial figures in the history of labor, gaining credit for building the industrial unions of the CIO into a political and economic powerhouse to rival the AFL, yet was widely hated as he called nationwide coal strikes damaging the national economy in the middle of World War II. He had a powerful voice and a powerful need to be in full command, destroying his enemies as needed. Coal miners for 40 years hailed him as the benevolent dictator who brought high wages and medical benefits, and damn the critics.

Early career

Lewis was born at the coal mining town of Lucas, Iowa, the son of Thomas H. Lewis, a farm laborer and coal miner from Wales, and Ann Louisa Watkins. He attended three years of high school and at the age of 17 went to work in the coal mines. In 1906 he was elected a delegate to the United Mine Workers (UMW) national convention, where he acquired prominence as a labor organizer and an advocate for safety and better working conditions in the mines. In 1909 he was elected president of the union local in Panama, Illinois. Samuel Gompers hired him as an AFL organizer he traveled throughout the Midwest as a union organizer.

National leader

In 1917 Lewis was elected a vice-president of the union. The president was incompetent and Lewis soon took over, assuming the role of president formally in 1920. With 400,000 members, he called his first industry-wide coal strike in November 1919, but quickly acceded to government demands that he accept a compromise. He led another national strike in 1922, and an Ohio strike in 1927; they failed and membership plunged from 485,000 in 1922 to under 100,000 in 1932, as the owners started an open shop campaign that allowed non-union men to dig coal. Furthermore new mines were opening in the non-union districts in Kentucky and the South.

Coal miners worldwide were sympathetic to socialism, and in the 1920s Communists systematically tried to seize control of UMW locals. William Z. Foster, the Communist leader, opposed dual unions in favor of organizing within the UMW. The radicals were most successful in the bituminous (soft) coal regions of the Midwest, where they used local organizing drives to gain control of locals, sought a national labor political party; demanded federal nationalization of the industry. Lewis, committed to cooperation among labor, management and government, fought them bitterly and in 1928 expelled the leftists. They started a separate union, the National Miners' Union; violence between the two unions broke out especially in southern Illinois. After 1935 Lewis invited the radical organizers to work for his CIO organizing drives, and they soon gained powerful positions in CIO unions, including auto workers and electrical workers.

Great depression

Lewis supported Republican Herbert Hoover for president in 1928; in 1932 as the Great Depression bore brutally on the mining camps, he officially backed Hoover but quietly supported Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1936 his union made the largest single contribution to Roosevelt's campaign for reelection.

Lewis was appointed a member of the Labor Advisory Board and the National Labor Board of the National Recovery Administration in 1933, and in the 1930s he became an influential figure in political circles. He was instrumental in securing the passage of the Guffey Coal Act in 1935, later declared unconstitutional, and exerted pressure for a second Guffey Act in 1937, both of them favorable to miners. Lewis had long had the idea that the highly competitive bituminous coal industry, with its sharp ups and downs and cut-throat competition, could be stabilized by a powerful union that set a standard wage scale and could keep recalcitrant owners in line with selective strikes. The Guffey acts made this possible, and coal entered a golden era. At all times Lewis rejected socialism and promoted competitive capitalism.

Founding the CIO

Lewis obtained from the American Federation of Labor, at its annual convention in 1934, an endorsement of the principle of industrial unionism, as opposed to limitations to skilled workers. With the leaders of nine other large industrial unions and the UMW, in 1935 Lewis formed the Committee for Industrial Organization to promote the organization of workers on an industry-wide basis. They were expelled from the AFL in November 1938; the committee became the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO]] with Lewis as the first president. In the 1940 presidential campaign, left-wing supporters of the Soviet Union forced him to repudiate Roosevelt's foreign policy, and he supported Republican Wendell Willkie; few CIO members joined him, as they gave FDR over 85% of their votes. After Roosevelt's victory, he resigned as president of the CIO. but kept control of the UMW and withdrew it from the CIO.

World War II

Throughout World War II Lewis repeatedly called his miners out on strike, defying the government in many instances. In January 1946 Lewis led the UMW back into the AFL (not the CIO). In the postwar years he continued his militancy; his miners went on strikes or "work stoppages" annually. In response, industry, railroads and homeowners rapidly switched from coal to oil. In December 1946 a federal court injunction was issued against the UMW. enjoining them to stop striking; a fine of $3.5 million was levied upon the UMW. and one of $10,000 upon Lewis personally. In 1948 he was again fined $20,000 by a federal court for civil and criminal contempt.

After disagreeing with the AFL over signing non-Communist oaths required by the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, Lewis disaffiliate. making the UMW independent. Lewis, never a Communist himself, refused to allow any of his officials to take the non-Communist oath required by the Taft-Hartley Act; the UMW was therefore denied legal rights protected by the National Labor Relations Board. He denounced Taft-Hartley as authorizing "government by injunction" and refused to follow its provisions, saying he would not be dictated to. Lewis made an outstanding achievement in the postwar years when he secured a welfare fund financed entirely by management but administered by the union. In May 1950 he signed a new contract with the coal operators, ending nine months of regional strikes. He retired in 1959, as membership slipped to 188,000 because of mechanization, strip mining, and competition from oil.

Bibliography

Coal miners and unions

  • Baratz, Morton S. The Union and the Coal Industry (Yale University Press, 1955)
  • Bernstein, Irving. The Lean Years: a History of the American Worker 1920-1933 (1966), best coverage of the era
  • Bernstein, Irving. Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941 (1970), best coverage of the era
  • Clapp, Thomas C. "The Bituminous Coal Strike of 1943."

PhD dissertation U. of Toledo 1974. 278 pp. DAI 1974 35(6): 3626-3627-A., not online

  • Dublin, Thomas and Walter Licht. The Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century (2005) excerpt and text search
  • Dubofsky, Melvyn, and Warren Van Tine. John L. Lewis: A Biography (1977), the standard scholarly biography excerpt and text search
  • Dubofsky, Melvyn, and Warren Van Tine. "John L. Lewis " in Dubofsky and Van Tine, eds. Labor Leaders in America (1990)
  • Fishback, Price V. Soft Coal, Hard Choices: The Economic Welfare of Bituminous Coal Miners, 1890-1930 (1992) online edition
  • Galenson; Walter. The CIO Challenge to the AFL: A History of the American Labor Movement, 1935-1941, (1960) online edition
  • Hinrichs, A. F. The United Mine Workers of America, and the Non-Union Coal Fields (1923) online edition
  • Laslett, John H.M. ed. The United Mine Workers: A Model of Industrial Solidarity? 1996.
  • Lynch, Edward A., and David J. McDonald. Coal and Unionism: A History of the American Coal Miners' Unions (1939) online edition
  • Seltzer, Curtis. Fire in the Hole: Miners and Managers in the American Coal Industry University Press of Kentucky, 1985, conflict in the coal industry to the 1980s.
  • Singer, Alan Jay. "`Which Side Are You On?': Ideological Conflict in the United Mine Workers of America, 1919-1928." PhD dissertation Rutgers U., New Brunswick 1982. 304 pp. DAI 1982 43(4): 1268-A. DA8221709 Fulltext: [ProQuest Dissertations & Theses]
  • Zieger, Robert H. John L. Lewis: Labor Leader (1988), 220pp short biography by scholar
  • Zieger, Robert H. The CIO 1935-1955. 1995. online edition

See also

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