Storm Over Steel

(See front cover)

"A campaign to unionize the employes of the steel industry has been announced. . . . Persons and organizations not connected with the industry have taken charge of the campaign. There are many disturbing indications that the promoters of the campaign will employ coercion and intimidation of the employes in the industry, and foment strikes.

"The objective of the campaign is the 'closed shop' which prohibits the employment of anyone not a union member. The steel industry will oppose any attempt to compel its employes to join a union or to pay tribute for the right to work. . . ."

Thus last week did the mighty American Iron & Steel Institute, speaking for nine out of ten U. S. Steelmasters, snatch up Labor's greasy gauntlet, thrown down as the third and fiercest attempt to unionize the historically non-union steel industry began.

In 1892 workers locked out of Henry Clay Frick's Homestead mill near Pittsburgh captured a boatload of Pinkerton guards, won a historic industrial battle but subsequently lost their first attempt to force labor unions on the highly individualistic steel industry. In 1919 a Chicago railway organizer named William Zebulon Foster tried his hand at organizing Steel. This attempt degenerated because American Federation of Labor unions were more anxious to protect their individual interests than to bring steelworkers into the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel & Tin Workers. As in 1919, the great 1936 fight to unionize 500,000 steelworkers will not be directed by a member of the steel craft but by a heterogeneous group, mostly outsiders.

Committee. Within the unsympathetic walls of Pittsburgh's huge Grant Building --tenanted by Steelmaster Ernest Tener Weir and one of William Randolph Hearst's radio studios--fortnight ago the Steel Workers Organizing Committee set up headquarters, held its first meeting. Present, largely for form's sake, were Joseph K. Gaither and Thomas G. Gillis (the latter representing aged President Michael F. Tighe) of the little Amalgamated Steel Union, for whose withered and impotent favors the great forces of industrial and craft unionism within the A. F. of L. had just done mortal combat (TIME, June 15). Messrs. Gaither & Gillis had been members of the Amalgamated Committee which, after several weeks of nervous vacillation, had finally gone over to a group of insurgent A. F. of L. unions combined as the Committee for Industrial Organization. It was these A. F. of L. insurgents who put up the men (Steel Workers Organizing Committee) and money ($500,000 as a starter) to organize Steel. To be depended on for good general advice were such Steel Workers Organizing Committeemen as Julius Hochman, Socialist vice president of the International Ladies' Garment Workers which vainly supported the 1919 steel strike with $60,000; rough & ready Socialist Leo Krzycki of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, another big industrial union, which contributed $100,000 to the same strike; Lee Pressman, "purged" from the Agricultural Adjustment Administration in 1934, who had joined the committee as counsel. President Van A. Bittner of the West Virginia miners' union was told off to direct the assault on non-union Steel in the Chicago area. The South was assigned to William Mitch, district mine president of Alabama. To Clinton S. Golden, onetime official of the National Labor Relations Board, was assigned direct charge of the East. On top of the whole field organization was placed pious and progressive U.M.W. Secretary & Treasurer Philip Francis Murray, who. just off an emigrants' boat from Scotland, went underground in a Pittsburgh mine at 16.

Last week in McKeesport, Philip Murray and Judge Michael Angelo Musmanno, co-author of the colliery cinema Black Fury, called on 1,000 steel workers to join a great industrial union to be built over the bones of Amalgamated. Same day at nearby Brackenridge. John Brophy, director of the Committee for Industrial Organization, similarly exhorted 2,000 other steelworkers. This week 170 more tough, hardened organizers will join the 30 which the Steel Workers Organizing Committee already has sent into the field. Next week will be held a great mass meeting near Homestead, at which the graves of the workers killed in the 1892 battle will be wreathed and Pennsylvania's Lieutenant Governor Thomas Kennedy, International Secretary-Treasurer of the U.M.W., will orate. Pleased as punch with the way the campaign was going Philip Murray barked confidently: "No obstacle which might be thrown in the way of this committee will deter it."

Man Who. Meanwhile, the man who had done more than any ten others to make the steel drive possible was not only far from the scene of these significant activities, but did not even have a place on the organizing committee. Big as was the job of changing the labor structure of the nation's heaviest of heavy industries, John Llewellyn Lewis in the past few weeks had already moved on to larger operations. The United Mine Workers' president, the leader of the largest U. S. labor union, the founder and chairman of the Committee for Industrial Organization, John Lewis was rapidly becoming a potent force in national as well as industrial affairs. Reporters in the Senate Press Gallery knew it fortnight ago when they saw the baleful glare Miner Lewis cast down on West Virginia's snaggle-toothed Rush Holt as that daring young man filibustered the substitute Guffey Coal Control Bill and possibly his own public career into the discard. Newshawks at the White House knew it when John Lewis stomped grimly into the President's office next day. And correspondents in the press box at the Democratic Convention last week knew it when John Lewis, hospitably received by the Resolutions Committee, was presumably permitted to hew out the labor plank of the platform on which Franklin Roosevelt will stand for reelection. Significantly the plank went out of its way to take specific note of labor problems which interest John L. Lewis. By last week, newshawks widely concluded, John L. Lewis had entered the charmed circle of Politicians Who Count.

The Education of John L. Lewis is a process which has notably accelerated in recent years. Credit for the initial polishing of an extremely rough diamond goes to Mrs. Lewis, a onetime Iowa schoolmarm. Like the wife and scion of any prosperous businessman, Mrs. Lewis and her only son John L. Jr. were last week on their way to Europe for a summer vacation. About on a par with the decor of a successful mine superintendent's home is that of John L. Lewis' neat colonial house in Alexandria, Va. There in his lovely garden he now receives the flower of legislative society. Perhaps the only mannerism which still betrays his early career as a mine mule-skinner is his habit of hitching up his coat sleeves before he carves the roast. His conversation is straightforward, if sometimes redundant, and he is quite capable of conveying, if not originating, an acceptable image. Sonorously he speaks of the democratic necessity, in these troubled political times, of a large, well-disciplined, contented bloc of organized workers between "the upper millstone of capitalism, and the nether millstone of radicalism."

As late as 1933, John Lewis was little more than the hard-boiled head of a hard-boiled union. Less than 25% of the nation's soft coal was dug under union contract. More than half of U.M.W.'s 300,000 membership probably failed to pay dues. Under the New Deal's NRA, U.M.W. suddenly gained 200,000 members which it has managed to keep, now represents 95% of the industry. On mine operators John Lewis riveted the "check-off"--that potent device whereby employers automatically deduct union dues from payrolls, turn the proceeds over to the union, which is thus kept strong and well-fed. Result: U.M.W. today has a war chest of some $2,000,000. From 1934 John Lewis can date his ambition to reorganize the traditionally craft-built A. F. of L. on industrial lines, like his U.M.W. After failing to get what he wanted from the A. F. of L.'s conventions, John Lewis resigned his A. F. of L. vice-presidency last November, banded together seven other industrial unions* in a smaller federation of his own. As the Committee for Industrial Organization they are now out to increase their strength, prestige and combined membership of 1,300,000 with Steel's half-million workers.

Most leaders who once fought John Lewis have since joined him. A. F. of L.'s President William Green, dedicated by his office to the craft tradition, has made himself look silly by continuing to order Lewis' Committee for Industrial Organization to disband under pain of excommunication. No one knows better than "Bill" Green that it takes two-thirds of a Federation convention to banish member unions, that the Committee for Industrial Organization represents more than a third of the entire A. F. of L. membership. Best current guess is that William Green will make his peace with John Lewis before the Tampa convention adjourns next November.

New Friend. The courage and vitality which often attracts a scholar to a man of action recently brought Resettlement Administrator Rexford Guy Tugwell and John L. Lewis together. Professor Tugwell had heard of Lewis' plans regarding Steel, wanted to give him "some economic advice." There was a dinner in Alexandria. Shortly thereafter Harvard's Lee Pressman, the Resettlement Administration's General Counsel, was serving the Steel Organization Committee in a similar capacity. Furthermore, when sharecroppers' organizers following their arrest recently could not raise bail in Memphis, it was the U.M.W. which arranged their freedom for them from New York. Sharecroppers are Administrator Tugwell's gravest concern.

The spectacle of John L. Lewis on Organized Labor's pinnacle, throned on Coal and crowned with Steel, is not fantastic. With Welsh caution, he himself protests he sees no further than 1936, declares:

"This [steel drive] is to be a campaign that has no terminal facilities, that has no deadline. It is a fight that is going to go on until the workers in the steel industry have the right to organize in unions of their own choice and decide conditions of their own working life in the same manner as workers in other industries."

* International Typographical Union; Amalgamated Clothing Workers; International Ladies' Garment Workers; United Textile Workers; Oil Field, Gas Well & Refinery Workers; United Hatters, Cap & Millinery Workers; International Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers.

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