Union v. the U. S.

The big paunchy figure of John Llewellyn Lewis straddled the nation last week, striding shadowily across innumerable newsreel screens, moving like a ponderous nightmare.

John L. Lewis dominated the stage. The huge spotlight of public attention played so exclusively on him that little else could be seen. And the stage was crowded with actors, the drama vast and profound.

The play began with a tiny incident, something as small as Ben Franklin's nail (for want of which a horseshoe was lost). And the result threatened to be as enormous as Franklin's disaster (for want of a battle, the kingdom was lost).

The facts were simple. John Lewis' Mine Workers have a closed shop for 350,000 miners in the bituminous commercial coal mines. The captive mines (those owned by the steel companies to produce coal for their own use) are long since 95% union-organized. But they are not closed shops. As the present union contract with the captive mines expired. Lewis threatened to strike the 53,000 captive coal miners (37,000 are in captive U.S. Steel Corp. mines) unless the closed shop was granted. Last week the contract expired, the miners went out.

The United Mine Workers could continue to ignore the unorganized 5%--as they have ignored them for years; or the steel companies could accept a closed shop without giving the union appreciably more strength in future negotiations. Lewis had offered a penalty clause against strikes, insuring uninterrupted coal production throughout the emergency. But the operators refused--bolstered with new courage by the sudden spectacular support of Franklin Roosevelt, who had a bellyful of strikes-as-usual. Clearly the National Defense Mediation Board put the problem:

"The intensity of the dispute and the stubbornness with which the parties stick to their positions in spite of the great emergency that confronts the country, seem out of all proportion to the minute fraction of the individual workers . . . who have not joined the union."

The White House. Franklin Roosevelt's Mediation Board, under the miraculously skillful management of bushy-headed William Hammatt Davis, had done a champion job: they had built up a great structure in which the public, industry and labor alike had confidence, were now within sight of roofing this house with a definite pattern of dispute settlement, under which all disputants would automatically turn to mediation machinery, would never strike. As last week opened, Davis was ready to nail on the weather vane: for the first time in seven months not a single actual strike case was before the Board.

Then the captive-mine case kicked loose the cornerstone. The C.I.O.'s representatives on the Board--C.I.O. President Philip Murray, Vice President Thomas Kennedy--resigned; C.I.O. cases before the Board were hauled away. The house tottered.

Franklin Roosevelt, the Great White Father of Labor, is also President of the U.S. He summoned the disputants to the White House, told them off in language that had the forceful clarity of a long-suffering man boundlessly irked. To Steelmen Purnell, Fairless and Grace and the three chiefs of C.I.O., the President read the riot act in primer words: ". . . In the first place, we all know that the United States is in a state of national emergency. ... It is essential to national safety that we continue the defense production program without delay. . . . Coal for steel plants is a necessity because steel is an essential in the manufacture of munitions."

The President told them that it was his "indisputable obligation" to see that coal was produced. He reminded them that he had been under pressure for many months to permit the passage of anti-strike legislation. Then he said something that many a U.S. citizen had never expected to hear from him. "I tell you frankly that the Government of the United States will not order, nor will Congress pass legislation ordering, a so-called closed shop. . . . The Government will never compel this 5% [unorganized miners] to join the union by a Government decree. That would be too much like the Hitler methods toward labor. The President asked the six men to confer, to reach an agreement, to report back to him two days later.

The President's words appeared to mean that when the Government was obliged to prevent strikes it would not force capital or labor to give up what either held at emergency's beginning. If so, they were a return to the labor policy of World War 1 in which the Government in forbidding strikes froze the status quo in regard to closed and open shop so that neither party should profit because of the Government's intervention.

The Wardman Park Hotel. Next day Lewis walked through a side door of the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, strode up one flight to 200-B, the suite where Messrs. Fairless, Purnell and Grace awaited him and his aides.

The big struggle was between Grace and Lewis. Reporters outside knew well that Purnell and Fairless were inclined to sign with Lewis. But Lewis is Grace's devil, and vice versa. They have a long record of hatred, these two--the smooth, hard-boiled man whose income has averaged about $600,000 a year for 23 years, who was condemned blisteringly by William Howard Taft, a World War 1 chief of the War Labor Board, for wrecking a hard-won labor agreement; and the huge, hard-boiled man who has seldom been down a mine in the last 20 years, who lives luxuriously on $25,000 a year (and perquisites) squeezed out of the $35-a-week earnings of 400,000 very poor men.

The sessions went on & on. No agreement. At midnight on Saturday the miners officially went on strike.

The miners didn't want to strike. They never do. But they had faith in John Lewis. They know the old, old response, when the union chief roars: "No contract --?" they sing out "No work!"

Detroit. The sickest men in the U.S. were the leaders of C.I.O., meeting in fourth annual convention in Detroit's dingy, down-at-the-heel Moose Temple. They had carefully prepared to make a great bid for public favor and approval of C.I.O. Speech after speech, resolution after resolution, was prepared to show the U.S. that C.I.O. was burning with all-out defense spirit, keen to outproduce Hitler, to back up Franklin Roosevelt.

They were sick at heart, angry, bewildered. And they understood what a box John L. Lewis had got them into.

Last June, after Lewis had called a strike in soft coal mines, the troubles seemed to have been settled for a long time. However, when local committees sat down to negotiate contracts, it developed that captive mines were refusing to go along on the union shop. Lewis went to the mat with them. Many an observer wondered whether crafty Mr. Lewis was not marking time over the issue until the strategic moment just before the C.I.O. convention.

The C.I.O delegates, as good unionists devoted to the closed shop, had to swallow their fury and back him to the limit on this issue. And Lewis, whom they had hoped to wreath with laurels and bury decently, was the man of the hour.

The C.I.O. chiefs had been outwitted by the ruthless old master. Grimly they had to play the farce out to the end. to make all the suddenly hollow speeches backing the defense effort, to approve the reports attacking Hitler as a foe to the U.S. Moreover, they had to endorse the miners' strike--and John L. Lewis.

The U.S. Lewis had been clever, his timing perfect. But the people of the U.S. are sick-&-tired of the word "strike," and they now associated that word with John L. Lewis in a perilous and ugly way. The U.S. would back Franklin Roosevelt in any course he took to keep coal production going--even if it meant calling out the Army. Lewis, as a purblind isolationist, might not think the continued production of coal was important, might not think that the defense program was all-important. But interventionist or isolationist, people do not like to see one man hold up a national effort. This time they plainly were ready to see that John Lewis was hammered down to size.

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