John Lewis Fights a Strike

Thick-chested Oscar Servaczgo, striking Wilkes-Barre anthracite coal miner, sat in his kitchen talking to Philadelphia Record Reporter Johnston D. Kerkhoft. Suddenly a telephone call brought him stunning news. One of his two Navy sons had been killed in the Pacific. Servaczgo burst out: "I ain't a traitor, damn 'em, I ain't a traitor. I'll stay out until hell freezes over. . . .

Dickie was fighting for one thing. I'm fighting for another. And they ain't so far apart."

The people of the U.S. shivered and wondered. Some of them were indeed using the word traitor on the likes of Oscar Servaczgo. In all the Eastern Seaboard there was not enough fuel to keep homes warm, fire factory furnaces, prosecute the war. In East-Central Pennsylvania's anthracite basin extending from Carbondale to Pottsville there was good hard coal aplenty--underground--but some 17,000 striking miners refused to dig it. Other thousands threatened to walk out. The press roared its disapproval or belatedly questioned, "Why?"

On the street corners of dusty mine towns, in the beer taverns or standing in grim little groups near the black, smokeless collieries, idle hard-coal miners were bewildered too. They had struck hopelessly against John L. Lewis and a 50-c- monthly increase in United Mine Workers' dues. To them it was the last straw of Lewis dictation.

Two "orders" from the National War Labor Board, frantic efforts by John L. Lewis to stop the strike, to recapture his cracking domination of the anthracite region, failed to move them back to the mines. Said a Tamaqua local union president: "I'd rather work under soldiers than under John L. Lewis."

In Washington there was talk of a personal appeal from President Roosevelt over the head of Lewis, to start the flow of coal again. If that failed, there was only one recourse--Government occupation of the mines, with troops if need be.

Said an official of the War Labor Board, powerless to end the intra-union dispute: "It is very strange the miners have refused to follow the order and counsel of Mr. Lewis." To the people of Eastern U.S., the strike was not only strange, it looked like sabotage. But to the men who worked in the hard-coal shafts, it was neither. It was a strike not against the mine operators or the public but against a union despot.

The strike had started with the year's end. Under U.M.W.'s checkoff system of dues collection, coal companies had begun deducting 50-c- more for union dues than the usual $1 per month from miners' pay --the increase had been voted at the last U.M.W. convention. A majority of the anthracite miners opposed it then, vowed they would never pay it. They were outvoted by the more numerous bituminous-coal workers, traditionally loyal to Lewis. To the hard-coal workers, this meant placing additional millions from their own slim pay checks at the disposal of Absentee Landlord Lewis. They bided their time, and when the checkoff came, they struck. It was as simple as that, and as complex.

There was no violence, no central organized leadership, few picket lines in this strange work stoppage. Never once did Lewis appear on the ground; the mine town talk was that he was afraid to. Through his chief agent Thomas Kennedy, Secretary-Treasurer of U.M.W., in the fields and personally before the War Labor Board in Washington, he vainly urged miners to abide by their contract, keep Labor's "No strike" pledge. Lewis was on firm legal ground and he knew it. Technically he was blameless for the strike; but in every beer tavern from Wilkes-Barre to Hazleton the anthracite miners had only one refrain--"God damn John L. Lewis!"

This week the powerful mineworker foundation on which the shaggy labor leader climbed was crumbling. Even with WLB help he had been unable to quell a wildcat strike in his once solid jurisdiction. Only the President, with whom John Lewis long since broke all ties, could act directly to send the miners back to work. While nothing happened, anthracite production was dropping more than 40,000 tons a day.

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