John Lewis & the Flag

This was a great week for John L. Lewis; a bitter hard week for President Roosevelt; and a week of shame, dismay and helpless wrath for the U.S. people.

John Lewis had clearly, coldly and precisely outmaneuvered the President in a battle that was even more momentous than the people yet realized. John Lewis had not yet won that battle, but in the attack his men had knocked out the strong points and climbed the slopes before the fortress. They had made a frightening show of strength, and their ranks were unbroken.

The battle was for high stakes. If John Lewis finally won it, he would be the biggest man in U.S. labor. No matter how desperately C.I.O.'s Phil Murray and A.F. of L.'s Bill Green aped him, the lesson would be plain to all union men: John Lewis is the one who gets you more money despite hell, high water, the war and the President of the U.S. And money talks, to any worker whose wartime raise has long since been chewed up by high prices.

And if Lewis won, he would stand forth as a stronger man than the U.S. President, a position calculated to discredit Mr. Roosevelt and lower the prestige of his office. He had already made some progress toward that position.

Strategic Truce. John Lewis now had a 15-day truce, in which he was prepared to bargain with his new employer, the U.S. Government. He had successfully bypassed the coal operators and the War Labor Board. As the week began, chances were he would win a guaranteed six-day work week for his bituminous miners ($7 a day for five days, $10.50 for the sixth), and perhaps even a guaranteed annual wage, which was his goal. The Government as an employer could afford to pay any amount, for the Government as a wartime customer needed all the coal the miners could dig. After a suitably decorous interval WLB would approve the new contract (retroactive to April 1), and the mines would be returned to the helpless operators, the contract a fait accompli. (No tears fell for the operators: a February price increase, approved by OPA, took care of added pay for the sixth working day.)

The way he got the truce was a Lewis masterpiece: a piece of tactics no Clausewitz could have improved on. The President had given fair warning that he would address the miners and the nation on Sunday night. Sunday morning John Lewis and three henchmen slipped into Washington, worked out the truce with Harold Ickes, now his boss as Solid Fuels Coordinator. Lewis entrained for New York. Naturally the truce could not be announced until the miners' policy committee had met. And somehow the policy committee deliberated just long enough. Twenty minutes before the President went on the air, John Lewis announced the truce, asked the miners to go to work Tuesday.

This act stripped the gears in the White House. The President did not have time to turn around and rewrite his plea that the miners go back on Monday. Doggedly, gravely the President made his case, but the speech fell in a vacuum. It even confused many miners who were already all set to go back to work, and now heard the President plead that they do.

The Mood of the Soldiers: News of the strike had come to U.S. soldiers like this:

> On a grassy hill outside Kunming, four U.S. flyers, killed in a Jap bombing raid, lay newly buried in the damp China soil. Back in the barracks, their friends read the ugly facts in the news bulletin. Some were men from the Pennsylvania coal fields. Their first reaction was bewilderment: ("Why do they let John Lewis push them around that way?"); their second, cold fury ("I'd just as soon shoot one of those strikers as Japs").

> In North Africa, where the fight for each hill was desperate, U.S. officers and men heard the details from the gloating Axis radios. They knew but one way to express their feelings: strong oaths, clamped jaws, clenched fists.

> In Orlando, Fla., an Army flying ace with 13 Jap planes to his credit, Colonel Robert L. Scott, former aide to Major General Claire L. Chennault in China, boiled over in anger: "I know I could do one service. . . . Destruction with six machine guns ... of John L. Lewis. I definitely believe that by such a coldblooded act I could rid the country of a man who acts as though he were in the pay of the Japanese Government."

This savage mood set brother against brother, miner son against miner father.

The Miners Leave. The soldiers had roots at home. Small red & white service flags with their blue stars hung in many a miner's home. The miners, too, thought of their sons in battle.

Striking is old stuff to the tough, hardened, cough-ridden miners of "dark and bloody" southern Illinois. But this time, when the deadline came on Friday night, it was different. In the bars of West Frankfort, among the men from Orient No. 2 (world's largest producer of soft coal) and Old Ben, there was an undercurrent of uneasiness; many had the shadow of a feeling of shame. The men were solidly behind Old John L., they would do what he said, all right. But their hearts were troubled; it took only a few beers to reveal a slightly guilty conscience.

Next morning, early, as the dew glistened on the cropped grass and the lilac bushes in front of Orient No. 2, no miners reported for the early shift. The whistle blew. "Let her blow," said a miner. "Sure, let her blow her head off." The miners were busy at other chores, mostly gardening. Said a grey-haired miner in faded overalls, spading his bean patch: "I hate to quit now. I got boys in the service and I realize what it might mean to the Government. But. . . ."

The Miners Are United. That morning the whistles had blown at all the mines. Nowhere was there a picket line; nowhere disorder, nowhere any coal mined. The miners waited for news.

In Pursglove, W. Va., on Sunday, the men from Scott's coal hollow held a meeting. Stiff in their Sunday clothes, they flocked to Dallas Hall, paused for a brief beer, stood bareheaded in the bare room to hear their leaders. Outside a brisk wind whipped powdery snow around the houses that cling drunkenly to the hillsides.

Up rose the local's president, a rangy, hard-bitten man named "Happy" Kundrock. "Happy" looked out the window where the U.S. flag fluttered above the Pursglove Mine. Said he: "I believe that Old Glory should wave above the tipples at any time. But, as they once said in Pennsylvania, we'll damned well die for you, but we'll be damned if we ever scab for you."

Man after man, the miners spoke the same way: "Let them draft us, put us in uniform. Maybe we'll have to dig that way. . . . But John L. Lewis is right: no work, no contract; no contract, no work."

On Tuesday they all went back, waving to photographers and smiling. Old Glory fluttered over the 3,850 grey-black mine tipples in 15 states, waving over the 530,000 miners just as it did over their sons in Tunisia and Kunming and Iceland, and just as it did over the White House, and over Manhattan, where John Lewis rested.

The miners did not seem to realize where their leaders had led them, or how close they had come to open rebellion against that Union of which their union was supposedly a loyal part.

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