Fighter's Retreat

Over the telephone, the editor of the bimonthly United Mine Workers Journal heard the unmistakable rumbling voice of U.M.W. President John Llewellyn Lewis: "When are you going to lock up the page forms of the next edition?" The editor said the following Monday. Replied John L.: "Well, I may have something for you. I'll let you know." Hours before presstime last week, John L. Lewis sent over a letter that gave the Journal--and most U.S. newspapers--a headline: JOHN L. LEWIS RESIGNS.

"At first," Lewis wrote the U.M.W. membership with the familiar flourish, "your wages were low, your hours long, your labor perilous, your health disregarded, your children without opportunity, your union weak, your fellow citizens and public representatives indifferent to your wrongs." But John L., born in Lucas, Iowa, Feb. 12, 1880, a Welsh coal miner's son who quit school after the seventh grade to dig coal in underground pits, a union organizer with a shock of red hair and red eyebrows and a Shakespearian style, fought his way to the top of the U.M.W. to change all that.

Up in Wages. Over his 40 years as U.M.W. head, he battled with presidents, congresses, courts, coal owners, and colleagues. Often his battles obscured the victory. Said Lewis to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, under whose benevolent New Deal he founded the C.I.O. and deployed the sit-down strike: "Nobody can call John L. Lewis a liar and least of all Franklin Delano Roosevelt.'' He denounced F.D.R.'s first Vice President, John Nance Garner, as "a labor-baiting, poker-playing, whisky-drinking, evil old man." Of the late A.F.L. President William Green he said: "I have done a lot of exploring of Bill Green's mind, and I give you my word there is nothing there." Said Harry Truman of John L. Lewis: "I wouldn't appoint him dogcatcher."

But through the late Truman years and the Eisenhower years, Lewis showed labor statesmanship of the highest order. He continued to press for the wage increases that brought average U.M.W. pay from $6 a day in 1920 to $11.75 after the war to $24.25 today. He fought for, got, and managed with integrity a $150-million-a-year health-and-welfare fund, went to bat on Capitol Hill for important mine-safety legislation.

Down in Number. Lewis' most forward-looking contribution to the U.S. was his acceptance of labor-saving machinery for an industry that was in decline. In the teeth of competition from natural gas and oil, Lewis wrote the contracts to help the coal owners, came out unequivocally for automation and higher productivity even though that meant redeployment of many of his miners and a faster decline of his mighty U.M.W. from 600,000 after World War II to 430,000 today.

In his letter of resignation to his miners, John L. Lewis, two months short of 80, summed up his life's, work in what were his least controversial words. "I shall hope," he said simply, "that each of you will believe that through the years I have been faithful to your interests." Lewis' successor as U.M.W. president for the final year of his four-year term: Mild, humorous Vice President Thomas Kennedy, 72, a miner since 1900, onetime Lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania (1935-39), who has lived and worked faithfully for 40 years in John L.'s massive shadow.

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