Demon, Sovereign and Savior

When we control the production of coal, we hold the vitals of our society right in our hands. I can squeeze, twist, and pull until we get the inevitable victory.

--John Llewellyn Lewis

Through four stormy decades, he was absolute sovereign of the men who worked the mines. To them he was a savior. His demagogic, often ruthless tactics alienated other Americans from Presidents on down. He gloried in playing the heavy in the drama of labor's awakening. When his sonorous voice boomed "Strike!", the nation's cartoonists went to work etching his famous eyebrows to give him a demonic visage. "I have pleaded your case," he told his miners, "not in the quavering tones of a feeble mendicant asking alms, but in the thundering voice of the captain of a mighty host, demanding the rights to which free men are entitled." When John L. Lewis, 89, died last week at Washington, D C.'s Doctors Hospital, he had been president emeritus of the United Mine Workers since 1960. Remembering his years of active leadership, the miners appropriately honored him by walking out of the pits for a four-day period of mourning.

Witch Hunt. Lewis was born to his job. His father, an immigrant miner from Wales, was blacklisted by his company's management for his role in a bitter, late-19th century strike John L. quit school before he finished the eighth grade, and by age 15 he had followed his father to the pits. In Colorado he mined coal. Then it was copper in Montana, silver in Utah, gold in Arizona. In 1911, Lewis went to work for Samuel Gompers, then president of the American Federation of Labor and the greatest labor tactician of the era. Because he could back his sharp tongue with a strong, 210-lb. frame, Lewis soon became a labor organizer. Often, days of organizing in small company towns ended in fistfights with union busters.

In 1920, Lewis became president of the United Mine Workers, a post he was to hold until 1960. During his first decade as union chief, economic conditions and his own mistakes almost destroyed the U.M.W. Faced with difficulties, he sought to offset bad publicity by launching a witch hunt for supposed Communists in the union. Between 1920 and 1930, dues-paying membership shrank from more than 400,000 to fewer than 150,000.

Enrolling Steel. Realizing that labor's future depended on organizing the unskilled, Lewis and other leaders rebelled against the exclusivity of the craft-oriented A.F.L. They formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations with Lewis as president. The C.I.O. extended unionization to the unskilled and semiskilled, organizing by industry instead of by trade. After rapid successes enrolling steel and auto workers, the union was firmly established. In 1937 Lewis had his first serious altercation with Franklin Roosevelt, triggered by a rash of "Little Steel" strikes. During one of them, in Chicago, police shot and killed ten workers. When Roosevelt was asked what he thought of the continuing management-labor clashes, he replied: "A plague on both your houses."

Lewis, a political independent whose union had contributed $500,000 to Roosevelt's 1936 campaign, was enraged but still able to frame one of his most eloquent condemnations: "It ill behooves one who has supped at labor's table and who has been sheltered in labor's house to curse with equal fervor and fine impartiality both labor and its adversaries when they become locked in deadly embrace."

He tried for revenge against Roosevelt in the 1940 elections, but could not rally his C.I.O. workers to vote as a bloc against his archenemy. Lewis backed Wendell Willkie, saying that the Republican was better fitted to keep America out of a war in Europe. In fact, Lewis' isolationism was a guise for his vendetta against Roosevelt. He vowed to leave the presidency of the C.I.O. if Roosevelt won, and when that happened, he kept his promise. Later he took his United Mine Workers out of the alliance. He returned briefly to the A.F.L., only to quit the federation because he refused to comply with a Taft-Hartley Act provision requiring union officials to swear they were not Communists. That stipulation, he said, was "damnable, vicious, unwholesome and a slave statute."

Lewis never recovered the prestige lost in his exodus from the C.I.O., though he still enjoyed the admiration and trust of his mine workers. During the 1940s, he called a series of coal strikes that won fringe benefits and wage increases. But some of the strikes cost Lewis and the union whopping fines for contempt of court.

Seeking Reform. Lewis had little use for other union leaders. He called Walter Reuther a "pseudointellectual nitwit" and characterized George Meany as "an honest plumber trying to abolish sin in the labor movement." He continued to be the loner, seeking reform in his own style. His crusade for better mine conditions finally succeeded in part when Congress passed the Federal Coal Mine Safety Act in 1952. He recognized the need to modernize mining techniques and worked with management to spur automation in the industry, even though it cost some miners their jobs.

Biographer Saul Alinsky wrote: "The key to the understanding of Lewis' personality is to be found in his extraordinary tenacity of purpose. Inconsistencies or contradictions create no conflict in Lewis." In private, he was a gregarious jokester who mimicked anyone, including himself. A prodigious reader, he was able in his speeches to bend the Bible and Shakespeare to the needs of the inarticulate men in the mines.

The austere, fearsome public image he projected was tailored to his purpose. For years it made him America's leading bogeyman. When union public relations men learned that mothers invoked the name of Lewis to keep rebellious children in line, they added in a biographical sketch that Lewis "feels at home with children and knows how to please them." To his own children, Lewis would often say: "He that toot-eth not his own horn, the same shall not be tooted."

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