John L. Lewis

Labor Leader

  • Born: February 12, 1880
  • Birthplace: Lucas, Iowa
  • Died: June 11, 1969
  • Place of death: Alexandria, Virginia

American labor leader

As president of the United Mine Workers union and founder of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, Lewis dominated the progress of organized labor in the United States from the 1920’s through the 1960’s.

Areas of achievement Labor movement, social reform

Early Life

John Llewellyn Lewis was the son of Thomas Lewis and Louisa (née Watkins) Lewis, who had been born in Wales and had migrated to the United States in the 1870’s. John was the eldest of six sons and two daughters. Thomas worked as a coal miner whenever he could find work, but, having been placed on an employer blacklist for leading a miners’ strike in 1882, he often had to fill in with other jobs, such as working as a night watchman.

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Young Lewis only went as far as the eighth grade before leaving school to supplement his father’s meager and irregular income. He sold newspapers in Des Moines, Iowa, for a few years until the abolition of the blacklist in 1897 allowed his father to return to Lucas, where Lewis, then age seventeen, joined him in the coal mines. Lewis worked there until 1901 and then set off on a working tour of Western mining communities, toiling in copper, silver, gold, and coal mines in Montana, Utah, Arizona, and Colorado. Soon after returning to Lucas in 1906, he married Myrta Edith Bell, the daughter of a local doctor. They would have three children: Margaret Mary (who died in childhood), Florence Kathryn, and John Llewellyn II.

Shortly before Lewis’s marriage, the Lucas miners elected him as a delegate to the national convention of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), the largest union affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). A few years later, in 1909, he moved his family to Panama, Illinois, and continued his union activity. He was selected president of the Panama miners’ local union and soon thereafter was appointed state legislative agent for District 12 of the UMWA. It was in this capacity that he convinced the Illinois legislature to pass a comprehensive package of mine safety and workmen’s compensation laws by exploiting the Cherry, Illinois, mine disaster of 1911 that killed 160 men.

Samuel Gompers(founder and president of the AFL), impressed by Lewis’s obvious leadership talents, took the young labor activist under his wing and made him a national legislative representative for the AFL in late 1911. This job took Lewis to Washington, D.C., where he was able to learn valuable lessons regarding the politics and management of labor organization. He also continued his rise through the ranks of the UMWA. In 1916, he served as temporary chair of the UMWA’s national convention and, in 1917, he was elected vice president of the union.

Lewis had his first taste of national-level labor confrontation when, in 1919, he became acting president of the union for Frank J. Hayes, who had become too debilitated by alcoholism to carry out his duties. Several months after assuming this position, Lewis called for a strike when mine operators rejected the union’s demand for a 60 percent wage hike, a six-hour workday, and a five-day workweek. A federal court issued an injunction against the strike, but, in November, 1919, Lewis defied the injunction, ordering 425,000 men out of the mines. The strike lasted two months and, after a face-to-face meeting with President Woodrow Wilson, Lewis was forced to call the miners back to work. They did gain a wage increase of approximately 30 percent, but their other demands went unsatisfied. The rough, bulky, bushy-eyebrowed Lewis did gain a reputation for toughness during the strike, however, and he parlayed this into an official UMWA presidency in 1920. He would hold this position until he retired in 1960.

Life’s Work

Lewis assumed the presidency of the UMWA at a time when the coal industry had begun to experience serious difficulties. Coal output had skyrocketed between 1916 and 1919 to meet wartime needs but, once World War I was over, demand dropped back to more normal levels, causing a glut of coal on the market. In addition, mine owners with union workers faced rising competition from nonunion mines in the South and from “captive” mines owned by steel companies and railroads. In an effort to meet these threats, unionized producers began to lower both prices and miners’ wages. Lewis refused to agree to this wage-reduction strategy and, in 1922, he called a strike. Miners did win a wage increase to $7.50 a day as a result of this strike, but many only worked irregularly as the crisis persisted.

In the years that followed, the situation in the coal industry continued to deteriorate. More than three thousand mines shut down during the 1920’s and UMWA membership dropped from a high of 500,000 in 1922 to 150,000 by 1930. Lewis responded by urging coal operators to increase their productivity and thereby halt the precipitous decline in regular miner employment. He opposed pay cuts that were made to keep unprofitable operations in business and instead favored the closing of these marginal mines and the introduction of increased mechanization in remaining ones to make them more efficient and competitive and thus a stable source of employment for his members. Factions within the UMWA opposed Lewis’s proposals and organized a series of wildcat strikes to protest his emphasis on mechanization (which they believed would cost even more jobs). This struggle within the UMWA, which also contributed to the decline in membership, culminated at the national convention of 1930, where his opponents made a concerted effort to unseat him. Lewis still had enough support within the UMWA, however, to resist these attempts and to purge the leaders of this opposition from the union.

As the Depression tightened its grip on the United States after 1930, it also aggravated the problems within the coal industry. Coal sales continued to slump, and thousands of miners lost their jobs. The UMWA, in an increasingly weakened position, could do little to resist employer attempts to reduce the wages of miners who managed to keep their jobs. It was at this point that Lewis turned to the national government for help. Although he had been a Republican throughout the 1920’s and had even supported Herbert Hoover in 1932, Lewis recognized that the Democrat who defeated his man in that election, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was sympathetic to labor’s plight and might come to its aid. Accordingly, Lewis swung to Roosevelt and the Democratic Party and participated actively in the New Deal. He became a labor adviser to the president, a member of the Labor Advisory Board, and a member of the National Labor Board. This close relationship between the UMWA and the Roosevelt administration benefited both parties. Because of the passage of the Guffey Act of 1935, National Labor Relations Act (or Wagner Act) of 1935, and section 7A of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, miners received a substantial daily pay raise, a shortened workday, and the right to bargain collectively through their own representatives. The UMWA recovered as a result, and, by 1935, its membership was approaching one-half million again. Roosevelt, on the other hand, received the grateful votes of coal miners, relative labor peace in the mines, and large contributions from the UMWA to his campaign treasury.

Meanwhile, trouble was brewing in the AFL, and Lewis, as usual, was at the center of it. Lewis had decided that “industrial unionism” (where all workers in a given industry, regardless of their particular trade, would be part of a single union that represented them all) was the best way for workers to fight for their rights, and he tried to convince the AFL, which represented workers by their trade, to adopt this policy. At the AFL national convention of 1935, however, his proposal was soundly rejected. In response, Lewis resigned as vice president of the AFL in November, 1935, and formed a new omnibus labor organization based on industrial unionism, one that eventually became the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Lewis’s UMWA led the way in affiliating with this new organization, and it was soon joined by many others. By 1938, the CIO included forty-four unions and more than four million members.

As president of the CIO, Lewis also began the hard struggle to organize automobile and steelworkers and affiliate them with his organization. Employing such tactics as the sit-down strike, he did force the automobile industry to recognize the CIO in 1937. He then convinced the nation’s largest steel manufacturer, United States Steel, to accept the CIO (also in 1937). The smaller steel companies, however, such as Bethlehem and Republic Steel, put up strong resistance to Lewis’s organizing efforts, forcing him to call a strike against them in May, 1937. Marred by violence, the strike dragged on until late summer of that year, and Lewis ultimately accepted a compromise settlement that fell short of his initial goals.

The strike also provoked a break between Lewis and Roosevelt. Lewis became disappointed and frustrated at the president’s lack of support for the so-called Little Steel strike and tried to rally labor behind his Republican opponent, Wendell Willkie, in the election of 1940. Roosevelt nevertheless won easily, but he never forgave Lewis for his defection. Temporarily defeated, Lewis resigned as president of the CIO and devoted his full attention to his UMWA.

Lewis opposed American involvement in World War II and stuck to this position right up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Although he declared his support for the American war effort after this attack, his “noninvolvement” stand up to Pearl Harbor had alienated many of his former allies among the leadership of the CIO. In 1942, therefore, he pulled the UMWA out of the CIO and purged CIO sympathizers from his union.

Lewis did not allow the war to stop him from fighting for the coal miners. In 1943, he declared that the wage increase authorized by the War Labor Board was inadequate and called a strike. The conflict lasted nearly a year, and, during its course, the government temporarily took over the nation’s mines and Roosevelt even appealed directly to the miners to return to work. In the end, though, Lewis won a two-dollars-per-day pay increase for his men. He called another strike in 1945 and won again, gaining an increase in overtime pay, the establishment of one-hour travel pay to and from work, and paid vacations for miners. Lewis authorized still another strike in March, 1946, which resulted in a small pay increase and, more important, the establishment of a pension and welfare fund for miners, financed by a five cents per ton royalty on all coal produced.

In October, 1946, Lewis called his third strike in fourteen months in an attempt to reduce the miners’ workweek to less than fifty-four hours. A federal court judge issued a restraining order against this work stoppage. When Lewis ignored the order, the judge found him to be in criminal and civil contempt and fined him ten thousand dollars and the UMWA $3.5 million. The Supreme Court upheld the judge’s order, and Lewis had no choice but to call off the strike.

In between the two strikes in 1946, Lewis had reaffiliated the UMWA with the AFL. This reconciliation lasted only a year before Lewis, after a disagreement with other AFL leaders over the organization’s position regarding the new Taft-Hartley Act, withdrew the UMWA again. It would remain unaffiliated with both the AFL and CIO during the rest of his presidency.

Lewis authorized more coal strikes in 1948 and 1949 and, despite court injunctions, fines, and the strict provisions of the Taft-Hartley law, he won further wage increases, a seven-hour workday, and increases in employer contributions to the pension and welfare fund. At the time of Lewis’s retirement from the UMWA presidency, a post he had held for forty years, miners earned $24.24 a day and possessed a pension fund of $1.3 billion. Lewis also devoted much of his efforts during the 1950’s to improving safety in coal mines and played a major role in obtaining the passage of the Federal Mine Safety Law of 1952.

Following his retirement, Lewis served as a trustee for the union’s pension and welfare fund; in 1964, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Lyndon B. Johnson. Lewis died in Washington, D.C., on June 11, 1969, at the age of eighty-nine.

Significance

Lewis transformed the coal industry and the American labor movement. When he became president of the UMWA in 1920, miners were paid seven dollars a day; they had no travel-time pay, no paid vacations, no welfare and pension fund; they had to supply their own tools; and they received no state compensation for mine accidents. In 1960, after forty years of Lewis’s leadership, they made more than twenty-four dollars a day, had one hour’s paid travel-time per day, a week’s paid vacation, a huge pension and welfare fund, and used tools supplied by their employers. All states paid compensation for miners killed or injured in work-related accidents, and, moreover, Lewis had persuaded the federal government to enact rules regarding mine safety that were enforced by a joint operator-miner committee. Lewis not only had greatly improved the material condition of coal miners in the United States but also had made them partners with their employers in determining conditions inside the mines.

Lewis’s influence spread far beyond the coalfields. His partnership with Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1932 to 1940 played a large role in determining the prolabor stance of the early New Deal and helped forge the alliance with organized labor that served the Democratic Party so well in future decades. Through his founding of the CIO in 1935 and his organizing efforts on its behalf, Lewis not only established industrial unionism on a solid and permanent foundation in the United States but also helped create the powerful United Automobile Workers and United Steel Workers unions. In addition, Lewis shaped the nature of modern collective bargaining between unions and management. By employing such tactics as the sit-down strike and through his willingness to call strikes whenever the interests of his men were threatened, regardless of the powers lined up against him, Lewis made organized labor a force to be reckoned with in the United States, one that insisted that it share in the decisions that affected it.

Lewis could be stubborn, vain, autocratic, and even abusive, given to labeling his opponents as “communists.” Yet the organized labor movement in the United States made gigantic gains under his uncompromising leadership, and the American worker, not only the coal miner, is much better off because of him.

Bibliography

Alinsky, Saul. John L. Lewis: An Unauthorized Biography. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1949. The author was a formidable organizer himself and he appreciates Lewis’s talents in this regard. Yet he is also at pains to point out what he sees as weaknesses in Lewis’s character, abilities, and tactics. This book is a good, balanced portrait of Lewis the man and Lewis the organizer.

Carnes, Cecil. John L. Lewis. New York: Robert Speller, 1936. Published shortly after Lewis founded the CIO in 1935, this book provides a rather colorless account of his career up to that point.

Dubofsky, Melvyn, and Warren Van Tine. John L. Lewis: A Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. This book is not only the most comprehensive and well-written study of Lewis; it is also an often brilliant analytical survey of the American labor movement from 1920 to 1960.

Kurland, Gerald. John L. Lewis: Labor’s Strong-Willed Organizer. Charlotteville, N.Y.: SamHar Press, 1973. A short (one-hundred-page) general examination of Lewis’s life and work. It will provide the interested reader with the highlights of Lewis’s career but little else.

McFarland, C. K. Roosevelt, Lewis, and the New Deal, 1933-1940. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1970. A good and concise investigation of the relationship between Lewis and Roosevelt up until their official split during the presidential election in 1940, this book falls a little short in explaining the long-range repercussions of this seven-year partnership.

Preis, Art. Labor’s Giant Step: Twenty Years of the CIO. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972. In the course of tracing the first two decades of the CIO, the author also presents a fairly objective portrait of Lewis’s role in creating and then almost destroying the organization.

Wechsler, James A. Labor Baron: A Portrait of John L. Lewis. New York: William Morrow, 1944. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972. Emphasizes Lewis’s negative side and downplays his positive achievements.

Zieger, Robert H., and Gilbert J. Gall. American Workers, American Unions: The Twentieth Century. 3d ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. This history of the American labor movement includes information about Lewis.

1901-1940: March 23, 1932: Norris-La Guardia Act Strengthens Labor Organizations; July 5, 1935: Wagner Act; November 10, 1935: Congress of Industrial Organizations Is Founded.

1941-1970: April 8, 1943-June 23, 1947: Inflation and Labor Unrest; June 23, 1947: Taft-Hartley Act Passes over Truman’s Veto; December 5, 1955: AFL and CIO Merge.