John Llewellyn Lewis (February 12, 1880 – June 11, 1969) was an American leader of organized labor who served as the ninth president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) from 1920 to 1960 and the first president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which organized millions of industrial workers during the Great Depression, from 1935 to 1940. Lewis was a major figure in the history of coal mining and the American labor movement; his supporters credited him with high wages, pensions, and medical benefits in the mining industry.Robert H. Zieger. "Lewis, John L." American National Biography Online Feb. 2000 Throughout his career in the public eye, Lewis was frequently caricatured and came to represent the broader American labor movement.
Lewis was born to Welsh immigrants in 1880 and raised in Iowa, where he entered work in 1897 as a coal miner without a high school education. In 1906, he was elected as a delegate to the UMW national convention. After a brief and unsuccessful attempt at politics and business, Lewis returned to mining and was elected president of the UMW local in Panama, Illinois. In 1911, Samuel Gompers hired Lewis to work for the American Federation of Labor (AFL) as a full-time organizer.
In 1919, Lewis led the first major union-led coal strike and the next year, he was elected president of the UMW, then the largest and most influential trade union in the United States. He remained its leader for four decades. As president, he placed locals under centralized leadership and supported principles of industrial unionism and "competitive capitalism," opposing efforts by communists, led by William Z. Foster, to organize within the UMW. His long tenure as UMW president was controversial within the labor movement. Supporters lauded material gains for miners under his leadership and his cooperative approach to legislative reforms, while socialists denounced him as a class traitor.
Lewis was the leading force behind the establishment of the Congress of Industrial Organizations to promote the principle of industrial unionism within the AFL and served its first president from 1935 to 1940. The CIO brought together ten allied industrial unions to promote the principles of industrial unionism in the United States and succeeded at winning collective bargaining agreements with General Motors and U.S. Steel, two of the most anti-union corporations in the United States at the time. In 1938, the CIO was expelled from the AFL and entered a period of competitive organizing against its parent federation which ended with their 1955 merger as the AFL-CIO.
Politically, Lewis was a member of the Republican Party but played a major role in helping Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt win a landslide re-election victory in 1936. Lewis broke with Roosevelt in 1940 over Roosevelt's support for growing American involvement in World War II. He supported Republican businessman Wendell Willkie instead. After Willkie lost, Lewis resigned as president of the CIO and withdrew the UMW to join the American Federation of Labor (AFL). After the attack on Pearl Harbor, however, Lewis pledged his and his union's full support to the war effort.
Early life and rise to power John Llewellyn Lewis was born on February 12, 1880 in or near Cleveland, Lucas County, Iowa (distinct from the present township of Cleveland in Davis County), to Thomas H. Lewis and Ann (Watkins) Lewis, immigrants from Llangurig, Wales. Cleveland was a company town, built around a coal mine developed one mile east of the town of Lucas.History of Lucas County, Iowa, State Historical Co., Des Moines, 1881, page 611. His mother and grandparents were members of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS), and the boy was raised in the church's views regarding alcohol and sexual propriety, as well as a just social order that favored the poor. While his maternal grandfather was an RLDS pastor and Lewis periodically donated to his local RLDS church for the rest of his life, there is no definite evidence that he formally joined the Midwestern Mormon denomination.Ron Roberts, "John L. Lewis's Ethical Contribution to Social Justice in the United States of America", Toward Economic Justice?, Vol. 4 of Paths of Peace, edited by David J. Howlett, Suzanne Trewhitt McLaughlin, and Orval Fisher (Independence, Missouri: Herald Publishing House, 2003), pp. 73-91; Ron Roberts, "A Waystation from Babylon: Nineteenth-century Saints in Lucas, Iowa," John Whitmer Historical Association Journal, 10 (1991): pp. 60-70.
Lewis attended three years of high school in Des Moines and at the age of 17 went to work in the Big Hill Mine at Lucas. In 1906, Lewis was elected a delegate to the United Mine Workers (UMW) national convention. In 1907, he ran for mayor of Lucas and launched a feed-and-grain distributorship. Both were failures and Lewis returned to coal mining.
He moved to Panama, Illinois, where in 1909 he was elected president of the UMW local. In 1911 Samuel Gompers, the head of the AFL, hired Lewis as a full-time union organizer. Lewis traveled throughout Pennsylvania and the Midwest as an organizer and trouble-shooter, especially in coal and steel districts.Zieger (1995)
United Mine Workers of America
After serving as statistician and then as vice-president for the UMWA, Lewis became that union's acting president in 1919. On November 1, 1919, he called the first major coal union strike, and 400,000 miners walked off their jobs. President Woodrow Wilson obtained an injunction, which Lewis obeyed, telling the rank and file, "We cannot fight the Government." In 1920, Lewis was elected president of the UMWA. He quickly asserted himself as a dominant figure in what was then the largest and most influential trade union in the country.
Coal miners worldwide were sympathetic to socialism, and in the 1920s, Communists systematically tried to seize control of UMWA locals. William Z. Foster, the Communist leader, opposed dual unions in favor of organizing within the UMWA. The radicals were most successful in the bituminous (soft) coal regions of the Midwest, where they used local organizing drives to gain control of locals, sought a national labor political party, and demanded federal nationalization of the industry. Lewis, committed to cooperation among labor, management, and government, took tight control of the union.Dubofsky and Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography (1986) pp 76-91
He placed the once-autonomous districts under centralized receivership, packed the union bureaucracy with men directly beholden to him, and used UMWA conventions and publications to discredit his critics. The fight was bitter but Lewis used armed force, red-baiting, and ballot-box stuffing and, in 1928, expelled the leftists. As Hudson (1952) shows, they started a separate union, the National Miners' Union. In Southern Illinois, amidst widespread violence, the Progressive Mine Workers of America challenged Lewis but were beaten back.Harriet Hudson, The Progressive Mine Workers of America: A Study in Rival Unionism (1952). After 1935, Lewis invited the radical organizers to work for his CIO organizing drives, and they soon gained powerful positions in CIO unions, including auto workers and electrical workers.
Lewis was often denounced as a despotic leader. He repeatedly expelled his political rivals from the UMWA, including John Walker, John Brophy, Alexander Howat and Adolph Germer. Communists in District 26 (Nova Scotia), including Canadian labor legend J. B. McLachlan, were banned from running for the union executive after a strike in 1923. McLachlan described him as "a traitor" to the working class.David Frank, J. B. McLachlan: A Biography: The Story of a Legendary Labour Leader and the Cape Breton Coal Miners, p 314 Lewis nonetheless commanded great loyalty from many of his followers, even those he had exiled in the past.
A powerful speaker and strategist, Lewis used the nation's dependence on coal to increase the wages and improve the safety of miners, even during several severe recessions. He masterminded a five-month strike, ensuring that the increase in wages gained during World War I would not be lost. In 1921 Lewis challenged Samuel Gompers, who had led the AFL for nearly forty years, for the presidency of the AFL. William Green, one of his subordinates within the Mine Workers at the time, nominated him; William Hutcheson, the President of the Carpenters, supported him. Gompers won. Three years later, on Gompers' death, Green succeeded him as AFL President.Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: a History of the American Worker 1920-1933 (1966)
In 1924 Lewis, a Republican, framed a plan for a three-year contract between the UMWA and the coal operators, providing for a pay rate of $7.50 per day ($ in dollars). President Coolidge and then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover were impressed with the plan, and Lewis was offered the post of Secretary of Labor in Coolidge's cabinet. Lewis declined, a decision he later regretted. Without government support, the contract talks failed and coal operators hired non-union miners. The UMWA treasury was drained, but Lewis was able to maintain the union and his position within it. He was successful in winning the 1925 anthracite (hard coal) miners' strike by his oratorical skills.
Great Depression
Lewis supported Republican Herbert Hoover for US president in 1928; in 1932, as the Great Depression bore brutally on the mining camps, he officially backed Hoover but quietly supported Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1936, his union made the largest single contribution, over $500,000, to Roosevelt's successful campaign for reelection.
Lewis was appointed a member of the Labor Advisory Board and the National Labor Board of the National Recovery Administration in 1933; he used these positions to raise wages of miners and reduce competition. He gambled on a massive membership drive and won, as he piggybacked on FDR's popularity: "The President wants you to join the UMW!" Coal miners represented many ethnic groups, and Lewis shrewdly realized that they shared a faith in Roosevelt; he was careful not to antagonize any of the immigrant ethnic groups, and he appealed to African-American members as well.
He secured the passage of the Guffey Coal Act in 1935, which was superseded by Guffey-Vinson Act in 1937 after the 1935 act was declared by the US Supreme Court to be unconstitutional. Both of acts were favorable to miners. Lewis had long had the idea that the highly competitive bituminous coal industry, with its sharp ups and downs and cut-throat competition, could be stabilized by a powerful union that set a standard wage scale and could keep recalcitrant owners in line with selective strikes. The acts made that possible, and coal miners entered a golden era. At all times, Lewis rejected socialism and promoted competitive capitalism.Dubofsky and Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography (1986) pp 131-61
Congress of Industrial Organizations
With the open support of the AFL and the tacit support of the UMWA, Franklin D. Roosevelt was nominated and elected president in 1932, and Lewis benefited from the New Deal programs that followed. Many of his members received relief. Lewis helped secure passage of the Guffey Coal Act of 1935, which raised prices and wages, but it was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.It was replaced in 1937 by the Guffey-Vinson Act, which passed Court scrutiny. James P. Johnson. A "New Deal" for soft coal: the attempted revitalization of the bituminous coal industry under the New Deal (1979) Thanks to the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, union membership grew rapidly, especially in the UMWA. Lewis and the UMW were major financial backers of Roosevelt's reelection in 1936 and were firmly committed to the New Deal.