John L. Lewis

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John L. Lewis bigraphy, stories - U.S. labor leader

John L. Lewis : biography

February 12, 1880 – June 11, 1969

John Llewellyn Lewis (February 12, 1880 – June 11, 1969) was an American leader of organized labor who served as president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) from 1920 to 1960. A major player in the history of coal mining, he was the driving force behind the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which established the United Steel Workers of America and helped organize millions of other industrial workers in the 1930s. After resigning as head of the CIO in 1941, he took the Mine Workers out of the CIO in 1942 and in 1944 took the union into the American Federation of Labor (AFL).

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The 1950s

Lewis at a labor rally in [[Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, meeting with mine workers.]] In the 1950s, Lewis won periodic wage and benefit increases for miners and led the campaign for the first Federal Mine Safety Act in 1952. Lewis tried to impose some order on a declining industry through collective bargaining, maintaining standards for his members by insisting that small operators agree to contract terms that effectively put many of them out of business. Mechanization nonetheless eliminated many of the jobs in his industry while scattered non-union operations persisted.

Lewis continued to be as autocratic as ever within the UMWA, padding the union payrolls with his friends and family, ignoring or suppressing demands for a rank-and-file voice in union affairs. Finally in 1959 the passage of the Landrum-Griffin Act forced reform. It ended the practice where the UMWA had kept a number of its districts in trusteeship for decades, meaning that Lewis appointed union officers who otherwise would have been elected by the membership.

He retired in early 1960, as the highly paid membership slipped below 190,000 because of mechanization, strip mining, and competition from oil. He was succeeded as president by Thomas Kennedy until his death in 1963, when he was succeeded by Lewis-anointed successor W. A. Boyle, who was just as dictatorial, but without any of Lewis’ leadership skills or vision.http://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/laborhall/1989_lewis.htm

Early life and rise to power

Lewis was born in Cleveland, Iowa, the son of Thomas H. Lewis and Ann Watkins Lewis, both of whom had immigrated from Wales. Cleveland was a company town built around a coal mine one mile east of Lucas., State Historical Co., Des Moines, 1881, page 611. The mother was a Mormon and the boy adopted her rigid views regarding alcohol and sexual propriety, but not her religion. He 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 1907 he ran for mayor of Lucas and launched a feed-and-grain distributorship. Both were failures and Lewis returned to coal mining; in 1906 was elected a delegate to the United Mine Workers (UMW) national convention. He moved to Panama, Illinois, and in 1909 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)

References and bibliography

  • Alinsky, Saul. John L. Lewis: An Unauthorized Biography. (1949.)
  • Baratz, Morton S. The Union and the Coal Industry (Yale University Press, 1955)
  • Bernstein, Irving. The Lean Years: a History of the American Worker 1920-1933 (1966), best coverage of the era
  • Bernstein, Irving. Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941 (1970), thorough coverage of the era
  • Cantril, Hadley and Strunk, Mildred, eds. Public Opinion, 1935-1946. (1951) summarizes all published polls on Lewis
  • Clapp, Thomas C. "The Bituminous Coal Strike of 1943." PhD dissertation U. of Toledo 1974. 278 pp. DAI 1974 35(6): 3626-3627-A., not online
  • Dublin, Thomas and Walter Licht. The Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century (2005)
  • Dubofsky, Melvyn, and Warren Van Tine. John L. Lewis: A Biography (1977), the standard scholarly biography ISBN 0-8129-0673-X.
  • Dubofsky, Melvyn, and Warren Van Tine. "John L. Lewis " in Dubofsky and Van Tine, eds. Labor Leaders in America (1990)
  • Fishback, Price V. Soft Coal, Hard Choices: The Economic Welfare of Bituminous Coal Miners, 1890-1930 (1992)
  • Galenson; Walter. The CIO Challenge to the AFL: A History of the American Labor Movement, 1935–1941, (1960)
  • Hinrichs, A. F. The United Mine Workers of America, and the Non-Union Coal Fields (1923)
  • Laslett, John H.M. ed. The United Mine Workers: A Model of Industrial Solidarity? 1996.
  • Lynch, Edward A., and David J. McDonald. Coal and Unionism: A History of the American Coal Miners’ Unions (1939)
  • Seltzer, Curtis. Fire in the Hole: Miners and Managers in the American Coal Industry University Press of Kentucky, 1985, conflict in the coal industry to the 1980s.
  • Singer, Alan Jay. "`Which Side Are You On?’: Ideological Conflict in the United Mine Workers of America, 1919-1928." PhD dissertation Rutgers U., New Brunswick 1982. 304 pp. DAI 1982 43(4): 1268-A. DA8221709 Fulltext: [ProQuest Dissertations & Theses]
  • Zieger, Robert H. "Lewis, John L."
  • Zieger, Robert H. John L. Lewis: Labor Leader (1988), 220pp short biography by scholar
  • Zieger, Robert H. The CIO 1935-1955. 1995.