John L. Lewis remembered fondly
Besides more $10 golf courses, what this country needs is a strong labor movement; a labor movement that causes presidents and lawmakers no end of trouble.
The country needs the kind of union movement that was led by the likes of John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers in the early days of the 20th century.
That the nation is ripe for the kind of rip-roaring leadership Lewis provided is clear from the campaigns of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
The two are dissimilar in so many ways, yet each has (sort of) stimulated the kind of working class excitement that was a characteristic of the labor movement in the 1920s and 1930s.
If those years teach us anything, it is that change is difficult and rarely pretty.
Lewis was a contrarian. A Republican in the 1920s, he jumped on FDR’s New Deal bandwagon in the early1930s, then jumped off as World War II approached. From Woodrow Wilson through Dwight Eisenhower, he was a major pain in the side to presidents of both parties. Harry Truman loathed him.
He was a familiar figure to miners in western Pennsylvania and especially Fayette County, the heart of the nation’s coke industry. He tried and tried again to bring the region’s non-union miners into the UMW.
Lewis was accused by the more militant members of the union of abandoning what in those days were called captive miners — captive because they worked for the H.C. Frick Company, which mined coal and produced coke exclusively for its parent company, U.S. Steel.
He finally succeeded in bringing captive miners into the UMW on the eve of World War II, pinning FDR into a corner from which there was no escape.
In 1933, he rallied local miners with the cry, “The president wants you to join the union.” President Roosevelt had no such intention in mind.
The summer of 1933 in Fayette County was punctuated by marches and speeches and, regrettably, bloodshed.
A few years later, as the founder and first president of the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO), Lewis pledged to be the first man shot by Michigan National Guardsmen who ringed the perimeter of a Flint auto plant as members of the nascent United Auto Workers sat inside, refusing to leave until their demands were met.
He addressed Gov. Frank Murphy: “When you order your men to fire … and my body falls from the window to the ground, you will listen to the voice of your grandfather, as he whispers in your ear, ‘Frank, are you sure you’re doing the right thing?'”
Lewis was two-fisted and tough-minded. And he made sense. He penned a book in 1925 in which he wrote, “When the UMW declares that it will take no backward step, this great union speaks in unison with the heartbeat of America, and puts into economic language the very essence of the American spirit.”
He called the purchasing power of workers “the pivot point upon which our whole economy turns.” Turn off the spigot of high wages and you doom our consumer-driven capitalist system to failure and assign hard-working Americans to economic “personage.”
Worse yet was what happens to the human spirit and American democracy and society when people are left on their own to confront the forces of predatory capitalism, Lewis argued. They lose their freedom.
Yes, John L. Lewis could be exasperating; he called two nationwide coal strikes in the midst of World War II; and his legacy is tarnished by a major scandal: he bequeathed the UMW to thug and murderer W.A. “Tony” Boyle.
But when Lewis was good, he was very good.
The country is far different than it was back in the Lewis heyday. But maybe it’s not so different that it couldn’t use some good old-fashioned union militancy.
A whole lot of people would be made to feel uncomfortable.
But, as Lewis knew, that is one of the costs of changing course.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.