John L. Lewis: An Unauthorized Biography

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Text originally published in 1949 under the same title.

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JOHN L. LEWIS

AN UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY

BY

SAUL ALINSKY

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

FOREWORD 6

CHAPTER 1—Of Men and Coal 8

CHAPTER 2—John Llewellyn Lewis 16

CHAPTER 3—The Bloody Twenties 45

CHAPTER 4—The Beginning of the Big Parade 64

CHAPTER 5—1937, the Year of Attack 80

CHAPTER 6—They Sit to Conquer 88

CHAPTER 7—The Rout 124

CHAPTER 8—The Lewis-Roosevelt Break 133

CHAPTER 9—Post Mortem 154

CHAPTER 10—The Lewis-Murray Break 169

CHAPTER 11—The Break with the CIO 186

CHAPTER 12—Lewis vs. the People 216

CHAPTER 13—Imbroglio 247

CHAPTER 14—Something of a Man 262

BIBLIOGRAPHY 281

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 284

DEDICATION

To

DAVID and KATHRYN

and

to the memory of

HELENE

FOREWORD

THIS is always an unpopular undertaking, and usually everyone is offended. While Lewis gave me unlimited interviews as well as access to records, there were no commitments of any kind. He knew that in this study the sharp edge of criticism would cut everywhere and everybody including himself—and it has. No one, including Lewis, was permitted to read these pages before publication.

I believe that it is the right of every reader to know the prejudices of the biographer. There are still too many who talk about objective and unprejudiced writers. There is not and never has been a living person lacking prejudices. The best we can do in the striving for so-called objectivity is to be consciously aware of and on guard against these prejudices.

To me, Lewis is an extraordinary individual and certainly one of the outstanding figures of our time. As a person I like him. As a labor leader, I share the opinion of many including some of his bitterest enemies, that John Lewis is the most powerful and dramatic product of the history of American labor. I have been in violent disagreement with his position at different times and particularly on his isolationism during those critical days of 1941—again on his break with Roosevelt, which I struggled to avert. Yet Lewis will not break a relationship because of criticism if the criticism is honest and open. On the whole I have felt that his career was a great American tragedy in terms of what might have been.

One more word on my prejudices. I am pro-labor. My record as a friend of organized labor is well known in Chicago. I have fought at the side of the CIO for the past twelve years, and have earned the right to criticize as a friend.

Now a word on the extraordinary difficulties of modern biographical research. No longer can the student dig through archives for detailed written records. Today most important decisions are made over the phone or in face-to-face conversation, with little written evidence for the future historian except distorted secondhand accounts or firsthand rationalizations. Even written materials are dishonest in many cases by omission rather than commission. To the honest biographer research becomes a nightmare of garbled, tortured pieces of information that parade as fact. There are days when you are haunted by Mark Twain’s rejection of history as being written with the ink of lies. There is only one way out for the honest biographer, which is to state, wherever possible, the source of his information, leaving the reader the right to weigh its credibility.

The organized labor movement is a human institution and possessed of those virtues and vices common in mankind. Unfortunately there are labor leaders who decry even the criticism of a friend as labor baiting. This stifling of freedom of criticism with the tyranny of the smear is evil no matter what its source. Today the precious American right of dissent is in great jeopardy by pressures from the right as well as the left. To write of the human motivations, both good and bad, of leaders of labor one’s eyes cannot be bound by the blinders of any doctrinaire policy or line of thought.

There are so many to whom I am indebted that it is impossible to name them. I am most grateful to John L. Lewis for the unlimited time he placed at my disposal and his releasing me from my only commitment to him dating back to 1940—that was not to reveal the events of the Roosevelt negotiations of that year. I am also grateful for the invaluable help of his loyal and devoted secretary, Elizabeth Covington. Too much cannot be said for the willingness and frank assistance of my close friend for many years, Kathryn Lewis.

I am grateful to the many labor leaders and former Government officials who gave so generously of their time both in interviews and in correspondence.

To my good friend George Bye who gently pushed me back into harness when I was discouraged.

To Herbert Hewitt of the reference department of the Chicago Public Library, who helped unearth every bit of written material on the subject, and to Sylvia Abrams who typed the long manuscript.

I will never forget the heart-stirring experience of those devoted friends of mine endlessly searching for ways to relieve me of undue domestic pressures, particularly through the months of this year. To them I owe a debt that is impossible ever to repay.

Without the selfless help of Babette Stiefel in research, editing, scolding, and cajoling, this book would certainly not have been complete at this time.

Last there are my two children, David and Kathryn, who were most patient and understanding of their father’s nightly absences in the preparation of this book.

SAUL D. ALINSKY

October 1, 1949

Chicago

CHAPTER 1—Of Men and Coal

COAL is the prime mover of our life. In these black chunks of the earth’s history is the energy that pours power into our gigantic industrial empire. Beyond the conjuring of any imagination is the awesome vastness of man’s industrial procession. Just a small segment of this Gargantuan industrial scene reveals interlaced speeding railroads, giant whirring dynamos lighting up the nation, and overwhelming surges of power spun from steam. For within coal is man’s industrial holy trinity of light, heat, and power.

More than half of American homes are heated by coal. Nearly ninety-five per cent of our railroad locomotives are driven by the fiery energy of coal.

Coal is essential in mass production of steel. If steel provides the skeleton for our cities and towns, then coal provides the heart. It also yields infinite products to our chemical industry. Break up this jet black nugget, and its by-products burst into more than ten thousand hues and colors, shaming the rainbow with its most delicate tints; for coal is basic to our making of dyes and colors.

This black chunk, which murders men underground, is the base for that lifesaving miracle of modern times, the sulfa drugs. From nylon to plastic, from aspirin to perfume, the list of products is as great as our supply. It is estimated that in America alone we have enough coal to last twenty-five hundred years. Contrast this with the dwindling crude-oil reserves, and coal assumes the role of not only our prime but our permanent mover. Coal is King.

It follows that he who controls coal holds within his hands the reins of our society. John Lewis, through his nearly half million coal miners, holds that power. For the men who mine coal can always strike out the flow of this life-giving energy.

These men who mine coal are a mystery to the overwhelming majority of our nation. They are thought of as a strange, defiant, rebellious, abnormal people, peculiar just like their ruler; for Lewis, too is strange, defiant, rebellious, and abnormal.

The miners are filled with bitterness bordering on hatred for the outside world—this outside world with its newspapers always attacking them, its politicians always intriguing against and insulting them, their union, and their leader, John L. Lewis. They bear little friendship for this strange, hostile world outside where, as the miners say, People seem to think miners are some kind of animal—underground rats as they call us.{1} Or, The way people outside think of us, we should be living in a zoo. One miner added bitterly, We’d get better fed and be a hell of a lot safer in cages! Damn that outside world!{2} And Lewis, like his miners, thinks bitterly of that outside world, feeling that every man’s hand is turned against them.

Suspicion begets brooding, and many miners do brood as does their leader. Surrounded by hostility, they have suffered from fears of insecurity and have reacted with that pugnacious belligerence so typical of Lewis.

They respond to threats with that indifference of men who work down below where death never takes a holiday. Familiarity with death breeds contempt for any threatened punishment. They have that stoicism born in suffering and tragedy. Lewis, too, contemptuously rejects punitive threats and does not flinch before authority, the press, or any of the thunder or lightning of the outside world.

The men who dig coal are fiercely independent, for under the physical conditions of mining each man works as his own boss. He has learned to stand and work, and if need be, die alone down below the ground. Lewis, like his miners, is possessed of the same independence.

Just as Lewis stands aloof and apart from the life about him, so do the miners, who live in a separate world and who are a people apart unto themselves. It becomes quite clear that the key to the enigma of John L. Lewis is embedded in coal and the miners. Therefore, to know the miners is to begin to open the door on the mystery of Lewis.

While America’s cities sleep, the men who mine coal are awake, moving quietly about the house trying not to disturb their sleeping children. They wash and dress by instinct in the darkness and then turn to the sudden dim light in the kitchen. There the miners’ wives stand by as their husbands wolf down a massive breakfast that would be both shocking and revolting to fifty-seven per cent of America’s population which lives in our cities and greets the new day with the morning ceremonial of toast and coffee. The miner’s breakfast may be fried chicken or ham with potatoes, hot cakes, biscuits, and endless steaming coffee, or, as they say, the kind of eats that sticks to a man’s ribs. But the miners need all the food they can eat, for ahead of them are both backbreaking physical exhaustion and the mental fatigue of constant alertness against the danger that lies about and above them.

As the sleeping city dweller stirs restlessly at 6:30 in the morning, the miners have already checked in at the entrance, or portal, of the mine. They have received their electric cap lamps, unless they are working at the kind of mine where the price of life is low and they are given open-flame carbide lamps. Then just as the sun comes up, they go plummeting down in an elevator cage—down into the earth.

If it is a large mine, they ride a coal train, banging, grinding, bumping, constantly careening around curves, and lurching up and down through long, seemingly never level, endlessly dark, subterranean passageways. They may ride for as far as six miles on what they call the man trip until they come to their place to dig. Here they climb out, and the train rolls off, leaving them alone watching the fast-fading trail of trolley flashes as the darkness closes in. For a moment they stand there, ankle deep in water, surrounded by darkness so black they can feel it. It is a darkness dripping with the oily black slime of the guts of the earth.

Then they turn, and each miner sloshes off to his individual workroom. This is a space opening off the tunnel and lined on two sides by walls of solid rock or coal and slate. Directly ahead of the miner is the end wall of solid coal known as the face. This is the coal to be mined.

The miner’s workroom may be only three feet high, compelling him to crawl into it and work through the day lying on his side. If it is four feet high, he will work on his knees, but if he is lucky, his workroom will be a little more than five feet high, and then he will spend his workday in a crouch.

He does not directly approach and begin to mine on the working face, for over him is the ever threatening roof. He knows what every miner knows—that above his head, like the sword of Damocles, hangs his most dangerous enemy. Falling roofs kill and maim more miners than any other single underground hazard. He knows that with the collapse of the roof his workroom will instantly become his tomb. So he begins by checking the timbers supporting the roof and goes about setting up more timbers as they are needed to give maximum support to this dangerous roof above. All the time he knows that the shoring timbers themselves will not save him, but their noise of cracking as a roof begins to cave in may give him a warning of some seconds to try to flee for his life. For him, the tearing of the timbers is the crack of doom.

Satisfied with the supports, he is ready to mine. An undercutting machine is then brought into the room and set next to the bottom of the coal face. It is started, and its whirling, tough, jagged teeth chew and rip like a buzz saw through the bottom of the coal face. The machine, moving from side to side, slices a deep groove along the bottom of this wall of coal.

When the machine’s job is finished, it is removed from the workroom, and now the miner is ready for the moment of danger, the shooting of explosives to break down the coal face. He will usually have an electric drill, although in old mines hand drills are still used. Small holes are drilled of a depth and location selected by the miners with their long experience as a guide. Into these holes they slip sticks of explosives with detonators of small mercury fulminate capsules attached to wires, some more than a hundred feet long. These holes are then tamped with incombustible materials to ensure that the force of the explosion will be expended inside the wall of coal. With everything set the miner retreats outside of the room, and attaching the wires to a dry cell, he shoots off the explosives. With a muffled roar, amid blinding dust, the wall of coal thuds to the floor. The large chunks of coal are crumbled with picks and made ready for the next stage of loading it into the railroad cars. Loading coal by hand is one of the hardest jobs known to mankind. Hour after hour the hand loader, crouched in his cramped quarters, shovels tons of coal into the small mine railroad cars. Today, with the progress of mechanization of mines, more and more loading machines are being used. With the loading machine, a miner and his buddy can load as much as ten tons of coal in just a few minutes. However, the majority of coal mines do not have machine loaders.

Once the coal is loaded into the railroad cars the cycle is repeated. Again the ripping of the undercutting machine, the whir of drills, the blast of explosives, the crash of the coal face, and the clatter of loading.

The miner is never alone, for death is all about him. It is over his head with the collapsing roof and his sudden crushing burial; it is in front of him in the pockets of invisible, odorless, tasteless, deadly methane gas released by cutting into the coal face and ignited by his explosives. Then it comes as a blinding flash and oblivion. It is behind him in the long tunnels, where it comes with the reptilian hiss of the rolling wall of smoke and flame as he shakes and screams in agony knowing that death is coming either by cremation or asphyxiation.

He knows the toll of his underground fraternity, for every morning he goes down under with the odds just a shade more than nine to one in his favor of escaping death or injury. Every day he shoots dice with death. Compare his mortality rate with that of the armed services. The miner knows that he digs death as well as coal, and the death tonnage is appalling.

He knew some of the 68,842 miners killed from 1910 through 1945, and he knew some of the 2,275,000 injured. He had stood awkward and choked with emotion before some of the 211,468 widows and orphans of these men. He contributed generously to collections for the impoverished survivors with the chilled feeling that the next collection might be for his widow and children.

And the dead were not just those entombed below or brought up as blackened, lifeless husks inside a roll of blanket. No, the dead were all about him, even next door, where as long as he could remember that miner with the broken back had been decaying in his bed inside a rotting shack. Across the road lay another, paralyzed from the hips down since the blast four years ago. They say he’ll never walk again. The younger miner knows some of the 841 men killed in the ten months between June, 1946, and March, 1947. He, too, has seen the agony on those charred, suffocated, smashed faces.

But he goes on, undercutting, drilling, blasting, and loading until his workday is ended. Then the elevator whisks him up to the surface, and the miner is homeward bound.

But even with the ground below him, he still cannot escape, for the miner’s life is the daily living of dust to dust. It is a life of dirt below and above, a life of coal blacks and dark grays as he comes up from the blackness below to the gray shroud above. For here, safe in his home, he is surrounded by the coal dust from the tipple, the bitter pungent stench of the burning slag heaps, and the dust clouds of dirt roads—all sinking together into a suffocating gray blight streaked with the black soot from the railroad tracks. It covers everything, and once settled, seems to creep inside every corner of the village and of the miners. It gets into the nostrils, and many miners say, into our insides. It is that melancholy gray so somberly suited to the grim stark tragedy that hangs over the lives of these—God’s forgotten people, the men who mine coal.

Here, too, the grim struggle for survival goes on as the miners wage their fight for the bread and the means, not for life, but for abysmal existence.

It is no exaggeration to describe the past life of the miners as one of serfdom. The shack a miner’s family lived in, miserable as it was, did not belong to him—it was owned by the Company. The food he bought came from stores—owned by the Company. The clothes he bought came from a store—owned by the Company. When illness struck, his family called the doctor—owned by the Company. His shoes came from a store—owned by the Company; and the road they walked on was—owned by the Company. The stinking air of soot and coal dust was—owned by the Company. His children, condemned by family need of food, entered the mines, and they, too, were—owned by the Company. The miners buried their dead, and the companies buried their living in a present and future as black as the coal pits below. The Company owned everything, everything but the spirit of the miners—that they owned themselves.

And so it was a saga, not of a war of the miners against the coal companies or operators, but of an insurrection. In a revolution there is none of the mercy of war, for there are no prisoners taken alive and mercy is a synonym for weakness. The only rule was no rule. The price of coal, always cheap, was for years higher than the price of human life. The story of coal and the miners is a saga of brutality and blood.

The miners tried for years to mobilize an army in the form of a union. It was to be a torturous blood-soaked trail bending downward into the black hell of Ludlow.

In the entire death-ridden history of the struggle between the miners and the operators, the Ludlow Massacre will always be remembered as one of the few upheavals in our history when class war broke out in full violence in the United States.

Ludlow, Colorado, was the site of the mines of the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. The latter had been struck by the mine workers union. The management of the company was implacably hostile and extraordinarily intransigent on the subject of organized labor. They fought the union in every conceivable way, importing the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, which rode around in an armored car shooting down strikers on sight. They got injunctions and indictments against labor organizers. They evicted miners and their families from company homes into the freezing temperatures of a Colorado winter. To meet this forced exodus, the union set up tents, where soon hundreds of miners and their families were sheltered.

The tension increased, and the militia was called in under the command of a Major Patrick Hamrock. Early on the morning of April 20, 1914, just as this tent community was preparing for breakfast, the state militia attacked. The New York Times reported: The Ludlow Camp is a mass of charred debris and buried beneath is a story of horror unparalleled in the history of industrial warfare. In holes that had been dug for their protection against the rifle fire, the women and children died like rats when the flames swept over them. One pit uncovered this afternoon disclosed the bodies of ten children and two women.{3}

More than two thirds of those killed by Major Hamrock’s men were women and children. American workers were white hot with indignation, while the miners went berserk and set out on a four-day war to burn and kill.

The bitterness of the American workers toward the militia was such that railroad crews refused to take trains filled with reinforcements and munitions to the imperiled militia.

Events such as the Ludlow Massacre reverberated throughout the mine fields of America and made men look to the union as their sole defense against the operator.

The names of those who carried the torch for unionization are, with few exceptions, buried as unknown soldiers in old history books. With few exceptions, too, the leaders were broken by their own miners.

There was John Bates, in 1849, who, after organizing most of the Pennsylvania anthracite miners, led them into a disastrous strike. The miners were disillusioned with unionism, and Bates was discredited.

Twelve years later, the miners of Illinois won a strike and in 1861 organized into a Miners Association under Daniel Weaver. In Pennsylvania there was John Siney, who not only organized a large number of the anthracite coal miners but led them through and won the bitter strike of 1869. He made history by establishing for the first time joint collective bargaining between the union and representatives of the Anthracite Board of Trade.

Siney then joined forces with the Miners Association and formed one union called the Miners National Association. He was elected president, but before this new national union could even begin to test its strength, it disintegrated under the impact of the depression of 1873. Working and living conditions went from bad to worse, and the miners, bitter, suffering, and resentful, crucified Siney. He was cursed and driven out of office in 1876, only two and a half short years after being idolized and cheered by his miners. Again the miners were disillusioned with unionism, and again they turned on and destroyed their own leader.

Beaten and disorganized, many bitterly struck back. In Pennsylvania the Molly Maguires sprang up, burning breakers, sniping at particularly hated foremen and superintendents, derailing mine cars, and beating up strike-breakers. Terror soon ruled the tipples of Pennsylvania.

The coal operators brought in Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, which set out to crush this secret society in its own way. Knowing that most of the Molly Maguires were Irish Roman Catholics, Pinkerton assigned young, laughing, Irish Roman Catholic, James McParland, to do the job. McParland was accepted by the leaders of the Molly Maguires, given shelter, food, and affection. In return, McParland urged them to even bloodier violence, then ended by informing and testifying against them in court. Fourteen Molly Maguires were hanged, and the name of James McParland replaced the name of Judas Iscariot for decades afterward.

Concurrently with the explosive, short-lived life of the Molly Maguires came another secret society known as the Knights of Labor. Although the Knights were suspect because of their secrecy, they were in actuality the exact opposite of the Mollys. They emphasized temperance, popular education, and remedial legislation. They were even allergic to strikes, yet a panicky press identified them with the Maguires. Many coal miners affiliated with the Knights of Labor, while others, led by John McBride, met in 1883 to organize the Amalgamated Association of Miners of the United States. The Hocking Valley strike smashed the Amalgamated Association and badly battered the Knights of Labor.

Tenaciously the miners came back in 1884 and organized the National Federation of Miners and Mine Laborers. Yet they were still divided, for many of the miners were still with the Knights of Labor.

Then it happened on January 25, 1890, in Columbus, Ohio. Here both groups merged into a new organization, the United Mine Workers of America, which received a charter from the also newly formed American Federation of Labor, which had been created in 1886. Leaders of both factions wept with joy as, at last, disunity was ended. Recognizing that a basic weakness of the past organizations had been the lack of control over the strike weapon, the new union forbade any local strike without the approval of the national president and at least one board member. Now the union could try to utilize its strike weapon as a cannon, rather than having it dissipate itself in grapeshot strikes.

From that time until the days of John L. Lewis, there were eight presidents of the United Mine Workers Union, of whom two were outstanding. One was Michael Ratchford, who at thirty-seven became president. He led the miners into a twelve-week strike on July 4, 1897, and won. Victory had a strange, sweet taste in the mouths of these miners who had never known anything but the bitter dregs of defeat. From a claimed paper membership of 11,000 the union jumped, in one year, to 33,000 active dues-paying members. The foundation was set.

Then came the man still revered in the coal pits as the patron saint of the union, John Mitchell. His career was meteoric. Becoming acting president of the union at the age of twenty-eight, Mitchell soon held the position by right of election. It was under Mitchell that the anthracite coal miners were organized. On May 15, 1903, Mitchell led them into a strike that was to last almost twenty-four weeks and end in the defeat of the anthracite operators. It was during this conflict that the famous divine right letter was written by George F. Baer, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Company, to W. F. Clark of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. In this letter, Baer pointed out: The right and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country, and upon the successful management of which so much depends.

Mitchell went on leading the miners to successive gains and building the union to the giant of today. In the field of legislation the union had promoted and seen enacted mine-safety laws and child-labor laws. The union seemed to prosper on every front, except financially, and then dissension began to develop. There was a growing impatience and scorn for Mitchell’s temperate moderation and the Christian charity that was ingrained in him. Many aggressive local union leaders turned against him. Mitchell became the target for fantastic charges and in the end was practically crucified by his miners. Once he protested, shouting, You are not going to do with me as your fathers did with John Siney. But they did. Mitchell retired from office at the 1908 convention. Here even his most vindictive foes joined in praising and in actually burying the career of the man so beloved by the miners, Johnnie da Mitch.

The next year his successor, still fearful of the rank-and-file feeling for Mitchell, tried to have the union’s constitution amended to bar Mitchell permanently from ever again holding office in the union. It was unanimously rejected, but the very next year the miners’ convention forced a tired and sick Mitchell to resign from a $6,000-a-year post with the National Civic Association on penalty of expulsion from the union! Sic transit gloria.

The companies’ degradation of the miners in forcing them into slave-like dependency; the rotting decay of the company shacks infecting the spirit as well as the body of their inhabitants; and the miners having witnessed the butchering in torture of their fellow coal diggers—all filled the miners with a hatred so deep and turbulent that it spilled over among themselves. Out of their dark despair, seemingly tormented in a death agony, they struck down their own leaders again and again with the blind fury of their own bitterness.

These miners seemed akin to powerful, unbroken, man-killing, wild horses. Mitchell’s gentle ways had quieted them for nearly eight years, but in the end they had unseated and trampled him.

The mine workers union would only be united by some man who would know not only the economics of coal but the miners and their self-destructive hatred. It would have to be a man far tougher and much more ruthless than all of them put together. It would have to be, as the miners said, something of a man.

CHAPTER 2—John Llewellyn Lewis

ONE of the shames of Western industrial civilization was and is the misery and stark poverty of the coal miners of Wales. Here generations of men have burrowed in the coal pits under extremely hazardous conditions, reaping a reward of lifetime poverty, broken backs, and broken hearts.

During the last century they, as did the poor of all Europe, turned their faces toward the warm glow of the promised land across the sea. It was said that in America the streets were paved with gold and every man was a prince. This might not be true, but what they did know was that in America, while a man might not be a prince, he could be a man.

The hardier ones leaped at every chance for escape to the New World. Welsh miners packed their large families and few belongings and sailed to the land of opportunity. Driven by the need for an immediate job, they at once sought the only work they knew: the mining of coal. They clustered in different parts of America, and one of the parts was the tiny mining town of Lucas, Iowa. Hither in the late 1870’s flowed a steady stream of them, among whom was the Watkins family, including their daughter Louisa, and a burly, brooding miner named Thomas Lewis.

Thomas Lewis worked all day in the coal pits and spent half his nights helping to organize his fellow workers in the big union of the Knights of Labor. In the 1880’s Iowa was the catalytic agent precipitating the waves of unrest which were the growing pains of a young democracy. From this state came General James B. Weaver, who as the leader of the Populist party gave Wall Street one of its blackest nightmares of terror. Iowa was in a ferment of ideas and all of these on the radical side. This was the climate which spurred on Thomas Lewis in his desire to organize the miners into a union.

Shortly after his arrival in Lucas he met Louisa Watkins, and in 1878 they were married. John L. Lewis told the writer that in looking over his family background he felt:

My background was one of contrast. On my father’s side, my family were fighters. They roved a great deal. They were very much interested in the world about them. They were tough people. My mother’s side of the family was the quiet kind. They were scholars, teachers, sort of retiring and shy.

Two years later, on February 12, 1880, their first child was born. They named him John Llewellyn Lewis. When young John Lewis was two years old, his father helped to lead his fellow miners in a bitter strike against their employers, the White Breast Fuel Company. He fought the company so bitterly that it became apparent that regardless of the outcome he would never again be employed by them. The strike was won; and Thomas Lewis stood alone, watching his friends and fellow miners return to work while he, who had fought so unreservedly for them, was forgotten. But the White Breast Fuel Company did not forget, and Thomas Lewis was placed on a blacklist as a radical and unionist.

From that time on Thomas Lewis was condemned to a wandering exile, seeking here and there for work to support his family. Now there was another child, Thomas Jr., and the Lewises moved to Colfax, Iowa, where for a time Tom Lewis worked as a night watchman, then again as a miner in an adjacent mining town until the blacklist reached his employers. Then the Lewis family moved to the state capital, Des Moines. Thomas Lewis again began to work as a night watchman and later was appointed custodian of the city jail. Danny Lewis was born in 1889. Three years later came Howard Lewis and, in 1894, Hattie Lewis. Eventually two more sons and one more daughter were born to Louisa and Thomas Lewis, so that the Lewis family consisted of six sons and two daughters.

Young John was an aggressive, pugnacious youngster. John first attended the Grant Park School, which was close to the Iowa state fairgrounds. From there he went to the Lincoln School in East Des Moines, then the old Washington School, and finally attended briefly a junior high school close to the state capital. He rebelled against the formal curriculum of school and quit before he finished the eighth grade. Lewis told the writer: I never went to high school. I got along all right in school, but I was just more interested in outside things than I was in classroom work. As a boy he thirsted for action and was eager to settle arguments with the fist. Seeing his father in physical fights made it seem natural to the son. Early in life he subscribed to and frequently tested the slogan that the bigger they come the harder they fall. And yet, for all his fighting, the boy possessed a natural talent for public speaking which even at that age awakened the admiration of his teachers.

As a boy of twelve he sold newspapers, and other newsboys quickly learned not to poach on his territory. Sports attracted young Lewis, particularly baseball. Here, as in everything else in Lewis’s life, he played it seriously and for keeps. However, young John did not play baseball very long, as, by the age of fifteen, he was in the mines augmenting the family budget by working every day digging coal. Every night he listened to his father expounding upon the virtues of trade unionism, the infamy of the coal operators, and the general subject of human nature, both of the miners and of the operators. John listened and became imbued with an implacable, life-long hatred for the coal operators and a distrust for the myth of nobility as applying to the great mass of common people. He heard over and over again how his father had fought their cause in the 1882 strike and how the miners had not fought for him when the company not only refused to rehire him but blacklisted him.

In 1897 the blacklists were destroyed, and Thomas Lewis was free to return to the coal fields. At once the Lewis family left Des Moines for their home town of Lucas, Iowa, where John Lewis, now seventeen years old, his brother Thomas, and his father all began to work in the Big Hill Coal and Mining Company. Ventilation of the mines was unheard of in those days. They sweated it out, working ten to eleven hours a day, working in the suffocation of power fumes. Robert Wilkinson, an old neighbor of the Lewis family who worked in the same mine, recalled, Lewis drove mules—pulled coal for me at the Big Hill. He was a hard worker. He was a good man—and his folks were nice. However, Wilkinson had some bitter memories about the mines: The air was generally pretty thin. We came home more than one day because there wasn’t any air in the mines.{4}

But still the Lewis family was much happier than they had been in Des Moines. Here they were at home among their own folk, Welsh miners who were hardy, rugged people. They were a unique breed, dramatic both in speech and gesture, a strange paradox of sentimental romanticism and hardened realism. They could be tender and yet ruthless. They sang their old Welsh folk songs and quoted Shakespeare in their daily conversations. To understand them was to understand much of what went into the make-up of John L. Lewis.

His energy was boundless. After the day’s work was done, John organized and managed both a debating team and a baseball team. He was a human sponge soaking up both information and knowledge from his avid reading. Lewis loved to read and devoured book after book, practically all of them of the sensational stripe. His interests, like his reading habits, were very disorganized until he went to a party and became attracted to young Myrta Edith Bell. It has always been assumed that Lewis met Myrta Bell at this party. However, Lewis told the writer, I had already known Mrs. Lewis [Myrta Bell] for fifteen years before I married her.

Myrta Bell was the eldest daughter of an Ohio doctor who had moved to Lucas when she was ten years old. The Bell family tree had its roots in the American colonies before the American revolution. It was peopled primarily by scholars, educators, and physicians. It possessed stability and security, and these were reflected in Myrta Bell. She was a calm girl, possessed of an inner security that bloomed into serenity as the years passed. Few ever realized her incredible inner strength. She was in a profound sense stronger than John Lewis. Underneath the tender gentility was a will of inflexible steel.

Myrta Bell organized Lewis’s reading habits and introduced him to Dickens and to Homer and other classics. She encouraged his interests, guided him, and loved him. Myrta Bell was to become the most important single force in the life of John L. Lewis.

He restlessly tried his hand at varied occupations from running a mill to carpentering to managing the local opera house, where he sponsored traveling shows ranging from Shakespearean actors to trained dogs. While the various shows differed greatly they were as one in their rank mediocrity. Some observers have attributed Lewis’s dramatic flourishes to his association with these traveling shows. Also, on the side, he became a justice of the peace, although he was not elected to the post.

At twenty-one a deep restlessness possessed John Lewis, and he left home to begin a trek that was to last for five years before his return. He told the writer: I was too impatient to sit still and go to school. I got my main education during five years when I knocked about the country, in different kinds of work. I saw the suffering that went on, the way people were pushed around, and the misery among large parts of our population. I would say that those five years of my life did more to shape my feelings and my understanding of how people behave and why they behave than anything else in my experience. Those five years were probably one of the most important parts of my life. I suppose if we talk about formal education, I would count that five years as my education. It was a very important part of my life.

His travels were to become a pilgrimage. During those five long years Lewis wandered all over the West. He lived from hand to mouth and traveled by anything he could ride, whether it was stagecoach, a passenger train, or the rods beneath a freight car. Lewis’s rise to national prominence has brought forth many tales of his experiences on this sojourn that are strongly reminiscent of the exploits of the fabulous Paul Bunyan. The real significance of these stories is not