Why John L. Lewis still matters
John Lewis just died. John L. Lewis died decades ago.
John Lewis was a congressman and a hero of the civil rights movement. John L. Lewis was the longtime president of the United Mine Workers and a champion of the working-class.
John Lewis was born in Georgia. John L. Lewis was born in Iowa. John L. became UMW chief just after World War I. By the 1930s, he was a household name, as famous as Clark Gable and Mickey Rooney, Joe DiMaggio and Lou Gehrig.
At the beginning of his reign as UMW president, John L. Lewis had this to say to critics who argued that miners and other blue collar workers should accept whatever was dispensed to them by the powers-that-be, including high government officials like the president of the United States:
“With Abraham Lincoln, I thank God we live in a country where man may strive. May the power of the government never be used to throttle and crush the efforts of the toilers to improve their material welfare and elevate the standards of their civilization.”
He was a wizard with words, a warrior of rhetoric.
Michigan governor Frank Murphy, whose Irish grandfather had been strung up by the British, threatened to use National Guard troops to oust striking auto workers from a Chevrolet plant they were illegally occupying.
Lewis, a leader of the strike, told Murphy should he carry out the threat, “I shall walk up to the biggest window in the plant, open it, divest myself of my outer raiment, remove my shirt, and bear my bossom. Then, when you order your men to fire, mine will be the first breast that those bullets will strike.
“As my body falls from the window to the ground, you will listen to your grandfather as he whispers in your ear, ‘Frank, are you sure you’re doing the right thing?'”
The president of the United States in the 1930s, an erstwhile friend of labor, declared his neutrality in a steel strike. “A plague on both” labor and management, he was quoted as saying.
Lewis replied, “It ill behooves one who has supped at labor’s table and who has been sheltered in labor’s house to curse with equal fervor and fine impartiality both labor and its adversaries when they become locked in deadly embrace.”
This strike against “Little Steel” erupted in mayhem on Memorial Day, 1937, when Chicago police attacked a line of pickets. Ten pickets died. Seven of the ten were shot in the back. Ninety were wounded.
The Chicago police in 1937 were ever bit as violent – arguably more so – as the police who smashed in the heads of John Lewis and other civil rights protesters on the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965.
For his words and for challenging men of power and the status quo, John L. Lewis was called a “communist stooge” and worse. During World War II, his actions sometimes bordered on national betrayal.
In some quarters, he was loathed.
Yet he was not, at bottom, a wild man. John L. Lewis sought common ground, like the contemporary John Lewis did.
“Trade unionism is a phenomenon of capitalism,” he argued. “One is essential for the pooling of labor for purposes of common action in production and in sales. The other is the pooling of capital for exactly the same purposes.
“The economic aims of both are identical.”
Union chief Lewis hailed the innovative impact of “mass production.” He declared that advances in productivity allowed American manufacturers to sell their products in countries as distant as “China and Japan.”
They key, he said, to a mass-production, consumer-oriented economy was high wages – the kind of wages won by unions bargaining in good faith with companies run by men who were themselves committed to the wellbeing of the country.
Consumers, he wrote as early as 1922, were “the pivot point” of the American economy. Low wages hurt both consumers and manufacturers – consumers because they would not have money in their pockets for new radios and movie tickets (or their equivalents today); manufacturers because of the threat to their bottom lines.
Lewis declared that the conditions unions sought were neither radical nor utopian. Rather, they were standards that “ought to have the support of every thinking [person] in the United States, because it proposes to allow natural economic forces free play in the production and distribution” of material goods.
Lewis’s accommodating ways got him into hot water with labor’s all-or-nothing crowd.
Like the latter day John Lewis, John L. Lewis sought to raise a standard to which all could repair. The failure of business to recognize the legitimate demands of workers was “an attack upon the foundations of American prosperity.”
Far worse, it was an attack on the human spirit and American democracy. Under such conditions, workers are robbed of their birthrights as American citizens; their claim to be free men and women was irredeemably corrupted and lost to fear and economic “peonage.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. His latest book “JFK Rising” can be purchased on Amazon. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.