The Mind of Mr. Lewis

The big man strides ponderously up & down the big, dark-paneled office, his wide feet sinking heavily in the taupe broadloom carpet. John Llewellyn Lewis is thinking. Now his pale thick hands are clasped behind him; now they jam in great fists in his coat pockets. Deep in his heavy chops he grips a cigar the size of an auto's gearshift, and like a gearshift the cigar slides slickly from point to point along the wide mouth. A mountain in a white suit, rumpled, tired, his whitening bale of hair shaking as he walks, the 61-year-old labor leader strolls and ponders.

John L. Lewis has been thinking thus, striding thus for a month. For three months he has been silent, reserving his fire. But possibly this week, certainly this month, he will come to a decision which may rock all labor, with repercussions spreading far into the U.S. body politic. For he has been and is debating whether to seize again the controls of the C.I.O.; and another decision just as great: whether to speak his mind about the Administration and its foreign policy--in effect, whether to declare himself an avowed enemy of Franklin Roosevelt.

The mind of John Lewis is sore and perplexed his friends say. In the past bitter six years his occasional heavy, snarling irony has become habitual. But, although he broods, his ideal is still the same; he calls it "industrial democracy," or a government in which labor has an equal right with capital. He has seen this ideal labeled as Communism and has heard, in black rage, the assertion that capital, crushed by the New Deal, should be given equal rights with labor.

He hates the New Deal. He hates Franklin Roosevelt. He thinks the President has betrayed labor, and that only blind men and fools cannot see that he has. Once he complained that the President was not spending enough or fast enough. Now he cries for economy, for bulwarks against inflation; he sees ahead a bankrupt country. The reason: now the money is being spent for armament instead of public works; and John L. Lewis, the man once mentioned for Coolidge's Secretary of Labor, the longtime conservative Republican, the old-fashioned believer in high tariffs and high-laced shoes, is opposed to it as wasteful.

There are stages in his isolationism. He believes that the U.S.'s first concern should be domestic affairs (foremost among them labor's affairs). He believes that the U.S., if concerned with affairs abroad, should not take the part of Britain primarily; should, if necessary, do business with the Nazis; and should pay enormous attention to economic relations with Russia. He has no faith in Roosevelt, in Roosevelt's foreign policy, in Roosevelt's economic policies, and his opposition to them makes him an isolationist.

Long ago John L. Lewis learned to distrust Franklin Roosevelt; he has come as near as is possible to saying that the President's word is no good. He believes that the President made a complete bust of his domestic policies and has since deliberately led the country toward war in order to save his political skin. He believes that the defense program is being tragically bungled, with an inefficiency fairly inviting graft and waste. He thinks the President is struggling desperately in quicksand of his own creation. He thinks the President's policies have nearly wrecked the domestic capitalistic system.

He is against Hitler. He prefers to denounce the British ruling class whom he loathes. He rails madly at the Tories, says that a British victory would be a fearful thing. He does not share the usual horror at the possibility of a Hitler victory. His conclusions on foreign affairs would thus come to an impasse except for one thing: he has an almost fanatical hope that the Russian Army will beat the Germans.

A Russian victory, thinks Mr. Lewis, would solve many world problems: 1) Hitler and Naziism would be destroyed; 2) there would be no possibility of a return of British world rule; 3) the Roosevelt emergency in the U.S. would be exposed as unnecessary, and the world war would be seen as merely a European war.

This fierce hope is at the root of his present indecision. If the Russians are on their way to triumph by Sept. 1, John L. Lewis may attempt to return to command of C.I.O.'s masses; may tell the U.S. that the President has now been shown to be an untrustworthy leader; and insist that labor be given a greater voice in national affairs.

But if the Russians fail, Lewis may still try to seize command of the C.I.O. to try to unite labor in a demand for a constructive domestic program, and to force through a place for labor at the defense program's top. (He is completely contemptuous of OPM's Sidney Hillman.)

Whatever the present outcome, he agrees with Hitler that Britain's stranglehold on world trade must be broken; the English Tories brought to book. He is not so sure that they will be, as he is that history will bring Franklin Roosevelt to book. Such were the thoughts last week of this big man who walks up & down his spacious office, gnawing his great cigar, storing up the Biblically powerful invective of which he is a master, and biding his time.

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