Until April 1943

To Labor Leader Lewis it was a big and gratifyingly noisy success. To the U.S. it was time wasted that could never be bought back. To the miners themselves it was another weary walkout. Before a truce came last week to the sooty soft-coal hills of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, the strike ordained by John L. Lewis had cost some 200,000 miners a week's wages, had cost the defense program at Carnegie-Illinois* some 30,000 tons of steel (enough for 3,000 light tanks or 30 destroyers).

For six days, while John Lewis curled his long lip in scorn over every Presidential appeal for some kind of settlement, his pallid-faced miners obeyed his orders, roamed the drab hills, picketed gates, shot and were shot at, and explained to their wives and kids, in the gaudy little parlors of their ugly little houses, why they were out.

First & foremost reason: John Lewis had ordered it. They made the strike all that John Lewis could have demanded. They not only walked out of the captive mines, they struck at mines already under contract--in the Allegheny County region around Pittsburgh, along the Monongahela River Valley, in the mountains of West Virginia. Only a few tried to keep on working. At Edenborn, Pa., a group of them posted themselves around the slate dump, fired on pickets with revolvers and shotguns, wounded more than a dozen.

Bituminous production dropped an estimated 1,500,000 tons a day. By week's end, Carnegie-Illinois reported that the mammoth coal pile at its Clairton byproducts plant had shrunk to 200,000 tons, enough for only six days of operation. Shut for want of coke was the hot-strip mill at U.S. Steel's modern Irvin works. One by one, in the nation's industrial center, open hearths were banked.

When John Lewis unexpectedly gave in, agreed to submit the dispute to arbitration, observers wondered why this roaring lion had suddenly begun to coo like a sucking dove. Some suggested a possible reason: Mr. Lewis had good reason to suppose that the arbitration board--U.S. Steel Corp. President Benjamin Fairless, Dr. John R. Steelman, head of the U.S. Conciliation Service, and John L. Lewis himself--would decide in Mr. Lewis' favor.

Anyhow, the coal strike was over. Most people hoped that John L. Lewis would now get off the front page and stay off. They also hoped they could believe his promise: "With the mines returning to work and the controversy well on the road to just settlement, the country can feel reassured as to its supply of coal for national defense and all domestic usage . . . until April 1, 1943. . . ."

* Subsidiary of U.S. and the industry's largest consumer of soft coal.

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