Lewis and the Champ

To Franklin Roosevelt the hulking form of John L. Lewis is like an ominous figure in a recurrent bad dream. This week the dream and the figure were back again in their most nightmarish aspect. With a coal strike threatened next weekend, John Lewis had once again maneuvered the President of the U.S. into a head-to-head personal fight.

For seven weeks John L. and the mine operators have presented the nation with their usual spring show, war or no war. To outsiders the show seemed to follow the routine peacetime patterns: offers, counteroffers, the appearance (and failure) of a Government conciliator, the transfer of New York negotiations to Washington. John Lewis stood fast: he wanted to crack the Little Steel wage formula with a $2-a-day raise for his men and to torpedo WLB (as he had sunk its predecessor, the National Defense Mediation Board). But what he was really after was a showdown with the President. John Lewis is not at all afraid of the Champ; the Champ, after years of trial bouts, is not so keen for the battle.

Last week John L. took on the Champ in a minor, preliminary bout: U.M.W. strikers (members of his catch-all District 50) went back to work at Celanese Corp.'s big plant in Newark. Carefully they proclaimed that they had won a "Victory" because the President himself had stepped into the fracas, ordered their return. But last week, as WLB took over his big show, John L. was not at the coal hearings: he was ensconced in Manhattan's Roosevelt Hotel, holding a watch on the White House and ticking off the hours until his May i deadline. And already idle were 14,000 overzealous miners in Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Alabama.

The crisis in coal was far more serious than a bout between two well-known champions. If John L. Lewis' 450,000 men strike, and are allowed to stay out. they will in due course bring the bulk of the U.S. war machine to a grinding stop by cutting off two-thirds" of the nation's electric power, stopping most of its railroads and steel mills. And if they win, they will spearhead the forces that may smash the President's Maginot Line against inflation.

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