The Great Actor

It was as if John L. Lewis were reciting from a selection of great works--or what he imagined to be great works.

Was it Jeremiah? "Surely, there must be some balm in Gilead for a coal miner."

Was it Zola? "Mismanagement, cupidity and wanton neglect . . . in a period of 14 years . . . have made dead 28,000 mineworkers. . . . We accuse that in the same period . . . management and stockholders . . . violently mangled, crushed and shattered the bodies of 1,004,000 mineworkers."

Was it Shakespeare? "He is fearful of the night, of the ague and terror of the day. Mere words do not change his condition. Yet, words are all the miner has used so far, in his struggle to better his condition."

The audience was hardly worthy of the show: a mere collection of the nation's coal operators--men who recked little of such great echoes, and cared less. The Great Actor was holding forth behind closed doors, in the beige and green ballroom of Washington's Shoreham Hotel. The business at hand, they crossly supposed, was a coal contract.

Whatever character the negotiations called for, the Great Actor had it: Mephistopheles in a baggy, black business suit; Daniel Webster, crouching behind his eyebrows; Billy Sunday, with the vox humana in his trombone voice; Bette Davis, crying like a curlew; John Barrymore, tearing an emotion to tatters.

In the rare moments when he seemed just himself ("Will you go to hell with my compliments?") the operators felt less uncomfortable. But in two weeks of negotiating, Lewis had thundered no heads-will-roll ultimatums. The operators, fearing that he might ask for bigger raises than they could balance with price rises, were almost eager to settle for the going 18 1/2-c--an-hour increase. But Lewis could not seem to bring himself to talk paychecks. Instead, he dramatized the need for a miner's "health and welfare fund," hinted that he might ask reduction of their current 54-hour work week to one of 35 hours--with no reduction in the current base wage of $63.50. He paraded his 30 U.M.W. district presidents for the operators, bawled out critical columnists, craftily put off the final, secret negotiating session at which he would talk unmistakable turkey.

At week's end, with the show still going strong, the operators were beginning to wonder if Lewis had them in mind at all. Who was the old ham really playing to?

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