The Moth & The Flame

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0, it is excellent to have a giant's strength. . . .

The giant stalked around his large office in Washington last week opening telegrams, growling at awed associates and champing at cigars.

"Prosecute me--for what?" he thundered. "We are exercising our right to strike. That breaks no law. . . . Let them seize the mines. That won't produce any coal. .

John Lewis spat the shreds of his cigar halfway across the room.

His soft-coal miners, out since April 1, were solidly behind him. Nor were they particularly dismayed at being out of work. They had had a wonderful winter and they were well off--temporarily, at least. In West Frankfort, Ill., near the world's largest mine, they stood three deep around the Egypt Cafe bar; miners' wives paraded into Pollock's Electrical Appliance Co. to order washers and refrigerators. The West Frankfort bank was fairly bursting with miners' deposits. Telephone installations were at an all-time peak and the "42" Cab Co. was doing a record business. Illinois miners had enough money, a United Mine Workers official figured, to stay out six months. From Pennsylvania came the same kind of reports. From Welch, W.Va.: "We're behind you, John, go your full length."

"We Accuse." John had gone his full length, knowing to a hair what it would be. As he paced his 30-ft.-long office he could look back on his campaign with gleeful satisfaction. Everything had worked out as he had planned it.

They had been caught unawares. They had thought he was going to be sweetly reasonable. They had thought they could settle for at least an 18 1/2 wage boost. They were ready to make a lot of other concessions. Then John Lewis attacked:

"We accuse by the record that the management and stockholders of the bituminous-coal industry in a period of 14 years have through mismanagement and cupidity and wanton neglect made dead 28,000 mine workers . . . shattered the bodies of 1,004,000 miners. . . . We accuse . . . we accuse . . . we accuse."

What did he want? He wanted a welfare fund, such as he had mentioned last year, to be raised by a royalty on every ton of mined coal and put at the disposal of the union. The royalty he had suggested a year ago was 10-c-, which would have swelled his treasury by $60,000,000.

Day after day he had talked on, noting understandingly how the operators' "souls are tortured." He had made no specific demands. They pleaded: what was his proposition? He countered: what did they offer? At last in lofty-anger he withdrew. Contracts expired and miners stopped mining.

He had figured every angle--nothing sudden to make the nation mad; the strike, as usual, to come in April when householders would not feel the pinch; no defiant demands (yet); a cause calculated to arouse some sympathy. Everyone knew that a miner's life was a wretched one, although John Lewis had never before made a fighting issue of welfare programs.

After that he had waited for the paralysis to set in which would give him what he needed for victory.

Front & Center. Forty days of paralysis. The nation's economy slowed, faltered, wobbled toward a dead stop. Chicago plants cut operations to 24 hours a week. In Detroit, Ford shut up shop, shutdowns became a matter of days at Chrysler and G.M. Great Lakes shipping, at this time normally at its peak, was down to 40%. Minnesota creameries were about to close for lack of fuel. Passenger trains stopped running. Freight loadings dropped 75%. Freight cars piled up. Steel plants banked their fires. More than a million men were out of work.

Deeper, organic injuries were done. They would be felt next winter in consumers' coal bins. Coming on top of the steel strike (said the Civilian Production Administration), the coal stoppage had caused a loss of some 90% of the steel required for a year's production of automobiles, refrigerators, electric irons, washing machines, etc. Loss of pig iron (used in pipes), lumber, other building material, would complicate the housing problem, already snafu. Production of sorely needed farm machinery was hurt. Pipelines of raw material and manufactured goods had been drained out. It would take a long time to fill them up again.

But it did not really make the people mad, it only annoyed them. No one strung John Lewis up in effigy, as had been done in 1940. This was the way he had calculated it. But, as they have every time John Lewis has cast his bulbous shadow over the nation's economy, Americans let out a bewildered cry: "Who the hell does John Lewis think he is?"

Mr. Lewis, waiting in the wings, bowed himself front & center.

The Man from Lucas. Who is he? He was born in Lucas, Iowa in 1880. He went through the seventh grade, tramped around the country and followed his Welsh coal-miner father into the labor movement. Sam Gompers was his mentor. He had a shock of red hair, red eyebrows and a sonorous voice. He married Myrta Edith Bell, a schoolteacher who interested him in Shakespeare. He climbed roughshod over lesser men and landed in the presidency of the U.M.W., a roughshod outfit.

At first he was a spectacular flop. His was a sick union in a sick industry, and by his stubborn insistence on an uneconomic wage scale he almost killed it. By 1932 the U.M.W. was a shell and the (miners' cry was: "Down with John Lewis." Thousands flocked to the rambunctious, independent Progressive Miners Union. But a year later, staking every last dollar in his treasury, John Lewis rushed back into the fray, let the rumor spread that he had dinner every day with Franklin Roosevelt, and waved a banner with a strange device: NRA and 7A. By the tens of thousands the miners rejoined him.

John L. is the man who organized labor against the "overlords of steel," who coldbloodedly kept the sit-down strikers at G.M. in Flint while the National Guard prepared to clean them out with bayonets, who signed the first contract with Big Steel and became at length not merely boss of C.I.O., but C.I.O. itself.

He is the man who handed out $500,000 of his miners' money to help re-elect Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 and in 1940 renounced him to settle his regal choice on Wendell Willkie. Because of that error in judgment he had to turn over the C.I.O. presidency to his Man Friday, Philip Murray.

In vengeance he called out 53,000 mine workers in 1941 and wrecked the Mediation Board which Franklin Roosevelt had set up in an effort to keep labor peace while the country armed for war. He split labor apart. Congress was so incensed that it was ready to torpedo national policy just to sink John Lewis.

He enjoyed the effect, although he was a little flabbergasted when the Japs struck Pearl Harbor. Having followed an isolationist line, he now said lamely: "When the nation is attacked every American must rally to its defense." Overshadowed by the war, he sulked.

Man In Cartoons. But not for long. He proposed the "accouplement" of A.F.L. and C.I.O., cynically putting his old friend Phil Murray on the block. When the shocked Murray attacked him for suggesting such a deal, he put Murray on trial in the basement of the U.M.W. building (from the walls of which hundreds of Lewis cartoons glared at the white-faced Murray) and read him out of the miners' union. Then he led the miners out of Murray's C.I.O.

For a period of eight months in 1943, he harried the nation with coal strikes, split the Administration, humiliated Franklin Roosevelt, and virtually wrecked the War Labor Board, as he had wrecked the Mediation Board. In return for only the smallest of gains he brought down upon his head once more the wrath of Congress. It was a blunder. More than any other man, John Lewis was responsible for the Smith-Connally Act, the boomerang labor law which Congress passed in an effort to curb him.

Some of this history was certainly in his mind as he paced his office, gaped at by his aging courtiers. None of the small Johns and Toms had much to say; they did not even know exactly what was in the great man's mind. There was little warmth in the Lewis office, only reverence. "Some great statesman once said the heights are cold," John L. orated in 1940. "I think that is true. The poet said, 'Who ascends to the mountain's top finds the loftiest peaks encased in mist and snow.'"*

Under the Chandelier. Did the great man himself know what he had on his mind? What does John Lewis want?

He has no real desire to reform the economy. He is actually an economic classicist. From time to time he has collaborated with revolutionists ("those carrion birds"), but only because he thought he could make use of them. He also collaborated with Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt.

Is he obsessed with a desire for power? Time & again he has deliberately thrown away chances to increase his power, as when he broke with Roosevelt. Time & again he has recklessly doublecrossed and reviled the very men who could help him to power.

Is his objective a strong, unified labor movement? No labor leader in U.S. history has split labor into so many parts and hacked off so many splinters. Does he really give a damn for labor? He speaks of labor in sweeping, lofty terms: "I salute the hosts of labor. ..." Labor to him was "18 million stomachs clashing against backbones." A few years later it had become "52 million shrunken bellies." Paunchy Mr. Lewis is haunted by flat stomachs.

Obviously he wants a bigger and stronger miners' union, because that is the platform on which he parades. But he has very little association with mining these days, except when he stands in his pine-paneled office under his chandelier: a cogwheel hanging from mining augers, decorated with mining shovels and a sledge, supporting a ring of miners' lamps. The country's welfare is the miners', and for the country's welfare he has shown little regard.

John Lewis' one objective may be a very simple one: just to be in the limelight. Throughout the years, like a potbellied moth, he has courted the flame of publicity. History, while recording his contributions--his gains for his miners; his great exposition of the idea of industrial unionization, his usually peerless strategy--may also record that he was one of U.S. labor's greatest charlatans.

The Hon. John. At week's end John L. stopped pacing. He knew exactly what his next move was to be. He recognized his cues. The Senate had voted overwhelmingly to take up the anti-labor Case bill. The Senators were in a mood to legislate something even stronger than the Smith-Connally act. Lewis did not want that.

His strike had approached the proportions of the British general strike of 1926, which had boomeranged on labor. He would not wanf that. There was a point beyond which he did not care--or dare--to go, which he had carefully calculated. He fed on discontent but he had no stomach for disruption.

He waited. He thought he had stirred up just the right amount of public indignation to force the President to intercede. He liked dealing on the top level.

Then the message came; Harry Truman summoned him--buf not a moment too soon. In the excitement someone at the White House typed the announcement that the President would confer that afternoon with "Mr." Charles O'Neill (head of the northern mine operators) and the "Hon." John Lewis. Triumphantly, the Hon. John Lewis acted. As he had once ruined Franklin Roosevelt's show by proclaiming the end of a strike 15 minutes before Roosevelt went on the air to castigate him, he now spoiled Harry Truman's show. Three hours before he was due at the White House, he ordered his miners back to work--not permanently, but for a truce of twelve days.

It was his "contribution," he said magnanimously, "to our nation's economy, which is being imperiled by the stupidity and selfish greed of the coal operators and associated financial interests and by demagogues who have tried to lash the public mind into a state of hysteria."

He walked triumphantly into the White House. Forty minutes later he emerged with Mr. O'Neill, a onetime miner himself.

Wage adjustments would be retroactive.

The welfare fund was settled in principle; all "that remained was to write the ticket, which the Hon. John Lewis and Mr. O'Neill would proceed to do. The President wanted the contract written in not more than 'five days. Did Lewis think that was possible?

"That depends entirely on Mr. O'Neill and his associates," said Lewis.

"And on Mr. Lewis and his associates," O'Neill said bravely.

Lewis glowered at the newsmen surrounding them. "May I call your attention to the fact," he rumbled, "that with the country suffering from a lack of coal, according to the newspapers, Mr. O'Neill hesitates to say whether he will work his mines?" O'Neill grimaced.

There might be a truce, but with John Lewis around there could never be much peace.

0, it is excellent to have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous

To use it like a giant. . . .

* Misquoted from Childe Harold by Lord Byron.

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