That Man Again

Two weeks before the Japs struck Pearl Harbor, the nation's defense industries were just recovering from near-paralysis; its key coal mines had been strike-shut. Last week, at another uncertain moment in history, some U.S. citizens rubbed their eyes. Were they dreaming, or were the country's mines shut again?

Familiar voices repeated an old and threadbare lie--the miners were merely on a vacation. But almost every one of 400,000 soft-coal miners had left the pits. Blast furnaces had begun to shut down. An anxious government ordered railroads to cut their coal-burning passenger service by 25%. These were the first signs of the palsy which always accompanies a coal strike. It was no nightmare. It was, in fact and flesh, John Lewis again.

Just as real and grim as the shutdown was the dispute. John Lewis insisted that every miner over 60 with 20 years of service should be paid a pension of $100 a month. The operators' Ezra Van Horn insisted that to finance such a plan the present 10-c--a-ton royalty on mined coal would have to be raised to 40-c-. The operators were not going to cough up.

The fiction of a "vacation" was maintained because Lewis could not legally order a strike. In Washington he stalked in & out of conferences while outsize Cyrus Ching, the Government's chief conciliator, beamed on him hopefully, tried to drag him into a meeting with the coal operators.

As paralysis spread, the Administration considered the next move: using the emergency machinery ultimately to get an injunction, force Lewis to keep the mines operating until every possible solution had been explored. This machinery was provided by the Taft-Hartley Act, which Harry Truman once denounced as "cumbersome and ineffective ... a clear threat to the successful working of our democratic society."

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