What Next?

John L. Lewis learned in 1947 that it is dangerous to play fast & loose with the courts. The lesson cost him and his United Mine Workers $710,000. Last week, therefore, ordered by a federal judge, he sullenly appeared before a presidential fact-finding board and explained his version of the coal dispute.

The board listened. It decided that John was mostly to blame for the breakdown in negotiations over the pension fund. As for the current strike, which John insisted was not a strike, the board thought it "was more than a coincidence" that after John wrote his miners a letter saying that the operators had "dishonored" the 1947 coal contract, the miners had walked out.

Lewis waited four days. Then he wrote his miners again. The gist of it: "I never told you to strike. This is all your own idea."

The same day, the Government went to court and got a temporary restraining order, a necessary preliminary to obtaining an 80-day injunction under the Taft-Hartley Act. The court ordered Lewis to refrain "from continuing the strike now in existence." But early this week the miners were still on strike and John L. was closeted with his lawyers.

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