Thunder from the Past

It was like old times. John Llewellyn Lewis, hair still flying in the draft of that old invisible vacuum cleaner, stomped majestically into the solidly packed House Caucus Room, took his place at the microphone, glowered briefly at his audience, and unleashed a torrent of colorful abuse against all the labor-reform bills now before Congress. The years had left their mark on the old ham: the massive shoulders were stooped, the magnificent mop of hair had turned white, and the hedgerow eyebrows were frosted with grey. But John L. Lewis, now in his 80th year, was the same ferocious old firebreather.

The labor-union curbs being considered by the House Education and Labor Committee, thundered Lewis, are nothing more than a plot to oppress the poor laboring man: North Carolina Representative Graham Barden's reform bill is "88 pages of misery," and the mild Kennedy reform bill (TIME, May 4) is "66 pages of misery that is not quite so strong." As for Senator John McClellan's investigation of labor-management racketeering, it marked "a re-establishment of the principle of the Star Chamber of the Tudor and Stuart kings, with a slight touch of the Spanish Inquisition."

Speaking without notes, Lewis roared for three hours. Here was the same spavined warrior who had learned tactics at the knee of Sam Gompers, who had campaigned fervently for, then violently against Franklin Roosevelt, had regularly undermined the economy with his coal strikes (statisticians blame his miners for 25% of all workdays lost by strikes in the 22 years before 1949). Here was the rebel who had founded the C.I.O., left it, rejoined the A.F.L., left it ("TheA.F.L. has no head; its neck just growed and haired over"). There were flashes of the old defiant Lewis who had traded hot words with Federal Judge T. Alan Goldsborough and accepted historic contempt fines of $2,130,000 against his United Mine Workers union and himself, the same old thunderer who had led his coal miners from economic prostration in the Depression to a $24.25 daily basic wage and the fattest welfare benefits in labor history (with membership down from a high point of 600,000 in the late '30s to 500,000 today).

Yet the legislation and legislators he belabored had no desire to change labor's hard-won basic rights. Today's miner, at $24.25 per diem, could hardly be called downtrodden. (Nor could John L. Lewis, still the $50,000-per-year U.M.W. president and a power in the National Bank of Washington as well.) The concern of Congress and of the U.S. in 1959 is the gangsterism and brutality that infest the unions and threaten the working man. With oratory and belligerence out of the past, John L. Lewis was fighting for a cause already won, defending a crime against labor still unpunished.

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