John L. Lewis

John L. Lewis (born February 12, 1880, near Lucas, Iowa, U.S.—died June 11, 1969, Washington, D.C.) was an American labour leader who was president of the United Mine Workers of America (1920–60) and chief founder and first president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO; 1936–40).

The son of immigrants from Welsh mining towns, Lewis left school in the seventh grade and went to work in the mines at age 15. In the coal-mining town of Panama, Illinois, he became head of a United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) local, and in 1911 he became an organizer for the American Federation of Labor (AFL), with which the miners’ union was affiliated. Lewis became a vice president of the UMWA in 1917, acting president in 1919, and president in 1920, by which time the UMWA had become the largest trade union in the United States. He would remain the UMWA’s leader for the next 40 years. Lewis led a successful national coal strike in 1919, but during the 1920s the UMWA’s membership shrank from 500,000 to fewer than 100,000 as unemployment spread among UMWA members in northern states and nonunionized mines in the southern Appalachians increased their production.

Beginning in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal presented organized labour with opportunities that Lewis exploited with energy and imagination. The formation of the National Recovery Administration through the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) guaranteed labour the right to bargain collectively. This enabled Lewis to launch new organizing campaigns in the coalfields of Appalachia and elsewhere, tripling the UMWA’s membership within a few years.

Unions gained even more organizing rights with the 1935 passage of the Wagner Act (officially, the National Labor Relations Act). Building on previous labour victories, Lewis and several other AFL union leaders formed the Committee for Industrial Organization with the intention of organizing workers in mass-production industries. The more traditional leaders of the AFL, however, preferred limiting its membership to craft unions and refused to support the new strategy. As a result, Lewis and seven other dissident union heads left the AFL to organize what became the CIO. The new organization named Lewis its president. Beginning in 1935–36, Lewis presided over the often-violent struggle to introduce unionism into previously unorganized industries such as steel, automobile, tire, rubber, and electrical products. A dramatic 1936 “sit-down” strike against the General Motors Corporation convinced many unskilled workers that the motto “one shop, one union” could work and prompted other successful sit-down strikes to follow.

Lewis was a lifelong Republican, but he had crossed party lines to support Roosevelt for the presidency in 1932 and 1936. He opposed Roosevelt’s third term, however, threatening to resign as CIO president if Roosevelt won. Interpreting Roosevelt’s victory as a repudiation of his own leadership, Lewis resigned as president of the CIO in 1940. In 1942 he pulled the UMWA out of the parent body. A series of miners’ strikes called by Lewis in the 1940s won wage increases and new benefits for miners but alienated large segments of the public. Antiunion sentiment spurred the passage of the Smith-Connally Anti-Strike Act (1943) and the Taft-Hartley Act (1947), both of which placed new restrictions on labour unions.

In the 1950s Lewis worked closely with mine operators to mechanize the industry, a strategy that increased productivity and ultimately enlarged the union benefits for the miners. After retiring as UMWA president in 1960, he served as chairman of the board of trustees of the UMWA’s welfare and retirement fund. A man of imposing appearance, with overhanging brows and a bulldog chin, Lewis studded his sonorous oratory with literary allusions and sometimes with harsh epithets.