TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/election/40elect/40elect.013

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                .!.                                                            May 10, 1943

LABOR

John Lewis & the Flag



     This was a great week for John L. Lewis; a bitter hard week
for President Roosevelt; and a week of shame, dismay and helpless
wrath for the U.S. people.

     John Lewis had clearly, coldly and precisely outmaneuvered
the President in a battle that was even more momentous than the
people yet realized. John Lewis had not yet won that battle, but
int the attack his men had knocked out the strong points and
climbed the slopes before the fortress. They had made a
frightening show of strength, and their ranks were unbroken.

     The battle was for high stakes. If John Lewis finally won
it, he would be the biggest man in U.S. labor. No matter how
desperately C.I.O.'s Phil Murray and A.F. of L.'s Bill Green aped
him, the lesson would be plain to all union men: John Lewis is the
one who gets you more money despite hell, high water, the war and
the President of the U.S. And money talks, to any worker whose
wartime raise has long since been chewed up by high prices.

     And if Lewis won, he would stand forth as a stronger man
than the U.S. President, a position calculated to discredit Mr.
Roosevelt and lower the prestige of his office. He had already
made some progress toward that position.

     Strategic Truce. John Lewis now had a 15-day truce, in which
he was prepared to bargain with his new employer, the U.S
Government. He had successfully bypassed the coal operators and
the War Labor Board. As the week began, chances were he would win
a guaranteed six-day work week for his bituminous miners ($7 a
day for five days, $10.50 for the sixth), and perhaps even a
guaranteed annual wage, which was his goal. The Government as an
employer could afford to pay any amount, for the Government as a
wartime customer needed all the coal the miners could dig. After
a suitably decorous interval WLB would approve the new contract
(retroactive to April 1), and the mines would be returned to the
helpless operators, the contract a fait accompli. (No tears fell
for the operators: a February price increase, approved by OPA,
took care of added pay for the sixth working day.)

     The way he got the truce was a Lewis masterpiece: a piece of
tactics no Clausewitz could have improved on. The President had
given fair warning that he would address the miners and the
nation on Sunday night. Sunday morning John Lewis and three
henchmen slipped into Washington, worked out the truce with
Harold Ickes, now his boss as Solid Fuels Coordinator, Lewis
entrained for New York. Naturally the truce could not be
announced until the miners' policy committee had met. And somehow
the policy committee deliberated just long enough. Twenty minutes
before the President went on the air, John Lewis announced the
truce, asked the miners to go to work Tuesday.

     This act stripped the gears in the White House. The
President did not have time to turn around and rewrite his plea
that the miners go back on Monday. Doggedly, gravely the
President made his case, but the speech fell in a vacuum. It even
confused many miners who were already all set to go back to work,
and now heard the President plead that they do.

     The Mood of the Soldiers: News of the strike had come to
U.S. soldiers like this:

     -- On a grassy hill outside Kunming, four U.S. flyers,
killed in a Jap bombing raid, lay newly buried in the damp China
soil. Back in the barracks, their friends read the ugly facts in
the news bulletin. Some were men from the Pennsylvania coal
fields. Their first reaction was bewilderment: ("Why do they let
John Lewis push them around that way?"); their second, cold fury
("I'd just as soon shoot one of those strikers as Japs").

     -- North Africa, where the fight for each hill was
desperate, U.S. officers and men heard the details from the
gloating Axis radios. They knew but one way to express their
feelings: strong oaths, clamped jaws, clenched fists.

     -- In Orlando, Fla., an Army flying ace with 13 Jap planes
to his credit, Colonel Robert L. Scott, former aide to Major
General Claire L. Chennault in China, boiled over in anger: "I
know I could do one service. . . . Destruction with six machine
guns . . . of John L. Lewis. I blooded act I could rid the
country of a man who acts as though he were in the pay of the
Japanese Government."

     This savage mood set brother against brother, miner son
against miner father.

     The Miners Leave. The soldiers had roots at home. Small red
& white service flags with their blue stars hung in many a
miner's home. The miners, too, thought of their sons in battle.

     Striking is old stuff to the tough, hardened, cough-ridden
miners of "dark and bloody" southern Illinois. But this time,
when the deadline came on Friday night, it was different. In the
bars of West Frankfort, among the men from Orient No. 2 (world's
largest producer of soft coal) and Old Ben, there was an
undercurrent of uneasiness; many had the shadow of a feeling of
shame. The men were solidly behind Old John L., they would do
what he said, all right. But their hearts were troubled; it took
only a few beers to reveal a slightly guilty conscience.

     Next morning, early, as the dew glistened on the cropped
grass and the lilac bushes in front of Orient No. 2, no miners
reported for the early shift. The whistle blew. "Let her blow,"
said a miner. "Sure, let her blow her head off." The miners were
busy at other chores, mostly gardening. Said a grey-haired miner
in faded overalls, spading his bean patch: "I hate to quit now. I
got boys in the service and I realize what it might mean to the
Government. But. . . ."

     The Miners Are United. That morning the whistles had blown
at all the mines. Nowhere was there a picket line; nowhere
disorder, nowhere any coal mined. The miners waited for news.

     In Pursglove, W. Va., on Sunday, the men from Scott's coal
hollow held a meeting. Stiff in their Sunday clothes, they
flocked to Dallas Hall, paused for a brief beer, stood bareheaded
in the bare room to hear their leaders. Outside a brisk wind
whipped powdery snow around the houses that cling drunkenly to
the hillsides.

     Up rose the local's president, a rangy, hard-bitten man
named "Happy" Kundrock. "Happy" looked out the window where the
U.S. flag fluttered above the Pursglove Mine. Said he: "I believe
that Old Glory should wave above the tipples at any time. But, as
they once said in Pennsylvania, we'll damned well die for you,
but we'll be damned if we ever scab for you."

     Man after man, the miners spoke the same way: "Let them
draft us, put us in uniform. Maybe we'll have to dig that way. .
. . But John L. Lewis is right: no work, no contract; no
contract, no work."

     On Tuesday they all went back, waving to photographers and
smiling. Old Glory fluttered over the 3,850 grey-black mine
tipples in 15 states, waving over the 530,000 miners just as it
did over their sons in Tunisia and Kunmig and Iceland, and just
as it did over the White House, and over Manhattan, where John
Lewis rested.

     The miners did not seem to realize where their leaders had
led them, or how close they had come to open rebellion against
that Union of which their union was supposedly a loyal part.


November 15, 1943
LABOR
End of a Battle

     John Lewis, greatest labor tactician in U.S. history,
captured his own Kiev last week.

     In the eight-month battle for higher wages he had campaigned
like Red general, scornful of the cost, his eyes fixed on the
final objective. He began with a war of nerves, attacking with a
demand for $2 a day more for every miner. He followed up with one
strike threat after another -- at a time when the U.S. considered
a coal strike unthinkable. Three times, by strikes, his forces
streamed through the suburbs and stormed the city's gates. Three
times he was repulsed.

     John L. had two opponents: the U.S. Government and the mine
operators. Shrewdly he outflanked the operators, isolated the
Illinois divisions, forced them to sign.

     Meanwhile he split the Administration forces, holding his
fire from Fuel Boss Harold Ickes, but attacking the War Labor
Board head on.

     In the final battle last week, Lewis won from Harold Ickes a
contract giving the miners an extra $1.50 a day for overtime,
plus travel time. This, together with an added $.25 a day granted
by WLB during an earlier delaying action, actually gave John L.
more than he had asked for -- a point mainly overlooked by the
press. He had demanded a weekly wage of $57.50; under the new and
complicated contract, a miner working a full week will get a
minimum of $58.87. John L. Lewis purred that it was a
"satisfactory wage agreement."

     John L. won his final victory by cutting the miners' lunch
period from 30 to 15 minutes.

     Said a Washington gangster: "John Lewis and Harold Ickes
signed a contract, and the miners lost their lunch." Cracked
Scripps-Howard labor reporter Fred Perkins: "Meanwhile; Mr. Lewis
may be found lunching daily in the Carlton Hotel, where it takes
15 minutes to look at the menu."

     The Casualties. The big difference about Strike IV was that
this time almost nobody was mad at John Lewis. Press and public,
either tired of the whole mess, or more sympathetic to the
miners, or disgusted with Administration ineptitude, raised no
cry. Most of the press blamed the Administration. WLB, badly
beaten and obviously worn down, okayed the new contract by an 11-
to-1 vote. The dissenter: embattled, unshakable Public Member
Wayne Lyman Morse, a literal man who insisted on holding the line
even after the President was abandoning the hold-the-line policy.
Prophesied Wayne Morse: the whole fight to stabilize wages will
collapse.

     Main casualty was the U.S. coal stockpile, which is now
40,000,000 tons short. As a result many a community will be short
of coal this winter. Coal production will gradually be increased
as the miners work overtime an hour a day, but no one saw much
hope of reaching the winter production goal of 335,000,000 tons.
For 60 days, until the mines are again turned over to the
operators, there will be peace. The effect on another battle --
the battle against inflation -- is incalculable.