Lewis, John L.

Lewis, John L. (1880–1969), labor leader.Born in Lucas, Iowa, to Welsh immigrant parents. Lewis as a young man wandered the West and attempted to establish several businesses. He became a coal miner and in 1908 moved to Panama, Illinois. A year later, Lewis became president of the United Mine Workers (UMW) local. Thereafter, he rose rapidly in the labor movement, becoming in 1917 a UMW vice president. Lewis's political ability and his adroit handling of the 1919 coal strike won him the union's presidency in 1920.

The union over which Lewis assumed command soon entered an era of decline. Ironically, as the power of the UMW eroded in the 1920s, Lewis's personal power in the union grew. With Franklin Delano Roosevelt's election in 1932, Lewis rebuilt the UMW. In 1933, he launched a spectacular organizing drive that brought over 90 percent of the nation's coal miners into the UMW. Lewis emerged as the dominant labor leader of the 1930s and an effective advocate of aggressive organizing. In 1935, with the passage of the prolabor National Labor Relations Act, he created the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) within the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to unionize workers in the mass production industries. As president of the CIO (which was expelled from the AFL in 1938 and changed its name to the Congress of Industrial Organizations), Lewis helped unionize the automotive industry, the iron and steel industry, and others.

At first allied with Roosevelt and the New Deal, Lewis broke with the president during the 1940 election. Roosevelt's reelection caused Lewis to resign as president of the CIO and in 1942 to withdraw the UMW from the CIO.

During World War II, Lewis played the militant loner. In 1943, he led a series of unpopular strikes. After the war, Lewis led more massive coal strikes that spurred the passage of the 1947 Taft‐Hartley Act. In the 1950s, he shifted from militancy to accommodation with mine owners. He transformed himself into an industrial statesman, urging trade policies that would increase coal exports, building a string of union hospitals, and seeking the passage of the first Federal Mine Safety Law. When he retired from his union presidency in 1960, Lewis left an ailing industry and a debilitated, corrupt union.
See also Labor Movements; Mining; New Deal Era, The; Strikes and Industrial Conflict.

Bibliography

Melvyn Dubofsky and and Warren Van Tine , John L. Lewis: A Biography, 1977.

Warren Van Tine