John L. Lewis

John L. Lewis was born near Lucas, Iowa, to Welsh immigrant coal miners whose faith in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints shaped his sense of who deserved protecting. He went into the Big Hill Mine at seventeen in 1897 without finishing high school, and after a failed run for mayor of Lucas and a failed business venture, went back underground. In Panama, Illinois, miners elected him president of their local union in 1909. Two years later Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor hired him as a full-time organizer, and by 1919, not yet forty, Lewis was acting president of the United Mine Workers of America, leading a strike of 400,000 men before he had formally taken the office.

Lewis ran the United Mine Workers for forty years, from 1920 to 1960, and ran it as something close to a personal domain, purging rivals with expulsions, red-baiting, and, when needed, force. His real break came in November 1935, when he split from the AFL's craft-union model to found the Committee for Industrial Organization, built to unionize entire industries at once rather than trade by trade. The CIO backed the 1937 Flint sit-down strike that forced General Motors to recognize the United Auto Workers, then negotiated directly with U.S. Steel. He was, for a decade, the most powerful labor leader in the country, delivering half a million dollars to Franklin Roosevelt's 1936 campaign and holding real veto power over what industrial America could and could not do without a fight.

Then Lewis turned on the president who owed him. He opposed American entry into World War II, backed Republican Wendell Willkie in 1940, and told CIO members to follow him out of Roosevelt's coalition — 85 percent stayed with Roosevelt instead, and Lewis resigned the CIO presidency he had built. He kept control of the UMW, pulled it out of the CIO in 1942, then broke the wartime no-strike pledge in 1943, forcing Roosevelt to seize the mines by federal order. A Gallup poll that June found 87 percent of Americans disapproved of him. A fellow labor leader who had once been an ally called him "the most imaginative, the most efficient, the most experienced truth-twister" in the movement.

By the time Lewis retired in 1960, mechanization and the shift to oil had cut UMW membership below 190,000, a fraction of its peak — even as he had spent the 1950s winning miners health and pension funds few other unions matched, and pushed through the first federal mine safety act in 1952. Lyndon Johnson gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. He died in 1969 at his home outside Alexandria, Virginia, and even Reuben Soderstrom, the rival who had called him a truth-twister, wrote afterward that Lewis had made American coal miners "the best paid and best protected miners in all the world."

John L. Lewis's life against the full span of the corpus.

• United Mine Workers of America company
  Led for forty years, 1920 to 1960 1920
• Committee for Industrial Organization company
  Became the CIO after its 1938 break with the AFL 1935
• General Motors recognizes the UAW other
  Won by the CIO-backed Flint sit-down strike 1937
• Federal Coal Mine Safety Act law
  Result of Lewis's decades-long campaign for mine safety 1952
• 1950 UMW wage and welfare agreement other
  Ended chronic regional coal strikes and won miners' pension and hospital funds 1950

• February 12, 1880 aged 0 Born near Lucas, Iowa
• 1897 aged ~17 Begins work at the Big Hill Mine at 17
• 1911 aged ~31 Hired as a full-time AFL organizer by Samuel Gompers
• 1920 aged ~40 Elected president of the United Mine Workers
• November 1935 aged 55 Founds the Committee for Industrial Organization
• 1940 aged ~60 Breaks with Roosevelt, backs Willkie, resigns as CIO president
• 1943 aged ~63 Wartime coal strikes prompt Roosevelt to seize the mines
• 1960 aged ~80 Retires as UMW president after forty years
• June 11, 1969 aged 89 Dies at his home outside Alexandria, Virginia

• Samuel Gompers 1850–1924
  Founding leader of the American Federation of Labor who established durable craft-union organization. hired by
• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. broke with
• Walter Reuther 1907–1970
  United Auto Workers leader who helped build organized labor into a major economic and political force. rival
• Mother Jones 1837–1930
  Organizer whose militant campaigns for miners and against child labor made her an icon of American labor. succeeded the movement of
• Alfred P. Sloan 1875–1966
  General Motors leader who established the multidivisional corporation and professional management systems copied across industry. opposed