LABOR: Jubilee

Oh Johnny, Oh Johnny, Oh! was the tune for the bands one morning last week when John L. Lewis walked into a hall at Columbus, Ohio. On the platform he paused for a word with his daughter, Kathryn, large and placid in a black dress. He mouthed his after-breakfastcigar, chatted, paced up & down until an introductory orator droned:”I give you . . .” Only then did the finest actor in U. S. Labor turn to the crowd. Grey hairs laced his black mane. His squat body was taut and still. One hand brushed at his eyes, at the arching black eyebrows, the monolithic slopes of his face, the broad mouth. After seven minutes of ovation he spoke in low monotone: “. . . Delegates to the Golden Jubilee Convention of the United Mine Workers of America. . . .”

John Llewellyn Lewis was in his 60th year, his 21st as president of the mine workers, his fifth at the helm of C. I. O. He was an emigrant Welsh miner’s brat in Iowa when, this day 50 years ago, 198 men from the coal fields met in Columbus to weld their various feuding unions into one United Mine Workers of America. Behind him and his 2,400 jubilee delegates were men long dead: John Bates, who founded the first U. S. miners’ union in 1849, and failed; the thousands of British diggers who flocked over to man U. S. coal mines during the industry’s Civil War boom, and remained to foster unionism; the violent Irishmen who were called Molly Maguires; sainted John Siney, whose Miners’ National Association of the U. S. rose, fell, and left him dying (of a broken heart, some said); the Knights of Labor, “one big union” for all workers; whiskered John Rae, first U. M. W. A. president, whose son appeared at the convention last week. There were the nameless dead—of catastrophe, foul air, killing hours in the mines; murdered by company thugs; murdered, too, by union gangs whose internecine wars reddened the rise of U. M. W. A. and John Lewis. And at home last week in Glenalum, Sarah Ann and Carbondale, Black Lick and Conemaugh, in coal towns from Nova Scotia to Alabama, were the 600,000* members of U. M. W. A.

On the third day of his jubilee, John Lewis observed that he wished television were at hand to bring the sight in the hall to his NBC hearers. Suddenly his miners saw a sight indeed: a red, rectangular flag with the hammer-&-sickle of Soviet Russia and U. S. Communism lowered down from the flies above the auditorium stage, over Mr. Lewis’ head. Angry delegates leaped from their seats. To puzzled Mr. Lewis, who did not see the flag, a convention secretary passed a note. The offensive emblem was removed. “It appears,” said Mr. Lewis, whose union has long barred known Reds, “that someone attempted to perform a most cowardly, reprehensible and dastardly trick.”

Fault & Default. Someone besides pranksters or intruding Reds had indeed played a trick on John Lewis. Someone apparently had convinced him that there is in the diffuse U. S. a solid, national, manageable Labor Vote.

In his role of 1940 politico, John Lewis first dusted off Indiana’s Paul Vories McNutt, whom nobody had considered a likely bidder for C. I. O. support. To a gallery of undesirables which already included John Nance (“Evil Old Man”) Garner, Boss Lewis also added Cordell Hull, with unkind references to his trade agreements.

All this caused no great stir in the U. S. at large, nor among the Republican,Democratic, Socialist, and just plain know-nothing delegates to Mr. Lewis’ jubilee. But a further announcement from John Lewis made the delegates sit bolt upright in their chairs. Said John Lewis, crediting the President’s re-election in 1936 to “a coalition between the Democratic Party and organized labor”:

“A political coalition . . . presupposes a post-election good faith. . . . The Democratic Party and its leadership have not preserved this faith. . . . The current administration has not sought nor seriously entertained the advice and views of labor upon the question of national employment or lesser questions. . . . After seven years of power, [the Democratic Party] finds itself without solution for the major questions of unemployment, low national income, mounting internal debt, increasing direct and consumer taxation and restricted foreign markets. There still exists the same national unhappiness that it faced seven years ago.

“I am one who believes that President Roosevelt will not be a candidate for reelection. Conceding that the Democratic National Convention could be coerced or dragooned into re-nominating him, I am convinced that, with the conditions now confronting the nation and the dissatisfaction now permeating the minds of the people, his candidacy would result in ignominious defeat. . . .”

Therefore, said John Lewis, let U. M. W. A. withhold any indorsements of 1940 candidates, leave matters to him and his executive board (as the union did in 1938). For the first & only time during the convention, hardly a handclap followed John Lewis from the speaker’s rostrum.

“No Place to Go?” What he was getting at with his shocker, John Lewis later explained: “I intended my statement to be a distinct jar to the professional politicians in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party … to serve notice that labor is not to be taken for granted.”

If John Lewis took labor’s acquiescence for granted, he was in for a distinct jar himself. C. I. O.’s potent Vice President Sidney Hillman, whose own Amalgamated Clothing Workers is for a Third Term, hustled to Columbus to speak his mind to Mr. Lewis and the miners. On record for a Third Term is Manhattan’s American Labor Party, the State C. I. O. councils of New York, New Jersey and California, many & many a local and district C. I. O. organization (including some in Mr. Lewis’ U. M. W. A.).

While professional politicos signally failed to heed John Lewis’ warning, newsmen in Columbus asked lone Mr. Lewis to answer the big question he had raised: where else but to the Democratic Party, Franklin Roosevelt or a Roosevelt candidate could “the labor vote” go this fall? Said John Lewis, at ease in his Neil House parlor: “That [assumption] is the fatal defect of the philosophy of the Democratic leaders.” Then he again observed that the Republicans must not be allowed to win this fall, pried open a door into the Democratic parlor: “. . . I’d like some Democratic leader to lie awake all night some night, thinking about our internal problems, then announce what he is going to do.”

A Democrat who has been thinking about John Lewis is Montana’s oldtime pro-Labor liberal. Senator Burton K. Wheeler. Last week two convention bands welcomed Burton Wheeler to Columbus, John Lewis greeted him with a creamy smile, Kathryn Lewis pinned an honorary delegate’s badge on him. There his New England twang (a relic of boyhood in Hudson, Mass.) sounded like a voice wooing support for the Presidential nomination. Willing Mr. Wheeler agreed with John Lewis that “unemployment is America’s No. 1 problem,” faintly damned Franklin Roosevelt for giving undue attention to World War II, lifted other parts of his speech from C. I. O.’s current Congressional prospectus. But his Third Term views were his own: “In my opinion, if President Roosevelt wants the nomination he will get it. If he wants the nomination, he should say so. It can only lead to disaster if the present confusion continues. . . .” And, said Mr. Wheeler, he would neither run against nor oppose the President.

Candidate Wheeler at week’s end had pledged support of Nebraska’s Norris (if Roosevelt does not run), intimations of support from A. F. of L.’s Green. As for scheming John Lewis, said Burton Wheeler: “If he favors me he has never told me so. I would be happy to have the support of Mr. Lewis.”

*Claimed. A more realistic total is the 400,000 who get the union’s bi-monthly Journal, which is mailed free to members in good standing.