Who was John L. Lewis?
John Llewellyn Lewis was born in Lucas, Iowa, on February.12, 1880, to Tom Lewis, a coal miner from Wales, and Ann Watkins. The first of seven children, Lewis for 10 years was formal education before joining his father in the mines at age 16. As a young man, Lewis served as the recording secretary of United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) Local Union 1933. In 1907, Lewis married Myrta Edith Bell and had three children. 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 labor with opportunities that Lewis exploited with energy and imagination. The formation of the National Recovery Administration through the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) guaranteed labor 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. 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.
Unions gained even more organizing rights with the 1935 passage of the Wagner Act (officially, the National Labor Relations Act). Building on previous labor victories, Lewis and several other AFL union leaders formed the Committee for Industrial Organization with the intention of organizing workers in mass-production industries.
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. Lewis won periodic wage and benefit increases for miners and led the campaign for the first Federal Mine Safety Act in 1952. Perhaps Lewis' greatest legacy was the creation of the UMWA Welfare and Retirement Fund in a contract with the federal government, signed in the White House with President Truman in attendance. The UMWA Fund would change permanently health care delivery in the coal fields of the nation. The UMWA Fund built eight hospitals in Appalachia and established numerous clinics. In 1964, Lewis was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian decoration, by President Lyndon Johnson. Lewis retired as president of the UMWA in 1960 but, remained Chairman of the UMWA Fund until his death in 1969 in Alexandria, Virginia.
