THE JUDICIARY: The Overriding Loyalty

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"I was home eating my junior food," said K. C. Adams, editor of the Mine Workers Journal. "It's already chewed—lamb and vegetables, chopped liver and prunes and applesauce that looks like gunpowder." Mr. Adams has a delicate stomach. "I asked Lillie [Mrs. Adams] to fix me some tea. She made it out of one of those little tea balls." Mr. Adams made the motions of gently dipping a tea ball into a cup, " 'Lillie,' I said, 'this tea with no leaves won't do me no good. I need the leaves and a gypsy to go with them.'"

Mr. Adams had just got the news: the Supreme Court had decided that his boss, John L. Lewis, was in contempt of court. Mr. Adams and the rest of the U.S. could only try to divine, with or without tea leaves, what would happen next.

Appropriate Decision. Mr. Adams could remember clearly the steps which had led up to this startling event. Last spring, after a 59-day coal strike, the Government had seized the nation's soft-coal mines and made a contract with Lewis. But six months later John L. decided that he wanted a better deal. When the Government said that the contract could not be reopened, Lewis said the agreement was off, threatened to strike.

Federal Judge T. Alan Goldsborough tried to restrain Lewis until the question of his right to call off the contract could be settled by the courts. Goldsborough ordered him. not to call the strike. Lewis called the strike anyhow, arguing that the Norris-LaGuardia Act took away the court's authority to enjoin workers in a labor dispute. Obediently his miners, nearly 600,000 of them, walked out. Goldsborough convicted him of contempt and the case went to the Supreme Court.

Now the decision was in, handed down, surprisingly, on a Thursday afternoon. Monday is usually "judgment day" in the U.S. Supreme Court. But the opinions of the justices were written, and Chief Justice Fred Vinson knew they were too hot to keep from a watchful press.

Goldsborough had fined Lewis $10,000. The Court upheld that. He had fined the union $3,500,000. The Court reduced that to $700,000, on condition that Lewis withdraw his new strike threat.

It was one of the worst blows a leader and his union had taken in the history of U.S. labor. In the case of John Lewis, who has ridden contemptuously over the Government, over the public, over his own labor colleagues and even over his own mine workers, the verdict was peculiarly appropriate. But the decision went beyond Lewis. It stirred up the tea leaves in all of organized labor's cup.

The Interests of Government. A court which is not noted for its unanimity of opinion followed a fairly clear line on the main question of Lewis' guilt. Justice Wiley Rutledge dissented. He belabored Goldsborough for his failure to draw a clear line between civil and criminal contempt—on both of which counts Goldsborough had held Lewis culpable. "No case in this Court heretofore has ever sustained such conglomerate proceedings and penalties," Rutledge wrote. He and Justice Murphy both thought that Goldsborough should be reversed.

But the other seven justices agreed that Lewis was wrong in defying the district court, no matter whether or not the court had any legal right—under the Norris-La-Guardia Act—to order him not to strike.