LABOR: John Lewis & the Flag

• Share

This was a great week for John L. Lewis; a bitter hard week for President Roosevelt; and a week of shame, dismay and helpless wrath for the U.S. people.

John Lewis had clearly, coldly and precisely outmaneuvered the President in a battle that was even more momentous than the people yet realized. John Lewis had not yet won that battle, but in the attack his men had knocked out the strong points and climbed the slopes before the fortress. They had made a frightening show of strength, and their ranks were unbroken.

The battle was for high stakes. If John Lewis finally won it, he would be the biggest man in U.S. labor. No matter how desperately C.I.O.'s Phil Murray and A.F. of L.'s Bill Green aped him, the lesson would be plain to all union men: John Lewis is the one who gets you more money despite hell, high water, the war and the President of the U.S. And money talks, to any worker whose wartime raise has long since been chewed up by high prices.

And if Lewis won, he would stand forth as a stronger man than the U.S. President, a position calculated to discredit Mr. Roosevelt and lower the prestige of his office. He had already made some progress toward that position.

Strategic Truce. John Lewis now had a 15-day truce, in which he was prepared to bargain with his new employer, the U.S. Government. He had successfully bypassed the coal operators and the War Labor Board. As the week began, chances were he would win a guaranteed six-day work week for his bituminous miners ($7 a day for five days, $10.50 for the sixth), and perhaps even a guaranteed annual wage, which was his goal. The Government as an employer could afford to pay any amount, for the Government as a wartime customer needed all the coal the miners could dig. After a suitably decorous interval WLB would approve the new contract (retroactive to April 1), and the mines would be returned to the helpless operators, the contract a fait accompli. (No tears fell for the operators: a February price increase, approved by OPA, took care of added pay for the sixth working day.)

The way he got the truce was a Lewis masterpiece: a piece of tactics no Clausewitz could have improved on. The President had given fair warning that he would address the miners and the nation on Sunday night. Sunday morning John Lewis and three henchmen slipped into Washington, worked out the truce with Harold Ickes, now his boss as Solid Fuels Coordinator. Lewis entrained for New York. Naturally the truce could not be announced until the miners' policy committee had met. And somehow the policy committee deliberated just long enough. Twenty minutes before the President went on the air, John Lewis announced the truce, asked the miners to go to work Tuesday.

This act stripped the gears in the White House. The President did not have time to turn around and rewrite his plea that the miners go back on Monday. Doggedly, gravely the President made his case, but the speech fell in a vacuum. It even confused many miners who were already all set to go back to work, and now heard the President plead that they do.

The Mood of the Soldiers: News of the strike had come to U.S. soldiers like this: