On October 25, 1940, John L. Lewis gave a speech denouncing Franklin Delano Roosevelt and endorsing the Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie. This alienated Lewis from the rest of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which he had founded and funded. To his credit I suppose, he resigned as head of the federation and then pulled his United Mine Workers of America out of the federation. But this moment showed the limitations of the man who had transformed the labor movement through bringing industrial unionism to America. It also showed how Lewis was determined to keep his unions independent of the Democratic Party, for better or for worse.
Lewis transformed the labor movement when he decided to leave the American Federation of Labor in 1937. Creating the Congress of Industrial Organizations and then marching out of the American Federation of Labor brought millions of people into the labor movement because he organized them on industrial lines, instead of the old craft model of the AFL. The AFL did not want to organize industrial workers period. There were millions of workers who wanted unions but couldn’t have them. The CIO then won major campaigns and created the United Auto Workers and United Steelworkers of America, and other giant unions with strong political agendas to transform the lives of working class Americans. Lewis employed boatloads of communist organizers to organize workers ranging from auto factories in Detroit to the mines and fields and timber camps of the American West.
But don’t fool yourself — Lewis was a politically conservative man. He wasn’t an idiot — he understood what was needed for the labor movement to survive. But Lewis, like most of the old AFL leadership, was fundamentally a man with 19th century values. These were people who did not actually like class conflict that much. They did not like the US engaging with the rest of the world. One of the things that made Lewis infamous is him punching Carpenters president Big Bill Hutcheson on the floor of the 1935 AFL convention over the issue of industrial unionism. But those guys were old poker buddies and they were both Republicans their entire lives. Lewis would use the communists to serve his interests, but he was no radical at all.
So when the CIO formed, most of its leaders quickly realized that its future was going to be tied to the Democratic Party. One huge difference between the federations was their understanding of politics. The AFL preferred to stay above politics. Their leaders were naive. They still thought the future of labor was a contest to be decided between unions and employers in the contract, without a role for the government. The long history of government putting its thumb on the scale for the employers did not seem to break this. But new CIO leaders such as Sidney Hillman worked hard to seal those connections. They knew that the Roosevelt administration had created the legal conditions for unions to succeed, through the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act, not to mention his Supreme Court appointees.
But none of this made Lewis comfortable. He still saw the future of labor as between his workers — whom he was happy to mobilize to flex their power — and the employers. Moreover, like a lot of the AFL labor leaders, he was fundamentally an isolationist and hated FDR’s increased involvement in Europe as World War II developed.
So Lewis came out against FDR and went so far as to endorse Wendell Willkie for president. Now, Lewis’s move wasn’t strictly cynical. He seems to have really believed that FDR should have been a bought and sold man of the labor movement. He felt that Roosevelt did not put enough effort behind getting labor legislation passed. He believed that organized labor needed political independence to play the parties off each other and increase their power. He was concerned that organized labor would just become a junior party in the Democratic coalition that didn’t have real power but also didn’t have the ability to extricate itself. He wasn’t wrong about this. That’s exactly what happened to organized labor in the postwar period and it continues to be a problem for the labor movement today, though the Biden administration deserves credit for centering union concerns more than Obama, Clinton, or Carter.
When Lewis denounced FDR, he quickly found out that the rest of the CIO didn’t see him as their personal lord and savior. He had some suspicions that would happen. Lewis was also an autocrat’s autocrat, a man with a long history purging his union of anyone who challenged his power. Other labor leaders might be autocrats too — many of them were — but they weren’t going to put up with it from Lewis. So Lewis pulled the UMWA out of the CIO in 1942. This was a serious move. His union had mostly paid for it after all. His lieutenant Phil Murray, who now headed the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, did not follow him out. Murray understood what made his new union succeed and it wasn’t Lewis’s feelings. It was the government sitting the steel companies down and telling them as the war started that if they wanted contracts from the government, they were going to have to accept the union.
Lewis did not just then sit on his hands. He simply was not going to sit back and let the government dictate the terms of employment to labor during the war. Almost every union gave a no-strike pledge, but not the United Mine Workers. Lewis was more than happy to pull his workers out of the mines during the war, imperiling the war effort. In 1943, he did this very thing and 500,000 people went on strike. For Lewis, the war effort simply was not worth considering for a labor leader. He was there for his workers and if the employers didn’t like it, they should give the miners what they wanted.
The government saw this situation somewhat differently, to say the least. Roosevelt nationalized the mines and Congress passed the Smith-Connally Act in 1943, which laid the groundwork for the Taft-Hartley Act that busted much of labor’s successful tactics in 1947. Alarmed, FDR vetoed Smith-Connally, but Congress overrode the veto, demonstrating just how much Lewis had overplayed his hand. This laid the groundwork for the anti-union legislation that would succeed to reducing labor power after the war.
FURTHER READING:
Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography
Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor
Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor
Robert Zieger, The CIO, 1935-1955
Randi Storch, Working Hard for the American Dream: Workers and Their Unions, World War I to the Present
And on that note, I'm off to canvass, NinedaysohmyfuckingGod...
And who does history record as the winner?
"𝙄𝙩 𝙖𝙞𝙣'𝙩 𝙒𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙡𝙡 𝙒𝙞𝙡𝙡𝙠𝙞𝙚!"
(Sorry, but the opportunities to quote that line from Bugs Bunny are exceedingly rare)