Mine workers and the UAW strike
On an April day in 1937, John D. Mallory, “demonstration chairman,” and John P. Depto, toastmaster of that year’s Mitchell Day celebration for coal miners in Brownsville, messaged mine workers’ president John L. Lewis.
At the parade and later at the banquet highlighting the April 1 activities, revelers had expressed their sincere thanks for Lewis’ tireless efforts in support of working stiffs everywhere, the pair said.
Especially noteworthy were recent successes in the battle for union benefits for steel and auto workers. The celebrants, Mallory and Depto said, wished to “send you greetings of solidarity … and look forward to victory for coal miners.”
In addition to these sentiments, there were “pledges” of support from the Mitchell Day crowd for the Lewis innovation that was leading the charge on behalf of heretofore unorganized factory workers – the new Committee for Industrial Organization, or CIO.
Someone – in all likelihood Lewis himself – hand wrote a reminder on the telegram from Brownsville: “Write a nice [return] letter.”
That return letter, dated April 13, 1937, reads, in part, “Your message of greetings from 40,000 union men and friends was a welcome one, and I really appreciate their splendid support.”
Lewis was perhaps the most effective labor chieftain of all time. Certainly, he was one of the strongest, most wily, and most dedicated of leaders. He was one with his times. As historian David M. Kennedy notes, “More keenly than any other man, Lewis understood … that the mid-1930s presented American labor with a unique opportunity. He was on fire to seize it.”
Lewis strengthened the United Mine Workers and, in his role as the founder and leader of the CIO, lent critical aid to auto workers struggling against the likes of anti-union General Motors. Here’s hoping current auto workers’ president Shawn Fain is half as smart and tough as Lewis. Fain is leading a UAW strike against General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis – today’s diminished iteration of Detroit’s Big Three.
On Tuesday, Fain expressed impatience with the pace of negotiations. “We’re not going to keep waiting around forever while they drag this out…. We’re not messing around.”
Give Fain credit. He’s blunt. Lewis could be blunt, silver-tongued, outspoken; he was a verbal showman. To one erstwhile labor ally he thundered, “It is inconceivable that you intend … to sit under an awning on the hilltop, while … workers in the valley struggle in the dust and agony of industrial warfare.”
He once called Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president, John Nance Garner, “a labor-baiting, whiskey-drinking evil old man…. Garner’s knife is searching for the quivering heart of labor. I am against him officially, individually and personally, concretely and in the abstract.”
It’s a safe bet that Kamala Harris won’t be condemned in like fashion by Fain, even though the UAW president is as militant a labor leader as they come in 2023.
During the 1936-37 Flint, Michigan, sit-down strike that literally made the United Auto Workers, Lewis told Michigan governor Frank Murphy that he would “bare his bosom” to the rifle fire of National Guardsmen, and “as I fall from the [factory] window to the ground, you will hear the voice of your [Irish revolutionary] grandfather whisper in your ear, ‘Frank, are you sure you’re doing the right thing?'”
It took just a few more weeks for General Motors to capitulate. Lewis’ machinations, along with the tacit support of the president of the United States, and, above all, the persistence and courage of the strikers themselves, all helped to turn the tide.
It was a near thing, however. Historian Kennedy notes that the unprecedented act of the seizure of private property by strikers sitting down and refusing to budge from the factory floor was unpopular with the public. And Gov. Murphy was under tremendous pressure. A state court order compelled him to end the sit-down tactic, or so it seemed.
Like today’s strikers, the sit-down strikers of 1936-37 had one big emotionally charged issue on their side – the huge disparity between what they were earning and what auto executives were being paid: an average $1,000 a year to annual salaries in the range of $200,000.
Today’s discrepancies are even more absurd.
The current strikers are practically assured of scoring a victory, whether big or small, major or middling. It’s regrettably true that few of the triumphant strikers will look back to the key role played by the United Mine Workers and its president, John L. Lewis, in forging their union at a time when nothing at all was certain.
Richard Robbins writes about Lewis in “Troubled Times: The Struggle for Wages, Recognition, and Power in the Age of Coal and Coke.” He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.