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Posted February 1, 2007
John L. Lewis founded the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which established the United Steel Workers of America and helped organize millions of industrial workers in the 1930s.
Born in Lucas, Lewis began working the Big Hill Mine near Lucas as a teenager. His father, a Welsh immigrant, was a union organizer for the United Mine Workers of America and quit school on the eighth grade to work full time in the mines. However, Lewis’s mother, Myrta, was a school teacher who read
FAMOUS IOWANS
The famous (and infamous) who have had a lasting impact on the state and the world
Famed labor leader John L. Lewis
frequently and encouraged her son to do the same.
Lewis was one of the most eloquent speakers of his day and was widely quoted by newspapers. He appeared in the New York Times more frequently than Franklin Delano Roosevelt and drew huge crowds wherever he spoke.
A powerful speaker and strategist, Lewis first became president of the United Mine Workers Union and used the nation's dependence on coal to increase the wages and improve the safety of miners, even during several severe recessions. He masterminded a five-month strike, ensuring that the increase in wages gained during World War I would not be lost.
At that time, industrial workers like the mine
John L. Lewis was mostly self-educated and spent his boyhood working in mines in southern Iowa.
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workers were a part of the American Federation of Labor but often felt ignored by the AFL. The simmering contempt came to a head during the AFL’s national convention in Atlantic City in 1935 when William Hutcheson, president of the Carpenters Union, made a derogatory comment about a rubber worker who was delivering a report to the assembly.
Lewis told Hutcheson that his derogatory comments were “small potatoes” and Hutcheson responded that, “I was raised on small potatoes, that is why I am so small.” Words continued and Lewis knocked Hutcheson to the ground, relit his car, and returned to the speaker’s stand. The incident strengthened Lewis’s reputation as a person who would stand up for the common man.
After the convention, Lewis called together leaders from several other unions and spearheaded the creation of the CIO, although first presented itself as a branch of the AFL. But AFL leaders treated the CIO as outcasts and Lewis ramped up his denunciation of AFL policies. He also led the formation of the Steel Workers Union, despite complaints by the AFL.
In the 1950s, Lewis won periodic wage and benefit increases for miners and led the campaign for the first Federal Mine Safety Act in 1952. Lewis tried to impose some order on a declining industry through collective bargaining, maintaining standards for his members by insisting that small operators agree to contract terms that effectively put many of them out of business. Mechanization nonetheless eliminated many of the jobs in his industry while scattered non-union operations persisted.
Lewis retired as president of the UMWA in 1960 and was succeeded as president by Thomas Kennedy until his death in 1963, when he was succeeded by Lewis-anointed successor W.A. "Tony" Boyle, who was just as dictatorial, but without any of Lewis' leadership skills or vision.
Lewis died at his home in Alexandria, Virginia in 1969. He is buried in Oak Ridge Cemetery, Springfield, Illinois.