U.S. At War: Cat and Canary

John L. Lewis started out last week to redraw the map of U.S. labor—and perhaps that of U.S. politics, too.

Just eight years after he split American labor wide open by founding the revolutionary C.I.O., Lewis asked that he and his 600,000 miners be taken back into the older and more conservative American Federation of Labor. The news came as a mighty shock to millions : What was John Lewis up to now? The move was the result of secret negotiations, mainly between Lewis and big Bill Hutcheson, head of the Carpenters' Union, who...