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From his grandfather Lew inherited charm; from his father he inherited the restless drive that has kept him chugging like a jackhammer for 53 years. Lew was born in the little Arizona town of Bisbee, soon moved to Douglas, which his father had named in "the professor's" honor. When Lew was six, the family pushed on again to the Nacozari mine in Mexico, where his father got the nickname of "Rawhide Jim" because of his practice of repairing mine machinery with rawhide. As superintendent of the mine, Rawhide Jim cut wages, drove his men hard, and contemptuously ignored threats of death, kidnaping and dynamiting.
Lew grew up in the big house on the hill at Nacozari, playing baseball with the Mexican kids, learning to ride and rope. Rawhide Jim was a stern father who trained Lew to independence and hard work. Once, to discipline him, his father sent him over to a wrecked schoolhouse and ordered him to "take every last nail out of every last board."
The Hard Way. At eleven, Lew went east to the Hackley School in Tarrytown, N.Y. While his father made a strike at the U.V.X. mines in central Arizona, Lew was studying history and playing baseball at Amherst, trying to make up his mind what to do next. After one postgraduate year studying metallurgy at M.I.T., World War I decided for him.
Lew came back from France a 1st lieutenant, with a citation from Pershing, a Belgian Croix de Guerre, and suffering from the aftereffects of a gassing in the Argonne. He tried teaching, first at Amherst, then at Hackley, where he could be closer to Peggy Zinsser (niece of famed Scientist Hans Zinsser), whom he had met at a Smith-Amherst dance. But teaching was not quite Lew's line. After he and Peggy were married, they moved back to Arizona.
Rawhide Jim put Lew to work as a mucker in the mines at Jerome, where he started learning copper the hard way. It was a rough life. Rawhide Jim was still the stern, domineering, iron-willed parent. (He had gone to France for the Red Cross during the war, became such an ardent Francophile that when he came home, he carried his own sack of French croissants whenever he went into a restaurant.) He kept a tight rein on Lew. Peggy hated the life. When a Prescott newsman suggested that Lew run for the state legislature, both Lew and Peggy jumped at the chance.
White House Favorite. They piled into an old Ford, stumped the district together. Lew won handily. In 1926, when Arizona's lone Representative Carl Hayden resigned to run for the Senate, Lew made a bid for higher office.
He was a wet in a dry state, but he won the election by two to one. In Congress, he plumped for an import tax on copper, fought against Boulder Dam because he thought it discriminated against Arizona water interests. He won his reputation as a determined foe of Government spending. A nominal Democrat, he often hurdled party lines to vote with the G.O.P., tangled violently with tough old Speaker Jack Garner.
Arizona voters sent him back twice and elected him for a fourth term. A lean, wiry youngster in his 30s, he was a familiar figure on the Hill, bicycling to work from his Georgetown home, pitching for the Democrats in the annual House baseball game.