(5 of 5)
Social Somebody. For months the Washington society columnists have been trying to transform Labor's Lion into a social lion. Already he is definitely a Social Somebody, the prize exhibit of whatever hostess gets him. If he does not rank above the British Ambassador in seating, he does rank above him in attention. But three nights out of four he spends at his colonial house in Alexandria across the Potomac from Washington.
Aside from his wife, his daughter, Kathryn, who acts as his personal secretary, his son John, who is in Princeton, and his brother Dennie, who works for U. M. W., John Lewis has few confidants. In the past few months he has become more reticent and reserved, and, with the possible exception of C. I. O. Counsel Lee Pressman, Phil Murray, vice president of the Mine Workers, seems to be the only person outside his family who shares his full confidence.
Yet John Lewis is as sure of himself as he ever was. He scoffs at the notion that C. I. O. is on the way out, for he and Sidney Hillman are prepared to support the organization alone if others desert. Like all unionists he has had to retrench—but in the process he laid off a disproportionate number of organizers who followed the Communist Party line. He has deep laid plans for reorganizing C. I. O. when Recession ends. He feels he has his contract with U. S. Steel Corp. sewed up for another year. And if worried about the troubles that depression brings to unions, he has only to think back to 1933, when with his last $75,000 he set out to rebuild a union which had lost 325,000 members in the previous ten years. Where his road now leads, no one dares predict, least of all himself. But never yet has John Llewellyn Lewis failed to come back from and misfortune stronger than before.