(4 of 4)
But mostly he handled labor cases. In 1923, as state commander of the American Legion, he won labor's cheers by bringing the Legion and state labor leaders to a common understanding.
Through his labor practice, Lawyer Schwellenbach became a director of the Brotherhood (of Locomotive Engineers) Bank & Trust Co. and president of the Superior Service Laundries Inc., another Brotherhood business. The laundry failed and investors lost heavily. When he ran for the Senate in 1934 (he had lost out for governor two years before), the opposition called Schwellenbach "Lewie the Laundryman."
The Senator. Nevertheless, with solid labor backing, Schwellenbach was an easy winner. At Washington he showed that Franklin Roosevelt's New Dealing policies were precisely to his liking. He became the friend and crony of Senate New Dealers such as Indiana's Sherman ("Shay") Minton, now a federal judge, Pennsylvania's Joe Guffey, Missouri's Harry Truman. It was Debater Lew Schwellenbach who led these young Turks, and the vacillating oldtime leadership, in a fight to smash the filibustering tactics of redhaired, Roosevelt-hating Huey Long.
But neither the hurly-burly of the U.S. Senate nor the Washington climate agreed with Lew Schwellenbach. Soon he began to look longingly at the bench—especially the highest bench in the U.S.
Franklin Roosevelt passed him over for the U.S. Supreme Court, in 1940 appointed him to the U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington. There he won repute as an able, fair-minded jurist, was studiously attending to his duties when ex-crony Harry Truman handed him the toughest job in the Cabinet. Lew Schwellenbach would still rather have been a Supreme Court Justice.
The Secretary. Lew Schwellenbach's philosophy of labor is clear:
He believes in a high-wage economy. He advocates raising the minimum wage level to 65¢: "Our high wage economy has shown that it can outproduce low-wage economics by maintaining a higher degree of productive efficiency."
He looks on himself not as the arbiter between labor and management but as an advocate of labor—although many a labor leader privately feels that Schwellenbach has too much of the judicial temperament to promote the cause of labor.
He still believes that the Labor Department, particularly through strengthening the Conciliation Service, can be made an active arm of the Government in labor relations, in contrast to the statistics-collecting agency it was under its previous Secretaries.
He hopes to achieve industrial peace on the basis of free collective bargaining—to be brought about through a labor-management agreement at the forthcoming conference. And he insists on a sense of responsibility in labor.
In Washington last week, it looked as if the months ahead would take all of Lew Schwellenbach's labor advocacy and judicial talents too. His sandy hair mussed, his cigar chewed to shreds, he found himself catapulted from one major crisis to another. The week's end saw him face to face with belligerent, threatening John Lewis, whose miners were once more on the rampage.
In the White House, worried presidential advisers were pressing Harry Truman to go to the people, make a direct appeal for an end to strikes.