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Front & Center. Forty days of paralysis. The nation's economy slowed, faltered, wobbled toward a dead stop. Chicago plants cut operations to 24 hours a week. In Detroit, Ford shut up shop, shutdowns became a matter of days at Chrysler and G.M. Great Lakes shipping, at this time normally at its peak, was down to 40%. Minnesota creameries were about to close for lack of fuel. Passenger trains stopped running. Freight loadings dropped 75%. Freight cars piled up. Steel plants banked their fires. More than a million men were out of work.
Deeper, organic injuries were done. They would be felt next winter in consumers' coal bins. Coming on top of the steel strike (said the Civilian Production Administration), the coal stoppage had caused a loss of some 90% of the steel required for a year's production of automobiles, refrigerators, electric irons, washing machines, etc. Loss of pig iron (used in pipes), lumber, other building material, would complicate the housing problem, already snafu. Production of sorely needed farm machinery was hurt. Pipelines of raw material and manufactured goods had been drained out. It would take a long time to fill them up again.
But it did not really make the people mad, it only annoyed them. No one strung John Lewis up in effigy, as had been done in 1940. This was the way he had calculated it. But, as they have every time John Lewis has cast his bulbous shadow over the nation's economy, Americans let out a bewildered cry: "Who the hell does John Lewis think he is?"
Mr. Lewis, waiting in the wings, bowed himself front & center.
The Man from Lucas. Who is he? He was born in Lucas, Iowa in 1880. He went through the seventh grade, tramped around the country and followed his Welsh coal-miner father into the labor movement. Sam Gompers was his mentor. He had a shock of red hair, red eyebrows and a sonorous voice. He married Myrta Edith Bell, a schoolteacher who interested him in Shakespeare. He climbed roughshod over lesser men and landed in the presidency of the U.M.W., a roughshod outfit.
At first he was a spectacular flop. His was a sick union in a sick industry, and by his stubborn insistence on an uneconomic wage scale he almost killed it. By 1932 the U.M.W. was a shell and the (miners' cry was: "Down with John Lewis." Thousands flocked to the rambunctious, independent Progressive Miners Union. But a year later, staking every last dollar in his treasury, John Lewis rushed back into the fray, let the rumor spread that he had dinner every day with Franklin Roosevelt, and waved a banner with a strange device: NRA and 7A. By the tens of thousands the miners rejoined him.
John L. is the man who organized labor against the "overlords of steel," who coldbloodedly kept the sit-down strikers at G.M. in Flint while the National Guard prepared to clean them out with bayonets, who signed the first contract with Big Steel and became at length not merely boss of C.I.O., but C.I.O. itself.
He is the man who handed out $500,000 of his miners' money to help re-elect Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 and in 1940 renounced him to settle his regal choice on Wendell Willkie. Because of that error in judgment he had to turn over the C.I.O. presidency to his Man Friday, Philip Murray.