Lewis, John L. (1880–1969)

As president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) for 40 years, John Llewelyn Lewis boosted union membership and the labor movement's outreach to industrial workers. He also gained—and lost—influence at the highest levels of government.

Born near Lucas, Iowa, on February 12, 1880, Lewis was the first child of Thomas H. Lewis, a coal miner who immigrated from Wales, and Ann Louisa Watkins. Lewis spent much of his childhood traveling from one Iowa mining town to another as his father searched for work. By age 17, Lewis himself was working in the mines. He became the first recording secretary of the United Mine Workers chapter in Chariton, Iowa, in 1901. After several years in the West, a failed run for mayor of Lucas, Iowa, in 1907, and an unsuccessful attempt to start a business, Lewis established a lifelong commitment to trade unionism. Newly married to Myrta Edith Bell, Lewis moved to the mining town of Panama, Illinois, in 1908 and rapidly worked his way up through the local miners' union. Between 1911 and 1917, Lewis took his skills on the road, organizing miners throughout the country for the American Federation of Labor (AFL). He became vice president of the UMWA in 1917 and president in 1920. Lewis solidified his personal authority over the union in the 1920s by ejecting those who disagreed with him. While Lewis dominated the union, however, the government was not swayed by his demands for federal regulation of an unstable economy.

Lewis would find a more receptive audience and more political influence with the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the institution of New Deal regulatory policies. Lewis broadened the base of the labor [Page 850]movement in 1935 by forming the Committee for Industrial Organization to encourage the AFL to organize noncraft workers. The AFL refused and forced the committee out of its organization in 1936. Now independent, the committee became the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and Lewis served as its president until 1940. Lewis became disillusioned with the government's economic interventionism by the second half of the 1930s, after a recession and Roosevelt's new attitude of cooperation with business in the mobilization for America's entry into World War II, which Lewis also opposed. In 1943, he supported workers' contravention of the no-strike pledge. The move cost Lewis his influence in the government and cost labor unions the support of many Americans.

Lewis's power weakened in the 1940s and 1950s as other forms of energy replaced coal. He also refused to align the UMWA with the new union formed in 1955 when the AFL and the CIO merged, losing his position in the vanguard of the labor movement. Lewis resigned as UMWA president in 1960, though he continued to oversee its welfare and retirement fund. He died on June 11, 1969.