LEWIS, JOHN L.

born Feb. 12, 1880, near Lucas, Iowa, U.S. died June 11, 1969, Washington, D.C. in full John Llewellyn Lewis American labour leader who was president (192060) of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) and chief founder and first president (193640) of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The son of immigrants from Welsh mining towns, Lewis left public school in the seventh grade and went to work in the mines at age 15. In the coal-mining town of Panama, Ill., he became head of a UMWA local, and in 1911 he became an organizer for the American Federation of Labor (AFL), with which the miners' union was affiliated. He became a vice president of the UMWA in 1917, acting president in 1919, and president in 1920 of the largest trade union in the United States. He would remain the UMWA's leader for the next 40 years. Lewis led a successful national coal strike in 1919, but during the 1920s the UMWA's membership shrank from 500,000 to less than 100,000 as unemployment spread among UMWA members in northern states and nonunionized mines in the southern Appalachians increased their production. Beginning in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal presented organized labour with opportunities that Lewis exploited with energy and imagination. The National Industrial Recovery Act (1933), which guaranteed labour the right to bargain collectively, enabled him to launch new organizing campaigns in the Appalachian and other coalfields and triple the UMWA's membership within a few years. In 1935 Lewis joined several other AFL union leaders and formed the Committee for Industrial Organization with the intention of organizing workers in mass-production industries. The more traditional leaders of the AFL favoured limiting its membership to craft unions and refused to support the new strategy, so Lewis and seven other dissident union heads left the AFL to organize what became the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), with Lewis as its president. Beginning in 193536 Lewis presided over the often-violent struggle to introduce unionism into previously unorganized industries such as steel, automobiles, tire, rubber, and electrical products. The CIO proved so successful that by the end of 1937 it had more members than did the AFL. Lewis was a lifelong Republican, but he left his party and supported Franklin D. Roosevelt for the presidency in 1932 and 1936. He opposed a third term for Roosevelt, however, and threatened to resign as CIO president if Roosevelt won. Interpreting Roosevelt's victory as a repudiation of his own leadership, Lewis resigned as president of the CIO in 1940 and in 1942 pulled the UMWA out of the parent body. A series of miners' strikes called by Lewis in the 1940s won wage increases and new benefits for miners but alienated large segments of the public. The strikes spurred the passage of the Smith-Connally Act (1943) and the Taft-Hartley Act (1947), both of which placed new restrictions on labour unions. In the 1950s Lewis reverted to his more conciliatory attitude of the '20s; he worked closely with mine operators to mechanize the industry, a strategy that increased productivity and ultimately enlarged the miners' union benefits. After retiring as UMWA president in 1960, he served as chairman of the board of trustees of the UMWA's welfare and retirement fund. A man of imposing appearance, with overhanging brows and a bulldog chin, Lewis studded his sonorous oratory with literary allusions and sometimes with harsh epithets.