John L. Lewis

John Llewellyn Lewis (February 12, 1880 – June 11, 1969) was an American leader of organized labor who served as the ninth president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) from 1920 to 1960 and the first president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which organized millions of industrial workers during the Great Depression, from 1935 to 1940. Lewis was a major figure in the history of coal mining and the American labor movement; his supporters credited him with high wages, pensions, and medical benefits in the mining industry. Throughout his career in the public eye, Lewis was frequently caricatured and came to represent the broader American labor movement.

Lewis was born to Welsh immigrants in 1880 and raised in Iowa, where he entered work in 1897 as a coal miner without a high school education. In 1906, he was elected as a delegate to the UMW national convention. After a brief and unsuccessful attempt at politics and business, Lewis returned to mining and was elected president of the UMW local in Panama, Illinois. In 1911, Samuel Gompers hired Lewis to work for the American Federation of Labor (AFL) as a full-time organizer.

In 1919, Lewis led the first major union-led coal strike and the next year, he was elected president of the UMW, then the largest and most influential trade union in the United States. He remained its leader for four decades. As president, he placed locals under centralized leadership and supported principles of industrial unionism and "competitive capitalism," opposing efforts by communists, led by William Z. Foster, to organize within the UMW. His long tenure as UMW president was controversial within the labor movement. Supporters lauded material gains for miners under his leadership and his cooperative approach to legislative reforms, while critics denounced him as a class traitor.

Lewis was the leading force behind the establishment of the Congress of Industrial Organizations to promote the principle of industrial unionism within the AFL and served its first president from 1935 to 1940. The CIO brought together ten allied industrial unions to promote the principles of industrial unionism in the United States and succeeded at winning collective bargaining agreements with General Motors and U.S. Steel, two of the most anti-union corporations in the United States at the time. In 1938, the CIO was expelled from the AFL and entered a period of competitive organizing against its parent federation which ended with their 1955 merger as the AFL-CIO.

Politically, Lewis was a member of the Republican Party but played a major role in helping Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt win a landslide re-election victory in 1936. Lewis broke with Roosevelt in 1940 over Roosevelt's support for growing American involvement in World War II. He supported Republican businessman Wendell Willkie instead. After Willkie lost, Lewis resigned as president of the CIO and withdrew the UMW to join the American Federation of Labor (AFL). After the attack on Pearl Harbor, however, Lewis pledged his and his union's full support to the war effort.