John L. Lewis: An Unauthorized Biography
262 pages
English

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262 pages
English

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This is the story of a 30 year, one-man war. The author confesses his bias - in favor of labor, in friendship with Lewis, but he manages to present Lewis convincingly, with his complicated personality, his inconsistencies, his dynamic power, his ruthless use of any means to his end. He traces the steps by which he reached the peak from the pits of Illinois mines. He tells how he created C.I.O. in protest over the limitations of A.F. of L.; of how he secured his own U.M.W. even at the cost of dictatorship. He goes behind the scenes for his breaks with Green, with Murray, with Roosevelt. But the end-all is gains for his miners - in pay, in safety, in security. Brilliant analysis, an unflaggingly interesting chapter in American labor, it provides an interesting insight into a fascinating part of American history. It's a reminder of what unions did achieve and it is a contrast to the comparative powerless of unions these days.

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Publié par
Date de parution 10 novembre 2021
Nombre de lectures 0
EAN13 9781774644249
Langue English
Poids de l'ouvrage 1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0050€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

John L. Lewis: An Unauthorized Biography
by Saul Alinsky

Firstpublished in 1949
Thisedition published by Rare Treasures
Victoria,BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
Trava2909@gmail.com
Allrights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced ortransmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage orretrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, whomay quote brief passages in a review.
JOHN L. LEWIS

An Unauthorized Biography



by Saul Alinsky

DEDICATION
To
DAVID and KATHRYN
and
to the memory of
HELENE
FOREWORD
This is always an unpopular undertaking, and usually everyone is offended. While Lewis gave me unlimited interviews as well as access to records, there were no commitments of any kind. He knew that in this study the sharp edge of criticism would cut everywhere and everybody including himself—and it has. No one, including Lewis, was permitted to read these pages before publication.
I believe that it is the right of every reader to know the prejudices of the biographer. There are still too many who talk about “objective” and “unprejudiced” writers. There is not and never has been a living person lacking prejudices. The best we can do in the striving for so-called objectivity is to be consciously aware of and on guard against these prejudices.
To me, Lewis is an extraordinary individual and certainly one of the outstanding figures of our time. As a person I like him. As a labor leader, I share the opinion of many including some of his bitterest enemies, that John Lewis is the most powerful and dramatic product of the history of American labor. I have been in violent disagreement with his position at different times and particularly on his isolationism during those critical days of 1941—again on his break with Roosevelt, which I struggled to avert. Yet Lewis will not break a relationship because of criticism if the criticism is honest and open. On the whole I have felt that his career was a great American tragedy in terms of what might have been.
One more word on my prejudices. I am pro-labor. My record as a friend of organized labor is well known in Chicago. I have fought at the side of the CIO for the past twelve years, and have earned the right to criticize as a friend.
Now a word on the extraordinary difficulties of modern biographical research. No longer can the student dig through archives for detailed written records. Today most important decisions are made over the phone or in face-to-face conversation, with little written evidence for the future historian except distorted secondhand accounts or firsthand rationalizations. Even written materials are dishonest in many cases by omission rather than commission. To the honest biographer research becomes a nightmare of garbled, tortured pieces of information that parade as fact. There are days when you are haunted by Mark Twain’s rejection of history as being “written with the ink of lies.” There is only one way out for the honest biographer, which is to state, wherever possible, the source of his information, leaving the reader the right to weigh its credibility.
The organized labor movement is a human institution and possessed of those virtues and vices common in mankind. Unfortunately there are labor leaders who decry even the criticism of a friend as labor baiting. This stifling of freedom of criticism with the tyranny of the smear is evil no matter what its source. Today the precious American right of dissent is in great jeopardy by pressures from the right as well as the left. To write of the human motivations, both good and bad, of leaders of labor one’s eyes cannot be bound by the blinders of any doctrinaire policy or line of thought.
There are so many to whom I am indebted that it is impossible to name them. I am most grateful to John L. Lewis for the unlimited time he placed at my disposal and his releasing me from my only commitment to him dating back to 1940—that was not to reveal the events of the Roosevelt negotiations of that year. I am also grateful for the invaluable help of his loyal and devoted secretary, Elizabeth Covington. Too much cannot be said for the willingness and frank assistance of my close friend for many years, Kathryn Lewis.
I am grateful to the many labor leaders and former Government officials who gave so generously of their time both in interviews and in correspondence.
To my good friend George Bye who gently pushed me back into harness when I was discouraged.
To Herbert Hewitt of the reference department of the Chicago Public Library, who helped unearth every bit of written material on the subject, and to Sylvia Abrams who typed the long manuscript.
I will never forget the heart-stirring experience of those devoted friends of mine endlessly searching for ways to relieve me of undue domestic pressures, particularly through the months of this year. To them I owe a debt that is impossible ever to repay.
Without the selfless help of Babette Stiefel in research, editing, scolding, and cajoling, this book would certainly not have been complete at this time.
Last there are my two children, David and Kathryn, who were most patient and understanding of their father’s nightly absences in the preparation of this book.


SAUL D. ALINSKY
October 1, 1949
Chicago
CHAPTER 1. Of Men and Coal
Coal is the prime mover of our life. In these black chunks of the earth’s history is the energy that pours power into our gigantic industrial empire. Beyond the conjuring of any imagination is the awesome vastness of man’s industrial procession. Just a small segment of this Gargantuan industrial scene reveals interlaced speeding railroads, giant whirring dynamos lighting up the nation, and overwhelming surges of power spun from steam. For within coal is man’s industrial holy trinity of light, heat, and power.
More than half of American homes are heated by coal. Nearly ninety-five per cent of our railroad locomotives are driven by the fiery energy of coal.
Coal is essential in mass production of steel. If steel provides the skeleton for our cities and towns, then coal provides the heart. It also yields infinite products to our chemical industry. Break up this jet black nugget, and its by-products burst into more than ten thousand hues and colors, shaming the rainbow with its most delicate tints; for coal is basic to our making of dyes and colors.
This black chunk, which murders men underground, is the base for that lifesaving miracle of modern times, the sulfa drugs. From nylon to plastic, from aspirin to perfume, the list of products is as great as our supply. It is estimated that in America alone we have enough coal to last twenty-five hundred years. Contrast this with the dwindling crude-oil reserves, and coal assumes the role of not only our prime but our permanent mover. Coal is King.
It follows that he who controls coal holds within his hands the reins of our society. John Lewis, through his nearly half million coal miners, holds that power. For the men who mine coal can always strike out the flow of this life-giving energy.
These men who mine coal are a mystery to the overwhelming majority of our nation. They are thought of as a strange, defiant, rebellious, abnormal people, peculiar just like their ruler; for Lewis, too is “strange, defiant, rebellious, and abnormal.”
The miners are filled with bitterness bordering on hatred for the outside world—this outside world with its newspapers always attacking them, its politicians always intriguing against and insulting them, their union, and their leader, John L. Lewis. They bear little friendship for this strange, hostile world outside where, as the miners say, “People seem to think miners are some kind of animal—underground rats as they call us.” {1} Or, “The way people outside think of us, we should be living in a zoo.” One miner added bitterly, “We’d get better fed and be a hell of a lot safer in cages! Damn that outside world!” {2} And Lewis, like his miners, thinks bitterly of that outside world, feeling that every man’s hand is turned against them.
Suspicion begets brooding, and many miners do brood as does their leader. Surrounded by hostility, they have suffered from fears of insecurity and have reacted with that pugnacious belligerence so typical of Lewis.
They respond to threats with that indifference of men who work down below where death never takes a holiday. Familiarity with death breeds contempt for any threatened punishment. They have that stoicism born in suffering and tragedy. Lewis, too, contemptuously rejects punitive threats and does not flinch before authority, the press, or any of the thunder or lightning of the outside world.
The men who dig coal are fiercely independent, for under the physical conditions of mining each man works as his own boss. He has learned to stand and work, and if need be, die alone down below the ground. Lewis, like his miners, is possessed of the same independence.
Just as Lewis stands aloof and apart from the life about him, so do the miners, who live in a separate world and who are a people apart unto themselves. It becomes quite clear that the key to the enigma of John L. Lewis is embedded in coal and the miners. Therefore, to know the miners is to begin to open the door on the mystery of Lewis.
While America’s cities sleep, the men who mine coal are awake, moving quietly about the house trying not to disturb their sleeping children. They wash and dress by instinct in the darkness and then turn to the sudden dim light in the kitchen. There the miners’ wives stand by as their husbands wolf down a mass

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