When John L. Lewis, age 67, delivered these remarks to the annual convention of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), held in October 1947, his name was immediately recognizable to virtually every household in the United States. Thanks to movie newsreels and newspaper cartoonists, his imperious visage and flaring eyebrows were equally familiar.

The bold and charismatic Lewis more than any other individual personified labor’s titanic and militant struggles in the 1930s to most Americans. As longtime president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), Lewis spearheaded the organization in 1935 of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO; originally the Committee for Industrial Organizations, a formation of AFL unions supporting the organization of workers in mass production industries).

Lewis demonstratively identified himself with the semi-revolutionary occupation of General Motors automobile production facilities in Flint, Michigan, in December 1936, vowing to Michigan Governor Frank Murphy that he would personally enter GM property and place himself at the head of the striking autoworkers if Murphy called out the National Guard to forcibly remove the strikers.

During World War II, it was Lewis and the UMWA, almost alone among U.S. unions, who boldly defied the no-strike pledge extracted from labor at the war’s onset, carrying out successful strikes in the coal mining industry in 1943 involving half a million miners.

Only seven months prior to the AFL’s convention, and just one month after Taft-Hartley was enacted, 111 coal miners had been killed in a catastrophic explosion in Centralia, Illinois, on March 25, 1947. Lewis called an unprecedented six-day strike to honor their dead, pointedly disregarding Taft-Hartley’s newly minted restrictions on strikes.

The eight-month-old Taft-Hartley statute (actually an amendment, adopted by Congress in February 1947, to the 1935 National Labor Relations Act), which Lewis discusses here, was well known to most Americans, coming as it did after some 18 months of intense postwar labor struggle. The legislation was clearly crafted by its capitalist sponsors in government and business to put labor back in its place. Its most notorious provision was the demand that the unions and their officers grovel before labor-haters in government and industry and sign anti-Communist affidavits. Beyond that, as Lewis says in this speech, it contained some 73 pages of printed text, “containing only two lines that say labor has the right to organize, and 33 pages of other additional restrictions that dare labor to organize.”

The 1945–46 strike wave, which opened up at the close of World War II, was fueled by the aspirations of some 10–15 million returning veterans and the renewed demands of the unions which had been bottled up during four years of no-strike pledges and wage freezes. It took off almost immediately at the close of the war in August 1945. The largest strike wave in American history, this stunning upsurge launched itself from the new and higher plane of industrial unions created in struggle in the 1930s, whose ranks had been augmented by the great gains in union membership during the war.

Although Lewis, a member of the Republican Party National Committee, was no revolutionist (to say the least), he always comported himself — unlike the rest of the AFL bureaucrats — as though his union, the UMWA, was a sovereign state owing allegiance only to its own interests (as perceived by Lewis, naturally). And he clearly expected that he was entitled to the respect and deference due any head of state.

He was not fooled for an instant about the real intent of Taft-Hartley, which was not fundamentally about eliminating the numerous members and fellow travelers of the American Communist Party from the unions, particularly in the CIO, where the Stalinists had deeply discredited themselves by their vehement support of the wartime no-strike pledges. Its real intent, as Lewis said with his characteristic pungent sarcasm, was to convince the “great leaders of labor in this country” (as far as Lewis was concerned, there was only one great labor leader in this country) “that all indeed is lost unless they can grovel on their bellies and come under this infamous act.”

And herein is the great lesson that John L. Lewis inscribed in the historic record for the labor movement yet to be, and that is that Lewis, a fundamentally conservative and pro-capitalist labor leader as much as any of his auditors in that convention, never groveled to anyone. In this unique and somewhat peculiar combination of unshakable personal confidence, bureaucratic arrogance, and proletarian intransigence Lewis captured both the strengths and limitations of the native labor movement in the United States as it unfolded over his lifetime.

Lions Led by Asses

In the speech reprinted here, Lewis, a master of invective, scornfully excoriates the leaders of the AFL for their capitulation to Taft-Hartley and the drastically increased government intervention in the unions that it represented. Here is his indelible characterization of the pusillanimous, superstitious, and cravenly patriotic union officialdom, as he tells the assembled bureaucrats and their hangers-on to their faces that the American labor movement reminded him of the Biblical phrase about “Lions led by Asses.” This was classic John L. Lewis. He did not stop there, in case anyone in the hall had missed his meaning. “When I think of that mighty host, led and flanked and having their thinking done for them by intellectually fat and stately asses,” Lewis advised them, he was saddened and appalled.

“I wonder what built up the labor movement in this country?” he asked the convention. “Was it protecting laws and statutes that protected the organizers of our movement when they went to meetings? Oh no! The founders of our Federation had no such protection. They had to fight for the right to be heard. They had to fight for the right to hold a meeting, and men had to sacrifice and sometimes die for the right to join a union.”

True enough. But what could be done about Taft-Hartley? Lewis, a master maneuverer and tactician, had abilities that did not stop with oratory. If the labor movement had simply refused to sign the anti-Communist affidavits, he correctly pointed out, the Act would have essentially been stillborn. “All we needed to do when we met in Chicago,” he said, “was to do nothing and the act would have been discredited, there would have been no cases filed before the [National Labor Relations] Board, and its only functions would have been functions solely in the interests of the employer,” thus exposing its true nature as a weapon of class war, and effectively neutralizing it.

What the infamous anti-Communist affidavit provisions of Taft-Hartley actually consisted of were no more than a directive that the National Labor Relations Board give no consideration to questions or petitions brought before the Board by non-complying unions. If, as Lewis suggested, a united labor movement had refused to comply — and, as he said, there was no mandatory provision in the law requiring such compliance — the NLRB would simply have sat idle, while unions pursued their objectives through other methods. Ironically, some 50 years later a number of unions have decided to do essentially that, having learned through bitter experience that the NLRB cannot or will not compel the employers to recognize or bargain with unions.

But the union bureaucracy, including its Stalinist wing, did not ignore or defy the affidavit provisions of the new law. That would have taken the will, and the confidence, to struggle, which Lewis had and they didn’t. And when John L. Lewis came out fighting, the rank and file of the UMWA did too. “If John L. Lewis told us to go out on strike tomorrow,” one mineworker told the New York Times in 1947, “we would go out, even if it meant going to prison for 20 years.”

As Lewis had predicted, the bureaucrats fell into the trap set by those who devised the act, lining up to sign the affidavits. Among those bureaucrats were some who deluded themselves into thinking that since they were “Leninists,” they were superior to John L. Lewis as maneuverers. They were eventually prosecuted for perjury and expelled from the CIO in 1949. The Stalinists’ bureaucratic opponents in the unions secured themselves in office as a result of these purges and settled down to a long-term relationship as the junior partners of American capitalism for the next half century, and beyond.

“This new, consolidated, conservative bureaucracy,” the socialist James P. Cannon said in 1952, became “closely tied in with the government,” and became, “in effect, a government agency within the unions. It fully and consciously supports the whole program of American imperialism,” Cannon said, “and hopes to share in the crumbs of the prospective spoils at the expense of the rest of the people of the world.” That story, however, is beyond the scope of this introduction.

For further reading on Lewis, Taft-Hartley, and the postwar American labor movement: