Highlights Archives
John L. Lewis and the Fight for Mine Safety
With so many mining tragedies in the news lately, it is fitting that the Wisconsin Historical Society honors the February 12th birthday of a giant in the movement for the rights and safety of mine workers, John L. Lewis. President of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) for 40 years, Lewis reinvigorated the labor movement in the 1930s, a movement whose rich history is a particular strength of the Society's library and archives.
Born in Cleveland, Iowa, on February 12, 1880, John Llewellyn Lewis became president of the United Mine Workers in 1920. The 1920s were a particularly difficult time for labor organizations, and the UMWA was no exception as membership declined. In 1933, in an effort to restore the nation's industrial base, Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act. Seeing an opportunity, Lewis launched a successful organizing drive that rebuilt the UMWA, organized previously non-union coal regions, and laid the groundwork for industrial unionism that resulted in the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1936. Lewis served as president of the CIO from 1936 to 1940, when he resigned and resumed control of the UMWA.
Throughout the 1940s Lewis agitated for reforms and led several strikes that won enormous gains for coal miners. A mine explosion in Centralia, Illinois, on March 25, 1947, that killed 111 miners led both the U.S. House and Senate to hold committee hearings on mine safety, and proved the catalyst to force the government to act to improve mine safety.
Listen to an excerpt from Lewis' testimony (MP3, 1.3MB) before the House committee, and view photos from an earlier Illinois mine disaster at Cherry Hill in 1909.
One of Lewis' greatest contributions was the creation of the UMWA Welfare and Retirement Fund that provided for hospitals and health care clinics. Lewis also sent hundreds of UMWA organizers to help create some of the nation's leading labor unions, including the United Steelworkers of America and the United Auto Workers.
John L. Lewis' papers are one of the noteworthy labor-related resources housed in the Society's library and archives. Beginning in the 1890s, the Society became one of the first institutions in the nation to actively collect materials related to working-class movements and trade unionism. These collection efforts became more systematic in 1904 with the formation of the American Bureau of Industrial Research at the University of Wisconsin. Because the Society took a broad definition of labor, the collections are rich in material on everything from trade unions to anarchism, communism, socialism and utopianism.
The particular strengths of the labor collections include political, radical and reform movements among the working class, 19th-century Marxism in the United States, worker education, labor economics and history, and trade unions. The Society has collected practically every known labor newspaper, periodical and pamphlet, many of which are unique to the Society's collections. The archives' collections include records from the American Federation of Labor and 12 national labor organizations, the papers of prominent labor leaders such as Adolph Germer and Hilton Hanna (and the aforementioned John L. Lewis), and collections from social and political reformers and movements such as the Socialist Labor Party. The Society also has large collections of photographs, posters, broadsides, and even movies like the working-class themed 1934 documentary, Our Daily Bread.
These collections and more are searchable through the online Library Catalog (formerly MadCat) and the archives catalog ArCat.
:: Posted February 13, 2006
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