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a eee ca eetevinlonas-eteitaiahs = hs. ee ae ee eae 24 TYPICAL PENNSYLVANIA ANTHRACITE TOWN: FLARING FURNACES, COMPANY SHACKS MUL ; 31.7 percent of all US energy require- ments. Ten years later it provided only 46.4 percent. Goose-pimpling talk of big and little-inch pipelines for carrying oil and gas is therefore understandable. Some petroleum companies are experi- menting with extraction of oil and gas from coal, believing the process may be cheaper than piping them out of the ground, But no one knows whether it will work, and if so, when, The making of a dictator H” did it come to pass that half a million coal miners obey the erders and often the whims of a single man? Lewis has headed the UMW— in fact, if not at first by tille—for 29 years, more than half its lifetime. But men have held long tenure in other unions without approaching his power. Part of the answer can be found in the century-long struggle of miners to hold their unions in the face of merci- less and devious onslaughts. The mine owners set one part of the pattern as carly as 1849, when they bought out John Bates, leader of Bates’s - Union, the first US miners’ organization, They set another in the middle seventies by putting the law on John Siney, head of the National Union. The prose- cutor thundered: “John Siney .. . did assist in this combination of miners for the purpose of raising wages, and it is your beunden duty under the provision of the law to bring in a verdict of guilty.” Another area of the pattern was stamped a few years later when Pinker- ton detectives were sent as labor spics into the Molly Maguires, a secret band of direct actionists. The calculated vio- lence of private-company armies and bribed officials was used against the Nv- tional Federation of Miners, organized in 1885, and it was stepped up after 1890 when the miners’ faction of the Knights of Labcr joined with the Na- tional Federation to found the present United Mine Workers of America. | Solidarity was the miners’ major counterweapon, When an able, incor- tuptible leader arose, they had a ten- dency to idolize him. They did it with John Mitchell, who even yet is given a NEW REPUBLIC “day.” And even that sensitive, mild leader stepped cut in 1908 after only 4 decade to accept a better-paying job with a semi-employer group—though he quit when the miners objected. John L. Lewis has been accused of taking power, but never bribes. The miner’s way of life was, and is, another compulsion for allegiance to personal leadership. What man could labor 12 to 16 hours a day, six days a week, often on his knees swinging a pick, and have time for analyzing com- plicated issues? In nearly half of the miners’ homes the official Journal, a powerful advocate of Old John, is still the chief reading fare. At the same time the “operator-dominated” public press is distrusted. ° But the greatest factors in the present organizaticn of the UMW are the per- sonal qualities, character and ability of John L. Lewis. The general public's simple view of him as a combination bruiser and ham actor is not shared even by enemies who know him well. “:hey have scen the Lewis ruthlessness and the Lewis theatricals, But they have S 3