◆ SpookStack

26. ’ house, and we would hold a caucus on it, we used to get along fine until Mother intervened and made the decision. In thé light of the greater knowledge that comes with increasing years ... I can look back now agd see that Mother was right every time... . , UMW officialdom, as a matter of fact, is referred fo teverently as the “family.” The ‘ambition of all local miner politicians is to get into the family. Most locals are allowed to elect their own officers, who receive per-diem : pay besides wages lost while on official duty. A man who is able to win local elections regularly catches. the eye of district officials, is brought to the atten- tion of Lewis-and eventually gets a chance to move up. Unswerving devo- “tion to Old John, head of the family, is the top requirement. ‘The family is important enough to warrant a pension system, which the miners themselves still lack. Employees pay a sum into the pension fund which is matched out of the union treasury. At 65, a $6,000-a-year man (a.medium- grade field executive) can figure on somewhere between $150 ‘and $200 a _ month for the rest of his life. If fired, he loses pension rights, though he gets back his own contributions. An aging subleader, with a good-sized equity above his own donations, thinks twice before displeasing Lewis. The allocation of dues also helps to center power at the top. The. national treasury gets 90 cents of the $1.50 - monthly total. The Auto Workers taice only 65 cents for the national office; the Steelworkers 75 cents out of an equal sum. Critics of Old John heaved out of the UMW cast an especially fishy eye on this section of the constitution: Any member guilty of slandering or cir- culating, or causing to be circulated, false statements ... wrongfully condemning any decision rendered by any officer of the or- ganization shalJ, upon conviction, be sus- pended from membership for a period of six months and shall not be eligible ‘to hold office in any branch of the organiza- tion for two years thereafter... . The Lewis-appointed executive board decides whether an officer has been “wrongfully” condemned. When Lewis went out to beat Pat Fagan in the Pitts- burgh district after Fagan refused to go along in the 1940 campaign against Roosevelt, several miners were hauled into the Washington headquarters and convicted,’ in effect, of circulating cam- paign litérature in Fagan’s behalf. The literature implied that Fagan might be tight, Lewis wrong. Fagan’s popularity was so great that many observers thought him unbeatable. But Old John drove him out of the herd. Solidarity against the world Mn expect to strike. ‘The press ‘can gloat over what it calls a~ resounding whipping given John I. Lewis, but \the, coal diggers see it the way Lewis said—the government black- jacked them. Of course, the miners are not swre they will strike. Old John will decide that. But the man in the pits, angry himself and understanding well the pride of Old John, at the moment , sees no other way out. But not even Lewis’ worst enemies —at least those who know him—pre- dict that he will call a strike for the hell of it,-without trying other means of getting victory or something resem- bling it. Labor men are of the opinion _ that if the government won’t bargain, Lewis will send envoys to the operators, perhaps secretly. © The operators have not signed the Krug-Lewis agreement. When the gov- NEW REPUBLIC ernment hands back the mines on June 30—which it must do unless there “is new legislation—the operators may try to knock out the welfare fund and other gains. Their hand will be greatly strengthened, of course, by Lewis’ bogeyman reputation -with the public. According to Gallup pollsters, President Truman’s popularity jumped sharply after his wrestle with Lewis. Congress could find no easier way of passing restrictive labor legislation than under the guise of “curbing” the mine leader. And so the prospect of Old John riding forth to protect what he calls the “defenseless breasts’? of his members brings shudders to other leaders of labor. If he and the miners are brought down;-ear-thebreach be-filled in time? Lewis’. possible successors HO is heir apparent in the UMW W should Lewis die—or, perhaps worse, undergo a long illness? No one, remembering the case of Ray Edmund- son, is likely to step forward as a can- didate. Rumors went around not long ago that Lewis would like to name his younger brother, Denny, as acting president and devote himself to the AFL and making war on the CIO. (The miners did not retufn to the AFL; the AFL aligned itself with the. UMW, according to the Jowrnal.)_ IN SPITE OF MACHINE AIDS, SOFT-COAL MINERS STILL WORK ON THEIR KNEES