DELEGATE LEWIS (President, United Mine Workers of America). “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn.” So runs the Scripture. But the Congress of the United States designated 15,000,000 workers in this country, organized into one form or another of unions, as being cattle that treadeth out the economic corn of our country, and the Congress placed an economic muzzle on each of you. What are you going to do about it? Oh, I see. You are going to change our Constitution. God help us!

The Taft-Hartley statute is the first ugly, savage thrust of Fascism in America. It came into being through an alliance between industrialists and the Republican majority in Congress, aided and abetted by those Democratic legislators who still believe in the institution of human slavery. It was bought and paid for by campaign contributions from the industrial and business interests of this country, and the Republican Party and the Democratic minority made good by forging these legislative shackles for you and the men and the women who pay you to intelligently represent them.

It creates an inferior class of citizens, an inferior category and a debased position politically for the men and women who toil by hand or brain for their daily subsistence and to safeguard the future for their loved ones.

It symbolizes and parallels historically what happened in Italy before the coming of Fascism, and it symbolizes and it parallels historically what happened in Germany before the coming of Nazi-ism. In each country labor was regimented by oppressive and punitive laws. Its leaders were persecuted, and when the labor unions were made to be devoid of influence and power, the liberties of all the people were taken away.

Now comes the Taft-Hartley Act, which tries to do that thing here in America, where we always believed heretofore that we had a free labor movement. We even presumed at times to lecture the representatives of labor in other countries and chide them because they didn’t have a free labor movement. And yet when this statute is enacted, some 73 pages in length in the printed copy, containing only two lines that say labor has the right to organize and 33 pages of other additional restrictions that dares labor to try to organize, when that comes to pass, the welkin is filled with the outcries and the lamentations of our great leaders of labor in this country calling upon high heaven to witness that all indeed is lost unless they can grovel on their bellies and come under this infamous act.

I am one of those who does not think that all is lost. I represent an organization whose members believe they pay their officers to fight for them, not to deliver them into slavery. And four weeks before this convention assembled we found our great leaders beating the drums in their own private little conclaves, trying to devise ways and means to have this convention call the Taft-Hartley Act a good Act, with a minimum degree of criticism from their membership.

The question of signing the anti-Communist affidavit, which is only one small feature of the abrogations of this act, has occupied the minds of our leaders and the columns of the public press now for more than six weeks, and at last we come to the fatal and unhappy day when men who purport to lead the mighty hosts within the American Federation of Labor cry aloud and say, “There is nothing else for us to do — nothing else for us to do!”

I will tell you what you should do at least once in your lives — you should do your duty by your membership.

I suppose it is hardly necessary for me to say that I am not a Communist. I suppose it is hardly necessary for me to say that I was fighting Communism in America, with the other members of my organization, before many people in this country knew what Communism stood for in America and throughout the world. In the early 1920s our organization paid for the research and study of the most serious analysis and compilation of Communist activities in industrial America that has ever been gotten out before or since, and that story was published in all the metropolitan newspapers of this country in seven serial issues. That story was made a congressional document and is on file to anyone who cares to read it. It exemplifies what I say, that the United Mine Workers of America has been in the vanguard of our citizenship in opposing the cast iron Oriental philosophy of Communism or any other damned kind of ism in this country. And we expect to remain in that position. We don’t expect to change our principles too often; and we do expect some support from the American labor movement, because we think that our attitude reflects the attitude of the rank and file in these great organizations of labor who work for a living and who want a country tomorrow in which their children and their grandchildren can live.

The signing of the affidavit isn’t the only thing that an organization has to do to conform to this Act. This Act is a trap, a pitfall for the organizations of labor, and I am surprised that those who have been attempting to analyze it haven’t looked down the road just a few months or a year to find out some of the things that are inherent in this Act. This Act was passed to oppress labor, to make difficult its current enterprises for collective bargaining, to make more difficult the securing of new members for this labor movement, without which our movement will become so possessed of inertia that there is no action and no growth, and in a labor movement where there is no growth there is no security for its existence, because deterioration sets in and unions, like men, retrograde.

But after you have filed the affidavit the Act says no petition will be received and acted upon affirmatively by the Board unless it has filed with the Secretary of Labor in such form as the Secretary may provide for showing:

(1) The name of such labor organization and the address of its principal place of business.

(2) The names, titles, and compensation and allowances of its three principal officers and any of its other officers or agents whose aggregate compensation and allowances — which means expenses — for the preceding year exceeded $5,000. And that takes in all of them.

(3) The manner in which the officers and agents referred to in Clause 2 were elected, appointed, or otherwise selected.

(4) The initiation fee or fees which new members are required to pay on becoming members of such labor organization.

(5) The regular dues or fees which members are required to pay in order to remain members in good standing of such labor organization.

(6) A detailed statement of or reference to provisions of its constitution and by-laws showing the procedure followed with respect to:

(a) Qualifications for or restrictions on membership.

(b) Election of officers and stewards.

(c) Calling of regular and special meetings.

(d) Levying of assessments.

(e) Imposition of fines.

(f) Authorization for bargaining demands.

(g) Ratification of contract terms.

(h) Authorization for strikes.

(i) Authorization for disbursement of union funds.

(j) Audit of union financial transactions.

(k) Participation in insurance or other benefit plans.

(1) Expulsion of members and the grounds therefore, and

(B) Can show that prior thereto it has first filed with the Secretary of Labor in such form as the Secretary may prescribe, a report showing all of:

(a) Its receipts of any kind and the sources of such receipts.

(b) Its total assets and liabilities at the end of the last fiscal year, and

(c) The disbursements made by it during such fiscal year, including the purposes for which made.

(2) Furnish to all the members of such labor organization copies of the financial report required by Paragraph (1) hereof to be filed with the Secretary of Labor.

The filing of your constitution, the filing of your financial report that you make to your members, the filing of your auditing report isn’t sufficient for the purposes of the Act, but that information must be furnished in the manner prescribed in the Act. And I assert without qualification that there isn’t an organization in the American Federation of Labor that can make that report in a manner that it can feel assured will be satisfying to the labor-hating, labor-baiting General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, who has been hired to persecute and prosecute your unions and make the life of your union and its members more difficult.

Oh, someone may say, “I have talked to Mr. Denham.” Yes, I know a number of gentlemen have talked to Mr. Denham, and he has said that (a), (b), and (c) won’t be necessary. That is all right for you gentlemen who have talked with Mr. Denham and convinced him of the purity of your motives and the fact that you will vote right on occasion. But how about some of the rest of us who haven’t talked to Mr. Denham and who don’t propose to talk to Mr. Denham privately? Do you think Mr. Denham will give us that consideration or will Mr. Denham, with the great powers vested in him by this Act, continuously say to a few gentlemen in the American Federation of Labor, “The reports filed by your union are not satisfactory.”

Suppose he deems them satisfactory only while we are good, in his estimation, and when anything happens that an organization follows a policy not to his liking will he put his research workers and young lawyers to work on these filed accounts and dig up the discrepancies?

There are things in here to which I cannot conscientiously swear of my own knowledge. What happens if I so swear and there are errors in it?

Well, on the form prepared by Mr. Denham for you gentlemen to attach your John Hancocks, appears the following warning — I am quoting:

Any fraudulent statement or misrepresentation in this affidavit is subject to punishment of $10,000 fine or ten years imprisonment, or both, as provided for by Section 35-A of the Criminal Code.

I wonder who you think Mr. Denham would use that clause on? Oh, he wouldn’t use it on the good boys. He wouldn’t use it on the complacent chaps. He wouldn’t use it on those unions that are willing to grovel before him and before the Taft-Hartley Act, but he probably would use it on the type of unions that believe his Act to be a despicable adventure inimical to the interests of all Americans, debasing to conform to, and not in concert with the guarantees accorded every citizen by the Constitution of the United States. Those are the kind of people that Mr. Denham will invoke his ten years or his $10,000 fine arrangement on.

If we had had this Act and had our Mr. Denham in the last coal controversy, I ask you, do you think he would have given Judge Goldsborough a lift? Do you think he would send his young lawyers into court and make averments as to the inadequacy of the returns and the misrepresentations contained in those returns, and we could take the next ten years in appealing from their decision and hire more lawyers, because the damage would have been done and the unions would have been convicted in the newspapers and the so-called court of public opinion in America?

I wonder whither we are drifting? The Executive Council, in its several meetings has said, each to the other, “We must stand for the repeal of this un-American statute and we must resist and withhold support from all modifying amendments that seek to make it virtuous. It is so completely bad that it can’t be made virtuous and enough amendments cannot be attached to it to make it virtuous, so we will stand against its modification by amendment and we will ask the American people to join us in asking for its complete repeal.”

Then your president and other officers of your organization have made known that position in public. And now we meet this afternoon and the distinguished Committee on Laws comes in here with a report, that, in effect, says, no, we won’t permit Congress to amend it; we will debase ourselves and amend our own Constitution to make it unnecessary. What a paradox! What a paradox! How much heart do you think that will give the members of our organizations out in the industrial centers of this country when they see their great leaders, with all the pomp and ceremonials of a great convention, kneeling in obeisance before this detestable and tyrannical statute? Do you think that that will encourage them?

What effect will it have upon the ordinary citizen not related or concerned intimately with labor organizations? When you organize and implement your plans to go out and ask a Congressman or Senator who fashioned this iron collar that has been placed about your neck and sets you apart from your fellow man, what are you going to say to him when that man in the street says, “Why, Mr. Blank, I understand your organization has amended its Constitution to permit you to accept the great virtues of this Act, and that you overrode the opposition in your convention, in your wild clamor to be the first to sign up. How can you be opposed to the act for which you fight to receive its emoluments? Surely Mr. Taft must be right when he says the rank and file of labor have been liberated under this act from the tyranny of their own leaders.” And is it true that the leaders of our movement are to be the first of our mighty hosts of 8,000,000 members to put their tails between their legs and run like cravens before the threat of the Taft-Hartley bill? I am reminded of the Biblical parable, “Lions led by asses.”

Is it true of this mighty host of 8,000,000 workers in the American Federation of Labor, each filled with enthusiasm and ambition, each having responsibilities and dreams for himself and his family, each looking forward to the realization of a substance that will carry him through the evil days that must come to every man, when I think of that mighty host trying to advance across the plains of America, led and flanked and having their thinking done for them by intellectually fat and stately asses ?

I think you should think about these things. God knows, you are paid enough for thinking. I am, too, but I do try to shut my mouth occasionally and think once in a while, and that is what the American Federation of Labor should do.

The great brains in Congress who enacted this measure under the tutelage of the lawyers employed by the National Association of Manufacturers, in a moment of mental aberration, put an optional clause in this statute and they made it optional as to whether or not you would conform to the obligations of the act. It was not mandatory and it was not illegal, and it did not put anyone in defiance of the act if they failed to file that affidavit, because it was an option.

And they unwittingly gave to labor the greatest chance to destroy this statute that will ever come to us. All we needed to do when we met in Chicago was to do nothing, and the act would have been discredited, there would have been no cases filed before the Board, and its only functions would have been functions solely in the interests of the employer, and the sense of fair play of the American people would not have permitted this Government to spend money to utilize the savage devices of this statute solely in the interests of the great industrialists and employers of this country who now are making larger profits than ever before in the history of our country or any other country.

We lost that chance. We lost it by bickering among ourselves. We lost it by failing to take counsel with each other in good faith. We lost it because we could not overlook our small animosities or our little ambitions or our private dreams. Time went on, and from the council meeting in Chicago to the advance meetings of the departments in this city before the convention, the waiting world had a right to believe that labor could no longer exist in free America unless it was permitted by some stubborn man to sign an affidavit, to run the risk of being prosecuted under that affidavit in the months to come.

I wonder what built up the labor movement in this country? Was it protecting laws and statutes that protected the organizers of our movement when they went out to the 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. Those were the conditions under which this movement of ours was created. It is a monument to the unselfish sacrifice of millions of men through decades of time and to the unswerving devotion to principles of the great leaders of our movement who have preceded us.

Well, what are we going to do? Are we going to abandon that policy and that course of action that created us, that made strong and courageous men out of our members and great leaders out of their representatives? And are now we going to cry aloud, like a voice in the wilderness, that we must have a law that will prevent men and women from leaving our unions?

That is what this clause in the constitution amounts to. Some people are afraid that a federal labor union will leave the American Federation of Labor because some raiding organization will pass by long enough to stop and get on a ballot. I make the averment to you that unless a majority of the members of a local union want to change their affiliation or leave that union, the contracting organization does not have to be on the ballot.

Oh, you might say it makes it easier for the officers if we do this. What do I care about that? I think sometimes as we grow successful in mature years and we get a little heavier, we are a little more indolent, and I think that is one thing about the American Federation of Labor, and some of us need to revise our perspective and wonder how we would have done this job 10 years ago or 20 years ago, how we would have approached it and how we would have executed it.

I am fairly familiar with the history of the American Federation of Labor. You can look at these charts on your tables there and you can see that in 1934, after two years of the New Deal, the membership of the American Federation of Labor was 2,600,000. You can look at the membership today and will see it is 7,600,000 — a great increase, but not too much to be proud of, because after all, how did the American Federation of Labor get those members, substantially speaking? Why, those unions followed along after the armored divisions of the United Mine Workers of America and mopped them up. That is how you got them. Some of your unions adopted the technique of the industrial organizations. You refused to do that 12 years ago when the representatives of the United Mine Workers came before you pleading to take in the millions of the great mass production industries, and you said no, perhaps just as you will say no today when the representatives of the United Mine Workers rise in this convention and ask you to look whither thou goest.

The CIO, which we would like to have in membership in our great Federation now, would have never been the CIO if the American Federation of Labor had listened to the words of the United Mine Workers of America, which offered them the services of their men and the millions of their treasury. That is what we offer you now. Had we been able to agree in 1934 and 1935 and 1936 in our councils of this Federation — yes, even in this very city and in this same hall in 1934 — we wouldn’t have 7,600,000 members today. The American Federation of Labor would have had, in my considered judgment, an enrollment today of 25,000,000 workers in its ranks in American industry.

Oh, you may say, those are the words of a prophet without too much honor in his own country. Yes, but it is the word of a worker in the ranks, and it is the word of one who has worked in the industrial workshops of this country and who has carried the flag of organization throughout our great modern industries, and it is the word of one who knows something about the dreams of the man and woman who work for a living, and who knows something about their responsibilities and their burdens. And I say to you as my calm and considered judgment, I say to you now that if you take this action today recommended by your committee, in my judgment, you will live to regret it — you will live to regret it.

That is only the opinion of one and may not be well received on the part of some of you. If there ever was a time in the history of the organized labor movement, in the history of our country when unity of purpose, unity of the structural form of our movement, unity of policy and objections were needed in the interest of every man, woman, and child under our flag, then that time is now in this year of Our Lord, 1947. Yet we quibble over details, we swallow a camel — the Taft-Hartley Act — and we strain at gnats.

Your committee comes in here with a constitutional amendment, which, of course, I am trying to oppose — just for the record — that puts in the printed word of the Constitution the claim that the American Federation of Labor will only have two officers. Well, that is not true. The Federation will continue to have 15 officers, 13 members of some kind of an Executive Council and a President and Secretary, which makes 15, although your Constitution will say that you only have two officers. Of course, the Council is going to have some duty, and if they are not officers of the Federation what will they be?

You know, to me that smacks of the Communist “technique,” to lie to escape responsibility. That is what that does; that’s a lie.

Is that what you want to do, or do you want to be men and stand foursquare and look the Congress in the face and look Taft and Hartley in the face and look Denham in the face and say, “We want our rights as free men, and we are going to have them.”

You know, if you grovel enough in this convention you will probably have more to grovel for next January and March, because when the Congress and the enemies of labor find out how easy you are they will give you more to grovel for. Did you ever think of that? Hadn’t you better fight a little now than fight more down the road, or would you rather run?

Well, gentlemen of the convention, I represent an organization. They pay me; and they are not going to run with you. They don’t like to run. I will say this, that those of the membership don’t hesitate to tell me that they don’t pay me to run, either, in the wrong direction.

We are not going to run with you. I don’t know what the Congress will do next session. That depends a great deal on what this convention does. If they see we are on the run they will take courage and they will fashion some more sharp spears to accelerate our speed even greater. Conceivably they might pass a bill next session that takes away the optional features of this act: make it 20 years in the pen for not signing this affidavit or send out a provost-marshal guard and corral some of us; charge us with treason or high crimes and misdemeanors. That is the next logical step. That is what happened in Italy and in Germany, didn’t it? God knows, it’s been happening in Russia for a long time before that—even before we made them our Allies. Sometimes I think we must have known what we were doing when we made them our Allies. That’s questionable, though.

Isn’t that the next step? If you resist the power of the state, the central government will be used against you, and if you don’t resist, it will be used against you that much more quickly, because they won’t lose any sleep at night worrying about what to do with a labor movement that is fleeing before the storm. And that is what you will be doing if you pass this damnable amendment that you have before you.

So, friends of mine, take your choice. Some of you are boasting you have the votes to do it. Perhaps you have, but that isn’t all you need after you do it, because you will have additional troubles. You will have some trouble in your own membership in this country; and how many of you think that you are going to have an easy time in the future after you qualify under this act and after you amend your Constitution? How many suits do you think will be filed against you?

You know that under this act any place where the employer alleges an unfair labor practice they can ask the Board for an injunction, and the Board has no power but to petition for the injunction from the court on a prima facie presentation of facts by the employer, not subject to review in advance. That injunction will cut you off from your membership, whatever the circumstances. And what you are doing today by this proposed amendment to this Constitution—you are repealing the 1919 injunction policy articulated by that convention, the words of which were written by men in this convention at the instigation of President Gompers. You are repealing that and you are humbling yourselves in abasement before the return of government by injunction.

Have you thought of these things? Hastily, perhaps, some of you — some of you, looking at the immediate considerations. I am trying to look at the future of our labor movement. I am here to say that if we have the courage to stand together, we are strong enough and powerful enough to protect our membership, our unions and our country from the detrimental effects of this most despicable act. If we don’t stand together—well, divided we fall.

Now, I won’t keep you much longer. I fear greatly you are bored. I have tried to be as brief as possible. It is a most serious question with me. If I have seemed exceedingly earnest, it is because I feel the weight of the great responsibility.

I ask you to believe that as far as I can translate it and interpret it, I am representing the undivided thought and spirit of the men who compose the organization which I have the honor to represent.

One thing more. It is always well to have a little zest in an undertaking. I wish to say this to you — I care nothing about the title of Vice-President. I care nothing about the numbers that are attached to the names of the members of the Executive Council. I have often wondered why we had those titles and those numbers. I would just as leave sit on an Executive Council that was called an Executive Board. That is what the United Mine Workers have, an Executive Board, with no numbers, no titles. It isn’t a question of being demoted in honorable position. There is nothing personal about it. It is a matter of principle as to whether or not I should accept a position on a denatured governing body of this organization that will live a continuous lie as long as in the service, because that Board, whatever you call it, will be the officers of the American Federation of Labor, and it simply is not true that the American Federation of Labor will only have two officers.

But if you do elect to take this astounding action, I can only say to you that you will be voting this speaker off of the Council of the American Federation of Labor. I will not be a candidate for election to this debased board.

Perhaps that makes no difference; perhaps you will say, “John Lewis is trying to hold a gun to the head of the convention.”

That is not true. I don’t think anyone can hold a gun to the head of this convention. I am simply telling you what I think on principle, so that you can make your decision with full knowledge of what it means. As far as that is concerned, on this particular issue, I don’t think that the Federation has a head. I think its neck has just grown up and haired over.

So, gentlemen of the convention, I know you must be appreciative, as I, of the portents of this possible action. I know you are just as anxious to serve your membership in this Federation. It is a question of policy how to do it, to arrive at your decision.

Call the long roll when you will, and the decision—whatever it may be—will be yours.

I thank you.