LEWIS AND ICKES IN THE NEWS

...This they regard as "sinister" and speak darkly of subversive plots around UMW headquarters...

...There was no plan—no real effort to convert a huge Government investment into useful assets of peace...

...It would be a.free undertaking within the frame work and geared to the objectives of private enterprise...

...Ickes Has A Plan THE two men who conducted themselves like adults in the recent coal crisis were Ickes and Lewis...

...In other words, the old-timers fear Lewis bearing the gifts of hundreds of thousands of new members...

...Our plant investment now makes that of the last war look like a peanut stand...

...However, after Lewis and his miners had come through one of the dirtiest smear campaigns ever conducted against a militant cross-section of American workers, Lewis emerged triumphant with a contract signed by Secretary Ickes which sent the miners back to work at a halfway decent wage...

...When, in the course of the coal stoppages last year, Lewis denounced the Board and its attempt to destroy all vestiges of genuine collective bargaining, the mine leader was in turn denounced by such "intellectuals" as are still in the CIO for everything from hindering the war effort to kicking his cat...

...The president had a tight little tame cat union, with a docile rank and file., who would only strike when wages threatened to reach the starvation point...

...We haven't the secretarial force to handle their enrollment...

...It is a healthy thing to have a Cabinet member bring the issues of the fight into the open...

...Knowing that the mine leader will not support the fourth term ambitions of the President, they are accusing Lewis of over-weening ambition...

...In this situation the war liberals are once more venting their spleen upon Lewis...

...In another part of his speech which certainly gave his audience pause, he said: "If these plants are merely to be turned over to be quietly throttled in the interest of an economy of scarcity—scarce production, scarce opportunities, and few jobs, we can confidently look forward to postwar chaos...

...Bob La Follette has pointed out in The Progressive, one of the big fights for a democratic future will center around these key plants now owned by the Government, which means, of course, you and me...

...Consequently, while he has made a number of concessions in regard to other trades organized by District 50, where there might be jurisdictional disputes, he is holding fast to his contention that if the miners go back to the Federation, they take the by-product workers with them...

...Now that the Supreme Court has decided in the case of the iron ore workers that portal to portal pay is the law of the land, the coal miners will soon be receiving that pay...

...He then made his proposal that in place of bonuses or doles, the returning servicemen be given shares in the Government corporation that would be set up to run the plants which would turn out goods for peacetime use, and jobs in those plants, as well...

...Of course it will be fought claw and fang by such good friends of monopoly as Jesse Jones under whose not so tender mercies most of the important government-owned plants—aluminum, magnesium, synthetic rubber, various plastics enterprises are now operating...

...And now the "Curmudgeon," as the Secretary of the Interior likes to call himself, comes out with the most interesting plan for the democratization of government-owned plants that has yet been offered...

...If we had more of Ickes and less of Jones in the Administration, we might be getting along faster in our planning for a postwar America where democracy can once more breathe freely...

...Lewis knows very well what an important part chemicals made from the by-products of coal will play in the postwar world...

...War Liberals Blast Lewis Mr...

...As Sen...

...Lewis And Ickes In The News By McALISTER COLEMAN DURING a prewar strike of textile workers in New Jersey, the alarmed president of the international union, which the strikers were anxious to join, arrived at the scene of battle...

...Without going all out for such a plan before the Secretary reveals further details, it is, in the opinion of this "writer, one of the most sensible proposals made by any man in the Administration for the disposal of this* complex problem...

...Ickes, "some of the plants which were owned by the Government were sold to the highest bidder at a fraction of their cost, some were retained for military purposes, and many were abandoned...

...Are we going merely to abandon it, or to sell it to the highest bidder at a fraction of the cost, or are we going to see to it that this tremendous productive potential is used to further the development of the American system of private enterprise...

...This the Secretary believes would "serve to keep production and employment at a high pitch and prevent our present productive capacity from drying up under control of the monopolies...

...After the last war," said Mr...

...On the other hand continued Government ownership and operation would be a negative answer...

...But it will be worth the prayerful study of small businessmen, farmers, and small consumers and, especially, the servicemen and industrial workers...

...There is no national union for these workers in the AFL: They are taken into federal unions directly under the domination of the Federation with little chance of independent action...

...With bulging eyes he looked over the surging ranks of the Jersey strikers and then cried, "We can't take them into our union...

...The main trouble seems to be that Lewis might organize too many workers, An old-line unionist is quoted as saying: "The American Federation of Labor leaders who want to limit Lewis's ambitions in the chemical field know his ability to organize these workers...

...Speaking before the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco Apr...

...Perhaps," said the Secretary, "the first directors would have to be appointed by the Government...

...They know what he did with the Committee for Industrial Organization before it became a permanent organization when he went after the formation of unions in the basic and mass production industries...

...Ironically enough, over in the CIO camp, under the faltering leadership of Phil Murray and his strangely assorted advisors, an attack is now being launched against the War Labor Board and its unrealistic Little Steel formula...

...They'd laugh you right out of the hall...

...Beyond that there would be no special relation between the Government and the enterprise...

...It will also rouse to fury the back-to-the-good-old-days mob of the NAM and other "free enterprising" exploiters...

...He has been studying the role of plastics and synthetics and he realizes the necessity for a strong industrial union of all the workers in these fields...

...He was held up in the pseudo-liberal press as a shaggy monster darkly brooding over the prospects of selling out the American labor movement (though no specifications were advanced as to the purchaser...

...Don't try telling a eoaldigger these days that John L. Lewis is trying to sell out anybody or has sinister dictatorial ambitions...

...They contend that Lewis wants to take over the AFL and turn it into the same sort of militant weapon for industrial democracy that the CIO represented under his leadership...

...14, the Secretary suggested that instead of turning over the ownership and control of the vast war-developed production plants, many of them operating around the great dams in the South and Northwest, to the privateers at a few cents on a dollar, the plants be run by Federal corporations in which the returning servicemen be given shares...

...Right now the hierarchy of the American Federation of Labor is still stalling on whether or not to take John L. Lewis and his miners back into the Federation...

...In the "catch-all" District 50 of the United Mine Workers they are routinely signing up workers in the chemical and coke plants as full-fledged members of the miners' union...