Despairing of fair treatment, they resolved to do something for themselves.

The workers of the nation were tired of waiting for corporate industry to right their economic wrongs, to alleviate their social agony and to grant them their political rights.

Labor and the Nation' speech in Washington, D.C. Labor and the Nation speech (September 3, 1937)

When asked about the presence of communists and other radicals working as organizers for the Steel Workers Organizing Committee quoted in Life magazine, October 25, 1954.

Who gets the bird, the hunter or the dog?.

Speech at United Mine Workers convention at Indianapolis (March 1940), quoted in Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren R.

I have pleaded (labor's) case, not in the quavering tones of a feeble mendicant asking alms, but in the thundering voice of the captain of a mighty host, demanding the rights to which free men are entitled.

After resigning as head of the CIO in 1941, he took the Mine Workers out of the CIO in 1942 and in 1944 took the union into the American Federation of Labor (AFL). A major player in the history of coal mining, he was the driving force behind the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which established the United Steel Workers of America and helped organize millions of other industrial workers in the 1930s.

John Llewellyn Lewis ( Febru– June 11, 1969) was an American leader of organized labor who served as president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) from 1920 to 1960. Lewis at a labor rally in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, meeting with mine workers.

John L. Lewis by Melvyn Dubofsky