John L. Lewis Quotes
It is a sad commentary upon our form of government when every decision of the Supreme Court seems designed to fatten capital and starve and destroy labor.
John L. Lewis, 1882-1947, President, United Mine Workers of America, Speech
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
At the time, it did seem impossible that labor and capital would ever have harmonious relations. But the notion that slavery would solve the problem is as preposterous as anything ever entered into the American political dialogue. But there were many in the South, and some in the North, who actually believed it. Even 150 years later, while labor and capital relations were much better than pre Civil War, they still could not be described as “harmonious” or “friendly”.
The Banks and Wall Street were much to blame of the Great Depression which began in 1929. Many called for reform and heavy regulation of the finance industry. However President Hoover was very passive and the Depression became worse. Hoover also opposed ANY regulation of banking or Wall Street. Hence the names in this quotation. The Priest was the right wing demagogic radio host of his day. Virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Black, he was threatened with excommunication by the Catholic Church, which finally ordered him to cease us weekly radio show and stop the political hate.
Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his peacemaking in the Russo-Japanese War.
In 1902 there was a major coal strike in which Roosevelt pressured the coal operators to make concessions to labor. The abuses of some of the large monopolistic enterprises were turning large segments of America against capitalism. TR always believe that he saved capitalism from its own self destruction. The same has been felt about Franklin Delano Roosevelt who many believe saved American capitalism in the Great Depression.
The factory workers in Lynn, Massachusetts started their own newspaper: This was published four years before Marx and Engles published the Communist Manifesto
John Llewellyn Lewis was an American leader of organized labor who served as president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) from 1920 to 1960. 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, during the Great Depression. After resigning as head of the CIO in 1941, Lewis took the United Mine Workers out of the CIO in 1942 and in 1944 took the union into the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
