Word: johnes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Along the creek runs, the hollows and slate hills where they take coal from the ground, the hard-bitten and taciturn West Virginians were confused and worried. "That John," said an Irish-born shot-firer in the Kanawha coalfields, "he be the greatest man of the 20th Century, but I be damned if we'uns can figure him out this time ... I think John be a thinkin' o'hisself...
Despite all the suffering, John Lewis was still king of the coal miners. "All we got, we owe to him," said a miner with finality. "Twenty years ago we worked 20 hours for $2; now we get $15 for eight, that's what." But the king, it was plain, was no longer above timid, hesitant reproach. It wasn't too safe to criticize him openly: the old men didn't dare risk being blackballed by the union; they were too near pension time. And a coal miner's wife in Cinderella, W. Va., who wrote...
White Flag. But never in his 29 years of imperious reign had John L. Lewis fumbled so badly, and the miners knew it. His three-day work week and the strike had won them nothing-not even a crisis in the nation's coal supply. He had methodically bullied and insulted the coal mine operators into hard and adamant opposition to his demands for higher pay and a bigger slice of royalties for his U.M.W. welfare fund. The fund itself had dwindled until it was necessary to cut off all but emergency benefits-at the worst possible time...
...Chicago last week, where he held a hastily called "yes man" meeting of his union policy committee, John Lewis raised the white flag. Without warning, he ordered his coal diggers back to work immediately on the same terms that he had haughtily rejected. But he served notice that the strike would be on again Dec. i unless the "arrogant and brutal" mine owners came to terms. At a news conference, where he tried to look ferocious but looked instead like a tired and harried hoot owl, John L. tried to explain that it was not a retreat but simply...
...president of a great university," Hutchins announced to Adler at lunch. "But I haven't thought about education." "Me either," said Mortimer. "I'm a philosopher." The only thoughts he had about education, he went on to say, had come from Columbia's John Erskine, who had taught a general course in "the great books" of Western civilization. Adler thought Hutchins should begin reading them too. "He broadly hinted," Hutchins said later, "that the president of an educational institution ought to have some education. For two years we discussed these matters, and then...