A grim reminder that coal, long forgotten, is still critical to the nation - ADAM GELLER, AP Wire
The supremacy of coal, harnessed by union leaders, gave lowly miners real power for the first time.
By the 1930s, John L. Lewis was one of the nation's most recognized figures, a big-shouldered man with famously bushy eyebrows regularly seen by Americans in movie theater newsreels. He was the ruler of the United Mine Workers, a union unlike any other previously seen.
Not satisfied to limit his influence to the mines, Lewis argued that workers throughout the economy had to try a new way - his way - to organize entire industries, rather than professional trades. To make his point, Lewis broke away from the mainstay of the union movement, forming the Congress of Industrial Organizations and pouring his energies into helping build the United Auto Workers and United Steelworkers of America.