The Man on the Pea-Green Sofa

In a parlor in Washington's Hotel Statler, eight frazzled negotiators sat silent for minutes at a time, pulling on cigars or cigarettes and staring morosely into space. On streamlined, shocking-pink armchairs sat the stubborn coal operators: George Love, Joseph Moody, Harvey Cartwright, Harry Moses; the stubborn miners: Thomas Kennedy, John Owens, William Mitch. On a pea-green sofa sat the grandiloquent John L. Lewis.

At week's end came news that Lewis' brother Thomas, in ill health for years, had shot and killed himself, and John went to Springfield, Ill for the funeral; he had been in Springfield only five weeks before for the funeral of his mother. In the hotel room, the negotiations lapsed from semi-into complete paralysis.

"Simply Chaos." Government mediators--ruminant Cyrus Ching and Fact-Finder David Cole--fingered their chins. Out around the country, cities, steel mills, schools and hospitals scraped the bottoms of their coal bins. Governors declared a state of emergency. A coal official predicted what would happen if there were no settlement soon: "Simply chaos."

The Government, which had waited so long before acting--until Harry Truman could bring himself to invoke the Taft-Hartley Act--moved laboriously along the legal front. This week, in the ultimate stage of the crisis, the United Mine Workers' bow-tied, bass-voiced Attorney Welly Hopkins appeared before Federal Judge Richmond Keech. In obedience to Judge Keech's Taft-Hartley order, the union had twice instructed its 370,000 idle miners to go back to work. They had disregarded the instructions. But the Government maintained that the union was still responsible for their actions. The judge had ordered the union to stand trial for contempt of court.

Really a Strike. Assistant Attorney General H. Graham Morison began unfolding his evidence. It was Morison who pressed a similar case against Lewis and the U.M.W. in 1948 in which Judge Alan T. Goldsborough slapped the union and its boss with $1,420,000 in fines for contempt (two years before Lewis and the U.M.W. had had to pay $710,000 for contempt). Painstakingly, Morison presented the evidence that was as plain as the scowl on Lewis' face: the mines were not operating; there really was a strike. Looking for evidence that was not so plain but more relevant to the case, Morison subpoenaed Union Leader John Owens to appear with records of wires and telephone conversations from U.M.W.'s Washington headquarters on 15th Street.

While the wheels of justice creaked, Lewis buried his brother. This week he was due back in his seat on the pea-green sofa.

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