John L. Lewis, a Punch at the 1935 AFL Convention and the Birth of the CIO

The American Federation of Labor held its 1935 convention in Atlantic City, a resort town built for strolling, salt-water taffy and ocean air, and in October of that year the delegates gave the boardwalk something better to talk about. Near the end of a long, bitter fight over how unions should be organized, the president of the United Mine Workers, a heavy-browed man named John L. Lewis, walked up to William Hutcheson, the head of the carpenters' union, after an exchange of insults on the floor, and hit him in the face. Hutcheson went down among the chairs. Delegates pulled the two men apart. Lewis, by the usual telling, simply collected himself and walked back to his seat as though nothing much had happened. Within weeks he had formed a committee that would split the labor movement in two and, in the process, organize the steel mills and auto plants that the old federation had left alone for half a century. The punch was theatre. The argument underneath it decided who in America got a union.

In short: In 1935 John L. Lewis broke with the American Federation of Labor over a simple question: should workers be organized by trade or by industry? The committee he founded became the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which unionized millions of factory workers in steel, autos and rubber, and its story still explains why some workers get organized and others never do.

The fight was about the shape of a union

To understand why grown men were swinging at each other in a convention hall, start with the way the AFL was built. Its member unions were mostly craft unions. A carpenter joined the carpenters, a machinist joined the machinists, an electrician joined the electricians. That model made sense in a world of skilled tradesmen who carried their tools from job to job and could not easily be replaced. Their skill was their leverage, and the union was a guild that protected it.

The mass-production factory broke that logic. A tire plant in Akron or a steel mill in Pittsburgh employed thousands of people, most of whom were not tradesmen at all. They tended machines, fed furnaces and stood on assembly lines. If the old federation tried to organize such a plant, the skilled minority would be parcelled out among a dozen craft unions, each jealous of its jurisdiction, while the semi-skilled majority, many of them immigrants and Black workers from the South, belonged nowhere. An employer could play one group off against another, and usually did.

Industrial unionism proposed a different shape: one union for everyone in the plant, from the sweeper to the toolmaker. Lewis already ran a union built that way. The United Mine Workers took in everyone who worked in and around a coal mine, and Lewis had used the New Deal's first labor provision, Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, to rebuild it from a battered shell into a large and growing organization. He had seen what an industrial union could do when the law briefly leaned the workers' way. He wanted the federation to charter industrial unions in rubber, autos, steel and radio, and to do it before the moment passed.

The craft leaders, Hutcheson prominent among them, were not villains in this story so much as defenders of an institution that had kept their members alive through hard decades. Their case was that jurisdiction was the federation's constitution; that handing whole industries to new unions would strip established unions of members they had a claim to; and that unskilled workers were hard to organize and harder to keep. Those were not foolish concerns. They were wrong about where American work was heading.

Atlantic City, 1935

The resolution in favour of industrial organization lost at the 1935 convention, as similar proposals had lost the year before. Lewis kept pressing the issue anyway, and the craft leaders kept ruling him and his allies out of order. The scuffle with Hutcheson came during a dispute over whether a delegate from the rubber workers could speak. Accounts differ on the exact words that passed between the two men; most agree that Hutcheson said something coarse and that Lewis answered with his fist.

It is tempting to read the blow as a loss of temper. Most historians read it as a performance. Lewis had a showman's instincts, a Shakespearean speaking style and a sense of what would travel in the newspapers. Workers in Akron and Detroit who had never heard of a jurisdictional dispute could understand a picture of the mine workers' chief flattening the carpenters' chief because the carpenters would not make room for them. The punch announced that someone at the top of the labor movement was willing to fight for the unorganized, literally.

A committee that became a rival federation

On November 9, 1935, a few weeks after the convention, Lewis met with the heads of several other unions to form the Committee for Industrial Organization. Among them were Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and David Dubinsky of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, two leaders of needle-trades unions whose members were largely immigrant and whose politics leaned well to the left of the federation's old guard. Lewis resigned his post as a vice president of the AFL soon after.

At first the committee described itself as a body working inside the federation to promote industrial organizing. The federation did not see it that way. In 1936 the AFL suspended the unions involved, and in 1938 it expelled them. That year the committee reorganized as a permanent federation of its own, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, keeping the same initials. For nearly two decades the United States had two rival labor federations, one built mostly on crafts and one built mostly on industries, until they merged in 1955 as the AFL-CIO.

The timing mattered. In July 1935, a few months before the Atlantic City convention, President Franklin Roosevelt had signed the National Labor Relations Act, which gave private-sector workers a legal right to organize and to bargain collectively. The law was a door. Someone still had to walk through it, plant by plant, and the old federation was not in a hurry.

Steel, rubber and the sit-downs

The CIO moved fast. Rubber workers in Akron had already been experimenting with sit-down tactics. In 1936 Lewis funded the Steel Workers Organizing Committee and put Philip Murray, his longtime lieutenant from the mine workers, in charge. Steel had been the great graveyard of American organizing; the 1892 Homestead lockout and the failed 1919 steel strike had left a generation convinced that the mills could not be cracked.

Then, in the winter of 1936 to 1937, autoworkers in Flint, Michigan, occupied General Motors plants for six weeks. Lewis went to Michigan and joined the negotiations, and in February 1937 General Motors agreed to recognize the United Automobile Workers for its members. Weeks later, in March 1937, United States Steel, the largest steel company in the country, signed a contract with the steel organizing committee without a strike, a reversal that stunned observers who remembered Homestead. Smaller steel firms, known as Little Steel, fought on, and the Memorial Day massacre in Chicago in 1937, when police fired on marchers outside Republic Steel, was a brutal reminder that recognition was not inevitable.

Still, the shape of the labor movement changed in a handful of years. Industrial unions brought in workers the craft model had ignored, including large numbers of Black workers and recent immigrants. In many CIO unions, left-wing organizers, including Communists, did much of the hardest work, a fact that would come back to haunt the federation during the Cold War, when it expelled several left-led unions in 1949 and 1950. The CIO also built an explicit political operation, with Hillman at the centre of it, that tied the new unions to the Democratic Party and the New Deal coalition.

The mercurial man at the centre

Lewis does not fit neatly into anyone's hall of heroes, and the honest version of his story is better for that. He was born in 1880 in Lucas, Iowa, to Welsh immigrant parents, went into the mines young and rose through the United Mine Workers, which he led from 1920 until 1960. In the 1920s he ran the union as a near autocracy and crushed internal opponents. He had been a Republican for much of his life. In the 1930s he became the most important organizer of unskilled workers in American history.

He also broke with Roosevelt. In 1940 Lewis endorsed the Republican nominee, Wendell Willkie, and promised to resign as CIO president if Roosevelt won. Roosevelt won, and Lewis kept his word; Murray took over the CIO. During the Second World War, Lewis led coal strikes that infuriated much of the public and Congress, and later pulled his miners out of the CIO altogether. In the postwar years he negotiated a welfare and retirement fund for miners financed by a royalty on each ton of coal, an innovation that paid for hospitals and pensions in coal country.

Here is the argument this post wants to make about him: the punch in Atlantic City matters not because Lewis was a good man or a consistent one, but because he saw clearly that the shape of an organization decides who it can serve. The craft leaders were defending their members. Lewis was asking about everyone else.

The question Atlantic City still asks

The craft-versus-industry dispute sounds antique, but its descendant is alive in every organizing drive. Under federal labor law, the National Labor Relations Board decides what counts as an appropriate bargaining unit, and that decision can make or break a campaign. A union may want to organize a single department where support is strong; an employer may argue that the unit must include the whole facility, diluting that support, or the reverse. Workers who are classified as independent contractors or supervisors are outside the law entirely. Fights over who belongs in the unit are the modern version of the jurisdiction fights that sent Hutcheson to the floor.

The other lasting question is about where the labor movement spends its energy. Every union faces a choice between servicing the members it has and organizing the workers it does not. The craft leaders of 1935 chose the first. Lewis chose the second, at great cost and with no certainty of success. Today's union density is far below its mid-century peak, and the industries where most Americans now work, such as warehouses, retail, health care, restaurants and tech, look more like the unorganized factories of 1935 than like the tidy trades of the old federation. The organizing drives at Amazon warehouses, Starbucks cafés and graduate-student unions have the same feel: large, diverse workforces with high turnover and employers prepared to fight.

The opposing argument deserves a fair hearing. Critics of aggressive industrial organizing, then and now, warn that big unions can become bureaucracies of their own, that they can protect incumbent workers at the expense of newcomers and consumers, and that a single union covering an entire industry gains real power over prices and output. Some of those concerns are legitimate, and the CIO's own history includes corruption, purges and leaders who outstayed their usefulness. The answer is not to pretend unions are flawless. It is that a worker on an assembly line in 1936, or in a fulfilment centre in 2026, has almost no individual bargaining power, and the choice is rarely between a perfect union and a perfect market. It is between some collective voice and none.

You can follow the drives that inherit this argument on our workers and unions topic page, where the newest coverage is gathered as it lands.

What happened to the rivalry

The split that began with a punch ended with a handshake. In 1955 the AFL and CIO merged under George Meany, a plumber from the craft side, with Walter Reuther of the autoworkers leading the industrial unions' department. By then many AFL unions had begun organizing industrially themselves, partly to compete with the CIO, which is a fair measure of who won the argument. The merged federation was larger than ever. It was also more cautious, more tied to the bargaining routines of big manufacturers, and less interested in the hard work of organizing new sectors. Union membership as a share of the workforce peaked in the 1950s and began a long decline.

Lewis outlived his own revolution. He retired from the mine workers in 1960 and died in 1969. The industries he helped organize, coal and steel above all, shrank dramatically in the decades after, and the communities built around them are among the places where the labor movement and the Democratic Party have lost the most ground. That is a sobering place to end a story about triumph. It also explains why the question he forced in Atlantic City still lands: the labor movement grows when it reaches the workers no one else is organizing, and it withers when it waits for them to show up.

What you can do

The fights of 1935 were won by people who showed up in plants, union halls and state capitols. Here are ways to carry that work forward.

• See who is organizing now. The labor page lists the newest union elections the National Labor Relations Board has counted, which side won, and how union membership has moved over time. Look for the drives in your own industry or county, and notice how many are in warehouses, hospitals and cafés rather than mills.
• Support workers already in a fight. Groups that back organizing campaigns, worker centres and legal aid for fired workers are listed by state on our organizations page. A small, steady donation to a local worker centre often does more than a large one to a national campaign.
• Ask your members of Congress where they stand. Labor law reform, including bills that would raise penalties on employers who break the law during campaigns, comes up in every Congress. Enter your address on the representatives tool to get phone numbers and contact forms for your representative and senators, and to see how they voted recently.
• Learn the history where you live. Most towns with a factory, mine or rail yard have a labor history that local libraries and historical societies keep. Knowing who organized your town, and how, makes it easier to explain to a neighbour why a union is not an outside force.