Daily Inspiration Quote by John L. Lewis

Lewis isn’t just announcing an organization; he’s declaring a new center of gravity in American life. The phrasing has the ceremonial heft of a founding document, and that’s the point: “is here” reads like a fact of nature, not a debatable initiative. He turns the CIO from a tactical coalition into an “instrumentality” - a word that sounds technical, almost governmental, as if labor is upgrading itself into infrastructure. That choice is strategic. If you can make a union movement feel inevitable, you reduce the space for opponents to dismiss it as a passing agitation.

The subtext is power, openly claimed. “Destined” is a dare to employers, politicians, and rival union leaders: you can resist, but you can’t shrink what’s coming. Lewis is also rebranding the worker from a private employee into a public actor whose working conditions shape “the internal and external course of the republic.” That’s an audacious expansion of jurisdiction. Domestic policy, sure - wages, hours, industrial rules. But “external” signals something bigger: trade, war production, national standing. Labor isn’t asking for a seat; it’s asserting that the room can’t function without it.

Context does the heavy lifting. The CIO’s rise in the mid-1930s, alongside New Deal legitimacy and mass industrial organizing, made it plausible to speak in nation-making terms. Lewis harnesses that moment with preacherly certainty, framing collective bargaining not as class conflict but as democratic architecture - and warning that the republic’s future will be negotiated on the factory floor as much as in Congress.