War & Peace Quote by John L. Lewis

Peace, in John L. Lewis's telling, is not a warm sentiment or a handshake photo-op. It's a conditional truce, priced in compliance. The line reads like moderation - "at least" and "existing statutes" are deliberately modest - but that restraint is the weapon. Lewis isn't asking employers to become benevolent; he's demanding they stop acting above the law. The genius is how he lowers the moral bar so far that refusal looks not merely greedy, but illegitimate.

The specific intent is tactical: redefine labor conflict as an employer-created crisis that can be solved without radicalism. By anchoring his demand to "existing statutes", Lewis positions unions not as revolutionaries but as enforcers of the rules the country has already agreed to. That framing matters in an America where strikes were routinely cast as disorder and unions as foreign agitators. He flips the script: the real threat to "peace in our industrial life" isn't collective action, it's corporate impunity.

The subtext is a warning. "If there is to be peace" implies the alternative is not abstract. Lewis, who led the United Mine Workers through some of the most combustible labor battles of the 20th century and helped build the CIO, is speaking from a world where "industrial life" meant deadly mines, company towns, blacklists, and strikebreakers. He offers employers the minimum exit ramp: honor the law. If they won't meet even that baseline, they are choosing the fight - and Lewis is telling the public who to blame when the factory gates turn into a battlefield.