Politics & Power Quote by John L. Lewis

Lewis frames labor organizing as something less like a policy choice and more like a biological event: a birth forced by pain. “Agony and travail” drags the listener into the bodily reality of the Depression-era economy, where unemployment, wage cuts, and violent anti-union repression weren’t abstractions but daily conditions. It’s a canny move. By casting “economic America” as the suffering parent, Lewis relocates responsibility. The CIO isn’t a radical infection introduced from outside; it’s the nation’s own offspring, produced by the system’s failures.

That metaphor also smuggles in a threat. Birth imagery implies inevitability: you can’t lecture a laboring body into stopping. Employers and politicians can resist, but they’re resisting something nature-like, unstoppable, morally freighted. The CIO’s emergence becomes both justified and destined, which is exactly what a leader needs when building a mass coalition across ethnic lines, skill levels, and industries.

Context matters: the CIO’s break with the AFL in the mid-1930s was a wager that industrial unionism could match the scale of modern capital. Lewis is defending that gamble in one sentence, making hardship do the persuading for him. The subtext is a demand for recognition: if America has been put through “travail,” then the new institution is not merely entitled to exist, it’s entitled to power - bargaining power, political power, and the dignity of being treated as a legitimate actor in the national story.