Politics & Power Quote by John L. Lewis

Legitimacy, Lewis argues, is not granted from above; it is manufactured from below, then worn like armor in a hostile world. The sentence is built as a defense brief for the CIO at the very moment it needed one: the 1930s surge of industrial unionism, when sit-down strikes, mass organizing, and New Deal labor reforms collided with corporate power, court injunctions, and plenty of red-baiting. Lewis isn’t merely praising membership rolls. He’s trying to preempt the standard attacks - that the CIO is reckless, subversive, or economically naive - by relocating justification to a harder-to-dismiss place: “the hearts of the millions.”

That word choice is strategic. “Economic, social, political and moral” is a full-spectrum claim, a checklist that insists the CIO is not a narrow interest group but a civic institution. Lewis stacks these categories to deny critics any safe angle of opposition: if you challenge the CIO, you’re not just disputing wages; you’re taking a position against social order, democratic participation, even morality. It’s a rhetorical move that turns a labor fight into a referendum on the nation’s conscience.

The subtext is also a warning. By emphasizing mass support, Lewis signals scale and staying power: the CIO cannot be dismissed as a faction because it has already become a constituency. “True only because” suggests he knows the fragility of public legitimacy - and he’s shoring it up with the one force that can outmuscle elites in a democracy: organized numbers, translated into moral authority.