"While the men of the steel industry were going through blood and gas in defense of their rights and their homes and their families, elsewhere on the far-flung C.I.O. front the hosts of labor were advancing and intelligent and permanent progress was being made"
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Lewis writes like a commander filing a wartime dispatch, and that choice is the point. “Blood and gas” drags the steel struggle out of the realm of wages and contracts and into the moral register of trench warfare and state violence. It’s not subtle: if steelworkers are enduring battlefield conditions, then management and its allies look less like tough negotiators and more like an occupying power. Lewis is staking legitimacy through sacrifice.
The phrase “far-flung C.I.O. front” is careful propaganda in the best sense. It converts a sprawling, uneven labor movement into a coherent campaign with multiple theaters, implying coordination, discipline, and inevitability. In the late 1930s, the CIO’s mass organizing drives and the steel battles (with company unions, private police, injunctions, and sometimes literal tear gas) needed a story that could hold competing realities at once: defeat and momentum, tragedy and strategy.
The subtext is leadership triage. Lewis honors steel’s brutal immediacy while reassuring everyone else that the movement isn’t stalled, that it can absorb violence in one sector and still chalk up “intelligent and permanent progress” in others. That adjective pair matters: “intelligent” flatters the CIO’s modern, industrial-union approach against the old craft model; “permanent” answers the fear that gains won in the street could evaporate in courtrooms or at the next downturn.
It’s also a quiet rebuke to complacency. If one front is paying in blood, no organizer, politician, or allied worker gets to treat the larger project as abstract.
The phrase “far-flung C.I.O. front” is careful propaganda in the best sense. It converts a sprawling, uneven labor movement into a coherent campaign with multiple theaters, implying coordination, discipline, and inevitability. In the late 1930s, the CIO’s mass organizing drives and the steel battles (with company unions, private police, injunctions, and sometimes literal tear gas) needed a story that could hold competing realities at once: defeat and momentum, tragedy and strategy.
The subtext is leadership triage. Lewis honors steel’s brutal immediacy while reassuring everyone else that the movement isn’t stalled, that it can absorb violence in one sector and still chalk up “intelligent and permanent progress” in others. That adjective pair matters: “intelligent” flatters the CIO’s modern, industrial-union approach against the old craft model; “permanent” answers the fear that gains won in the street could evaporate in courtrooms or at the next downturn.
It’s also a quiet rebuke to complacency. If one front is paying in blood, no organizer, politician, or allied worker gets to treat the larger project as abstract.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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