Chariton and the Man Who Moved Mountains for Labor

Chariton is the county seat of Lucas County, a rolling corner of southern Iowa where coal seams run under the farmland and the town itself was first settled in eighteen forty-six by Latter-day Saint families passing along the Mormon Trail. The name comes from the Chariton River, likely derived from a French trapper's name applied to the stream in the early fur-trade era. The county was named for Robert Lucas, the first governor of Iowa Territory.

For most of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lucas County was one of Iowa's most productive coal-mining districts. Mines opened in the western part of the county near the town of Lucas in the eighteen seventies, and by the early nineteen hundreds, thousands of men were working underground in the area. Most were immigrants or the sons of immigrants: Welsh, Irish, English, Scandinavian, and Eastern European miners who settled in the tight-knit communities scattered across the coal country south of Chariton.

One of those families was Welsh. John Llewellyn Lewis was born in eighteen eighty near the mining village of Lucas, Iowa, the son of Welsh immigrants who had come to dig coal in the new world. He left school after a few years of high school and went into the mines at seventeen. By nineteen oh six he was elected as the United Mine Workers' delegate from his Lucas County local. He rose steadily through the union hierarchy and in nineteen twenty became president of the United Mine Workers of America, a position he held for forty years.

What Lewis did with that office reshaped American labor history. Through the nineteen thirties and forties, he negotiated wage increases, pensions, and medical benefits for hundreds of thousands of coal miners at a time when mine owners routinely treated workers as expendable. He helped found what became the Congress of Industrial Organizations in nineteen thirty-five, bringing unskilled industrial workers into the union movement for the first time on a large scale. He organized steelworkers, autoworkers, rubber workers, and electrical workers during some of the most turbulent labor conflicts of the Depression decade. A sitting-down strike he supported against General Motors in nineteen thirty-six became a turning point in American labor relations.

John L. Lewis grew up speaking Welsh at home in a mining town that no longer exists, near a county seat that most Americans have never heard of. He died in nineteen sixty-nine, by which time the coal beneath Lucas County had long been exhausted and the mines were silent. His monument is not here in Chariton, but in the pension checks and health cards that American union workers carried for decades.