He dispatched teams of organizers to inform the miners: "The law is on our side," recruiting tens of thousands of miners.
Before long, the transformed John Lewis became the powerful leader of a militant faction within the Labor Federation, a group supporting industrial unionism—consolidating all the workers in a particular industry into one organization, regardless of their specific trade.
Besides John Lewis, this group included other individuals like Sidney Hillman, the astute and cunning head of the International Clothing Workers' Federation, Charles Howard from the International Printing Workers' Federation, and David Dubinsky from the International Women's Clothing Workers' Union.
These people believed that the craft unionists within the Labor Federation consistently missed the opportunity to mobilize the large-scale industrial workers who had yet to be unionized—industries like steel, automobiles, rubber, and the like.
