John L. Lewis, an unauthorized biography

America will sigh with relief, and yet America will sorely miss him. We shall miss those perennial strikes, his unbearable insolence to all authorities, the grimness of his unparalleled, stiff-necked determination, and his colorful epithets. We will miss cursing, ridiculing, fuming over him, and giving that grudging admiration for his doing what so many people would like to do: openly and successfully defy the political as well as the economic royalists. We shall realize that his defiance of every power was a note of reassurance for the security of the democratic idea, that his dissonance was part of our national music. For all these things have been indelibly woven into the fabric of the past thirty years of America and have become part of the tradition of America. But until that time, today, as before, and to the end, Lewis will continue as the incredible earthquake beneath our economy. The years of thunder in the earth will roar on as Lewis lives on, for he is, as he has bellowed at his miners, “something of a man.”