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CHAPTER 11: THE NEW DEAL AND WORLD WAR IIunionizing campaign, rebuilding the UMW’s declining membership from150,000 to over 500,000 within a year.Lewis was eager to get the AFL, where he was a member of the ExecutiveCouncil, to launch a similar drive in the mass production industries. Butthe AFL, with its historic focus on the skilled trade worker, was unwilling todo so. After a bitter internal feud, Lewis and a few others broke with the AFLto set up the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), later the Congressof Industrial Organizations. The passage of the National Labor Relations Act(NLRA) in 1935 and the friendly attitude of the National Labor RelationsBoard put the power and authority of the federal government behind the CIO.Its first targets were the notoriously anti-union auto and steel industries.In late 1936 a series of sit-down strikes, orchestrated by the fledgling UnitedAuto Workers union under Walter Reuther, erupted at General Motors plantsin Cleveland, Ohio, and Flint, Michigan. Soon 135,000 workers were involvedand GM production ground to a halt.With the sympathetic governor of Michigan refusing to evict the strikers,a settlement was reached in early 1937. By September of that year, the UnitedAuto Workers had contracts with 400 companies involved in the automobileindustry, assuring workers a minimum wage of 75 cents per hour and a 40-hour work week.In the first six months of its existence, the Steel Workers OrganizingCommittee (SWOC), headed by Lewis lieutenant Philip Murray, picked up125,000 members. The major American steel company, U.S. Steel, realizingthat times had changed, also came to terms in 1937. That same year the SupremeCourt upheld the constitutionality of the NLRA. Subsequently, smallercompanies, traditionally even more anti-union than the large corporations,gave in. One by one, other industries — rubber, oil, electronics, and textiles— also followed suit.The rise of big labor had two major long-term impacts. It became theorganizational core of the national Democratic Party, and it gained materialbenefits for its members that all but erased the economic distinction betweenworking-class and middle-class America.In the depths of the Great Depression, March 1933, anxious depositors line upoutside of a New York bank. The new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt,had just temporarily closed the nation’s banks to end the drain on thebanks’ reserves. Only those banks that were still solvent were permittedto reopen after a four-day “bank holiday.”T U R M O I L A N DCHANGEA P I C T U R E P R O F I L EFor the United States, the 20th century was a period of extraordinaryturmoil and change. In these decades, the nation endured the worsteconomic depression in its history; emerged triumphant, with theAllies, in World War II; assumed a role of global leadership in thecentury’s twilight conflict known as the Cold War; and underwent aremarkable social, economic, and political transition at home. Whereonce the United States transformed itself over the slow march ofcenturies, it now seemed to reinvent itself almost by decades.228 229