Credit: Image donated by Corbis-Bettmann
In the early 1930s, the United Mine Workers, led by John L. Lewis (2nd from the right) and UMW vice president Thomas Kennedy (far right) led an aggressive campaign to organize the Pennsylvania coal mines. (W.W. Inglis, President of the Glen Alden Coal Company, and A.J. Maloney, President of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company, are on the left.) Soon after this photo was taken, Pennsylvania's soft coal miners again went out on strike against the W. C. Frick Company–a subsidiary of U. S. Steel–and in the process threatened to shut down Pennsylvania's steel mills. Distressed by the AFL's failure to assist miners and other unorganized industries, Lewis in 1935 would break from the AFL and organize the CIO. In 1934, Kennedy was elected the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania.
