Scope and Content Note
The papers of Lewis Graham Hines (1888-1960) span the years 1916-1959, with the bulk of the material concentrated in 1939-1956. The collection consists of Family Correspondence, General Correspondence, Speeches and Writings File, Subject File, Miscellany, and Oversize Scrapbooks.
Lewis Hines was a union representative and public servant who became the first official from organized labor to head Pennsylvanias Department of Labor and Industry. Appointed by Governor Arthur Horace James to the directorship in 1939, Hines came to his task with six years of experience as a government strike mediator and two years as administrator of the Pennsylvania Division of the United States Employment Service. Hines was a political maverick who supported Republican candidates for election during the New Deal and then switched to Harry S. Truman in the presidential campaign of 1948. In 1943 he returned to the American Federation of Labor, where he had worked from 1933 to 1939, first as a representative and then as organizer and assistant to the national president, William Green. He remained with the AFL until his dismissal by George Meany and William Schnitzler after the federations merger with the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1955. As an AFL representative on national legislation during and after the World War II, Hines dealt with issues important to labor, including conscription, production, veterans benefits, wage and price controls, fair labor standards, health insurance, the Taft-Hartley bill, executive reorganization, and internal security. He was appointed to the Advisory Committee on International Development (the Point Four Program), and he served as a member of the Department of Labors Advisory Committee on Farm Labor.
The Hines Papers focus on his professional life after 1925, but are especially strong on Pennsylvania labor politics in the 1930s and early 1940s. They show him dispensing jobs to unemployed veterans in his position with the United States Employment Service, directing revision of the states unemployment compensation laws during his tenure as head of the Department of Labor and Industry, and defending the Republican administration of Governor James against critics within the labor movement. The General Correspondence and Subject File document his career as an administrator. In 1932 he charged Governor Gifford Pinchot with awarding public work jobs to political loyalists, and in the 1938 election he insisted that dissident Pennsylvania labor leaders agree to the national AFLs endorsement of Republican candidates whom they personally opposed. The Subject File demonstrates his leadership of labor organizers supporting Wendell L. Willkie for president in 1940 and his antipathy to John L. Lewis, to the CIO, and to Communism. In files on the Willkie campaign, for instance, are field reports on the impact in Pennsylvania of Lewiss decision to back the same presidential candidate that Hines favored. As secretary of the Department of Labor and Industry, Hines carried his opposition against the CIO to the extent of purging the agency of those members of the unions municipal, county, and state employees affiliate whose names had appeared on petitions urging nomination of Communist Party candidates for state offices. In files labeled “CIO and Communism” Hines kept investigative material collected by the states criminal intelligence division to scrutinize the character and patriotism of CIO loyalists.
Hines's papers for the last fifteen years of his life are derived mainly from his functions as lobbyist for the AFL and the AFL-CIO. While in Washington, Hines attended to various lobbying duties, spoke frequently before labor groups, and appeared before House and Senate committees that dealt with legislation affecting labors interests. As a member of the Point Four committee from 1950 to 1952, he was the recipient of reports and draft materials on international aid that were supplied by the Department of State; and as a member of the Advisory Committee on Farm Labor, he established a substantial file on the conditions of migrant farm workers in the western states. Dealing primarily with the bracero problem and the importation of Japanese, Filipino, and Okinawan laborers, these files contain the official correspondence, minutes, reports, and secondary matter which the Advisory Committee and the United States Section of the Joint United States–Mexico Trade Union Committee forwarded to its representatives.
Hines kept newspaper clippings of his newsworthy activities after the mid-1920s, but with the exception of a scrapbook for 1934 and clippings for the years 1930-1955, most of the newsprint pertains to his term as secretary of labor and industry in Pennsylvania. The Speeches and Writings File is fairly complete in its coverage of Hines's testimony before congressional committees, but is sparse on speeches he gave during his tenure in Arthur Jamess cabinet and offers even less of a record of his many talks on the banquet and convention circuit.
Correspondents include Ray Kelsay, William H. Mostyn, and Gustave A. Luedke of the Metal Polishers, Buffers, Platers and Helpers International Union; Senator James J. Davis of Pennsylvania; William Green, George Meany, and Thomas Mallon of the AFL; James L. McDevitt and David Williams of the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor; Frances Perkins, Robert C. Goodwin, Verne A. Zimmer, and A. F. Heinrichs of the United States Department of Labor; Ernesto Calarza and H. L. Mitchell of the National Agricultural Workers Union; and Cornelius J. Haggerty of the California State Federation of Labor. Other letter writers are Perry S. Melton, Robert P. Lonergan, Arthur Horace James, Nelson Rockefeller, Wendell L. Willkie, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Broadus Mitchell. The collection includes a letter to Hines of 1918 from Thomas J. Mooney defending the credentials of Warren K. Billings as a laboring man and union organizer. The letter is located in a file on the Mooney–Billings case in the Subject File.
The Family Correspondence series consists solely of Hines's letters to and from his son during World War II.