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“It's perfectly true, but they still have to take account of him. I would ask him.”

We debated for some time whether we would ask him or not, but I finally did. The meeting was getting very large - it was well over eighty by this time - and there was no reason for not having John Lewis. So we put John Lewis's name on the list.

So I invited them all to meet with the Secretary of Labor. Now, the radical thing that I did was to ask Sidney Hillman and Dave Dubinsky, who were heads of independent unions who were not affiliated with the AF of L. All the rest were, of course. AF of L. There wasn't anything else. Of course, we had practically everybody on the Executive Committee of the AF of L invited, that would be natural. The AF of L, of course, had a particular grudge against Hillman and Dubinsky-Hillman in particular. Hillman had broken up an AF of L union in the garment trades in his Chicago strike and trouble with the Hart, Schaffner & Marx outfit, He had broken up a union, which they declared, and always have declared, was a perfectly good union. Of course, he said it was a set of racketeers and no union at all. He broke it up all right and completely.

Among other things that the AF of L had always supported was this union label movement, which was the very