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Well, I don't know if it's the key to him or not. Maybe something else is. But this is what he thought it was. Not the key to him, but what he thought was the determining pattern that he had seen. He was not ashamed of this, remember. He had no sense that it was an improper thing for him to want power. He wanted power because he wanted it for the good of the workers, you see, and he was going to have just as much power and the same kind of power that George L. Baer had. You have to be tough, and you have to insist.” George L. Baer never asked how people were gotten rid of,” John L. Lewis said to me once. Lewis never asked what had become of people that were in his way. They were swept out of his way. He ruined a man like that, and tossed him out, if he had any weakness towards the miners' position. This was what he said was what had determined his attitude. It was one of the factors, and probably the principal factor, in determining him to be --as he put it--“as good as George L. Baer.”
I remember being somewhat astonished at the time that a man of his intelligence had had so little philosophical background, or so little philosophical conception of what George L. Baer's place in the universe was, so that he could think it a model. Not a worthy model, but a model that had got to be followed if you were to come to grips with your aspect of life.
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