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couldn't reach a conciliator, then I, of course, thought up the principle of reporting, which I would have assumed had been going on. I wouldn't have thought of asking them, “How do you get your reports?” I just assumed they had them.

So with the passage of 7(a) of the NRA, several of the unions took a great chance on an organizing drive. John L. Lewis was one of them. Within forty-eight hours of the signing of the NRA, he had posters out in every mining community. Way back in the '20s he had entered into the Jacksonville Agreement. That was an agreement that he made that had the effect of breaking up the union. That agreement had raised the rates so high that it put the high- cost mines out of operation and did great damage to the membership, as well as to the coal industry, although the low-cost mines always like it because they had pushed the high-cost mines out of the picture. It's in the high-cost mines that a great many of the men work. Perhaps the largest proportion work in those because they haven't got the benefits of machinery and so forth and have to hire more men.

The combination of the Jacksonville Agreement and the depression had resulted in a terrible reduction in members of the United Mine Workers. I don't know that the figures were ever published, but the number of persons who were bona fide members was very small. I don't think Lewis let anybody