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and so forth. I think there's a little more of it today than there used to be twenty years ago.

At any rate, John L. Lewis once told me, and somebody else confirmed it--he told me himself in some conversation in which he was philosophizing and reminiscing--that George L. Baer was what he had seen as a boy as representing power, success, the determination of the terms and conditions of his own and other people's lives, and that George L. Baer was this kind of a person. He strutted around with arrogance, and he had what he wanted by ordering it. He insisted upon it. He lived magnificently, and he did himself up in fine shape. As a boy he, John L. Lewis, took a vow that he would be like George L. Baer someday. And he had patterned himself on George L. Baer, the coal magnate. John L. Lewis saw him as the totally successful person. When Lewis was a boy, there was the dominating figure in the whole coal and other industries. Lewis saw him, of course, strictly from the angle of the coal miner in Southern Illinois.

He had the power to say “yes” and “no”, and it was done. Lewis determined to have that power to say “yes” and “no” and it should be done.

Is that the key to John L. Lewis--the drive for power?