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the coal operators for the success of the coal industry. It runs to the coal industry rather well--I mean, very well indeed. He foresaw long ago this present decline in coal, you see. And that was one of the reasons--at least, he always said it was one of the reasons--why he was so bold and so aggressive in getting all he could in the way of money in wages and money in what are called fringe benefits, both. He fought for that because, he said, “Coal's a dying industry.”

He said that to me certainly as early as '37 or '38, and it was very farsighted, because although certainly imaginative economists had pointed out that it might be so, it didn't seem to be imminent, you see. Lewis saw it as sufficiently imminent that so that he, within these few years when the going was good, must get money and get it piled up into his hands and get a welfare fund that he could use. Also, he began even then filtering young men and boys out of the industry, urging miners not to put their boys to work in the mines but to get their boys out of the community, get them into something else, send them out of that immediate society and work and so not add any more people onto the payroll.

That talk that Lewis and the President had was of no consequence, but the President, I'm sure, was pleasant and charming. That was that, and Lewis was temporarily satisfied.

Did he ever report back to you on his conference