GREEN, WILLIAM

William Green (March 3, 1870–November 21, 1952) was a labor leader and president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Green was born in Coshocton, Ohio, the son of Hugh Green, a coal miner, and Jane Oram. He completed the eighth grade and aspired to the Baptist ministry, but at fourteen he began work as a water boy for the railroad. Two years later he became his father's helper in the mines, and within a few years he was a skilled pick miner. In 1892 he married Jennie Mobley, daughter of a local miner. In time he fathered six children, and he remained in the mines for nineteen years.

In 1891 Green was elected secretary of his United Mine Workers (UMW) local, and the union movement became the calling he had once sought in the ministry. He was elected president of the Ohio district in 1906. In 1913 miners elected Green UMW national secretary-treasurer, a post he would hold until 1924. Also in 1913, Green was appointed to the powerful AFL executive committee. When AFL president Samuel Gompers died in December 1924, executive council members chose Green to succeed him. Green served as AFL president for the next twenty-eight years.

Although Green was a moralistic man who pursued a policy of peaceful cooperation with employers in the 1920s, the Great Depression clearly proved that his strategy had failed. By 1932, Green's speeches were replete with militant rhetoric about the need for "forceful methods" to bring about full employment. But militancy never suited Green. With rising rank-and-file pressure to seek legislative redress, Green happily assumed his chores as leading lobbyist for labor. His efforts helped to shape and pass many New Deal reforms, including the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933), the National Labor Relations Act (1935), the Social Security Act (1935), and the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938).

When many AFL organizing campaigns during the Depression failed, a rupture developed between conservative craft union leaders, who dominated the AFL executive council, and more militant industrial union advocates. The second group, led by John L. Lewis of the UMW, pushed for aggressive campaigns to organize mass-production workers on an industry wide basis. The defeat of Lewis's resolutions at the 1935 AFL convention and the subsequent rise of the Committee for Industrial Organization (in 1938 to become the Congress of Industrial Organizations, CIO) shaped the remainder of Green's career as a labor official. Green voted with the executive council majority in 1936 to suspend the CIO unions and in 1938 to expel them. For the rest of his life his energies would be consumed by a crusade against the rebel movement. Although he attended peace conferences with the CIO, the two labor federations remained divided until after his death.

By 1939, however, Green's power and influence within the AFL began to decline with the rise of an ambitious George Meany in the post of secretary-treasurer. Green did spearhead a vigorous but unsuccessful campaign to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, but by the time of his death in 1952 he had become a largely forgotten figure.

GREEN, WILLIAM

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