John Brophy was born on November 6, 1883 in St. Helens, Lancashire, England, the son of Patrick Brophy, a coal miner, and of Mary Dagnall. In 1892 the family immigrated to the bituminous coal fields of Pennsylvania, where they endured the hard times of the 1890's.
Brophy supplemented the third-grade education he had received in English Catholic schools with a few years of public schooling in Pennsylvania. Although his self-education continued through a lifetime of assiduous reading, his formal learning ended at the age of twelve, when he joined his father in the mines.
Under the pressure of unemployment as well as the coal operators' blacklist, Brophy spent the next twenty-one years seeking steady work in numerous coal towns, primarily in Pennsylvania, but also in Iowa, Illinois, and Michigan. Having joined the United Mine Workers Union (UMW) in 1899, he won his first union office in 1904.
His growing prominence as a union activist led to the offer of a paid position as an organizer attached to the national office in 1908, but Brophy preferred to remain a rank-and-filer and an official of his local in Nanty Glo, Pennsylvania. Besides tenaciously fighting the coal operators, Brophy challenged the district union leaders whenever he felt they were following an insufficiently militant policy.
As a result he increasingly spoke for the insurgent forces within Central Pennsylvania's District 2 and in 1916 was narrowly elected its president.
Although he was the leader of 40, 000 Pennsylvania bituminous miners, Brophy continued to clash with the union leadership.
In 1922, when Brophy brought out 20, 000 formerly nonunion miners in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, in support of a nationwide strike, he insisted that they be included in any settlement. But Lewis signed an agreement covering only the traditional union properties, and Brophy blamed him for the failure of the newly unionized miners to win a contract after their seventeen-month strike.
Lewis further angered Brophy by refusing to give more than token support to the drive for nationalization of the mines, which Brophy saw as the fundamental solution to the problems of the coal miners.
These and other conflicts led Brophy to challenge Lewis for the UMW presidency in 1926. He called for organization of nonunion coal fields, nationalization of the mines, and support for a labor party. Brophy's "Save the Union" movement attracted the support of progressives, socialists, and Communists.
Brophy was defeated by Lewis, 170, 000 to 60, 000, but vote stealing probably exaggerated the margin of victory. For the next six years Brophy remained active in the opposition to Lewis, even though Lewis had him expelled from the union and the operators' blacklist kept him from working in the mines. Initially his wife supported the family, but later he spent three years as a salesman for the Columbia Conserve Company in Indianapolis, Indiana.
The revival of the UMW in the summer of 1933 with the help of New Deal legislation and depression-sparked militancy put the job of organizing the unorganized, which Brophy had always advocated, on the agenda.
Lewis decided to welcome his old enemy back into the fold to help with that task. At first this meant organizing and lobbying for the UMW, but by 1935, Lewis and Brophy were looking beyond the coal fields to the millions of unorganized industrial workers.
After the 1935 American Federation of Labor convention defeated a resolution backing industrial unionism, dissident unionists under Lewis' leadership formed the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), in Washington, D. C. , with Brophy as the director of organization.
Despite Brophy's success as labor organizer and administrator, his prominence within the CIO declined in the late 1930's. In 1938, Lewis passed over him for the crucial post of CIO secretary and the following year demoted him from national director to director of local industrial unions.
Moreover, in 1940, while Brophy was bedridden for several months with a heart ailment, Lewis had his desk removed from the CIO office. While Brophy attributed his fall from grace to his vigorous opposition to Lewis' isolationism in late 1939 and early 1940, it also seems likely that Lewis was trying to eliminate a possible rival for power and to reduce the influence of leftist sympathizers like Brophy within the CIO.
By the time Brophy was able to return to work, Lewis had resigned the CIO presidency after workers refused to follow his lead in supporting Wendell Willkie for president in the 1940 election. Philip Murray, who replaced Lewis, restored Brophy's office and gave him the more important job of director of industrial union councils.
Although Brophy had himself been the victim of "Red baiting" and had worked with Communists in the 1920's and 1930's, he joined with surprising vigor in the anti-Communist hysteria that gripped the labor movement and the general population in the late 1940's and 1950's.
In declining health, Brophy retired from the CIO in 1961. He died in Falls Church, Virginia.
John Brophy joined the United Mine Workers Union (UMW) in 1899, and in 1904 it was his first winning of the union office. His growing prominence as a union activist led to the offer of a paid position as an organizer attached to the national office in 1908, but Brophy preferred to remain a rank-and-filer and an official of his local in Nanty Glo, Pennsylvania. Consequently, he became the leader of 40, 000 Pennsylvania bituminous miners, and continued to clash with the union leadership. Serving as the "detail man" under Lewis' direction, he played a crucial role in the organizing drives that tripled the size of the labor movement in the 1930's.
John Brophy was deeply religious, and as a devout Catholic and his guiding ideology centered more on the Catholic social activism embodied in Leo XIII's papal encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891.
Although John Brophy shared some of the ideals of reformist socialism, Brophy apparently never joined the Socialist party. He had a conflict with John L. Lewis, who was a Republican, who became national president of the UMW in 1920. The two men contrasted sharply in appearance and style.
During the war, though, Brophy devoted much of his time to service on the War Labor Board. After the war he became a key figure in the fight against Communists in the CIO.
For most of his life Brophy had fought for progressive trade unionism, and on balance he was, as labor historian Philip Taft wrote shortly after his death, "a representative of the best type of unionist of the last generation. "
Quotations: In a wide range of industries--auto, rubber, steel, electrical products, maritime, shoes, lumber--Brophy's long trade union experience proved invaluable to workers struggling for union recognition. "In most cases, " Brophy recalled in his autobiography, "it was an undramatic routine of meetings, letters, and occasional personal contacts, with me in the role of adviser--arguing, persuading, or just giving encouragement to the men in the field. "
Friends and acquaintances invariably described Brophy as gentle, kindly, unassuming, and good-humored. Lewis and Brophy differed in trade union policy as well as personality.
On August 13, 1918, Brophy married Anita Anstead; they had two children.
