Green was born on March 3, 1873 in Coshocton, Ohio, the son of Hugh and Jane Oram Green. A coal miner in England, Hugh Green and his wife, who came from a Welsh mining family, migrated to the Ohio coalfields before William's birth. Devout Baptists, the Green family imparted to William a religious and moral code that he carried with him through life.
Poverty forced Green to leave school after the eighth grade, and prevented the boy from studying for the Baptist ministry.
Trade unionism was a shaping family influence. A strong union man in the tradition of Keir Hardy, Hugh Green participated in the Knights of Labor, and then in the Progressive Miners' Union that replaced it in Coshocton. Following his father into the mines at the age of sixteen, William naturally joined this union, which subsequently became Local 273 of the United Mine Workers of America. Green worked in the Coshocton mines until 1908, but he had long before begun a steady march up the ladder of trade-union leadership. He was elected secretary of his local union at eighteen, then treasurer, and finally president, becoming subdistrict president in 1900 and president of the Ohio district in 1906. Not marked by special brilliance or charismatic qualities, Green rose by virtue of his persevering nature and personal decency. A ready joiner, popular among his mates, Green gave efficient and honest service, and he was eager for office. Elected to the Ohio Senate in 1910, he served two terms, the second as Democratic floor leader, and distinguished himself especially as author of the Ohio workmens' compensation law (1911), which became a model bill for other states. In 1909 Green was an unsuccessful reform candidate against UMWA president Tom Lewis, and in 1910 he again ran unsuccessfully for international secretary-treasurer. He was then appointed union statistician after his friend John P. White assumed the presidency. In 1913 Green was elected secretary-treasurer of the UMWA, and for the next eleven years he immersed himself happily in administrative tasks, safely insulating himself from the factional wars during the turbulent reigns of the alcoholic Frank Hayes and the imperious young John L. Lewis. At this point, luck took a hand. When president White was elected to the executive council of the American Federation of Labor in 1913, he refused the appointment, and the executive council, anxious to have representation from the powerful and disaffected Miners, turned to the UMWA secretary-treasurer. Green thankfully accepted the honor. Green did not make enemies; he had accumulated the seniority - he was third vice-president by 1924 - greatly valued in the labor movement; and he had the backing of John L. Lewis and the Miners. For all the public eminence accruing to it, the AFL presidency did not confer much real power on its incumbent. Green could not hope to fill Gompers' shoes, although years of steadfast service had measurably increased his standing. But Green did fully understand, as Gompers had before him, what the labor movement expected of him: careful respect for its institutional rules and loyal adherence to the reigning labor ideology. The Miners' progressive tradition had shaped Green's social views. On becoming AFL president, however, Green embraced the voluntarism of his predecessor. The Great Depression soon forced organized labor to turn to the government for aid, and Green did so also, but in step with the conservative mainstream rather than in the vanguard. Thus Green opposed unemployment insurance in 1930-1931, and in 1932 reluctantly reversed himself only as opinion shifted within the Federation. Green had initially favored Hoover's program for voluntary stabilization of wages and employment, and, when this failed, advocated the Black bill for a thirty-hour week. As the AFL's principal lobbyist and public spokesman, Green played an active role during the New Deal, helping to shape the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933), the National Labor Relations Act (1935), and social security and relief legislation. He consistently worked to reconcile the expansion of governmental activity with the AFL's libertarian traditions and with its vested interests. On organizational policy, too, Green's past had to be accommodated to his official responsibilities. It was largely through Green's efforts that the AFL launched an organizing drive in the auto industry in 1926. Adopting a conciliatory strategy that stressed labor's patriotism and efficiency, Green hoped to win from open-shop employers the acceptance that could not be wrested from them by force. Despite some encouragement from the Republican administration, industry rejected his overtures. Discouraged by this response and stirred by labor's suffering in the depression, Green took a more aggressive line in 1933, once Section 7A of the Wagner Act had granted workers the right to organize. Green recognized - as, indeed, he had in 1926 - that newly organized mass-production workers could not be readily divided up among a variety of unions. To skirt the jurisdictional problem, Green proposed to organize these men temporarily into federal labor unions, which came directly under AFL control. The organizing drives of 1933-1934 made considerable headway in the mass-production fields, but ultimately foundered. Green's resources were too slender; the open-shop resistance was too fierce. His efforts to maintain control over the new unions roused rank-and-file discontent, and the craft unions became more insistent on having immediate access to the men of their trades. This failure plunged the AFL into a deep crisis. The labor progressives, led by John L. Lewis, demanded more vigorous organizing action on an industrial union basis. When his pleas were rebuffed at the 1935 convention, Lewis proceeded to set up the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The stiff reaction of the AFL, leading to suspension of the dissident unions inside of a year, pushed the CIO, whatever its original intention, toward independence and ultimately, in 1938, to the formal creation of a rival labor movement. For Green, this was personally painful, resulting as it did in a bitter break with John L. Lewis and expulsion from the UMWA. Although basically sympathetic to the industrial unionists, he aligned himself with the craft-union majority, with whose legalistic assessment of the CIO challenge he agreed, and acted as that faction's spokesman in the dispute. For the remainder of his career, the AFL-CIO rivalry haunted Green. While his desire for a reconciliation was certainly genuine, he was incapable of bridging the differences, although these steadily narrowed after 1941, and at his death the two movements remained apart. The departure of the progressive elements left the conservatives in firm command of the AFL and, by the same token, with a firm hold on Green's loyalties. Himself a lifelong Democrat, Green adhered to Gompers' nonpartisan policy in the face of mounting pressure during the 1930's. The AFL managed to hew to its traditional political line despite the movement of the rival CIO, through Labor's Nonpartisan League, into active alliance with the Democratic party. Only the intensifying reaction against labor's new power during the 1940's forced a significant departure from nonpartisanship. After the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, the AFL set up Labor's League for Political Education to mobilize its political resources, but still along nonpartisan lines. With Green's active approval, the AFL did not endorse Harry Truman in 1948. Only in 1952 did the Federation finally make a break with the past by giving its endorsement to Adlai Stevenson. The 1940's witnessed a steady liberalization of the Federation's social program. Little, however, was accomplished in the direction of internal reform. While publicly deploring union racketeering and racial discrimination, Green took the position that the Federation lacked the authority to enforce reforms on the autonomous national unions. Green was also fully in accord with the militant anti-Communism of the AFL. Opposed to recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933, critical of the CIO for harboring Communists, Green remained a vigilant anti-Communist even during the common-front days of World War II. In 1944 the Federation began to assist, through its Free Trade Union Committee, the rebuilding of non-Communist labor movements in war-torn Europe. This unprecedented venture, which led to the permanent overseas involvement of the AFL, was not Green's idea, but his initial hesitation gave way to active support. In December 1949 he participated in the London conference that set up the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and marked the end of the AFL's historic isolation from the international labor movement. In these last years, the institutional loyalty that was Green's hallmark could not keep him abreast of the winds of change sweeping through the AFL. Green died November 21, 1952, at 79 in Coshocton, Ohio. He was buried in South Lawn Cemetery.
Green is best remembered as the president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) from 1924 to 1952. He was a strong supporter for labor-management co-operation and was on the frontline for wage and benefit protections and industrial unionism legislation. As president of the AFL, he continued the development of the federation away from the foundations of "pure and simple unionism" to a more politically active "social reform unionism. "
On April 14, 1892, Green married Jennie Mobley of Coshocton; they had six children.
