... unions that welcomed all the workers in an industry now challenged the older unionism of skilled workers in a particular trade, represented by the American Federation of Labor (AFL). In 1936 John L. Lewis, head of the United mineworkers of America (UMWA), left the AFL to organize a labor federation based on industrial unionism. He founded the Committee for Industrial Organizations, later known as the ... ...
... to accept government help, optimistically believing that better days were ahead. Some moved out of the plains, running from not only drought but from the new machine-controlled agriculture. As John Steinbeck wrote in the bestseller The Grapes of Wrath, "it was not nature that broke the people-they could handle the drought. It was business farming, seeking a better return on ... family. Ultimately though, as Worster writes, the effect of the magnetic outward pull of the capitalistic ideals was stronger than the principals of the family. Post-Progressive Conservationists, such as Lewis Gr...
