John W. Brown
- The Man

©

orn in Canada in 1867, John W. Brown first became involved in the labor movement when he moved to Maine and took a job as a joiner at the Bath Iron Works. His experiences there convinced him that only through joining forces in unions could workers exert sufficient pressure on their employers to bring about improvements in working conditions and wages.

Before the nineteenth century ended, his commitment to the union movement had led him to become an organizer for the United Brotherhood of Carpenters. Sometime later he went over to the United Mine Workers and played a part in the bloody labor conflicts in Colorado in 1913 and 1914, including the Ludlow Massacre in April 1914 when actions by militiamen employed by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company led to the deaths of twenty-five people, including two women and fourteen children.

In the 1920s he was in the middle of the fight in West Virginia when owners used force against coal miners attempting to organize. Brown believed deeply in the union movement and accepted the inevitability of bitter and often violent conflict; as he put it, "if I have to live under this system I must fight, and one can't fight alone and accomplish anything."

By the early 1930s he had left the United Mine Workers and was living in semi-retirement in Woolwich, Maine. He continued to be active in union affairs, however, and in 1934 he helped establish Local 4 of the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America at the Bath Iron Works where many years earlier he had first become involved in the union movement.

Besides working to organize workers at the Bath Iron Works, Brown served as an advisor to the General Executive Board of the Industrial Union. Perhaps his most significant contribution was his column "Workers Should Know" in the Shipyard Worker, the Industrial Union newspaper. Starting on October 30, 1936, the column appeared regularly through June 20, 1941, the day after Brown died. Through his comments in "Workers Should Know," Brown in effect became a teacher, guide and cheerleader.

His major themes were that since workers are an indispensable part of the production process they should be paid appropriate wages and that since managements will resist paying workers more than they have to, workers must unite to force managements to accept their demands.

Brown's actions during the 1940 presidential election when Frankin D. Roosevelt ran for a third term reveal something of his character. An election in September that the Republican candidate for Congress won by over 70,000 votes had made clear that in November Maine would be solidly for the Republican ticket headed by Wendell Willkie.

Despite the odds, as a committed Democrat and a fighter, Brown "wasn't for handing it to them." He worked hard in what he knew was a losing cause but had the satisfaction of knowing that his efforts helped win Sagadahoc County, his home county, for the Democrats and helped reduce the Republican majority across the state to less than 10,000.

Late in the evening of June 19, 1941, Brown sat on the back door stoop of his house in Woolwich working on his hunting rifle. Somehow it went off in his face, wounding him so severely that he died within the hour.

At the Bath Iron Works at noon the following day a spokesman for the Industrial Union announced Brown's death over the public address system, noting that "He was a great and good man, an outstanding American. His spirit still lives on, and John Brown will remain an immortal in the ranks of American labor."