John Brophy, 1883-1963.

Throughout his life John Brophy (1883-1963) supported organized labor as a miner, union activist, and union official. As a youngster he emigrated from England to the United States in 1892 with his parents. Born and reared by a union supporting coal miner, Brophy entered the mines with his father as a teenager in 1894 and joined the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) in 1899. An activist in the union, he was elected president of District #2, representing Central Pennsylvania, in 1916. As a member of the Nationalization Research Committee in the early 1920s he vigorously supported the nationalization of the mining industry. Brophy maintained his position as President of UMWA District #2 until 1926 when he challenged John L. Lewis for the Presidency of the UMWA. After opposing and losing to Lewis in 1926, he was expelled from the union on charges of dual unionism. In 1933 Brophy returned to organized labor in an official capacity when UMWA President John Lewis brought him back into the UMWA bureaucracy. Brophy then quickly became an important figure in the national office of the Committee for Industrial Organizations (CIO) after Lewis, Sidney Hillman, and other AFL leaders formed the industrial union federation in 1935. He worked as the CIO's first National Director from 1935-1938 and as the Director of Industrial Union Councils and Director of Industrial Unions. After the merger of the AFL and CIO in 1955 Brophy continued to work in the national AFL-CIO office as a trouble shooter and with the Community Services Department. He also served on the Advisory Committee on Civil Defense Administration for the United States Department of Labor. Brophy finished a draft of an autobiographical manuscript that was later edited and rewritten with the help of John Hall and published as John Brophy: miner's life, (1964), a year after Brophy died in 1963.