‘The roughest, toughest man in the steelworkers - he could lick any six men,’ was a colleague’s description of John Riffe, who rose to be Executive Vice-President of the CIO. When he entered high office, however, John Riffe had found healing for bitterness, a destiny for labor greater than the class struggle and an ideology to answer Communism. Born in the Kentucky mountains in 1904, the son of a poor farmer, John Riffe became a coal miner at the age of 14. Years of poverty and persecution made him believe that the employer was the mortal enemy of the workers. He became a union organizer for the United Mine Workers, then the Steelworkers, and finally for the CIO. His home life became shadowed by his bitterness and other deep personal problems. In 1952 he was faced with divorce. At this point the Riffes met the world ideology of Moral Re-Armament. John Riffe’s bitterness was healed. His home was remade. He found new motives for his whole life. Called soon afterwards to be Executive Vice-President of the CIO, he lived with one purpose - that labor, united within itself, could become a force for unity in the nation and the world.
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