Appalachian Figures
Jenkins miner to CIO vice president
In 1904 a boy was born in the brand new coal town of Jenkins in Letcher County, Kentucky. Half a century later that same boy, John Vernon Riffe, sat in Washington as executive vice president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, one of the highest offices in American labor.
Newspaper obituaries, congressional tributes, and union records agree on the broad outline. Riffe was born in Jenkins on 15 March 1904, went to work in the mines as a teenager, rose through the United Mine Workers, helped organize the steel industry, directed the CIO’s southern campaign known as Operation Dixie, and finished his life as a controversial labor statesman who embraced the Moral Re Armament religious movement.
This is an Appalachian story. The man who negotiated with steel barons and testified before Congress began as a miner’s son in a Letcher County camp and carried the coalfields with him into every fight.
Born in a Letcher County coal town
Company engineers began laying out Jenkins in 1911 for Consolidation Coal. Within a few years it had mines, rows of company houses, and a population drawn from across the southern mountains. That is where genealogical records place the birth of John Vernon Riffe on 15 March 1904. Both FamilySearch indexes of Indiana records and collaborative family trees for “John Vernon Riffe (1904–1958)” list Jenkins, Letcher County, as his birthplace and later repeat that detail on World War II draft and marriage entries.
A short biographical sketch from the Moral Re Armament archives fills in the texture of his early years. It describes Riffe as born in Jenkins, the son of a poor mountain farmer, and notes that he went into the local coal mine at fourteen, first as a trapper boy working ventilation doors and then as a mule driver hauling cars.
Within two years he had joined the United Mine Workers of America and, remarkably, was elected president of his local at sixteen, according to later summaries by labor historian Gary Fink and biographer William Grogan.
Those details matter for Jenkins. They place an Appalachian teenager at the center of one of the most important labor movements of the twentieth century and show that union leadership in the CIO era sometimes started not in big city headquarters but in coal camps along narrow Eastern Kentucky creeks.
Coalfield education in the United Mine Workers
Riffe’s first education in organizing came in the union hall and the patch. By 1933 he was working full time as a United Mine Workers organizer based in West Virginia, a promotion that Grogan’s biography and later reference works treat as his formal entry into national union work.
These were the years of what historians now call the “coal wars” in the central Appalachians. The Battle of Evarts in nearby Harlan County erupted in 1931, and the union drives that followed pitted coal companies, private guards, and sheriffs against miners who demanded contracts and safety protections. Riffe came of age in that world of picket lines, tent colonies, and company deputies, and it left a deep mark on his later insistence that industrial workers deserved both a voice on the job and a measure of dignity at home.
The United Mine Workers eventually split from the CIO, an episode documented in convention minutes and contemporary accounts. A 1942 report on the UMW’s decision to withdraw from the CIO prints a formal statement signed by organizers including “John V. Riffe, Assistant Director,” showing him already working near the line where coal and steel organizing overlapped.
From coal to steel
In 1936 Riffe moved from the coalfields into the new Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), the CIO’s main instrument for unionizing basic steel.
There he stepped onto a larger stage. Secondary scholarship and contemporary newspapers place him in some of the fiercest battles of the late 1930s and early 1940s. During the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre outside Republic Steel’s South Chicago plant, police fired on SWOC picketers. Accounts of the incident note that organizers, including Riffe, were among those fired upon, a reminder that the danger he had known in the Kentucky mines followed him north to the mill gates.
A 1941 story in the Manchester Evening Herald on a Bethlehem Steel strike identifies “John V. Riffe, SWOC official in charge of the strike,” and quotes him on picketing plans at one Connecticut plant. It shows him not as a distant strategist but as the on the ground official directing a tense standoff between steelworkers and management.
When SWOC evolved into the United Steelworkers of America after World War II, Riffe’s reputation as a tough but capable organizer made him one of the union’s key field men. Later directories of the CIO list him among its national officers, and Grogan’s biography emphasizes his central role in building the steelworkers’ union in mill towns across the Midwest and beyond.
War work and the road to Operation Dixie
During World War II, Riffe served on the Cincinnati Regional War Labor Board, the government panel that mediated disputes in defense plants.
That wartime experience helped prepare him for what came next. In 1946 the CIO launched “Operation Dixie,” a multi state campaign to organize Southern textile mills and other industries. The official guide to the microfilmed CIO Organizing Committee papers shows Riffe first as chief assistant to regional director Van Bittner and later as director of the entire campaign. His name appears again and again in correspondence files with southern publicity directors and local organizers, discussing radio scripts, leaflets, staff assignments, and strike strategy.
The work was dangerous. A historian of Operation Dixie notes that Riffe, as head of the CIO’s Southern Organizing Committee, was “brutally beaten and almost killed” during one field trip in the South.
Those assaults were of a piece with attacks on other CIO organizers in the region, especially when they tried to build interracial unions. Scholars such as William P. Jones have shown that Operation Dixie’s limited success came partly from the violence and the power of Jim Crow, which made it hard for Black workers and poor whites to act together.
For an Appalachian son like Riffe, the southern drive was not just another assignment. It took him into cotton mill towns and tobacco warehouses that in some ways echoed the coal camps of his youth, and it forced him to balance militant economic demands with a growing interest in religious language and moral reform.
Religion speaks to labor
By the late 1940s and early 1950s, reporters and church writers were as likely to mention Riffe’s faith as his bargaining skills. An Episcopal newspaper feature titled “Religion Speaks to Labor” described “tall, genial John V. Riffe,” a seasoned union leader who now directed the CIO’s Organizing Committee and spoke often about the connection between Christian conviction and workers’ rights.
At roughly the same time, legal and political struggles on the American left sometimes flowed through his Washington office. A law school case narrative on “The Legless Veteran” notes that James Kutcher, a disabled Second World War veteran and socialist, sought help by writing to “Mr. John V. Riffe, Executive Vice President, CIO, 718 Jackson Pl., N.W., Washington, D.C.,” seeing him as a potential ally in a fight over civil liberties and employment.
These glimpses show how widely known his name had become beyond Appalachia. Miners, steelworkers, clergy, lawyers, and radicals alike viewed him as one of the people who might intervene when systems failed.
Executive vice president of the CIO
In 1953, after the death of previous officeholder Allan Haywood, CIO president Walter Reuther and other leaders chose Riffe as executive vice president of the federation. Contemporary union directories list him in that role alongside other top officers, and both the House and Senate honored him under that title after his death.
At that point he was not simply a staff organizer. He was part of a small inner circle that had to manage jurisdictional disputes among unions, deal with Cold War political pressures, and guide the CIO toward its eventual merger with the American Federation of Labor.
The CIO leadership of the early 1950s was fiercely anti Communist. In their study Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions, Stepan Norris and Zeitlin note that Riffe, as executive vice president, was among those who regarded unions like the United Packinghouse Workers as “Communist dominated” and supported efforts to isolate or discipline left led organizations.
This stance made him a respected figure among anti Communist liberals but a deeply controversial one among radicals who believed the CIO had turned its back on some of its most militant organizers.
Moral Re Armament and controversy
During these same years, Riffe experienced what he and his friends described as a religious conversion. He became an enthusiastic supporter of Moral Re Armament (MRA), a Christian movement that stressed personal moral change and reconciliation as the basis for social reform.
Moral Re Armament’s own short biography of him emphasizes that he and his family embraced the movement’s message of confession and reconciliation and that he saw it as a way to heal divisions in industry.
Some of Riffe’s statements in this period were dramatic. A 1955 article in the Atlanta Daily World covering an MRA gathering in Georgia reported that he told listeners he had recently turned over his bank account to support the movement’s work.
Critics saw this turn toward religious revivalism as a distraction from union democracy. Historians of American anticommunism have used Riffe as an example of a labor leader whose enthusiasm for MRA was part of a broader effort to combat Communism in the unions with a blend of patriotic and religious rhetoric.
For Appalachian readers, the shift is perhaps less surprising. A man raised in a coal camp where tent revivals and union meetings often shared the same hillsides could easily imagine that moral renewal and industrial justice belonged together, even if others disagreed.
Family life, records, and an early death
Behind the politics was a family that still pointed back to Jenkins. A Geni family tree and related genealogical compilations identify his parents, spouse, and several children, including a son, Estes Vernon Riffe, born in Jenkins in 1932.
By the time of the Second World War, however, Riffe was spending much of his time in the Midwest and on the road. Indiana marriage indexes and World War II draft registration cards show a “John Vernon Riffe,” born in Jenkins on 15 March 1904, residing in Indiana, further confirming the trail from the Letcher County coal town to his later organizing base.
He did not live to see old age. On 7 January 1958 John V. Riffe died in Arlington, Virginia, at just fifty three. The Atlanta Daily World ran his obituary under a headline describing him as a famous labor leader and noted again that he had been born in Jenkins and had started work in the Kentucky coal mines at fourteen.
In Washington, members of Congress took to the floor to memorialize him. On 14 January 1958 Representative George P. Miller of California introduced tributes in the House under the heading “John V. Riffe,” praising him as a leader of miners and steelworkers. Two days later Senator H. Alexander Smith of New Jersey added his own remarks in the Senate, emphasizing that Riffe had served as the last executive vice president of the CIO before its merger into the AFL CIO.
Those speeches, printed in the Congressional Record, placed the name of a Jenkins miner alongside the great national debates of the day.
Why John V. Riffe’s story matters in Appalachia
John V. Riffe’s life is not simple to celebrate. He was an early union organizer from the Appalachian coalfields who took bullets and beatings in the struggle to win contracts for miners and steelworkers. He was also part of a national leadership that helped purge Communist and left led unions from the CIO and that sometimes put Cold War loyalty tests ahead of rank and file democracy. He preached reconciliation through Moral Re Armament at the same time that Black workers in the South were asking for a more radical challenge to Jim Crow.
To tell his story is to remember that the coal camps did not just send men to the mines. They also sent them to union halls, war boards, congressional galleries, and, in Riffe’s case, to a sixth floor office in Washington where decisions affecting millions of workers were made by a miner’s son from Jenkins.
Sources and further reading
FamilySearch, compiled profile “John Vernon Riffe (1904–1958),” drawing on Indiana marriage indexes and the “Indiana, World War II Draft Registration Cards, 1940–1947” collection that list his birth as 15 March 1904 in Jenkins, Letcher County, Kentucky.FamilySearch+1
Geni, “John Vernon Riffe (1904–1958)” family tree, providing parents, spouse and children, with Jenkins as his birthplace and an Arlington, Virginia death in 1958, including mention of son Estes Vernon Riffe.Geni
Operation Dixie: The CIO Organizing Committee Papers, 1946–1953 (microfilm), guide describing extensive correspondence files under “John V. Riffe” for the Southern Organizing Committee, especially the North Carolina publicity department records.ProQuest+1
United Mine Workers of America convention correspondence, including a wartime document reproducing a letter signed “John V. Riffe, Assistant Director,” at the time of the UMW’s withdrawal from the CIO.Marxists Internet Archive+1
“Picked Police Guard Bethlehem’s Plant; No Incidents Today,” Manchester Evening Herald (26 March 1941), quoting “John V. Riffe, SWOC official in charge of the strike,” during a Bethlehem Steel dispute.Manchester Historical Society
Lucy Randolph Mason and CIO religious outreach materials, including the pamphlet Religion Speaks to Labor and an Episcopal newspaper article that described “tall, genial John V. Riffe” as director of the CIO Organizing Committee.Archives of the Episcopal Church+1
James Kutcher, “The Case of the Legless Veteran,” and related summaries in Revolutionary Principles and Working Class Democracy, reproducing a letter addressed to “Mr. John V. Riffe, Executive Vice President, CIO, 718 Jackson Pl., N.W., Washington, D.C.”Users+1
“Mr. Riffe, Famous Labor Leader Dies in Washington,” Atlanta Daily World, 10 January 1958, obituary noting his birth in Jenkins, early coal mine work, and status as last executive vice president of the CIO.Georgia Historic Newspapers
Congressional Record, House of Representatives, 14 January 1958, Extensions of Remarks under the heading “John V. Riffe,” and Congressional Record, Senate, 16 January 1958, memorial statements by Senator H. Alexander Smith.Congress.gov+1
“John Riffe – US Steelworkers’ leader,” For A New World (Moral Re Armament / Initiatives of Change biographical sketch), emphasizing his Jenkins origins, early mine work, union career, and religious conversion.For A New World
Moral Re Armament Records finding aid, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, listing correspondence and files under “Riffe, John V.” in the 1950s.Library of Congress Handle+1
“The Worldwide Legacy of Frank Buchman,” For A New World booklet that briefly references Riffe and his family in the context of MRA’s postwar work.For A New World
William Grogan, John Riffe of the Steelworkers: American Labor Statesman (New York: Coward McCann, 1959), full length biography of Riffe’s life from Jenkins childhood through CIO leadership and Moral Re Armament involvement.Biblio+2Lorne Bair Rare Books+2
Gary Fink, “John V. Riffe,” in Biographical Dictionary of American Labor (Greenwood, 1984), concise scholarly profile used as a standard reference.Wikipedia
Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955 (University of North Carolina Press, 1995), especially chapters on postwar CIO politics and Riffe’s role in Operation Dixie and Moral Re Armament.Libcom Files+1
Barbara S. Griffith, The Crisis of American Labor: Operation Dixie and the Defeat of the CIO (Temple University Press, 1988), a detailed analysis of the southern campaign that makes extensive use of Riffe’s correspondence.JSTOR+2Internet Archive+2
Judith Stepan Norris and Maurice Zeitlin, Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions (Cambridge University Press, 2002), discussing Riffe as part of the CIO’s anti Communist leadership in the 1950s.Libcom Files+1