Reckoning

by David Halberstam

  Anna Stocker Reuther, also born in Germany (she and Val had met at a workingmen’s tavern in Wheeling, where he delivered the beer and she worked in the kitchen), was a strong woman, an earnest member of the Lutheran Church. Val Reuther put his energy into the politicization of his children, but his wife was equally determined that their moral fiber be worthy of their political idealism. After her husband left the church, Anna Reuther continued to take her five children to services. Val, in order not to lose political control of his boys, began to question them about what the minister had said. Soon these informal sessions grew into a Sunday debating society. Brother was pitted against brother. Their father assigned the topics—women’s suffrage, pacifism, socialism, military spending—and the boys went off to the library and prepared all week for the coming disputation. Their father was timekeeper, moderator, judge. It was serious business, in effect a Reuther family town hall. Years later, as they debated opponents during the industrial struggles in Detroit, they were well trained in the art of thinking on their feet.

  It was a home with very little in the way of material things. Flour sacks, bleached out, became pillowcases, sugar sacks became underclothes. The soap was made at home out of fat drippings and lye. When young Walter used a new umbrella as a parachute and ruined it, Anna Reuther promptly turned it into a black waterproof shirt. There were prayers before every meal, and there was music after dinner. Later as the family prospered a bit, the boys wanted an indoor toilet. Val protested. Finally a compromise was reached; the toilet was located indoors but just off the back porch. Val did well as a representative of a brewery, but during Prohibition West Virginia voted dry, and he lost his job. The family for a time took in boarders. At one point Walter and his brother Roy raised chickens in order to sell eggs and thus augment the family income. Since big eggs were in far greater demand than small eggs, the boys—with what was to be typical Reuther thoroughness—wrote to the West Virginia farm extension service asking about feed that would create bigger eggs. Back came sound advice. Soon the Reuther chickens began to produce bigger eggs; thus encouraged, the boys continued to experiment with feed. The eggs got bigger and bigger until finally the chickens started to die because they could not lay their own giant eggs.

  Walter Reuther was a child of the modern industrial century. He was born in 1907, one year before the invention of the Model T. It was a time when the average workingman was utterly powerless, when the political and judicial structure of the society was largely the instrument of the proprietary class. It was harder to break out of class in those days. For people as poor as the Reuthers, sending one’s children to college was almost unthinkable, and Walter was virtually self-educated. (Almost all his contemporaries in the UAW leadership were men who had never been to college but were voracious readers.) Young Walter Reuther dropped out of high school in his junior year and went to work for Wheeling Steel as an apprentice tool-and-die maker. He earned 11 cents an hour. Eventually he was fired for leading a protest movement. His career, he realized, as befit a son of Valentine Reuther, was more likely to be as an organizer of workers than as a worker himself. Organizing was his passion and his talent. In 1927, as was probably inevitable, he migrated to Detroit. He was nineteen and a skilled tool-and-die maker, and if any city was a magnet for a bright ambitious young organizer, it was the Detroit of the mid-twenties.

  There the storm was gathering. Detroit had been an industrial center for some twenty years, and the owners, mainly through the use of spies and bully boys, had successfully resisted any intrusion by labor; there were perhaps 500,000 men working in some way or another for the auto industry, and none of them belonged to a union. It was the classic company town. The pay, once deemed good, was now poor, and the working conditions were horrible. Workers were deprived of the most elemental kind of dignity. It was an owner-worker relationship of contempt on the one hand and fear and hatred on the other. The companies and the judges and the police were all on the same side; if workers attempted to picket and company thugs attacked them, the police stood idly by and watched. But the times were changing. The New Deal had not yet arrived, but the forces that were to energize it were already coming together. The anger and the frustration and the bitterness were there. Too much money was being made off too much labor under too harsh conditions with too little going to the workers themselves. The exploitation had not dimmed the hopes of the workers, it had simply raised their consciousness. The companies themselves were growing more and more repressive; some executives sensed that the protest feeling was becoming stronger all the time.

  Given the strength of the companies, the task of the union organizer seemed impossible. The companies were all-powerful, they had vast resources, spies, complete control of the government matrix. But the sheer numbers of the workers had a force of their own, and their resentment was manifest. This was not some small company town where, despite the absence of modern labor relations, there was at least a measure of paternalism on the part of the owner. This was the cruelest kind of modern industrial setting, of speeded-up production lines, of brutal foremen, and not even a glimmer of protection for workers in hard times. Just as a harsh right-wing dictatorship often begets a harsh left-wing successor, the sheer strength of the big companies, their truculence, their determination to fight off all union incursions, meant that they would undoubtedly create—as if in their reverse image—a powerful, adversarial, industry-wide union.

  Walter Reuther worked briefly at the Briggs body shop, where working conditions were so bad that it was known as the Slaughterhouse, and then left to work at Ford. As an able and experienced diemaker, he was earning as much as $1.40 an hour at a time when unskilled production-line workers were making $4 a day (in a company that had once prided itself on its $5-a-day wage). While he worked he finished high school and started Detroit City College (later Wayne State). In an application for membership in a high school civics club he wrote: “I realize that to do something constructive in life, one must have an education. I seek knowledge that I may serve mankind.” He was working at Ford when the Depression struck. No city in the country was harder hit by the utter collapse of the economy. Jobs disappeared overnight by the tens of thousands, nor was there the frailest kind of social mechanism to ease the workers’ fierce plight. To Walter Reuther, joined now by his younger brother Victor, what had happened was a confirmation of everything he had always heard in his home. Like many in that era, he became radicalized by the experience. In the 1932 election he spoke actively for Norman Thomas, who was running on the Socialist ticket. He joined the radical autoworkers’ union. He was soon fired from Ford and was always convinced that the reason for his firing was his political activity both inside and outside the plant.

  Rather than wait around Detroit cursing the darkness, Walter and Victor Reuther took their savings, $900, and set off on a trip around the world, which took them through Nazi Germany and then to an auto factory in Gorki, in the Soviet Union, where they worked under desperately primitive conditions with Russian workers for a year. They felt immense sympathy for the Russian workers and had few illusions about the grim Soviet system. Eventually, in 1935, they returned to Detroit, no longer just young militants but men of the world. The time was ripe. The Detroit they returned to was much the same, and times were if anything harder. But Franklin Roosevelt had been elected President, the New Deal was under way, and for the first time the power of the government was at least neutral in industrial disputes. Roosevelt said that if he were a workingman, he would join a union; that had an electrifying effect upon union organizers, and the workers were emboldened. National sentiment was with them. In the previous year, 1934, GM had made a profit of $94.9 million while the average worker had earned only $1100. The raw human energy that had been accumulating in industrial cities like Detroit for some twenty years was finally emerging as a political force. Not only was the President of the United States sympathetic to workers, as his predecessor had not been, the new governor of Michigan, Frank Murphy, elected in 1936,
was also more sympathetic than his predecessor. Union activities that in earlier days would have been crushed were now condoned. At the same time the Reuthers and their colleagues devised new techniques, such as the sit-down strike, in which the workers would, on a signal, take over a plant and barricade themselves in, while management, afraid of having its expensive machinery smashed in a battle of force, tried to figure out what to do. It was a heady moment suddenly filled with new possibilities. For the first time union organizers perceived genuine vulnerability on the part of these huge, rich companies. Walter Reuther was perfectly positioned. He had returned to Detroit absolutely determined to organize the production workers. His mission was a family affair, for Victor soon joined him, and another brother, Roy, a gifted organizer, was already in Flint.

  In the fall of 1936, Reuther became the head of Local 174, a small unit on the west side of Detroit. His members worked at several companies, of which, he decided, Kelsey-Hayes was the most vulnerable. It supplied wheels and brake drums for Ford. He had Victor take a job at Kelsey-Hayes as a punch-press operator. The Reuthers, with a few colleagues, worked out their plan. On December 10, 1936, with Victor inside the plant to manage things, the strike began. A woman worker pretended to faint. Victor Reuther then pulled the switch stopping the line. The sit-down strike had begun. Paul Danzig, the company’s personnel director, demanded that the workers return to their jobs. Only Walter Reuther can make them do that, replied Victor Reuther. Danzig phoned Walter Reuther demanding that he end the strike. At Reuther’s suggestion, Danzig sent a car for him, and Reuther soon arrived in it, got up on a platform, and immediately started to make an organizing speech.

  “What the hell is this?” Danzig asked. “You’re supposed to tell them to go back to work.”

  “I can’t tell them to do anything,” Reuther answered, “until I get them organized.”

  In the end Kelsey-Hayes turned into a considerable victory for the UAW and for the Reuthers. Grudgingly, management came around; it accepted the union and granted an hourly wage of 75 cents an hour, double what men had been getting and more than triple what women had received. Reuther’s Local 174, which had entered the Kelsey-Hayes strike as a fledgling unit of under a hundred members, grew immediately to three thousand; within a year, with the skills of all three Reuthers behind it, its membership was over thirty-five thousand. Walter Reuther was thirty years old at the time. He had proved himself an effective leader, a man with both a larger vision and the small, bureaucratic, tactical skills needed to realize it. He had taken a minor local on the west side of Detroit and turned it into a power base.

  An even bigger struggle was shaping up at virtually the same time in Flint, a GM company town, where 80 percent of the families were dependent on that firm. There the union leadership planned a major attempt to organize one of the mightiest companies in the world. Reuther’s part in the Flint strike was small, although both of his brothers were actively involved. The strike was supposed to take place sometime in 1937, but when Frank Murphy was elected governor, the leaders could no longer control the workers, and the workers themselves, their rage no longer bearable, went out on December 30, 1936. The company, with numerous spies on the payroll, was ready. Wyndham Mortimer, a high UAW official, had barely checked into his hotel when the phone rang and a voice said, “You’d better go back where you came from, you son of a bitch, or we’ll take you out in a box.” The showdown had begun. A local judge, friendly to GM, issued an injunction demanding that the workers vacate the premises. The UAW’s lawyers checked and found that the judge, in a relationship that was not untypical of the period, owned some $220,000 worth of GM stock. That ended the injunction. Governor Murphy refused to permit the use of force to crush the workers. The company seemed paralyzed.

  The workers and their leaders, accustomed to maneuvering against the odds and around heavy police opposition, now proved to be supple tacticians. Roy Reuther and one of his colleagues, knowing which working men were company spies, leaked to them that their target was Chevrolet Plant Number 9. In fact their target was Chevy Number 4, which manufactured all Chevy engines. They created a distraction at Number 9, faked GM management out, took over Number 4, barricaded themselves in, and thus shut down Chevrolet production. Governor Murphy refused to send in the state troopers. (“I will not go down in history as ‘Bloody Murphy,’” he said.) Roosevelt pressured both sides to make a settlement. “Why can’t these fellows in General Motors meet with the committee of workers?” he asked his Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins. “Talk it all out. They would get a settlement. It wouldn’t be so terrible.” Finally, in early February 1937, GM capitulated. The UAW had won. The union was recognized. An era had ended.

  It was now a time for organizing and, for Walter Reuther, building up influence within the union. The Reuthers were now a force. Smarter than many of their colleagues, more sure of their mission, they—particularly Walter—were rising stars. No one inside the union worked harder, and there were three of them. His brothers tripled Walter’s possibilities. They constituted a wonderful intelligence system and gave him a remarkable capacity to stay in touch with the members. The brothers were great networkers; if a local leader had not been in contact with Walter, then he had surely just talked to either Roy or Victor. It was a faction-ridden union, as success began to come, and the principal danger to the UAW was that it would split apart. But the Reuther brothers systematically strengthened their position. Their ambition and their talent were self-evident, and it was clear to anyone else in the union with ambition that Walter Reuther would not be content for long as the leader merely of a local.

  The Reuthers were attacked from both the right and the left; to the powerful and well-organized Communist faction they were anathema. But they were canny politicians, and no one could cast doubt on their fierce commitment to the union or the purity of their belief. At the 1946 convention their forces outmaneuvered those of R. J. Thomas and won the union presidency for Walter Reuther. Late one night during the convention one of Thomas’s workers grabbed Brendan Sexton, one of Reuther’s men, and pointed to Thomas, who was sitting at the bar with his cronies having a few nightcaps. “Look at that S.O.B.,” the Thomas man said. “Right now Reuther’s upstairs sleeping—but he’ll be on the floor organizing people at six-thirty in the morning when Thomas is still sleeping it off.”

  If there had been any doubt of his position within the union, of his charismatic hold on the average workers, it was ended by two primitive assassination attempts upon him and one against his brother Victor. In the second of the two attempts thugs nearly killed him with a shotgun blast, and when Victor was attacked he lost an eye. The Detroit police did almost nothing, and the UAW officials believed that they were virtually co-conspirators. Joe Rauh, the influential liberal Washington lawyer, asked Attorney General Tom Clark to bring J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI in. Hoover, it turned out, had little sympathy for wounded labor leaders. “He says he’s not going to send the FBI in every time some nigger woman gets raped,” Clark reported back to Rauh. The UAW finally conducted its own investigation: There was no doubt that the assassinations had been carried out by Detroit underworld characters put up to it by anti-union company owners. From then on Reuther had his own security. His mother begged him to give up his union activities. “No, I must do what I’m doing,” he answered. “It’s bigger than I am and we can’t run away from it.”

  He was messianic about the union. For him it was a dream that had been born in Valentine Reuther’s home, an instrument of justice with which to temper an unjust world. It was not just about getting better wages; it was about leading lives of greater dignity. The UAW was not just a union, it was a community, and its job was to make the larger community of which it was a part a more decent, more tolerant place. He believed—as only someone of that generation, who had seen hard times and then the surge of that great, shared, American mass prosperity, could believe—in the attainability of a better society. He was also wary of any competing vision that might
be dangled in front of his workers, and soon after taking over the leadership of the UAW he drove out his old adversaries (and only rarely, for tactical reasons, allies), the Communists.

  Reuther scorned the company executives, with a few exceptions, such as Engine Charley Wilson and Big Bill Knudsen. He didn’t like the politics of either of them, but he respected them for their decency and thought of them as real. He was aware, however, of the vast differences in their lives. “Walter,” Knudsen once told him, “I had a wonderful Sunday yesterday. My children and my grandchildren were all there, and we all played by the pool, and I thought of you because it was so much like a Sunday that a worker would spend with his family.” The story, as far as Reuther was concerned, reflected the innocence of even the most humane of managers. “You know, he’s a nice guy and he meant well,” he told friends, “but can you imagine it, him around his swimming pool thinking he was like one of our workers?” As for the other bosses, it was not that he considered them greedy; his judgment was more severe: He considered them narrow, knowing nothing and caring for nothing beyond their own insular world, accepting no larger obligation. They had power and wealth and yet thought only of themselves and others like them. The UAW, he was sure, would always be different, never like that.