American Vanguard: The United Auto Workers during the Reuther Years, 1935-1970 (review)

In accepting the presidency of the United Auto Workers (UAW) in 1947, Walter Reuther hailed the union as "the vanguard in America in that great crusade to build a better world." John Barnard describes the origins, development, and achievements of the UAW from its inception in 1935 to 1970, the year that Reuther died. Drawing on extensive research in the voluminous UAW collections at the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs in Detroit and the large secondary literature on the union, Barnard offers a judicious, even-handed, and not uncritical assessment of this quintessential industrial union and its commitment to industrial democracy and social justice.

If not quite the leader of the postwar liberal quest for social improvement and equity, the UAW certainly was the pacesetter for union gains that boosted blue-collar workers and their families into the middle class. Barnard devotes nearly half the book to the UAW's history before Walter Reuther became president. Noting that the union "grew from the bottom up and it grew through contact of one worker with another" (103), Barnard evokes the excitement, energy, and democratic impulse of the union's early history. He captures the challenges and triumphs of the sit-down era and the legacy of struggle and success that characterized and shaped the union in the years that followed. In this half of the book, Barnard not only brings to life the rank and file as well as the leadership of the fledgling union, but he also provides an excellent guide to the different ideological and political groups that flourished within the UAW in the 1930s and 1940s. The second half of the book examines Reuther's rise to power and his leadership of the nation's largest industrial union. Promoting "teamwork in the leadership and solidarity in the ranks," Reuther steered the more than one-million-member union toward collective bargaining agreements that significantly improved the quality of life for autoworkers in the United States and Canada. From cost-of-living adjustments and the annual improvement factor that gave workers a share of gains in productivity and profits to vacations and paid holidays to health insurance to early retirement and pension benefits to supplemental unemployment benefits that off set the impact of layoffs and achieved a measure of secure and predictable employment and income, the contracts negotiated by the UAW created in effect a private welfare state. In the 1950s and 1960s, the UAW, says Barnard, "functioned superbly as a bread-and-butter union" (292).

Although sympathetic to the union, Barnard is no apologist. He appraises the union's strengths but also is straightforward about its limitations. Despite the union's commitment to racial equality, Reuther did not make an active campaign for black advance within the union a major priority in the postwar era. Barnard also charges Reuther with stifling dissent and violating the union's civil liberties principles in purging the left from the union. The UAW's deference to the Democratic Party and its failure openly to oppose the war in Vietnam not only denied the union independence but also undermined the reform coalition that Reuther and other auto unionists were dedicated to creating and preserving in the 1960s. On other matters debated by labor scholars, Barnard offers fair-minded analysis. In response to those who criticize the UAW for ceding control over the workplace in exchange for high wage and benefit packages, for example, Barnard notes both the refusal of auto executives to surrender managerial prerogatives as well as the evident desire among the rank and file for the meaningful improvements in the quality of life outside the plants. Barnard also reminds us of the conservative, antiunion climate in postwar America, suggesting that there was no other realistic route for the union to follow insofar as labor relations were concerned.

Written in clear and lively prose, American Vanguard is the only one-volume history...