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  • The Triumph and “Tragedy” of Walter Reuther
  • Bruce Nelson (bio)
Nelson Lichtenstein. The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit:Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor. New York: Basic Books, 1995. xiii + 575 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $35.00.

Walter Reuther, who served as president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) from 1946 until his death in 1970, has been the subject of many biographies. But after the publication of Nelson Lichtenstein’s The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit, it is unlikely that there will be another any time soon. 1 Lichtenstein’s biography is massive, insightful, and as close to definitive as we are likely to get. It does more than tell the story of Reuther’s life as a labor leader; it brilliantly situates his career within the larger context of the American political economy during the four decades when the New Deal order emerged, crystallized, and unraveled.

Reuther was born in 1907 to German immigrant parents in Wheeling, West Virginia. His father was an ardent Debsian Socialist who nurtured in his sons a lifelong commitment to social justice and an abiding respect for the dignity and creativity inherent in the work of skilled craftsmen. Along with thousands of other young men, Walter was drawn to Detroit in the 1920s, where he became a highly paid skilled worker and an apostle of self-improvement whose values were so unabashedly bourgeois that his friends called him the “corporation lawyer” (p. 23). But the Great Depression launched Reuther in an altogether different direction. He reclaimed the socialist heritage of his youth; worked, with his brother Victor, as a tool and die maker in a Soviet auto factory; and returned to Detroit just as the fledgling industrial union movement of the 1930s was about to become a major force in American society and politics. He quickly became a member of the UAW’s fractious leadership corps, and ten years later was elected president of what had become the nation’s largest trade union. For the rest of his life he remained a man in the headlines—ambitious, articulate, and innovative, widely respected and resented, the most dynamic labor statesman associated with the rise of the New Deal order and its industrial relations regime.

Reuther would make his mark, and find his most formidable adversary, at General Motors. But in important respects his career began at Kelsey-Hayes [End Page 488] Wheel, a relatively small auto parts manufacturing plant on Detroit’s west side. Kelsey-Hayes featured a heterogeneous work force, a weak and divided union leadership, and a company president whose shrewd paternalism had kept the UAW at bay, so much so that when Reuther entered the picture there were fewer than thirty-five union members in a work force of nearly five thousand.

But in November and December 1936 two things happened that dramatically altered the balance of power. First, Franklin Roosevelt’s triumphant reelection triggered a new surge of confidence among working people. Second, and perhaps more important at Kelsey-Hayes, a group of “semiprofessional agitators” succeeded in getting jobs in the plant (p. 65). The newly hired cadre were able to mount only a small sitdown strike, augmented by a thinly manned picket line on the outside. But the UAW came to the rescue with a “flying squadron” of 4,000 union partisans; the mayor of Detroit, sensitive to the sea change wrought by the Roosevelt landslide, kept the city’s famously belligerent police force in check; even the notoriously antiunion Henry Ford, who needed the parts to maintain his own production, put pressure on the company to settle. And so Reuther had his first victory.

According to Lichtenstein, the pattern at Kelsey-Hayes was replicated throughout much of the auto industry, as the UAW was “built from the outside in, by well-connected and ideologically motivated organizers who saw their trade union work as part of a larger project of social reconstruction” (p. 65). But the match between outsiders and insiders was by no means perfect. The rapid development of the union that followed the Detroit sitdown strikes and the even more famous confrontation with General Motors in early 1937 sent the UAW careening in two...

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