Domestic Left #72: The foreign and domestic policy of Walter Reuther
Prospectus for a tragedy in five acts
Dramatis personae
Walter Reuther, President of the United Auto Workers (UAW) from 1946-1970
His father Valentine
His younger brother Victor
Bob Travis and Wyndham Mortimer, key architects of the 1937 Flint sit-down strike and members of the Communist Party USA
Harry Bridges, President of the International Longshoreman’s and Warehouseman’s Union (ILWU)
Thomas Braden, CIA official
George Meany, President of the American Federation of Labor
Nikita Khrushchev, Premier of the Soviet Union
Reuther’s daughter Lisa
Members of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement
Three spirits: The State, The Corporation, and The Rank and File
First Act
Walter Reuther is born on the eve of Labor Day, 1907. to a German socialist immigrant father in Wheeling, West Virginia. In 1919, his father leads his family out of church when the minister denounces trade unionism from the pulpit. Reuther and his brothers vigorously debate the issues of the day around the dining room table.
Reuther drops out of high school to help support his family, and becomes a skilled tool-and-die maker. At age 19, he moves to Detroit and is hired by the Ford Motor Company. While working at the giant River Rouge plant, he goes back to high school and then attends community college, becoming involved in socialist politics as a student.
During the Great Depression, Reuther and his brother Victor spend almost two years working at an auto plant in the Soviet Union, writing glowing letters home about how “We are watching daily socialism being taken down from the books on the shelves and put into actual application.”
Second Act
Reuther, having returned to Detroit, joins Local 86 of the fledgeling United Auto Workers union, despite not actually being employed at the General Motors Ternstedt plant the local is trying to organize. Representing Local 86 at the 1936 UAW convention in South Bend, Indiana, he is elected to the union’s national executive board.
During the Flint sit-down strike1 in early 1937, Victor Reuther mans the UAW sound truck during the “Battle of the Running Bulls.” Walter regularly brings caravans of autoworkers from his Local 174 on the West Side of Detroit down to Flint to support the strike, which was led by Bob Travis and Wyndham Mortimer.
At the 1939 UAW convention, Reuther is appointed director of the GM division. After the convention, he has a dream in which three spirits appear to him: the State, the Corporation, and the Rank and File.
Reuther asks the spirits who will love him more. The State and the Corporation both make grandiloquent speeches, praising Reuther as a crusader for a better world and predicting that he will become a central figure in the development of modern industry. The Rank and File simply reply that they will love him according to his conduct as a union leader.
Third Act
At the 1941 UAW convention, Reuther and his brothers push through an amendment to the union’s constitution excluding Communists from membership. Mortimer and Travis are purged from the union.
During negotiations with GM following the end of World War II, Reuther publicly demands that GM grant a wage increase without increasing the price of cars. When GM responds that it can’t afford to do so, Reuther demands that GM “open the books.” Later he demands that the “Big Three” automakers begin producing smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. None of these demands are successful.
In 1946, Reuther is narrowly elected president of the UAW, and quickly acts to consolidate his power. He organizes the Administration Caucus2 and, following his re-election in 1947, eliminates virtually all of his opponents in the union.
At the 1949 CIO convention, Reuther leads the charge to purge two “Communist-led” unions from the federation, arguing that “red” unions do not belong in a democratic organization. “We have come here to cut out the cancer,” he declares.
Harry Bridges, president of the International Longshoreman’s and Warehouseman’s Union (ILWU)3, opposes the motion and says that the issue is not “communism,” that the issue instead is Reuther’s desire to have “No opposition in the CIO ... Oh sure you can speak all right, you can take your positions, but when you vote in your unions, make sure you vote right. That’s not opposition, that’s regimentation.”
Later that year, Walter and Victor Reuther help engineer the founding of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, an anti-communist labor federation that splits the World Federation of Trade Unions established by British, Soviet and U.S. unions at the end of World War II.
At the 1950 CIO convention, nine other unions are expelled, including the ILWU.
Fourth Act
CIA official Thomas Braden hands Reuther a suitcase filled with $50,000 in cash to distribute to ICFTU unions seeking to undermine the Confédération Générale du Travail in France because of its left-wing leadership and opposition to U.S. foreign policy.
In 1952, Reuther is elected president of the CIO. In 1955, he negotiates the merger of the AFL and CIO with AFL president George Meany, a man who proudly declared that he had never walked a picket line in his life. Meany becomes president of the merged organization.
Also in 1955, Reuther launches a campaign for a “guaranteed annual wage” in the auto industry, to address the periodic unemployment which plagues the industry. By 1967, the supplemental unemployment benefits won through this campaign provide laid-off auto workers with 95 percent of their regular income.
In 1959, during the AFL-CIO convention in San Francisco, Walter and Victor Reuther organize a dinner with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who had been invited by President Eisenhower to tour the U.S. During a night of heavy drinking, Reuther lectures Khrushchev about the superiority of the American free-market economy and “free” trade unions, telling him that “when we have disagreements, no one is exiled.”
Fifth Act
At a Passover seder in 1967, Reuther’s daughter Lisa confronts him about his union’s tacit support for the Vietnam war.
After Reuther leads the UAW out of the AFL-CIO in 1968, he is stripped of his vice presidency of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.
Together with the Teamsters, who had been expelled from the AFL-CIO for corruptions in 1957, Reuther launches the “Alliance for Labor Action” in 1968 in an attempt to capitalize on the energy of the youth and civil rights movements of the 1960s. It produces no meaningful outcomes.
As Black militants in the Detroit auto plants form the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement to challenge not only management but the union hierarchy, Reuther thinks he sees one of the spirits from his 1939 dream among them.
Those spirits return to him in 1970 on a late, 49-minute flight from Detroit to the Pelston airstrip near Black Lake, Michigan, where the UAW is building an educational center. The spirit of the Corporation explains to Reuther his detailed plans to deindustrialize the U.S., close plants, and force decades of concessionary bargaining. Reuther turns to the spirit of the State for help, but the State turns away from him. The spirit of the Rank and File, whom Reuther had seen among the DRUM militants, finally appears, but now in the chains of the Administration Caucus.
The sudden, loud sound of an airplane crashing into a stand of trees. A giant fireball is projected onto the stage. All goes dark.
This, uh, “prospectus,” was inspired by reading Jeff Schuhrke’s excellent new book Blue Collar Empire, which I wrote a more traditional review of for the latest issue of the UE NEWS. The book comes out on September 24; you can pre-order a copy here.
The biographical detail in this tragedy, however, is almost entirely based (sometimes somewhat loosely) on Nelson Lichtenstein’s canonical 1995 biography of Reuther, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit.
My co-worker Samantha Cooney wrote a UE NEWS Feature about the Peekskill Riots, which happened around this time of year 75 years ago. She does a great job of framing the narrative around three movement songs of the era.
Finally, Convergence magazine has republished my review of two fantastic books, Jen Soriano’s Nervous and Gabriel Winant’s The Next Shift, which was originally published as Domestic Left #38 last December.
The story of the Flint sit-down strike has been told in many places, including by two recent podcasts about the history of the CIO. Both Episode 3 of Organize the Unorganized and Episode 7 of Fragile Juggernaut are titled “Sit Down!” The former is a bit more NPR-ish, featuring interviews with a variety of historians (and quite a bit shorter, at around 45 minutes); the latter — if you’ve got two hours — goes into more detail and, for my money, conveys more of the excitement, historical significance, and quite frankly heroism of this key moment in U.S. labor history.
Organize the Unorganized also covered the 1949 CIO convention in Episode 8, “Is There an Ending to the CIO?” (Fragile Juggernaut has not yet got to World War II, let alone the post-war conflicts in the CIO.) In this episode, you can hear both Reuther and Bridges addressing the convention, as well as audio of UE Director of Organization Jim Matles telling the story of the anti-communist purges in the CIO decades later.
Earlier this year, Professor Emeritus at the Wisconsin School for Workers Frank Emspak released the audio recordings of a series of oral history interviews he did with Bob Travis in 1973. I haven’t gotten a chance to listen to them yet, but hope to sometime soon.
Happy eve of Labor Day!
One of the key victories that helped establish the UAW, and, arguably, the twentieth-century industrial unionism that brought a decent standard of living to large swaths of the working class for the first time. At least until the deindustrialization and de-unionization of the last four or five decades.
The Administration Caucus ruled the UAW as a virtual one-party state until the recent intervention of the federal courts, following revelations of massive corruption among UAW leaders (all of whom were, of course, members of the Administration Caucus). The courts forced a one-member one-vote election in 2023, which was won narrowly by reformer Shawn Fain, who went on to lead the historic “Stand-Up Strike” against the Big Three this past fall.
The ILWU is widely considered one of the most internally democratic unions in the U.S. Of the eleven union expelled from the CIO for “communist domination” in 1949 and 1950, only the ILWU and my union, UE, still exist. In 1997 the ILWU changed its name to the “International Longshore and Warehouse Union” because, you know, the working class hates “woke” gender-neutral terminology.