Walter Reuther 1907-1970
G., E.
"Seven times they raised me off the concrete and threw me down on it. They pinned my arms and shot short jabs to my face. I was punched and dragged by my feet to the stairway. I grabbed the...
...These men can tackle GM and Ford, as they have all along...
...THE INCREDIBLE WEEK in May 1970 that opened with the murder of four students at Kent State and closed with the death of Walter Reuther, his wife and four companions, in a plane crash on the night of May 9, will be with us for a long time...
...The UAW is itself a remarkable union, created by courageous men and women in struggle with industrial giants...
...Everyone is surely a master of hindsight, and no one can escape its judgments...
...There haven't been many labor leaders in this century whose names have meant something more than the union posts they occupied...
...quoted from Toil and Trouble, by Thomas R. Brooks...
...But it would be self-deceiving not to recognize that Reuther brought a special quality of leadership...
...If each of these men was a bogey to business (think back over the hysteria they could generate in corporate board rooms), each was also a man known to working people everywhere, and not in notoriety but in dedication...
...The union has done all that and more...
...Its leadership is uncommonly able, and Leonard Woodcock, who has been named by the union's executive board to succeed Reuther, is a man of recognized ability...
...Then they kicked me down the other flight of steps until I found myself on the ground where I was beaten and kicked...
...Perhaps the impact on the union itself, in the narrowest sense, will be slight...
...If Reuther was far-sighted and creative in his conception of a union's responsibility, the union expected him to be, and approved in successive elections, the most recent only a few weeks ago...
...Who can say what the consequences of Reuther's death will be on the UAW—and beyond that on the AFL–CIO which he helped create, and from which he withdrew his union not long ago, but in which he clearly remained a considerable influence...
...Gene Debs, John L. Lewis...
...I was thrown down the first flight of iron steps...
...Mourning Reuther, we can hardly attempt to assess the impact of the death of this remarkable labor leader...
...Did he have his faults...
...Walter Reuther describing to an NLRB hearing his encounter with Ford goons during the "battle of the overpass" near River Rouge, May 1937...
...They have all been on the line...
...I grabbed the railing and they wrenched me loose...
...Should he have done this, said that...
...How many others are known to laboring people in other lands as American leaders who could be depended on to think of them...
...Seven times they raised me off the concrete and threw me down on it...
...Mourning the deaths of the students—followed by others in Augusta and Jackson—we can sense how much these horrible events have shaken the country, and how much more it needs to be shaken...
...But this is not meant to be a funeral eulogy...
...I was punched and dragged by my feet to the stairway...
...We have already witnessed some of the repercussions to the National Guards' cowardly lunacy in Ohio...
...Woodcock, going to Georgia to join the SCLC march, does so not because Reuther would have gone there, but because it is the sort of thing one expects—and gets—from the UAW leaders...
...Obviously Reuther alone could not have kept black and white working together despite difficult situations, or kept the union in the forefront of imaginative response to current conditions, and done so with full respect to the best democratic traditions of unionism...
...G...
...Absurd questions...
...We think, however, that the creation of a union like the UAW, and all that it has signified in American life, will be looked upon as an achievement at once major and lasting...
...None of the UAW leaders "boast" that they never led a strike...
...We hope to see his like again, soon...
...It is a tribute to a man who led labor and led it well...
Vol. 17 • July 1970 • No. 4
