Nelson Lichtenstein's The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit
Brody, David
THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN DETROIT: WALTER REUTHER AND THE FATE OF AMERICAN LABOR, by Nelson Lichtenstein. Basic Books, 1995. 550 pp. $35.00. Midway through his extraordinarily rich biography of...
...Yet Reuther was also under real constraints...
...The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) called for protest demonstrations...
...and, within the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the birth of an insurgent group of industrial unionists fed up with the oldline leadership and determined not to let labor's chance to organize the unorganized slip away...
...on April 24 and assemble at Cadillac Square...
...The abject reversals of the party line in 1939 and 1941 on Moscow's orders were repellent to Reuther, and he was vocal in his contempt for CPers as genuine trade unionists...
...Lichtenstein gives us superb accounts of both episodes, but reconciling them is beyond his reach, and he leaves us with the ambiguous remark that although Reuther's understanding of the linkage between workers' rights and civil rights "had many limitations . . . he never doubted that it was an absolute condition to the advance of his agenda!' What we need is some overarching thesis to make sense of Walter Reuther...
...This was a political strike, familiar in Europe, and since the late 1930s increasingly commonplace in American industrial centers as well...
...He got a crucial leg up from them into the UAW and probably held a card briefly...
...But then, bethinking himself, Lichtenstein adds that racial polarization was already depriving Reuther of his white working-class political base...
...There are two ways of thinking about Reuther's anticommunism...
...Reuther pledged that the UAW would never again call its members out on a political strike...
...his strategy for defending the union wage structure against give-backs in the chaotic parts industry during the 1938 recession...
...The battle was actually lost in the opening skirmish when GM disestablished the dense shop-steward structure and forced the union to accept a thinly stretched committeeman system that was no match for the company's first-line supervisors...
...He could abide by it or go hopelessly to war with General Motors...
...If, as Lichtenstein reports, he called Harry Bridges a prostitute to his face, we can surely infer some principled conviction behind Reuther's anticommunism...
...Not much in any direct sense, since Reuther's social vision never had its source in his CP connection...
...General Motors, moreover, was an immovable obstacle in Reuther's way...
...Lichtenstein's own mind turns out finally to be affirmative...
...Anyone who quit work would be disciplined for violating paragraph 117 of the contract, which prohibited work stoppages...
...it was as if he were biologically structured for the quest...
...With the ground under his rich narrative thus ever shifting, Lichtenstein can't tell us what we need to know to make our minds up about Reuther, or rather, he tells us plenty, only we have to make up our minds for ourselves...
...on this front no national UAW rival stood to the left of him...
...A year later, Reuther won national attention with his bold plan for achieving all-out production of military aircraft by retooling Detroit's auto plants...
...The ideas and schemes simply came pouring out—the alchemy of the 1936 sit-down strike at Kelsey-Hayes that got Reuther's West Side power base started...
...the brilliant tool-and-die strike of 1939 that finally extracted exclusive recognition from General Motors...
...He battled Homer Martin's capitulation on unauthorized strikes in 1937 and again, late in World War II, seized the initiative against the no-strike pledge...
...FALL • 1996 • 131...
...But it was no fluke that he stayed there, as the UAW grew from thirty thousand members (few of them in Detroit), bested General Motors in the great Flint sit-down strike of 1937 and became a giant industrial union of half a million...
...But no one matched Reuther's organizational instincts, his unflagging energy, or his fertile mind...
...After the war, when the CIO seemed pOised for great things, Reuther envisioned a restructured, full-employment economy achieved through the bargaining muscle of the industrial unions...
...On shop-floor issues Reuther was no patsy...
...Thus, by something of a fluke, he bounded right to the top...
...In Reuther's own West Side local, rank and filers like Bill McKie had earned their spurs on the barricades, while at the national level Wyndham Mortimer was a strong and reFALL • 1996 • 129 Books spected figure...
...It is a cherished belief among labor historians on the left that this deprived the CIO of its most dynamic elements and sent industrial unionism into decline...
...Reuther may have been its prisoner, but the GM contract was mostly of his own making...
...But he was never integrated into the party (CP), and, once his base on Detroit's West Side was secure, his dealings with the communists were strictly as between power blocs, friendly while they battled the unstable UAW president Homer Martin and his (and Jay Lovestone's) Progressive Caucus, but then, after the communists betrayed Walter's brother Victor at the Michigan CIO convention of 1938 in a bid for Martin's allies, inveterately hostile...
...Even at the height of its power, the UAW could not defeat reactionary politicians who played the race card in the Detroit elections of 1937 and 1948...
...Lacking that analysis, Lichtenstein is left finally on shifting and uncertain ground...
...Lichtenstein quotes appreciatively Bert Cochran's recollection of the youthful Reuther as unlike "other auto union officials who avidly sought power...
...Unfortunately, Lichtenstein treats it more as a kind of literary flourish than as a tool for systematic analysis...
...He entitles his epilogue, "What Would Walter Do...
...Anything beyond that would depend on his motives...
...And he records in loving detail all the calculations, the factional shifts, the old pals abandoned, the loyalty Reuther demanded—"teamwork in the leadership"— once he got his machine installed, and, not least, Reuther's abiding anticommunism...
...But dual power could not be imposed on General Motors—this was Reuther's premise—so he put his mind to what could be achieved: a system that conceded managerial authority, yet ringed that authority with protective work rules and procedural guarantees...
...Reuther proposed that the entire industry be brought under national control, with the UAW and management sharing power over day-to-day operations...
...His father, Valentine, was a Debsian socialist, a dedicated unionist...
...If we subjected all the structures within which Reuther operated to this kind of analysis, we might come to differing conclusions about the degree to which those structures were the products of necessity...
...The Cadillac Square demonstration might stand for all the possibilities contained within the industrial-union movement that sprang to life in the 1930s—shop-floor control, a voice in corporate management, a labor party, and, at its most spacious moments (to use Reuther's own words), the industrial unions as "the vanguard ofAmerica...
...He does not commit himself and, despite all he has to say, Lichtenstein is finally inconclusive about Reuther's anticommunism...
...Scrambling to get them reinstated, the UAW bowed to the corporation's demand that it formally repudiate the contract violation...
...The basic terms of the union's relationship with the big auto companies—its contractual basis, the shop-floor regime, the rules of state regulation written into the Wagner Act—were givens, fixed before Reuther ever came on the scene...
...And so, Lichtenstein proceeds to argue, was much else that, juncture after juncture, hemmed Reuther in...
...it was too important to get pro-CIO Governor Frank Murphy reelected...
...Reuther had returned from Gorky still enamored of the Soviet experiment and more than willing to work with the communists in the early Popular Front...
...For a time in the late 1920s, Walter drifted away, but the Great Depression restored his radicalism and made him a sparkplug in Detroit's revived Socialist party (SP) movement...
...This episode serves usefully as an entry point into Reuther's career...
...How do we account for Reuther's failure to fulfill his historic role...
...His technical expertise got him a job at the Soviet auto works in Gorky, from which he returned in late 1935 just as the climactic drive for industrial unionism was gathering steam...
...In so many words: how much scope did Reuther have to build other than he did...
...Lichtenstein does take a stab at this...
...Lichtenstein is terrific on this—his chapter should be required reading for all sentimental advocates of workers' control—but what he demonstrates is that dual power was beyond the union's reach...
...But Lichtenstein is writing biography, and there is no basis in his close account of Reuther's machinations for drawing that conclusion...
...That, at any rate, is the question posed by Lichtenstein's biography: why did Reuther choose paragraph 117 over the political strike...
...Paragraph 117 stands for all those arrangements in collective bargaining, party politics, and bureaucratic unionism that confined and ultimately destroyed the grand promise of militant industrial unionism...
...He rightly focuses on the collective-bargaining system segmenting the working class into haves and have-nots...
...Two months later, at the South Bend UAW convention that overthrew the AFL-imposed leadership and aligned the auto union with the CIO, Reuther was elected to the general executive board representing Michigan...
...Reuther, in his capacity as United Auto Workers (UAW) president, sent telegrams to all the Detroit-area locals ordering them to stop work at 2 P.M...
...Reuther was their most formidable enemy, not only purging them from the UAW leadership but sparking the drive to expel the unions they led from the CIO...
...Walter and his brothers grew up talking socialism around the kitchen table...
...The strike call was not rescinded, but Reuther backed away from it, and word went out to the GM locals not to violate the no-stoppage provision...
...Reuther got home in time to drive with a carload of auto workers to the AFL convention in Atlantic City where he watched John L. Lewis defy the craft leadership and set in motion the rival CIO...
...Why did he back off...
...an imperishable boyhood memory was accompanying his father to visit the imprisoned Eugene Debs...
...His tragedy was that of a man imprisoned within institutions, alliances and ideological constructs that were largely of his own making...
...Because, Lichtenstein says, giving us a choice, "when it came to the crunch, Reuther commanded neither the power nor the will . . . ." The only alternative, Lichtenstein continues, was a political realignment, which leads to this summing up of lost political chances: in the municipal elections of 1937, because of political and racial antagonisms dividing Detroit auto workers...
...About this there really is no argument...
...It was this contractual system that was at stake when Reuther came to the question of paragraph 117...
...Consider, for example, why Reuther's hand was forced in the 1947 episode...
...We do not have to accept Lichtenstein's insistence on Reuther's opportunism...
...In our own postsocialist age, however, it would be surprising to make much of Reuther's loss of SP guidance, and Lichtenstein does not do so...
...The militants who did—most GM members waited until the shift ended before heading over to the huge rally—got fired or were given long suspensions...
...He is likewise inconclusive about Reuther as civil rights champion...
...We have here, certainly, the kernel of a working hypothesis about Reuther...
...Lichtenstein calls Reuther's anticommunism "obsessive," but he is mainly arguing that Reuther was an opportunist using anticommunism to advance his factional interests...
...This time, however, General Motors (GM) drew the line...
...and, in 1967 and 1968, when the Vietnam crisis offered one last chance, because of Reuther's fixation on the next round of contract negotiations...
...And since, in the emblematic 1947 deal with GM, it was Walter Reuther who gave the word, he becomes the prime mover, the man who held in his hands, as the subtitle says, "the fate ofAmerican labor...
...This is the question Reuther's aides and successors must have asked a thousand times in the years after his death in a plane crash in 1970...
...the great unionizing wave that had swept through auto and the other mass production industries in 1933 and 1934 and then receded, leaving behind the remnant organizations from which a new movement would have to be built...
...Reuther had missed all the preliminaries: the New Deal battles over labor's right to organize, which culminated, after many setbacks, in the passage of the Wagner Act of 1935...
...Never mind that Lichtenstein has cast Reuther as the author of an imprisoning system that outlived him and imprisons the faltering labor movement today...
...It might be argued that his social vision was inadequate to his task...
...Despite everything we suspect that, of all our labor leaders past and present, Reuther might have known what to do...
...Assessing his emblematic abandonment of the political strike in 1947, Lichtenstein remarks that "Reuther had become a prisoner of the General Motors contract...
...Reuther was forever after shy about venturing politically where the prejudices of white auto workers ran strongly, as, for example, over housing...
...In our distress we ask ourselves: "What would Walter do...
...Reuther's obsession with the politics of union control, Lichtenstein argues, prevented him from responding to black demands for a say in the union during the 1950s, thereby compromising the vanguard role he felt labor had to play on the civil rights front...
...in 1948, because of the cold war and Reuther's assault on the communists...
...Communists were a force to be reckoned with in the early UAW, just as they were virtually everywhere in the emerging industrial-union movement...
...Lichtenstein characterizes Reuther, at his moment of triumph at the 1947 UAW convention, as "the contemporary unionist who most clearly represented that meeting of organized power and social vision so vital to the creative future of America's working-class movement...
...only the previous summer CIO demonstrations against the decontrol of meat prices had shut down many Detroit plants...
...By then, too, he was a seasoned tool-and-die man at the 128 • DISSENT Books Ford River Rouge plant, part of that elite circle of skilled, class-conscious workers whom Lichtenstein identifies as the vanguard of auto unionism...
...Midway through his extraordinarily rich biography of Walter Reuther, Nelson Lichtenstein writes about an episode that occurred in 1947 while the Republican Congress was passing the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act...
...Not, surely, because he lacked the vision...
...Among the militant minority that built the great industrial unions there were many with equally strong radical credentials and better rankandfile connections...
...It is, in any case, the second question that truly engages Lichtenstein's interest: not what his anticommunism did to Reuther, but what it meant for CIO communists...
...In 1947 Reuther seized the presidency of the UAW for life...
...But we have would some fixed points for deciding about Reuther...
...If (as always) there was calculation in these stands, Reuther's commitment to shop-floor empowerment was genuine...
...In particular, he fails to pursue the critical question his formulation raises: not whether Reuther became a prisoner of 130 • DISSENT Books what he had built, but whether he was a prisoner even when he was building...
...AntiReutherites on the executive board, and even some of his allies, wanted to take GM on, but Reuther said no: the UAW couldn't retaliate against GM for enforcing the contract...
...Once past the Flint sit-down strike of 1937, the corporation was prepared to compromise on many things but not on its core rights of management, not at the corporate level and not on the shop floor, which in the early years meant resisting what Lichtenstein has famously called "dual power"—parallel union and supervisory structures at the workplace...
...Reuther recognized its poisonous inequity and twice, in the General Motors strike of 1946 and more tentatively through community organizing and the student left in the early 1960s, tried "to break with the insular bargaining patterns championed by state and industry...
...We might ask: what did it do to his progressivism...
...in 1964, because of Reuther's attachment to Lyndon Johnson...
...That seems right...
...He soon resigned over his inability to back the party ticket that year...
...Back in Detroit, Reuther wangled a membership card from the nearly nonexistent local at the GM Ternstedt plant (where he never worked...
...By 1938, party people could see, as the Michigan state chairman remarked, that Reuther was no longer a real SPer, just "a trade union politician with socialist sympathies...
...Reuther was a true son of the American left...
...He stresses instead the other side of the equation: Reuther the tradeunion politician...
...The crosscurrents are bemusing: Reuther at Martin Luther King's right hand in the March on Washington in 1963 and at Lyndon Johnson's in the shameful denial of seats to the insurgent black Mississippi delegation a year later at the 1964 Democratic convention...
Vol. 43 • September 1996 • No. 4
