John Barnard's American Vanguard and Jonathan Cutler's Labor's Time

...In a 1963 Dissent essay, Harvey Swados argued, "One cannot complain, as one might with almost any other union, of an absence of intellect, or of a lack of application of that intellect to the problems of our age...

...The UAW has been around for sixty years...

...I once thought of writing a history of this amazing worksite, but gave up after I had an underground "tour" of about half the place...

...Was there an alternative history that the men and women who devoted their lives to the UAW might have constructed...

...But when this magazine began in the mid-1950s, every subscriber knew the answer to that question...

...A decline in union militancy among the homeowning rank and file...

...And when the Dissent editorial board sat around to discuss the future of the labor movement, its members were really talking about the future of the UAW and what its celebrated president might or might not do...

...AMERICAN VANGUARD: THE UNITED AUTO WORKERS DURING THE REUTHER YEARS, 1935-1970 by John Barnard Wayne State University Press, 2004 607 pp $34.95 LABOR'S TIME: SHORTER HOURS, THE UAW, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR AMERICAN UNIONISM by Jonathan Cutler Temple University Press, 2004 230 pp $19.95 paper $59.50 cloth QUICK QUIZ: Who is the president of the United Auto Workers union...

...j ONATHAN CUTLER' S spirited history of the fight for shorter hours in the auto industry offers us a combative narrative that eschews Bieber's passivity...

...The Reuther cohort helped lead the great sit-down strikes of 1937, emerged victorious from the chronic factionalism that plagued— and energized—the UAW during the next decade, and negotiated the pattern-setting contracts that doubled auto worker wages in the quarter century following 1948...

...Most historians of this episode, and especially Jonathan Cutler, see this as a nadir of Reutherite hypocrisy, from which the UAW recovered slowly if at all...

...The issue vanished during World War II, but when Ford and a few other companies began to lay off workers during the first postwar recession, in 1949, the idea reemerged as a genuinely popular demand that had a deep, syndicalist resonance among thousands of workers whose moral economy was rooted in a world of shared scarcity and family income sharing...

...But Barnard invariably rounds off the corners, excuses the shortcomings, and gives little weight to the arguments made by the union's critics...

...Barnard is far too knowledgeable a historian not to be aware of a devolution in the union's fiber and fortitude, but the recognition takes a form more elegiac than condemnatory...

...And it remained the perspective of C. Wright Mills, Harvey Swados, and the New Left generation they would inspire...

...The fate of the UAW was too important to be left to trade unionists alone...

...Barnard is not unaware of this critique, and he recounts plenty of instances, at the bargaining table and inside the UAW executive board room, that could fuel a charge of Reutherite hypocrisy...

...All this is true, and it put Reuther on a different plane than such contemporaries as John L. Lewis and Jimmy Hoffa...

...The UAW's current president, Ron Gettelfinger, may or may not be a fine union leader...

...Moreover when unions are successful, and on the progressive side of the political culture, like the UAW in the postwar decades or the SEIU today, the left often looks the other way when these private bureaucracies institutionalize themselves...

...Retribution was swift...

...Cutler argues that the two most well-defined ideological groupings in the UAW were either hostile or lukewarm to the idea...

...jOHN BARNARD'S big, well-illustrated book has an encyclopedic feel...

...NELSON LICHTENSTEIN teaches history at the University of California, Santa Barbara...

...Other issues: the defense of their civil liberties, fair employment practice legislation, and perhaps most of all, "peace" in the cold war, took center stage...

...By 1950 100 n DISSENT / Fall 2004 the Reutherite leadership had begun its collective bargaining march toward a very different sort of industrial future, in which radical transformations in the character of the work regime were sidelined for what Cutler and other scholars have called a "corporatist" détente with the big corporations...

...Better an imperfect union than a weak one or none at all...

...But the decline of union democracy has enormous costs...

...And the communists, who remained a force to be reckoned with at the Rouge, were tardy and episodic champions of shorter hours...

...The benevolent autocracy presided over by Reuther, and by likeminded successors Leonard Woodcock and Douglas Fraser, stifled the growth of a new generation of leaders, whose incubator has always been the ideological and political strife that is characteristic of a militant and factionalized union...

...Perhaps it is enough to say that this issue, like so many others that have been central to the fate of the twentieth-century working class, was most energetically fought out within the ranks of the UAW, which is another reason that this union really was an "American Vanguard...

...It was just too complex, with too much history, too many traditions, and with a bewildering array of ethnic, social, and political vectors to parse...

...For people on the left this was the domestic equivalent of the old "Russian Question...

...A corporate counteroffensive...

...Whatever his formal powers, Reuther sought consensus, accommodated opposition viewpoints, and tolerated spirited debate at the biennial UAW conventions...

...We are the architects of the future," announced Walter Reuther in 1947, and it is precisely because of this strategic ambition that the UAW has attracted far more attention from historians than any other union...

...And perhaps more important, the auto union is losing its capacity to set wage-andbenefit standards for millions of workers who still work in an industry that remains central to the American political economy...

...It is now the sixth largest union in the United States, down from the number one spot it held during much of Reuther's presidential tenure, which ended in 1970...

...And now that that is no longer so, we can rightly marvel at the accomplishment and mourn the political and moral vacuum left by the union's decline...

...Immediately after a Detroit visit by the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities "exposed" the considerable role still played by communists at the Rouge, Reuther clapped Local 600 into an administratorship in March 1952, barring the communists from office and putting Reuther partisans in charge of the newspapers...

...Now retired from a long career as a historian at Oakland University just outside of Detroit, Barnard has interviewed many key UAW leaders and plumbed the massive union archives at Wayne State University's Reuther Library...

...Today, not twenty-five or forty years ago...

...Regardless of Reuther's efforts to delegitimize internal opposition, argues Barnard, the UAW president was not an autocratic leader, and after the early 1950s not heavy-handed in his leadership style...

...For more than half a century scholars have measured Reuther 98 n DISSENT / Fall 2004 and the UAW leaders by tougher standards than those they apply to most other twentiethcentury unionists...

...In the late 1940s and early 1950s top UAW leaders deployed crude anticommunist rhetoric and harsh administrative measures to crack down on their internal union opponents, foremost among them the rebels from Local 600 that represented tens of thousands of workers at the giant Ford Rouge complex...

...Barnard is unwilling to say, which might be why he takes as the title to his epilogue UAW president Owen Bieber's retrospective explanation for the concessions and compromises that made life so difficult in the 1980s and afterward: "The things we had to do, we did...

...It's hard to know because the UAW no longer casts an economic, political, or imaginative shadow across the nation...

...He is the author of Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit...

...There were a couple of hagiographic Reuther studies in the 1950s and 1960s and even a right-wing polemic that denounced him as the "autocrat of the bargaining table," but for the most part even sympathetic historians of the UAW have put the tension between the union's ideological aspirations and its industrial and political practice at the center of their narrative...

...Stellato, who soon recaptured the Local 600 presidency, reached BOOKS a tenuous accommodation with Walter Reuther, in part facilitated by Reuther's formal, but ineffectual, endorsement of the shorter hours demand...

...What one can say, I think with justification, is that the UAW leadership no longer takes its own demands seriously...

...The six-hour day was actually made standard at some workplaces, including many rubber factories...

...It did represent a failure of Reutherite democratic pretensions, but Cutler demonstrates that Reuther's opponents were also complicit in the construction of the UAW's one-party regime...

...The UAW can't do that job anymore: at 650,000 members, it enrolls less than half the number that paid dues twenty-five years ago...

...But UAW leaders did not just preside over a great moment of working-class prosperity, they were important players in many of America's significant postwar conflicts: the expulsion of the communists from public life, the shaping of the post—New Deal welfare state, civil rights battles in the South and in the auto shops, and the long, agonizing debate over the war in Vietnam...

...In a single year, 1951, Ford reduced Rouge employment by twenty thousand...

...The Great Depression, with its mass unemployment, seemed likely to spur on the idea: Reuther and other UAW leaders championed the concept during the Roosevelt recession late in the 1930s...

...Jonathan Cutler says definitely yes...

...Barnard's views are certainly those of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who in 1947 hailed "the extraordinarily able and intelligent leader of the United Auto Workers" as "labor's man of vision and will...

...Barnard recounts that once the Reuther group took power within the UAW it ran a one-party regime for the next quarter century...

...In the 1930s and 1940s, upward of twelve thousand blacks worked in the foundry, the motor building, and the steel mill, and it was out of this proletarian womb that a self-confident generation of postwar political activists would emerge...

...And it was at the Rouge that African American politics achieved much of its modern, civil-rights era configuration...

...This figure does not count much of the lower wage labor embodied in imports...

...Whatever their answer, both writers offer fascinating, politically charged narratives that explain why and how this union once stood so close to the imaginative center of progressive politics in North America...

...Proponents of the shorter hours idea were left in the cold...

...It takes the reader from the picket line and factory floor to the corporate boardroom and the oval office...

...Cutler's point of reference is not the Reutherite leadership but the politics and aspirations of the tens of thousands of automobile workers who labored at America's premier industrial worksite, the great River Rouge complex just outside of Detroit...

...This began with Howe and Widick in 1949, who saw Reuther as "an unfinished personality" poised between the socialist instincts of his youth and the lure of stabilized power that he encountered after World War II...

...Fearing McCarthyite persecution and noting efforts of Reuther and other liberals to stake out a post-Stalin foreign policy that allowed for a measure of coexistence, the communists made a subtle shift that put them in a de facto alliance with the Reutherites, thus contributing to the dissolution of the party's shopfloor presence and the collapse of Local 600's unique political culture...

...Is there anything in its history that might have forestalled these contemporary difficulties, or has the transformation of world capitalism during the last few decades been so dramatic and far reaching that no union rooted in the domestic manufacturing economy could grow and prosper...

...Walter Reuther once called it the "vanguard in America," but today, if there is a union that aspires to that role, it is the Service Employees International Union, which is organizing so many immigrant workers, shaking up the health-care industry, prodding the Democrats leftward, and mobilizing a new generation of radical youth...

...Thus, when his effort to purge five key communists from the Local 600 leadership failed, even in the early months of the Korean War, he switched sides and became a champion of the shorter hours movement and a vocal opponent of Reuther...

...Two chapter titles tell this tale...

...The liberal-labor commitment to a Keynesian, "full-employment" political economy, the fringe-benefit bargaining game that discouraged work-sharing and made overtime cheap for business, and the rising tide of corporate power, all mitigated against the idea...

...But critics charge that the Reutherites were actually sowing the seeds of union decline, BOOKS even as the UAW seemed to reach its organizational apogee...

...DISSENT / Fall 2004 •101...

...The UAW was a potent political and economic force at the heart of America's most important industry for more than thirty years...

...Dissent founders Irving Howe and B. J. Widick's first book was The UAW and Walter Reuther...

...For ten hours we ducked under machinery, skipped around assembly lines, ventured near the blast furnaces, chatted with the tool-and-die worker, and skittered away from the security guards...

...So why did that glory fade...

...The Reuther leadership has therefore been repeatedly attacked for purging the left, resisting African American demands for racial equality within the UAW hierarchy, accommodating the corporations by trading shop power for high wages, and getting too close to Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam...

...This dramatic takeover, and its subsequent failure, is rightly seen as Exhibit A in the bureaucratization of the UAW...

...Here were thousands of skilled, sophisticated craft workers (Walter Reuther had been one of them) who were the natural, self-confident leaders of the automotive working class...

...For nearly half a century after it came into existence in 1917, the Rouge, which employed more than sixty thousand workers, was a fiercely contested cockpit of proletarian politics...

...For more than a century, a reduction in the hours of work, first for women and children, then for men, had been high on the agenda of American trade unionism...

...For Barnard, the attacks miss the main point...

...It deadens the fighting spirit and sidelines the human resources necessary for periodic revitalization...

...Meanwhile, the communists also made an accommodation to Reuther and his team...

...All labor union issues would be subordinated to the service of the Soviet Union," writes Cutler, who has here recaptured the refreshing polemical disdain with which the Trotskyist left held their communist shop mates...

...Flint, Michigan, whose devastated neighborhoods are featured in every Michael Moore film, was once the top hourly wage area in the United States, with the highest proportion of owner-occupied houses of any similarly sized city...

...John DISSENT / Fall 2004 n 97 BOOKS Barnard thinks probably not...

...Indeed, if you were a political person in the mid-twentieth-century United States, you had to have an opinion—hostile, prodding, disappointed, celebratory—about the UAW and its strategic goals...

...If the only way to get ahead in a big organization is to toe the line, then you'll end up with a stolid stratum of cautious time-servers...

...The shorter hours issue exploded at the Rouge and in the politics of the UAW after Carl Stellato was elected president of Local 600 in 1950...

...You're stumped, right...

...His perspective is largely that of the generation of activists and unionists who rose to prominence with Walter Reuther in the 1930s and 1940s and then ran the union for decades afterward...

...The word is usually thought pejorative, but in Stellato's case it also encompasses an acute sensitivity to the felt needs of the most active participants in the Rouge political cauldron...

...A failure of the leadership to chart a more effective course...

...Cutler, a sociologist at Wesleyan University, uses the tools of the historian to probe the possibility of a radically different path that the UAW and all of American labor might have trod...

...Stellato was initially a Reutherite—Cutler describes him as a "rightwing, red-baiting anti-Communist"—but he was first and foremost an opportunist...

...CUTLER'S LENS for this revealing micro history is the struggle for shorter hours—thirty hours work for forty hours pay—that found its most potent champions within that local...

...When a newly freed Nelson Mandela visited DISSENT I Fall 2004 n 99 BOOKS Detroit in 1990, his first stop was the Rouge, where he told thousands of Ford workers, "I am your comrade...

...Because of the UAW's inability to organize either the Japanese or German "transplants" or the many parts plants that play such a vital role in the auto production stream, the union now represents less than half of all domestic auto workers...

...It was the great concentration point for communists and other first- and second-generation radicals who emerged out of a score of ethnic national lineages...

...Together, these facts spell the end for high-wage, pattern-setting collective bargaining with the "Big Three" (General Motors, Ford, Chrysler), which was the very hallmark of automobile industry unionism during the second half of the twentieth century...

...Cutler does not try to do justice to the cultural, racial, or technological complexities of the place, nor to the strategy pursued by Ford management, but my hat is off to him for coming closer than any other scholar in tracing the fortunes of the anti-Reuther leftcommunist, opportunist, syndicalist, African American—what for many years proclaimed itself the largest local union in the world...

...When Barnard interviewed Don Ephlin, the retired UAW General Motors director in 1993, the latter offered up a nostalgic, wishful phrase to describe the dynamic bargaining years of the early postwar era, "The glory days of growth and rich settlements...

...Barnard, on the other hand, is unwilling to assign much weight, symbolic or real, to the Reuther-Rouge encounter...