Mr. Dayton Looks at 'Reutherism'
Seligman, Dan
Mr. Dayton Looks at 'Reutherism' Walter Reuther, Autocrat of the Bargaining Table. By Eldorous L. Dayton. Devin-Adair. 280 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by Daniel Seligman Associate editor,...
...Reviewed by Daniel Seligman Associate editor, "Fortune" Though it is generally considered unfair for a reviewer to twit an author about any promotional nonsense issued by his publisher, I think the aura of looniness which envelops this book is fairly represented in a recent advertisement for it...
...Not much else has been kept out...
...Reuther's preoccupation with social issues not directly related to collective bargaining is portrayed as cant...
...and while his accounts of Reuther at the bargaining table are queer enough (e.g., he suggests that Ford gave Reuther a guaranteed annual wage in 1955 because Henry Ford II felt obligated to placate the liberals), he at least keeps dialectics out of it...
...Dayton, a newspaperman and television writer by trade, has assembled here almost all the anti-Reuther stories we have heard for years, and appraised them with unfailing unfairness...
...This passage is a good illustration of Dayton's style, syntax, wit, and taste...
...When Schicklegruber the housepainter has become Hitler the Reichschancellor, he can still aspire to becoming Hitler der Fuehrer...
...Dayton gives his readers no indication what it was he learned from the SLP...
...He tells them that Harold could have beaten back William the Bastard at Hastings if his men had stood firm...
...By way of suggesting the prodigies of research performed by the author, the ad revealed that he had sat in on study groups of the Socialist Labor party, of all people, in order to master dialectics-the point being that Mr...
...In the words of the song, he's got a million of them...
...His request for an occupational deferment during World War II, a subject to which Dayton gives a great deal of space-though it was nothing extraordinary for labor leaders in defense industries to be deferred-is contrasted with the heroic wartime death of a friend of Dayton's...
...Unhappily, or rather happily, Mr...
...In assessing Reuther's political activities, Dayton takes issue with J. B. Matthews, who once suggested that Reuther would like to be President of the U. S. This, says Dayton, "in the words of the song, ain't necessarily so, because Reuther could look upon the office of President as another rung to power...
...Why Mr...
...His fight against the Communists in the CIO is portrayed as a mere power-struggle...
...Another example of what I take to be wit occurs in the concluding lines of the book, in which he admonishes the "industrial brains and wealth of the world" to stand firm against Reutherism...
...Dayton believes Reuther utilizes dialectic reasoning at the bargaining table...
...Dayton had to infiltrate the SLP in order to study dialectics, when he could just as well have curled up at home with the Little Lenin Library, the ad did not disclose...
Vol. 41 • November 1958 • No. 40
