Organized Labor's Fraternal Triumvirate

...Although the Reuthers were all blessed with a very high level of social consciousness, Roy—and one wishes Victor had given us more on him—as a quote cited in this book puts it, is "the only Reuther who seems to get along with George Meany...

...and of the struggle to wrest control of it from the Communists and their followers...

...In the end, Meany out-gunned and out-generaled him...

...Walter, in particular, was always single-minded, unable to adapt to new conditions and realities...

...The AFL-CIO's "failure to achieve the hopes expressed on all sides, and the eventual rupture when Walter took the UAW out," he writes, can be traced directly to the fact that a solid foundation for a workable merger had not been laid...

...I think his position in the Federation would have been stronger, and Meany would have respected him more, if he had taken a position and stayed with it...

...Reviewed by Thomas R. Brooks Author, "Toil and Trouble: A History of American Labor" To those who view organized labor as a positive force for democratic change, the Reuther brothers will always be of special interest...

...In any event, Victor remains a partisan and, perhaps understandably, is incapable of recognizing that Walter's long-lasting troubles with AFL-CIO president George Meany were, in good measure, selfinflicted...

...George Meany, by contrast, continues to grow and change, and it is sad that neither Walter nor the otherwise perceptive Victor could appreciate him...

...Most frighteningly, he describes the reluctance of the Detroit police and the FBI to track down the gunmen and those who hired them...

...His plan to link pensions with Social Security has brought about improvements in the system that benefitted all...

...On this crucial matter, Victor's portrayal of Meany is too one-sided to be believed...

...They came out of the Socialist movement to battle the corporate giants, and they did their origins proud...

...Yet if this is so, how does he explain the longevity of the organization and the desire on the part of so many now on the outside to return to its fold...

...To this day the conspirators are unpunished...

...Many of Reuther's own supporter came to feel that he had let their side down, that he could have secured much of what he wanted had he handled the debate differently...

...The Reuthers successfully fused what Irving Howe and B. J. Widick, in their The UAW and Walter Reuther, termed "a fatal split in the American character between the 'idealist' and the 'realist.'" During his long career, Walter Reuther infused collective bargaining with a social vision that did much to reform American capitalism...

...Victor, riding the sound truck from front to front...

...Another pace-setting achievement, supplementary unemployment payments, helped hundreds of thousands survive the recent recession...

...Victor Reuther, naturally, cannot bring himself to acknowledge his brother's detachment from the rest of the labor movement, nor his being at loose ends...

...Victor Reuther gives a good account of the Reuthers' boyhoods...

...This would have increased his stature, even when he lost...

...This failure may have been the ultimate Reuther tragedy...

...When Walter Reuther was killed in an airplane crash on May 8, 1970, the democratic Left in this country, and countless others as well, felt a great loss...

...Joseph C. Goulden, in his biography Meany, quotes former AFL-CIO research director Stanley Ruttenberg on the infra-organizational squabbles: "Walter would force a confrontation, and then pull back without getting a vote...

...Ironically, however, death came at a time when the UAW president's career seemed stalled in a cul-de-sac of his own making...

...He also reports the results of the UAW investigations into the Reuther shooting (Walter almost lost the use of his right arm in 1948, Victor lost his left eye in 1949...

...The guaranteed annual wage he negotiated not only minimized the burden of seasonal layoffs in the auto industry, but set a pattern for other seasonal industries...

...The rise of the industrial unions in the late 1930s was a heady affair, and on the crest were the United Auto Workers and the ReuthersRoy, captaining the beleaguered sit-down strikers in Flint, Michigan...

...Indeed, what spoils an otherwise memorable memoir is his rancor, which leads him to reiterate charges that are simply not true—for example, that the Federation did not adequately support the farm workers' efforts to reorganize, and that the CIA influenced the AFL-CIO's attempts to combat the spread of Communist totalitarianism abroad...

...His only allies were the discredited Teamsters, and even that partnership was soon to fold...

...But we are given a revealing and rather poignant portrait of Walter pouring compulsively over the blueprints and mockups of a pet project of his, what ultimately became the Walter P. Reuther Family Educational Center at Black Lake, Michigan...

...of his and Walter's travels abroad in the early '30s (including two years in the Soviet Union, oneand-a-half of them spent working in the Gorky auto plant...

...of their youthful enthusiasms as they agitated and educated in pre-UAW Detroit...

...He had become isolated from the mainstream of organized labor, and the situation worsened when, in 1968, he walked out in a huff from the AFL-CIO...

...It appears, in that, that Victor Reuther has opposed the merger of the AFL (Meany) and the CIO (the Reuthers) from the start...

...and Walter, braving Ford's hired goons and negotiating labor's most advanced contracts at the bargaining table...

...He cannot see what his brother and Meany truly accomplished—the building of a sound base for the House of Labor...

...of the building of the union...

...I differed with him on this strategy...

...And despite the considerable health and welfare benefits it won for its own members, the UAW never let up in its drive for a national health care program...

...both nearly lost their lives...