by Mike McCallister

In the 1950s and ‘60s, when you thought of "Big Labor," it was Walter Reuther’s name who came to mind first. The President of the United Auto Workers was the feistiest leader of the nation’s strongest union. It’s a safe bet most people today wonder why the UAW was ever so feared. In The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor, labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein attempts to answer.

Former Michigan Governor and American Motors Co. President George Romney called Reuther "the most dangerous man in Detroit because no one is more skillful in bringing about the revolution without seeming to disturb the existing forms of society." Reuther had a much broader vision for the trade union movement than just winning a few cents an hour every year in his members’ pay envelopes. He was strongly influenced by the European social-democratic movement, particularly in Sweden and Germany, and sought to bring their social order across the Atlantic. In these countries, government worked closely with management and labor after World War II to provide ordinary people with an advanced welfare state while standing firm against Communism at home and abroad. This record matched Reuther’s own experience in the US. In the early Sixties, Reuther helped initiate a series of summer conferences in Harpsund, Sweden, to encourage American politicians like Hubert Humphrey to meet with leaders of the European social democracy to explore common ground.

Reuther grew up in a Socialist household with his two brothers, Roy and Victor, who would come to play major roles in the union. He moved to Detroit as a tool-and-die maker looking to move up in the world, but decided to make a two-year sojourn with Victor to the Soviet Union at the height of the Stalinist purge trials. This trip would haunt him later. Lichtenstein outlines his steady rise to leadership in the UAW. He left the Socialist Party to lead the UAW’s biggest local at the time on Detroit’s West Side. He thus became a player in the early union’s factional feuding. His ideological turn against the Communist Party’s influence in the union helped to ensure his rise to the UAW Presidency in 1946.

Reuther became a household name as a leader of the union’s organizing drive at General Motors. Walter and Victor Reuther played key roles in the success of the sit-down strikes that helped to unionize the auto giant on the eve of World War II. Walter went on to head the union’s GM Department under President R. J. Thomas. He also led GM workers on strike for 113 days in 1945-46, a battle that would lead him to the UAW presidency just a month later.

As Reuther became more entrenched as UAW president, Lichtenstein suggests that his search for broader influence began to stand in the way of his earlier vision. He highlights several key contradictions. Reuther may have been the strongest voice in the labor movement to support the civil rights movement against Jim Crow segregation in the South, but he was slow to recognize African-American leadership in his own union. When union leaders around the country began seriously discussing a break from the Democratic Party in 1948, Reuther moved to cement his union’s ties to Harry Truman to help gain a GM contract settlement. In 1960, Reuther tilted the UAW to the patrician John Kennedy over Hubert Humphrey in the primary battle, despite the Minnesotan’s lengthy pro-labor record.

Perhaps the biggest contradiction facing Reuther was his relationship to the anti-Vietnam War movement. In 1962, the UAW’s leadership retreat center in Port Huron, Mich. hosted a conference of a social-democratic youth group. The group, Students for a Democratic Society, adopted a resolution there which served as one of the seminal documents of the ‘60s New Left. Five years later, at a Passover seder Reuther was questioned by SDS leaders Barry Bluestone and Leslie Woodcock, both children of UAW leaders, on what he was doing about the war. Bluestone remembers that "Walter said ... he agreed the war was wrong, but ‘it was no time to split the union on this kind of ideological issue.’" Woodcock responded that "You’re telling me that you are unwilling to make a statement that may save 50,000, 100,000 or a million lives because you want to get 50 more cents in your (expletive deleted) contract? That’s the most inhumane thing I have ever heard in my life."

When Reuther was killed in a plane crash with his wife and several other staffers in 1970, the labor movement suffered a major blow, in Lichtenstein’s view. Until very recently, the phrase "What would Walter do?" was a common one at Solidarity House, the UAW’s Detroit headquarters, and UAW leaders debate whether Reuther would have supported the flood of concessionary agreements the union signed off on in the Reagan years. The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit is a useful guide for those who would understand.