Jeff McDonald

HIST 6394

Dr. Buzzanco

February 24, 1999

A Review of The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit

By Nelson Lichtenstein

Nelson Lichtenstein’s The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor is the biography of labor leader Walter Reuther. Lichtenstein writes about growing up in the 1950s and 1960s and hearing about Walter Reuther on the news, or seeing his televised speeches and knowing that this man was very powerful in a way that other politicians were not. As a graduate student at Berkeley, Lichtnestein learned more about Reuther, not in the classroom, but in the New Left movement founded in SNCC chairman George Lewis’ speech at the March on Washington in 1963.

The book begins with Walter Reuther’s father, Valentine, and his move to Wheeling, West Virginia. There he got a job at one of Wheeling’s ironworks as a laborer earning $1.50 per day. He was eligible to join the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers. Through a strike, Val Reuther lost his job, but through workers he met, joined the Ohio Valley Socialists. He came to be a great admirer of Eugene V. Debs and campaigned for him each time he ran for office.

Val Reuther learned by loosing his job in a strike that socialism and political action were the way to accommodation and holding jobs. These were the same ideas that he passed on to his sons: Theodore, Walter, Roy, and Victor. In 1927 Walter Reuther moved to Detroit, at the time, the fourth largest city in the nation. As an experienced toolmaker, he easily landed a job at Ford. In 1930, Victor Reuther moved to Detroit and lived with Walter. As the Great Depression hit Detroit, auto production dropped and along with it, auto industry employment. They were able to keep their jobs, but were not blind to the many economic problems that arose out of the Depression.

Walter Reuther became intrigued with the Soviet experiment of the Five Year Plans. Although socialists did not care for the one-party rule of the Communist. In January, 1933, Walter and Victor Reuther left for an extended tour or Europe that included twenty months of work at Gorky, the massive Soviet automobile factory. While in the Soviet Union they were excited about the transformation of a peasant society, but were not complimentary of the massive imprisonment and killing that took place. Two years later they returned to Detroit and found much had changed, in Washington and throughout the labor movement.

The New Deal years were important for Walter Reuther, he got married and in 1936 was elected to the executive board of the United Automobile Workers, and ran a successful strike. He spent the 1930s working towards labor concessions for the Union and making speeches. In 1940 he pushed forward the "500 Planes d Day" plan where production proved the importance of the workers. After the War, Reuther surmised that the problem was not in production, but in consumption. "With the end of military spending, the nation faced an annual loss of $35 billion in annual wages." (221) Reuther saw that the solution lay in a raise in wages to maintain the purchasing power of labor, this would keep deflation away. This was Reuther’s principle of Keynesianism that he preached throughout the 1940s.

Walter Reuther was elected president of the United Automobile Workers in March 1946. He spent the next two years using his presidency as an anti-Communist platform. He worked with President Truman and the Marshall Plan to set up labor organizations in Western Europe. He also expected American liberalism to help unionize the South, end discrimination in hiring and education, begin a system of national health insurance, and build government funded housing.

The Treaty of Detroit, 1950, was what Reuther called the most significant development in labor relations since the mass production industries were organized. It accepted the union shop and guaranteed a twenty percent increase in workers’ standard of living over five years. Not just wage increases, but a built in cost of living allowance (COLA). Over the next twenty years Reuther would work to improve the terms of the treaty, mostly through annual strikes, but never changed its essential structure.

In 1952, Reuther was elected president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). He understood the political power that labor was gaining and wanted to use that power to…"reshape the consciousness of millions of industrial workers, making them disciplined trade unionists, militant social democrats, and racial egalitarians."(300) When the American Federation of Labor (AFL) combined with the CIO George Meany became the new president, a position with Reuther coveted.

During the Cold War years, Reuther believed that victory by the West could be achieved by a substantial rise in the standard of living among the citizens of the countries that had been devastated by war and colonialism. "American production technique and organizational genius held the key to enhanced productivity and greater economic growth."(334) The ideas of the Marshall Plan, to send U.S. culture and ideas to Europe, were espoused in Reuther’s "Bread, Peace, and Freedom" proposals. The central focus of our foreign policy should by the aid in economic growth. This was seen in some of the same productivity schemes that Reuther used at home, being used by the labor unions across postwar Europe. The next step in Reuther’s vision would be international labor solidarity. Building this could be gained by way of multinational firms like GM and Ford; their workers all part of a global council. The need for this became more urgent in the 1960s with the first invasion of inexpensive German and Japanese imports. To solve this problem…"he proposed to pace the elimination of trade restrictions then being negotiated under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) with a nation’s agreement to abide by an international fair labor standards treaty." (338) The key for Reuther was a link between productivity growth and higher wages for workers.

The late 1950s and early 1960s were difficult for organized labor in the United States. After 1958 unemployment remained over six percent, in the recession of 1958 the Eisenhower administration would not stimulate the economy for fear of inflation, and membership in the UAW dropped by over four hundred thousand over a five year period.

Reuther had a cordial relationship with the Kennedy era Democrats, even offering JFK an idea where "technical missionaries with slide rules, with medical kits, with textbooks, would fight Communism on a positive basis." (358) A plan that Kennedy would sell as the Peace Corps.

Throughout the 1950s and 1060s Walter Reuther had been a highly visible and articulate spokesman for the Civil Rights movement. He claimed that the United States could not be a world leader and still have racism at home. The UAW gave large contributions to the NAACP, sent dollars to bail the Freedom Riders out of jail, and worked to appoint African-Americans to top level UAW positions. "By late August [1963] the UAW had shifted a sizable proportion of its entire staff to Washington in support of the march." (385) The major speakers who would speak at the Lincoln Memorial rally were John Lewis, SNCC Chairman, Walter Reuther, and Martin Luther King, jr. Reuther spoke about denying freedom in Berlin and equated it with freedom in Birmingham, he went back to his old saying of: "If we can have full employment and full production for the negative ends of war, then why can’t we have a job for every American in pursuit of peace?" (386) It was a good speech, but the same things he had been saying for twenty years. He was overshadowed by Dr. King and his "I Have a Dream" speech. The rally marked a shift from New Deal politics to the politics of racial divisions. The union movement now began to focus on civil rights and passage of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission.

Walter Reuther died in a plane crash in May of 1970. At the time he was embroiled in pressure from the UAW to speak out against the war in Vietnam. He had sent a message to the White House just days before his death denouncing the needless and inexcusable use of military force, and wasted lives. His death coincided with the end of a postwar boom that saw a sharp decline in union membership, layoffs, and plant closings.

Nelson Lichtenstein’s biography of Walter Reuther is a great look into the workings of the labor movement from the 1930s through the 1960s. It gives insight into his early years, the time he spent in Stalin’s Russia and how that shifted his opinions of communism and how he moved away from socialism. The book shows his rise to the presidency of the UAW and the CIO, and the political power that those positions held. It is a reflection of society in those years. The beginnings of the Cold War and Reuther’s attempts to establish a Peace Production Board, the work of the unions and the Marshall Plan, the wins and losses he suffered in the many strikes he organized, all are portrayed in the book. We see the politics of the times, the Republicans gaining power in Congress for the first time since the Depression, the idea the Kennedy’s liberalism was not liberal enough for the New Left, and Reuther’s impact on civil rights and the March on Washington. It is a startling look at how the unions, and their power, affected and were effected by the Cold War years. Lichtenstein takes the major events of the decades and shows the impact one man, Walter Reuther, on the outcome.