Walter P. Reuther

American labor leader

• Born: September 1, 1907
• Birthplace: Wheeling, West Virginia
• Died: May 9, 1970
• Place of death: Pellston, Michigan

Committed to politically active unionism, Reuther helped organize the automobile workers in the 1930’s and led that union in the support of a broad range of social and economic reform in post-World War II United States.

Early Life

Walter Philip Reuther (REW-thuhr) was born into a dissenting German Lutheran family. His father, Valentine Reuther, was active in local union activities and had become a convert to Debsian socialism, which advocated the gradual, democratic achievement of a humanitarian social order. The elder Reuther campaigned extensively for Eugene V. Debs for president, and he, himself, sought a state senate seat as a socialist. He imbued his sons with the need for greater social and economic justice and the necessity of independent thinking, and he taught them the techniques of effective public speaking and debate. Valentine Reuther became convinced that the labor movement should be organized along industrial rather than craft lines and that workers should be encouraged to use the ballot box as well as the strike to advance their cause. Unions existed, he insisted, not only to promote the selfish interests of their members but also as instruments for the achievement of broad social equality and economic reform.

Young Reuther’s own experiences tended to reinforce his father’s teachings. At sixteen, he dropped out of school to work at Wheeling Steel Company. Excelling at die making, the production of exceptionally hard and precise steel forms for use as metal-shaping presses, Reuther was naturally attracted to Detroit, the center of the new automobile industry. Moving to Detroit in 1927, he worked briefly at Briggs Manufacturing Company before obtaining a job as a die maker at Ford Motor Company. During the five years he worked at Ford, Reuther earned relatively high wages, completed high school, and, along with his brother Victor, enrolled in classes at Detroit City College (later Wayne State University). At the same time, he noted the hectic, inhumane hours and work pace on the automobile assembly line and joined the small, ineffectual, left-wing Auto Workers Union. After 1930, while at Detroit City College, he and his brother organized a Social Problems Club, opposed the establishment of Reserve Officers’ Training Corps on campus, and organized tours of the Depression-wracked city with its shantytowns and massive unemployment. They joined the Socialist Party and, in 1932, campaigned throughout southeastern Michigan on behalf of Norman Thomas, the party’s presidential candidate.

Laid off from his Ford job in 1932 (in part, he thought, because of his political and union activities), Reuther and his brother traveled extensively for almost three years. They bicycled through Europe, visited relatives, and established contact with the anti-Nazi underground just as Adolf Hitler was consolidating his power in Germany. In late 1933, they arrived in the Soviet Union and worked for almost two years at a massive automobile plant in Gorki. In letters to American friends as well as in interviews with Soviet newspapers, the stocky, redheaded, brash, idealistic, and self-confident Reuther spoke out on conditions inside the Soviet Union. Like many other Americans of left-wing sympathies, he praised the heroic purposefulness of the Soviet worker. Increasingly, however, he criticized the clumsy, inefficient, overly centralized state bureaucracy that slowed progress. In the fall of 1935, after further travels in the Soviet Union, China, and Japan, Walter and Victor Reuther returned to the United States.

Life’s Work

Reuther threw himself into union activities on arriving home. Despite New Deal legislation encouraging collective bargaining, labor organizing was a dangerous and uncertain undertaking in the mid-1930’s. Industrialists in Detroit a notoriously “open shop” city opposed unions with all the resources at their command. When regular law enforcement personnel were not at their disposal, they sometimes employed violent gangs with underworld connections. They conducted extensive spying on union activities, fired organizers, and employed strikebreakers. Meanwhile, the workforce was composed of a bewildering number of nationalities, speaking a variety of languages. Labor spokespeople, some influenced by communist and socialist ideologies, bitterly debated organizational strategies and engaged in internecine intrigue against one another. Reuther became an unpaid organizer for a small United Automobile Workers (UAW) local in early 1936. At the same time, he married May Wolf, a teachers union activist and member of the Marxist Proletarian Party. He addressed a labor rally the very evening of his marriage.

A shrewd strategist, Reuther understood the use of the dramatic in building UAW membership. Named president of a newly chartered west-side local in later 1936, he orchestrated a sit-down strike at Kelsey-Hayes , a major manufacturer of wheels and brakes for Ford Motor Company. Workers, in taking physical possession of the plant, prevented the introduction of strikebreakers and police by Kelsey-Hayes, whose owners naturally feared the destruction of company property in any possible scuffle. The successful Kelsey-Hayes confrontation was followed by the celebrated General Motors (GM) sit-down strike of 1937, in which Reuther’s brothers, Victor and Roy, played principal roles. The controversial sit-down strategy, ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in 1941, proved enormously helpful in building UAW membership in GM and Chrysler factories. Reuther and other UAW officials attempted to recruit Ford workers in 1937 as well but were surrounded and physically beaten by company service detectives. Not until 1941 did Ford finally capitulate to organizing efforts. Although he had only a marginal role in the GM strike, Walter Reuther had demonstrated remarkable courage and ingenuity during the organizational successes of the late 1930’s.

As a labor politician, Reuther engaged in acrimonious debate with critics, both on the Left and on the Right. In the mid-1930’s, he was part of the UAW’s Unity Caucus, composed of moderate nonideologues as well as communists and socialists. In 1937, he ran with Socialist Party backing for a seat on the Detroit Common Council but resigned from the party in 1939 and subsequently supported liberal, New Deal Democrats for public office. Although continually attacked by rivals as pro-communist because of his stands in the mid-1930’s, Reuther emerged, at the end of World War II, as the leading anticommunist spokesperson within the UAW. Gradually, he fashioned a middle position, opposing both communism and fascism and urging a program of government-encouraged production and abundance. During the war, he advocated a plan of rapid conversion of automobile manufacturing facilities to aircraft production but opposed a piecework incentive program proposed by union communists. In an especially bitter strike at GM in 1945-1946, Reuther attempted to speak for inflation-conscious consumers as well as union members. He demanded a “look at the books” of GM, which he said would justify his request for an hourly pay hike without a corresponding price increase to automobile buyers.

Although the postwar GM strike failed, Reuther was able to capitalize on his imaginative leadership during the dispute. In 1946, charging that communists as well as more orthodox labor leaders had sabotaged the strike, he won the presidency of the UAW. The subsequent year, he tightened his grip on the union, appointed persons loyal to him to influential positions, and began to commit the UAW to a broad program of political activity. In 1947, he helped form the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), the leading liberal anticommunist organization of the postwar period. The ADA, heavily financed by the UAW, exercised considerable influence with the Democratic Party. It backed Harry S. Truman’s Fair Deal programs of government-encouraged economic growth, the creation of national health care and housing plans, an attack on racial segregation, and the repeal of the pro-business Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. Reuther and the ADA argued that the best guarantee against communism, both domestically and internationally, was the expansion of material abundance and its more equitable distribution.

By winning major concessions for union members from the prosperous postwar automobile industry, Reuther was able to deflect internal criticism of his expansive reform activities. An exceptionally skillful negotiator, he won automatic cost-of-living adjustments in UAW contracts, improved medical and dental insurance coverage, and substantially advanced retirement and unemployment benefits. Multiyear contracts, moreover, brought a measure of stability to both the industry and the UAW workforce. While his left-liberal political positions and his strident, somewhat intolerant, style would hardly engender deep affection among most UAW members, Reuther clearly commanded their respect through his intelligence and stamina at the negotiating table. His personal courage, demonstrated during his recuperation from a serious wound suffered in a 1948 assassination attempt, added to his appeal among blue-collar automobile workers.

Beginning in 1952, Reuther played a major part in the merger of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the American Federation of Labor (AFL). These two giant labor federations, the first based on industrial unionism and the second having its foundation in craft unionism, had been sometimes harsh rivals since the mid-1930’s. With the deaths of the presidents of both organizations in 1952, serious talks about a merger became realistic. George Meany, a veteran labor politician, emerged as president of the AFL. Reuther overcame bitter opposition from the steelworkers union to become president of the CIO. (He also retained the presidency of the UAW.) Encouraged by progress in lessening interunion raiding, Meany and Reuther led their respective federations toward a merger in 1955. While Meany became president of the AFL-CIO, Reuther assumed the leadership of its Industrial Union Department and won Meany’s promise to eliminate corruption and racial discrimination in the new federation and to launch a major organizational drive.

From the beginning, the AFL-CIO proved to be a disappointment for Reuther. The much vaunted organizational blitz never took place; interunion rivalries precluded a genuine merger at the local level; and the percentage of the nonagricultural workforce that was unionized began a slow decline. Reuther clashed openly with Meany’s visceral anticommunism, his foot-dragging on civil rights issues, and his reluctance to commit the AFL-CIO to a massive organizational drive. Meany, a gruff, cigar-smoking bureaucrat with a more traditional view of unionism, enjoyed the good life and the annual AFL-CIO conventions at posh resort areas. He had little in common with Reuther, an abstemious (he used neither tobacco nor alcohol) idealist who continually sought to commit the labor movement to a broad program of social and economic reconstruction.

Frustrated with Meany and the AFL-CIO, Reuther enthusiastically embraced the reform policies of the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations. A longtime advocate of programs such as the Peace Corps, he was the most vocal and visible labor leader in support of the antipoverty and civil rights legislation of the 1960’s. Because of his support for Johnson’s domestic agenda, he only reluctantly expressed his reservations about American participation in the Vietnam War. By 1968, however, concerned about urban rioting, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the disarray within liberal circles, Reuther moved into open criticism of the war.

His painful break with the administration coincided with his departure from the AFL-CIO. Disputes with Meany over the Vietnam War, civil rights, and other public issues underscored fundamental differences about unionism itself. The continued rejection by the AFL-CIO of his view that unions should transcend narrow bread-and-butter issues to become instruments of broad social reform proved increasingly intolerable to him. The unwillingness of the federation to support César Chávez’s United Farm Workers, in which Reuther took a deep personal interest, represented only the most recent example. In 1968, Reuther took the UAW out of the AFL-CIO and entered a loose partnership with the Teamsters called the Alliance for Labor Action (ALA). In the ALA, the Teamsters agreed to respect Chavez’s organizational efforts and defer to Reuther on most issues of public policy. While still groping for ways to reinstill idealism and meaning into the labor movement, Reuther and his wife were killed in an airplane crash on May 9, 1970.

Significance

Reuther’s death occurred at a time of deep division and disillusionment in the United States. Most labor leaders spurned his call to greater social activism. UAW members, mostly of post-Depression era age, cared far more about upward personal mobility than the heroic organizing struggles of the 1930’s that had helped define Reuther. The American automobile industry, which had sustained high wages for the union, was plagued with antiquated productive facilities and faced increased foreign competition and a coming fuel shortage. Even Reuther’s liberal political allies, torn by war and domestic unrest, were entering a period of difficult redefinition.

While Reuther’s active career spanned thirty-five years, his consciousness thanks largely to his father touched most of the twentieth century. He remained true to his father’s Debsian socialist vision even when circumstances and practicality mandated that he sever official ties with avowedly socialist organizations. His goals of a purposeful, just, and humanitarian industrial order clearly date back to Valentine Reuther’s teachings. His dramatic, confrontational style, molded in the contentious 1930’s, remained his trademark even in the post-World War II period, when a lack of energy and idealism joined with rigid anticommunism to produce the conservative “business unionism” of George Meany. More than any other union leader of his time, Reuther struggled to transcend narrow conceptions of legitimate union activity and to commit labor organizations to a broad, advanced program of social and economic justice.

Bibliography

Barnard, John. American Vanguard: The United Auto Workers During the Reuther Years, 1935-1970. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 2004. A history of the union. Part one focuses on its formation and its earliest years; part two examines Reuther’s presidency from 1946 through 1970.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Walter Reuther and the Rise of the Auto Workers. Boston: Little, Brown, 1983. An excellent introduction to Reuther by a respected academic historian. Especially good in defining Reuther’s relationship with Debsian socialism. Barnard benefited from the extensive Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs at Wayne State University.

Bernstein, Irving. Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969. The classic study of labor organizing efforts in the 1930’s, including the passage of the Wagner Act, the rupture between the AFL and the CIO, and the growth of the UAW.

Cormier, Frank, and William J. Eaton. Reuther. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970. A readable and sympathetic biography based heavily on interviews of Reuther and those close to him.

Dayton, Eldorous L. Walter Reuther: The Autocrat of the Bargaining Table. New York: Devin Adair, 1958. A hostile study by a right-wing writer, most useful as a summary of conservative anxieties about Reuther.

Marquart, Frank. An Auto Worker’s Journal: The UAW from Crusade to One-Party Union. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975. A slashing indictment by an old-line UAW socialist of Reuther’s overweening control of the union. Marquart argues that Reuther rose to power within the union by Red-baiting his enemies.

Reuther, Victor G. The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976. An indispensable defense. Victor Reuther emphasizes the impact of their father and the closeness with which the brothers operated. To the left of Walter on most issues, Victor Reuther was highly critical of Meany and cautioned against the merger in 1955.

Salvatore, Nick. Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. A fascinating biography of Debs that provides excellent insights into early twentieth century American socialism.

Smith, Mike, and Pam Smith. The Reuther Brothers: Walter, Roy, and Victor. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 2001. Briefly charts the lives of Walter and his two brothers, describing how their commitment to each other and to workers’ rights led to their involvement with the United Auto Workers.

Zieger, Robert H. American Workers, American Unions, 1920-1985. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. A first-rate historical overview of organized labor in the United States since World War I.