John Barnard (2) (1932–)

John Barnard’s biography of Walter Reuther is a book about both a man and a moment. Though Reuther’s name may be largely unknown today to most people, as the president of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) union in the 1950s and 1960s he was in many respects the dominant labor leader in postwar America and a figure of national stature. His ascension to this position paralleled the rise of the UAW as a union representing the workers in one of the key sectors of the mid-20th century American economy, a rise that as Barnard demonstrates Reuther deserves no small share of the credit and which forms a key part of his short study of the man.

In many respects, Reuther’s life of labor activism was a family inheritance. The son of a German immigrant and union member, Reuther grew up in a household in which beliefs in union activism and social democracy ran strong. Even before he graduated from college Reuther went to work as a die maker in a West Virginia steel company before moving to Detroit to find work in the newly established auto industry. When he was laid off at Ford during the Depression, Reuther spent nearly three years abroad with his brother Victor, where he witnessed firsthand the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany and worked in a Russian factory before returning to the United States in 1935.

Reuther arrived at a propitious moment in American labor history. With the start of the New Deal in 1933 American unions enjoyed greater latitude in organizing workers. Though the American Federation of Labor chartered the UAW in 1934 in an effort to make inroads in the largely unorganized automobile industry, the craft-dominated AF of L’s efforts to preserve the prerogatives of craft unions within the industry led the industrial unions to break away the following year to form a new coalition of unions focused on manufacturing, which soon became known as the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Upon his return to the States Reuther joined the UAW as an organizer, and soon proved himself in the sometimes bloody clashes to organize auto workers throughout the industry in the late 1930s.

With many of the UAW’s organizational gains solidified by the Second World War, the union entered the postwar era in a position of strength. Though Reuther’s hopes for a more coequal industrial partnership with management were quickly frustrated, he won election to the presidency of the UAW in 1946. Reuther quickly established himself as a prominent figure of postwar American liberalism, helping to found the Americans for Democratic Action and later becoming a prominent advocate for the civil rights movement. Yet it was his role as a labor leader during an era of unprecedented prosperity in the American industrial economy for which he became best known, as through his successful bargaining with automobile manufacturers he ensured that his members enjoyed high wages and other benefits that dramatically improved their standard of living.

Reuther’s death in a plane crash in 1970 spared him from facing the challenges posed by the changes the automobile industry faced in the decade that followed. It also has the effect of making Barnard’s book a eulogy to a bygone era in the American economy. With his descriptions of the pre-unionized automobile workforce, the generous contracts they subsequently negotiated with profit-flush automobile companies, and the central role they enjoyed in postwar American life, Barnard’s book becomes about more than just Reuther’s life but an account of a unique moment in the nation’s history, one that, even while within living memory, nevertheless seems impossibly distant from us today.… (altro)