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University Daily Kansan
Friday, Jan. 4, 1963
Walter Reuther Moves Up—Where Next?
Editor's note: Labor strikes and surrounding issues have made headlines and supplied continuous stories since the 1880's. The effects of strikes at newspapers, missile sites and freight piers were in the news last year and will be in the news in 1963. This is a career evaluation of one of labor's foremost leaders.
By Dennis Branstiter
To nearly 1.5 million members of the United Auto Workers he is full-time union president and part-time god.
To former American Motors President George Romney, Republican governor of Michigan, Reather is "the most dangerous man in Detroit."
TO THE LATE Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt he was possible presidential timber.
To former United Mine Workers President John L. Lewis he is "a sundo-intellectual nitwit."
To America's "radical right" he is a pink labor dictator.
To the Communists he is a "company unionist."
Whatever else Walter Reuther may be, he is undoubtedly one of modern America's most controversial figures.
BUT NO MATTER how many enemies Reuther may have, he still has that 1.5 million-member UAW solidly behind him—a big club no matter how you wield it. With political unity this group could sway elections with considerably more divergent vote totals than the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy race. This same group controls an industry on which an estimated one out of every six American workers are dependent for a livelihood. The politico-economic leverage is staggering.
And on top of it all is Walter Reuther.
The Horatio Alger of the UAW, Reuther worked as a tool and die maker in a Ford plant by day while he finished high school by night. Within five years he was one of Ford's most highly paid mechanics, with 40 men under him. But the social ideas of the bright young "company man" quickly curtailed his advancement in the Ford plant.
It was 1922 and Norman Thomas was running for the presidency on the Socialist ticket. Reuther decided to make a speech in Thomas' behalf. This was not a simple task in Henry Ford's Dearborn, where public speeches were not made by any but "right-thinking" speakers. Reuther had to talk a friend into making a down payment on a vacant lot so he could make his speech on private property out of reach of Ford's law.
REUTHER WAS NOT kept from making his speech. His only rebuff came in his next pay envelope—a pink slip.
Blacklisted in U.S. industry, Reuther decided to see what the rest of the world looked like. He and his brother Victor went to Germany and then to Russia to observe what at the time they both considered an exciting experiment.
Walter and Victor Reuther went to Russia as American instructors at a Ford-built factory in Gorki. They worked there nearly two years.
Recalling the unheated factory in the dead of the Russian winter, Walter Reuther said dryly, "It was my first introduction to the workers' paradise."
DISENCHANTED with Bolshevik management and working conditions, the Reuther brothers left for Asia on the Trans-Siberian Railroad.
Reuther again went to work in the American auto industry. This time he organized a small group of workers into a local of the infant UAW.
Reuther's little group decided to send him as its representative to the first UAW convention, in South Bend, in 1936. One member wanted to give Reuther the whole treasury for his expenses, but the treasurer held out for an itemized expense account and return of any surplus. Reuther agreed and hitch-hiked to South Bend with the local's $5 treasury in his pocket for emer-
engencies-like food. At South Bend he shared a hotel room with four other delegates.
HIS UNION activities gained him the distinction of being a two-time loser on the blacklist.
Unable to organize the workers from outside the plant. Reuther called on brother Victor to come to Detroit and work from the inside. Victor engineered a sit-down strike to force recognition of his brother as official bargaining agent for the workers. This successful strike led to others, and the local's membership mushroomed to 2,400 in six months.
Reuther's name finally seeped to the top of the auto industry. And the big boys decided blacklisting would not be enough to stop Walter Reuther.
Enter the goon squad.
Ford's labor relations specialist,
Harry Bennet, began to give special attention to Reuther. When he went to Ford's Rouge plant at Dearborn to distribute leaflets,
Reuther was severely beaten.
HE CAME BACK with more leaflets—and 1,000 union men to insure distribution. They met no resistance.
The labor relations muscle men then visited Reuther's home. No convictions resulted from either incident.
Finally, in 1941 Ford grudgingly recognized the UAW as the official bargaining agent of the auto workers.
As the first UAW president, Homer Martin was a pretty good ping pong player. Reuther led a van attempt to overthrow Martin.
Enter the Communists.
THE AMERICAN LABOR movement in the early 1940s was the scene of vicious fighting as the Communists tried to take over. They looked at Reuther's current ambitions and his former Socialist sympathies, smiled quietly to themselves and offered to support Reuther in his attempt to overthrow Martin.
Reuther wanted the UAW presi-
deney, but he wanted it on his own terms. These terms did not include puppet strings to be pulled by the Communist party.
Reuther made his own way to the UAW presidency by constantly pushing new and previously almost unheard-of concepts in the
Walter Reuther
relationship between labor and business. During World War II he said strikes should be permitted because they would cut only a tiny fraction of 1 per cent from the total national industrial output. He demanded higher wages without a corresponding price increase. This shocked even CIO President Philip Murray. And if Murray was shocked, imagine the feelings of big business leaders.
REUTHER SAID he was working toward what he called a "mixed economy"—probably similar to the program of the British Labour Party.
The UAW presidency finally fell into Reuther's grasp in 1946. He won by a convention vote of only 4,444 to 4,320 and then found he
still had to fight the Communists for actual control. Eventually he also overcame the Communists.
Reuther littered the road to the UAW presidency with many enemies. In 1948 some of them decided to be less gentle than the goon squads Reuther faced in the 1930s. And what could be less gentle than a double-barreled 10-gauge shotgun? Reuther escaped with his life but nearly lost an arm. He still has only partial control.
An elaborate security system now shields Reuther from such attacks.
IN 1952, REUTHER succeeded the late Philip Murray as chief of the CIO. The CIO merged with the George Meany's AFL in 1955.
It is a long way from that first shoestring UAW convention in 1936 in South Bend to the 1959 AFL-CIO conference in Puerto Rico. In this respect only, Reuther clings to the past. He wanted a less expensive convention held in Washington but gave in when the Puerto Rican government extended a special invitation. Reuther later found out the invitation had been prompted by AFL-CIO President George Meany.
Reuther and Meany are often at odds—not about the ends of their organization but about the means and speed of achieving those ends.
When Meany arrived at the Puerto Rican conference a day late because of a cold, Reuther already had pushed through a proposal to organize a march of unemployed workers on Washington. Meany labeled this a Marxist tactic and said he would not have another Coxey's army marching under the banner of the AFL-CIO. They compromised on a "mass conference" in a Washington armory.
right now Reuther is at the top of the UAW. Where does he go from here?
ONE THEORY is that Reuther wants to take the AFL-CIO away from George Meany. The time may be ripe. The McClellan committee's investigations of labor racketinge
have switched the focus from the left wing to corruption as the big danger in American labor unions. This shift could be a great boon to Reuther if he wants the AFL-CIO presidency.
The chief targets of the McCellan committee have been the strongly pro-Meany conservative trade unions of the old AFL Hoffa's teamsters, the longshoremen, the bakers and the laundry workers, all with strong anti-Reuther sentiments, have been expelled from the AFL-CIO as a result of corruption exposed by the McCelilan committee.
From the far right have comeries that a deal was made between Reuther and McCllan committee counsel Robert F. Kennedy. The alleged deal offered rough treatment of the trade unions and soft treatment for the industrial unions in exchange for Reuther's support of John F. Kennedy for the presidency in 1960. Reuther favored Earl Warren for the 1960 Democratic nomination at first but gave strong support to Kennedy later.
THIS BRINGS IN the other theory about the ultimate ambition of Walter Reuther—the White House.
This theory may have gained in substance with the last election. Republican presidential nomination hopefuls for 1964—Rockefeller, Romney, Scranton and Morton—made strong onroads on the traditionally Democratic labor vote of the large cities.
Reuther may be the means to recoup these losses—perhaps not as a presidential but vice-presidential candidate. Conservative Democrats, particularly southern segregationists, would hardly accept anyone as liberal as Reuther for the top spot.
REUTHER'S NEXT STEP will have considerable bearing on the treatment he will get by historians of the future. If the present trend toward a more and more socialistic economy continues, Reuther probably will be heralded as a visionary far ahead of his time.
'54 Decree Key to Negro Rise
Editor's note: The riots at Ole Miss and the continuing furor of desegregation at other previously all-white institutions were leading news stories in 1962. The racial question undoubtedly will be in the spotlight for 1963. Here is a view of the 1954 Supreme Court decision and how it will continue to change the lives of many Americans.
Rv Jim Alsbrook
Many observers would agree that the most widely discussed pronouncement by the United States Supreme Court in recent years is the so-called public school desegregation decision (Brown v. Board of Education) of 1954. This ruling negated a prior decision (Plessy v. Ferguson) of 1896 and made illegal the racial segregation of students in public schools.
THE TWO MOST significant disturbances were at Little Rock, Ark., in 1957 at Central High School, and at Oxford, Miss., in 1962, at the University of Mississippi. Federal troops were called both times to enforce court orders which were being evaded and challenged by state officials and law enforcement personnel who seemed overtly and covertly to cooperate with gathering mobs.
The public reacted variously to the decision. In about two-thirds of the states where in 1954 there had been no legalized pattern of racial segregation in public schools, practically no significant disturbances resulted. In the "border" states of Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia and Maryland, comparatively mild repercussions were felt; but in the more Southern states, disturbances and resistances developed.
The epochal decision had resulted from close Supreme Court examination of a long series of complaints presented by the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People through its legal staff headed by Thurgood Marshall, a Negro lawyer from Baltimore. Md.
Marshall attacked the entire pattern of racial segregation in public schools and convinced the court of two highly significant things;
- Racial discrimination in public schools unavoidably constitutes racial discrimination and thereby deprives the segregated persons of equal protection of the law by penalizing them because of their race.
- Racial segregation in public schools tends to create and perpetuate a feeling of inferiority on the part of the Negro child and a feeling of superiority on the part of the white child, thus rendering both unable to function most normally and most effectively as American citizens living under the United States Constitution, which makes no provision for second-class citizenship.
Upon these two premises Marshall contended that racial segregation in public schools is a violation of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
CHIEF JUSTICE Warren, reading the unanimous verdict, stated that "liberty under the law extends to the full conduct which an individual is free to pursue, and it cannot be restricted except for a proper governmental objective. Segregation in public education is not reasonably related to any proper governmental objective."
Warren further stated that "... In the field of public education, the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."
In other words, the Court believed Marshall's argument that the mere fact that the facilities were segregated caused them to be unequal, regardless of excellence of teachers or other factors.
When the decision was read, many politicians in the South declared that they would not accept it. Some said they would defend their "sacred institutions" with their lives, and others said they would advocate the abandonment of public education and if necessary, all education, rather than have the public schools integrated.
IN OTHER PLACES, however tight-budgeted and hard-pressed boards of education heaved sighs of relief and began to save money by eliminating duplications. In Kansas City, Mo., and other large cities, it was no longer necessary for the board of education to pay travel expenses for Negro children living in communities isolated from Negro-attended schools, and the legal necessity of meticulously providing "equal" facilities for the two groups disappeared.
Public education was not the only area affected. Mayor H. Roe Bartle of Kansas City assigned experts to determine the cost of operating only one municipal hospital instead of two, and within weeks the municipality had abandoned the "Negro" hospital at a savings of more than $500,000 annually.
In some cases, however, Negro teachers and other professionals were released from employment, these dislocations frequently affecting teachers and others who had been on the same job for 20 or 30 years. Many received no financial consideration whatever from the bodies governing their employment. In some cities the segregationist sentiment was expressed through the firing of all Negro teachers.
A FEW NEGRO teachers deplored this Supreme Court decision, but they were bitterly attacked by the Negro press and prominent Negro leaders, their cries of protest being lost in the waves of approval coming from the masses.
By some it is believed that the desegregation decision resulted more from the United States' position in international affairs than from Thurgood Marshall's pleas for equality and justice. With colonialism dying and the non-white people emerging toward self-determination, with Communism threatening to engulf democracy and appealing strongly to the oppressed, with millions of people in China and elsewhere already converted to communism, and with Communists in Asia, Africa and South America linking capitalism with racial discrimination, many persons believed it to be politically timely for the United States to clean house, counteract Communist propaganda and to lend additional moral flavor to its professions of world leadership.
THE SUPREME COURT decision had wide sociological and philosophical connotations in the United States. It provided a glimmer of hope for the future and a measure of faith in America for millions of Negroes, and it eliminated federal approval from the stigma of being a Negro.
In addition it gave currency and approval to the notion that "all people are created equal" as applied to all United States citizens, and it destroyed the idea that a Negro is not legally entitled to the same rights and privileges other citizens have.
Since desegregation in places of public accommodation and in other phases of American life followed this 1854 decision, it is logical to believe that historians will regard this statement as perhaps the most significant step the federal government has made to improve the status of the Negro since the Civil War.