The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor: Nelson Lichtenstein
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Onetime Ford Motor die-maker Walter Reuther launched a sit-down strike in 1937 that forced General Motors to bargain with a multiplant union. Another key strike against GM, led by the indefatigable, self-confident United Automobile Workers (UAW) president from Wheeling, W.Va., ended in 1946 in a Pyrrhic victory for labor, setting off a wage-price upward spiral and marking the onset of the fragmentation of union power. Liberal, ex-socialist Reuther (1907-1970), who, as Congress of Industrial Organizations president, helped engineer that group’s merger with the American Federation of Labor in 1955, was a magnetic figure to the noncommunist left. Yet, in allying himself with Lyndon Johnson’s administration and fixating on the gamesmanship of auto industry bargaining, he missed an opportunity to forge ties among an insular trade union movement and the working and middle classes, suggests Lichtenstein, history professor at the University of Virginia. The author sees Reuther as a tragic figure, a man imprisoned within institutions and alliances largely of his own making. This vivid biography holds vital lessons for today’s moribund labor movement.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Lichtenstein (history, Univ. of Virginia) has written a comprehensive account of the public career of Reuther (1907-70), one of the outstanding U.S. labor leaders from the 1930s until his untimely death in 1970. The author recounts Reuther’s meteoric rise, first in the creation of the auto workers union (UAW) and his titanic battles with the “Big Three” auto manufacturers: General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler. Later, he worked on the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) as a rival of the older, craft-oriented American Federation of Labor (AFL). In the 1950s and 1960s, Reuther found more creative outlets in the reconstruction of European labor unions and in advancing the American causes of civil rights and Great Society programs. In Lichtenstein’s dense text, however, Reuther appears only intermittently, and his personal life all but disappears. Recommended for labor collections of academic libraries.?Harry Frumerman, formerly with Hunter Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.