Walter Reuther -- A Life Worth Living

I wrote a script for a documentary about the life of labor leader Walter Reuther that won a local Emmy in Detroit.  The film was so controversial that the local PBS station only aired it a 3 AM fearing they'd lose the support of the Big 3 automakers if they showed this pro-labor film.  Much to their surprise it won an Emmy even though it was buried in their schedule.

"A LIFE WORTH LIVING"

THE STORY OF

WALTER REUTHER

Written by

Michael Rose

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1.	A wire service teletype machine begins spewing out a story, a hand reaches over and rips the copy off the machine as five bells are sounded	NEWSREADER: Walter Reuther, the dynamic president of the United Auto Workers, was killed today when the plane in which he and five other people were riding, crashed during a storm near Pellston, Michigan,
2.	Film of crash site	NEWSREADER (cont): The party of six, which included Reuther's wife May, were on their way to the UAW Family Education Center at Black Lake.  The accident occurred when the small jet aircraft was approaching Pellston Airport in the northern area of the state's lower peninsula.
3.	Film of funeral Super: May 9, 1970	NARRATOR: The most powerful men and women in the country came to the funeral of Walter and May Reuther.  Among them, Hubert Humphrey, Edward Kennedy, Goerge Romney, George Schultz, and Henry Ford II.
4.		Some of those attending were longtime friends.  Some were political allies.  Some were former enemies.
5.		They came out of respect for a man who had led labor from the Depression years to World War II, had been in the forefront of civil rights marches and opposed the VietNam War.
6.		Reuther became one of the most influential men in America.
7.		But what was it about Reuther that made the top executives at Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors, stand with assembly line workers in UAW jackets and sing the labor anthem "Joe Hill?"
8.		In most respects, Reuther was a modest man.  He bought his suits off the rack.
9.		He was more at ease eating lunch in his Detroit office at a kidney-shaped desk, which he built himself, than hobnobbing at fine restaurants. BEGIN MUSIC -- TRANSITION
10.		Yet, when he died, he was arguably the most powerful union leader in the world.
11.		Walter Philip Reuther was born on Labor Day, 1907, in Wheeling, West Virginia.
12.		He was the second of three sons of Anna and Valentine Reuther, a union activist and president of the Ohio Valley Trades and Labor Assembly.
13.		His grandfather, Jacob Reuther, immigrated from Manheim, Germany, after being fired from a job for his pacifist and socialist views.
14.		Valentine Reuther was an admirer of socialist Eugene V. Debs and the populist William Jennings Bryan, both presidential candidates.
15.		When Debs was imprisoned in Moundsville, West Virginia, on a sedition charge for speaking out against U.S. involvement in World War I, Valentine took his sons to meet the great man.
16.		He left weeping, Walter said.
17.		Valentine believed in social justice, and that a person's labor ought to be accorded dignity with a fair wage.
18.		He brought up his sons to be debaters.  On Sundays, he gathered the boys in an upstairs bedroom of their Wheeling home to debate issues of the day.
19.		In 1922, when he was 15, Walter dropped out of high school to work at a bakery and then at Wheeling Steel Corp. as an apprentice tool and die maker.
20.		But three years later, he was fired for organizing protests over Sunday and Holiday work.
21.		He moved to Detroit, where mushrooming auto factories run by men named Ford, Dodge, Durant, Olds, and Fisher, offered all kinds of new jobs.
22.		Reuther was hired at Ford Motor Company's tool and die room in the Rouge plant, the most modern and largest industrial plant in the world.
23.		Plant work was hard.  Nine of every ten workers quit within a year because they could not keep up with the breakneck pace of the assembly line.
24.		Small craft unions had been forming around the auto industry for years to demand better working conditions.
25.		While at Ford, Reuther completed high school at Fordson in Dearborn and signed up at what today is Wayne State University.
26.		In 1932, brothers Roy and Victor joined Walter in Detroit, and the three soon found themselves organizing unions.
27.		The 1930s were tough for workers.  The Depression was in full swing.  Work was scarce.  One in four American men were unemployed.
28.		Throughout the country, the disparity between rich and poor was never so great.
29.		The Reuther brothers recorded the contrasts with a box camera in a series of photographs of squalid living conditions in Detroit, juxtaposed with the luxury of rambling mansions in the Grosse Pointes.
30.		It was this kind of concern for social inequities that would later attract First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to Walter Reuther.
31.		At Ford, he was soon heading the 40-man tool room.  But when he tried to organize it, he was fired.
32.		In 1933, Walter and Victor, now jobless, decided to study the plight of workers around the world.  They withdrew their savings and set out on a world tour.
33.		They traveled to Russia, China, Japan, and bicycled through France, Germany, Italy, and England.
34.		In China, they photographed the brutality of the Japanese invaders as they beheaded protesting Chinese workers during what later was called the Rape of Nanking.
35.		In Germany, where Hitler's Nazi movement was on the rise, they stayed with relatives, including an uncle and several cousins who had joined the Nazi party.  They feared for what was unfolding.
36.		In Russia, they worked in an auto factory, ironically built with Ford’s help, and discovered the inefficiencies of Josef Stalin's system.
37.		In 1935, Victor and Walter returned to Detroit by tramp steamer, more committed than ever in the belief that unions were essential to protect workers.
38.		Walter found work at a tool and die shop, joined the newly formed United Auto Workers, and returned to union organizing.
39.		One night in 1935, Reuther hopped a Detroit streetcar on his way home and met a young teacher and union organizer named May Wolf.
40.		They were married on March 13, 1936.
41.		"On our wedding night," she said later, "we took a drive out of town somewhere.  Walter had to make a speech."
42.		Later that year, Reuther was elected president of the west side Local 174, which had been involved in a massively successful effort to organize Kelsey-Hayes, which supplied parts to Ford.
43.		At that time, it had 178 members.  By the end of the following year, there were 35,000 members in the local.
44.		In Detroit alone in 1936 and 1937, there were 525 authorized sit-down strikes, and hundreds of wildcat strikes.
45.		But it was in Flint where the UAW and the Reuthers would gain their most significant victories with a series of actions against General Motors, already the giant of the industry.
46.		The UAW sent Roy and Victor Reuther to Flint to organize job actions and strikes.
47.		On November 13, 1936, three welders at the Fisher Chevrolet Body Plant were dismissed without being given a reason.  A fourth man, a UAW member, protested to the boss.  He too was fired.
48.		On his way down the line as he left, the UAW man gestured to another activist named Bud Simmons to join him.
49.		As Simmons moved down the line, he signaled the workers to put their tools down.  Soon, the entire plant of 700 was sitting down.
50.		When Simmons reached the exit, he turned to the plant manager and said, "Now you're talking to a union."
51.		But it was three other strikes at GM plants in Flint, in the months that followed, that led to the UAW's acceptance by General Motors.
52.		In the biggest battle, at the Fisher One plant, police lobbed tear gas canisters into the plant to dislodge sit-down strikers, and strikers drove police back in a hail of door hinges, handles and assorted car parts.
53.		While Walter Reuther had little to do with the Flint strikes, the collective Reuther successes heightened Walter's status in and out of the fast growing union.
54.		In 1937, Walter was elected to the Executive Board of the UAW.  He was 30 years old.
55.		With GM organized, the UAW turned once again to Ford.  It was the tough nut.
56.		Henry Ford declared: "We'll never recognize the United Auto Workers or any other union.  Labor unions are the worst thing that ever struck the earth, because they take away a man's independence."
57.		In April, 1937, the Reuthers rented a small plane to fly over the factory and, using a loudspeaker, encouraged workers to join the UAW.
58.		On May 26, 1937, male UAW members, and the union's women's auxiliary showed up in strength at the Rouge plant to hand out leaflets during the shift change.
59.		On the overpass at Miller Road, Reuther and other UAW officers were beaten by Ford security guards.
60.		Reuther and Richard Frankenstein, a UAW organizer, were rolled down the steps, kicked, and clubbed for about 10 minutes as news photographers recorded the event.
61.		Another man's back was broken.
62.		The security men seized cameras.  But Detroit News photographer, Scotty Fitzgerald, tossed his equipment into the back of a car which sped off.
63.		His pictures, published the following week by Time magazine, shocked the country.  An angry Ford responded by pulling all his car ads from Time and its sister publication, Fortune.
64.		The events at the overpass were a publicity nightmare.  But Ford still refused to negotiate.
65.		Meanwhile, threats occurred daily at Ford, as did beatings by guards.
66.		Twenty-two workers were fired for wearing union buttons.  One organizer was locked in a cage at the Rouge from Friday to Monday for trying to organize Ford workers.
67.		In 1940, the UAW filed notice that it intended to strike Ford, which in one year had fired more than 1,000 workers who had joined the union.
68.		Reuther organized an automobile barricade to stop all traffic entering a leaving the Rouge plant.
69.		Ford's chief of security, Harry Bennett, wired the White House to protest what he called " a communistic demonstration of violence and terrorism."
70.		Violent clashes between Bennett's security men and unionists followed.
71.		Michigan's Governor stepped in, and Ford agreed to a union election, believing that because it cleaned its plant of UAW members, the union would lose.
72.		But the UAW won by a margin of two to one.
73.		While the UAW was winning important battles, a war was looming on the horizon.  By 1941, it was clear to President Roosevelt that the United States would soon be at war.
74.		Roosevelt needed to convert the nation's industrial bulwark to make war machinery.  And that meant the support of both industry and labor.
75.		Many labor leaders wanted to stay out of the war, arguing that it would create a new set of challenges for labor.
76.		But, how would labor play its part?
77.		Driving by a Packard factory plant under construction one day, a full year before the bombing of the U.S. Fleet at Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, Reuther seized on an idea.
78.		By using assembly lines methods to make tanks and aircraft, Detroit’s factories could turn out 500 planes a day, or make a whopping 150,000 a year.
79.		General Motors' head, William Knudsen, a partner in President Roosevelt's Office of Production Management, and a production wizard, told a U.S. Senate Committee: "I'm against it.  It just won't work."
80.		But Roosevelt liked the idea.  So did the press.
81.		Columnist Walter Lippman said it was important because it was "the first great plan which organized labor had offered in its status, not of a hired man, but responsible partner."
82.		Reuther's clear thinking and bold ideas appealed to Roosevelt, who appointed him to serve on the War Production Board.
83.		American labor and industry powered up the most incredible war machine ever assembled that Roosevelt dubbed the “arsenal of democracy.”
84.		Hitler feared America more than any other country, but was convinced that Britain could be defeated before America could be mobilized or American industry could be effectively harnassed for the war effort. Neither the Nazis or the Japanese had any idea just how effectively American production could be converted to war production.
85.		Air Marshall Goering sneared. "The Americans only know how to make razor blades." Four years later with the Luftwaffe in tatters, Goering said he knew that the War was lost when American P-51 Mustangs appeared over Berlin escorting waves of bombers.
86.		Among Japanese leaders, only Yamamoto appears to have been fully aware of America's industrial capacity. Yamamoto pledged that if it came to war, his carriers could score great victories for the first 6 months. After that he couldn’t guarantee the results. His prediction proved to be accurate.
87.		As the war ended in 1945, and factories returned to making cars and trucks, unions turned to renewing labor contracts.
88.		The wartime partnership between the UAW and the auto companies during the war has opened a door.
89.		With boom years in auto sales on the horizon, a series of highly successful contracts were reached at all the car companies.  They would continue into the 1960s and 1970s.
90.		Between 1945 and 1960, the UAW bargained such innovations as cost of living allowances, company paid pensions, company paid health benefits, and supplemental unemployment insurance.
91.		Years later, Reuther calculated that COLA alone had put $18,000, over 20 years, into the average UAW pay envelope.
92.		By 1949, Walter Reuther, now president of the UAW, had become so respected and well-known that a poll ranked him with Josef Stalin and Winston Churchill.
93.		While relations were good with the auto giants, it was not so inside the UAW.
94.		The Reuthers created some bad blood wresting control of the UAW, by basically kicking out hard-line isolationists, communists, and leftists.
95.		On April 20, 1948, after a long UAW Executive Committee meeting, Walter headed home to his modest home at Appoline and Chippewa, arriving at 9:40 p.m.
96.		As he sat at the kitchen breakfast bar, talking to May, a blast from a shotgun shattered the kitchen window, hitting Reuther in the chest and arm.
97.		His arm was mangled but it was saved after 2-1/2 hours of surgery.
98.		Although no one was ever arrested, one of the stronger police theories was that the attack was the work of someone in the UAW with a grudge.
99.		Thirteen months later, Victor Reuther and his wife, Sophie, were sitting at home in their living room, when a shotgun blast shattered their lives.
100. 1		Victor was hit in the chest, throat, and face.  He was taken to Henry Ford Hospital where doctors removed his right eye.
101. 1		No one was caught in that shooting either.
102. 1		The two shootings changed the Reuther brothers' lives.
103. 1		They never went anywhere again without armed guards.
104. 1		In the year that followed, 40 gun permits were issued to the UAW by Detroit Police.
105. 1.		Victor and Sophie moved to another home that was surrounded by a high fence and equipped with bullet-proof glass.
106. 1		Walter and May moved to a secluded island in a stream near Rochester, Michigan.  The UAW, which bought an adjoining tract, fenced the entire property and built a guardhouse at the entrance.  Guard dogs patrolled the house and property.
107. 1		Walter, who lost most of the use of his arm in the attack, built much of the new home, often while in great pain.
108.		He refused to let the attacks dominate his life, turning his attention to other matters.
109. 1		To build power, labor needed to secure a foothold in government through politics, he reasoned.
110. 1		In 1955, Reuther, now also president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations the CIO, which had split 20 years earlier with the American Federation of Labor, approached George Meany, the new president of the AFL.
111. 1		The two began talking about a reconciliation.  In December, they brought 15 million of the 18.5 million organized workers in the country under one roof.
112. 1		The first major test of this new political force came the following year at the Democratic National Committee, when Adlai Stevenson won the Democratic nomination with labor's help.
113. 1		But Stevenson parted with tradition and threw the nomination for Vice President open to the convention floor, hoping it would select John F. Kennedy.
114. 1		Labor was caught by surprise and quickly backed Kefauver, who won.
115. 1		Labor's new political clout and particularly the role Reuther played, alarmed the Republicans.
116. 1		No sooner had Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon won re-election than the U.S. Senate began an investigation into labor racketeering.
117. 1		The target of the McClellan Labor Racket Committee was the Teamsters and their leaders, Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa.
118. 1		The teamsters were revealed to be a union full of graft and corruption.
119. 1		But the Republicans wanted to extend the brush far enough to paint Walter Reuther and the UAW.
120. 1		Senator Barry Goldwater, an Arizona Republican, alleged Reuther also ran a goon-loaded union that took payoffs and used strong-arm tactics.
121. 1		When the committee refused to let Reuther respond, he held a press conference and called Goldwater "a political hypocrite and moral coward."
122. 1		Finally, with the prodding of the committee's chief counsel Robert Kennedy, and his brother Massachusetts Senator John Kennedy, Reuther was allowed to address the committee.
123. 1		He turned over his tax returns and bank accounts to committee investigators.
124. 1		What they found was that Reuther made about $20,000 a year, gave $11,000 from speaking fees to charities, and routinely underspent when he was on union business.
125. 1		On one expense account filing, Reuther had even removed a valet charge of $1.50 for dry cleaning from his hotel bill.
126. 1		Robert Kennedy had found an honest union leader with whom he could comfortably align his brother in the next Presidential election.
127. 1		Reuther, meanwhile, went on to other matters.  Social problems at home, and international issues were going to be important matters for labor.
128. 1		On the foreign front, the auto companies were now building factories in Europe, South America, and looking at Asia.  Labor, Reuther said, must follow suit.
129. 1		Reuther began forming alliances with labor unions in Germany, India, Italy, France, and Latin America, particularly with the international metal workers in Mexico, where GM had plants.
130. 1		In 1959, he traveled to Berlin and delivered a speech attacking communism and supporting the embattled city.
131. 1		In San Francisco on September 20, 1959, Reuther took on Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at a dinner, over the failures of the communist system.
132. 1		Reuther also found himself in agreement with Kennedy on the need for dealing with Krushchev and the Soviets on nuclear disarmament.
133. 1		The nation, Reuther said, was at times "jeopardized by guided missiles in the hands of misguided men."
134. 1		With the 1960 election approaching, Reuther, a longtime friend of both Hubert Humphrey and Adlai Stevenson, both candidates for the Democratic nomination, saw John Kennedy as the best choice.
135.		Reuther’s brother, Roy, took a leave from the UAW to run the Democratic Party's voter registration drive.  Kennedy won, but would be assassinated three years later and succeeded by Lyndon Johnson.
136. 1		Johnson, a Texas billionaire, surprised many when he launched the most liberal social reforms ever undertaken in what he called his "Great Society" programs.
137. 1		To Reuther, the programs were good news.
138. 1		But it was also important to nurture new unions, Reuther reasoned, and put the UAW help and money behind Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers, and later the organizing of the American Federation of State and Municipal Employees.
139. 1		Social problems also needed attention.
140. 1		America still hadn't faced what it had done to women and African Americans, kicking them out of jobs at the end of the war.  Poverty, racism and the denial of opportunity, needed to be addressed.
141. 1		The Civil Rights movement was on the march and Blacks were demanding equality.  Within a decade, women would start demanding fairer treatment also.
142. 1		The UAW backed the NAACP and other groups with money, and provided marchers in Selma, Jackson, Memphis, and elsewhere.  It launched the Citizens' Crusade Against Poverty and gave it $1 million.
143.		Reuther knew how to use the union’ funds effectively.  When Martin Luther King was in the Birmingham jail he sent his brother Victor to bail him out.
144.		Victor flew down to Birmingham with two briefcases.  One held $50,000 for bail and the other was the $50,000 demanded as a bribe by Birmingham sheriff, Bull Conner.  Dr. King was freed.
145. 1		In 1963, Reuther assigned his assistant, Irv Bluestone, to help organize the famous "March on Washington."
146. 1		Though it may be hard to believe now, the event was controversial in 1963.  It caused a rift with Meany, who wanted labor to stay out of the March, fearing it would become violent.
147. 1		When Meany's Board agreed to a resolution of neutrality, an angry Reuther announced "that resolution is so anemic, it will need a transfusion to get to the mimeograph machine."  Reuther marched with King in Washington and stood by his side as he delivered his famous "I Have A Dream" speech.
148. 1		Social unrest would soon follow.
149. 1		In 1965, Watts erupted, followed by riots in Detroit, Newark, Washington, and other cities.
150. 1		While cities in America burned, the torching of Vietnamese villages by U.S. troops was not only losing the battle for the hearts and minds of Southeast Asia, but at home too.
151. 1		Finally, Reuther broke openly with Johnson and attacked the Administration's escalation of the war.
152. 1		The following year, 1968, Johnson, bewildered and shattered by the upheaval around him, announced he would not run again.  Everything seemed to unravel that year.
153. 1		Reuther's friend, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.  Reuther marched in his funeral in Atlanta.
154. 1		Roy Reuther died suddenly of a heart attack.
155. 1		Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles that summer, and Reuther was in the honor guard at the funeral in New York City.
156. 1		His relationship with Meany had reached a crisis point.  Meany was a hawk on the Vietnam War. Reuther opposed it.
157. 1		The AFL-CIO saw the rising environmental movement as a threat to industry and their jobs.  Reuther asked, what was the use of a UAW member owning a cottage by a lake if the lake was polluted?
158.		He gave Dennis Hayes the money to launch the first Earth Day.
159. 1		Late in 1968, Reuther withdrew the UAW from the AFL-CIO, and began turning his sights elsewhere.
160. 1		Despite the difficulties of the times, Reuther never lost his enthusiasm.  His outlook always remained positive.
161. 1		As he reached the close of his own life, he set about trying to establish a national health insurance system.
162. 1		He also began urging the government to plan for a post-Vietnam War era by studying the conversion of war machine industries to making low-cost, manufactured housing for the poor.
163. 1		He began concentrating on developing the UAW's Family Education Center at Black Lake, where he was headed when he died.
164. 1		Coretta Scott King summarized the lessons of Walter Reuther for everyone.  In a letter she wrote after he died, she said:
165. 1		"The secret of his success with Blacks was, that he was there in person when the storm clouds were thick. . . We shall miss him because we are all better off -- black and white -- because of his creative work. . . .He spent his life fighting the fight of the whole world."