The statute of limitations ran out on the shootings, with no sign of a conviction. In looking for motives the police had an embarrassment of riches. So many people had it in for Walter: embittered employers, Communists, the Ku Klux Klan, the numbers racketeers he swept out of the factories, sullen union rivals. The name of Reuther attracted lightning like a Franklin rod. Throwing it into a conversation was like tossing up a baseball bat on a sandlot; people chose up sides over it. Most critics didn’t want to see Walter actually assassinated, but plenty would have liked to see fate lean on him a little, and few of them wept when he died. To Jimmy Hoffa he was an antagonist far more deadly than all anti-Hoffa industrialists combined; to John L. Lewis, “a pseudo-intellectual nitwit”; to George Romney of American Motors, “the most dangerous man in Detroit.”
In 1958 Republican candidates across the country ran eagerly, if unsuccessfully, against Walter, and twice Presidents ran afoul of Reuther haters. Franklin Roosevelt, greeting him as a member of a labor delegation, extended his hand and said grandly, “Ah, here’s our engineer!” Another labor leader, unaware of the Veblenesque meaning of the term, as a social planner, muttered balefully, “Walter’s no engineer, he’s only a tool-and-die maker.” When Dwight Eisenhower invited him to a stag dinner with a group of businessmen, the evening turned into a verbal free-for-all, with Walter against the field. Ike may have understood how the field felt. Walter stepped on him once, hard. The President was telling a group how he knew labor’s problems; he had been pushed around as a boy, working twelve hours a day. Walter broke in. “General,” he said, “you should have joined the union.”
Walter’s difficulty, in the opinion of Rabbi Morris Adler of Detroit, was that “some people never forgive a man with a new idea.” Certainly the redhead crackled with new ideas. Days he scribbled them on thick pads; nights he sprang from bed to jot them down. He was forever hatching some new scheme to break up racial segregation, or cow company negotiators, or enlarge the union’s role in what management felt was its own business. His goal was a “mixed economy”—an American version of England’s Labour Party program. This enraged one end of the political spectrum but enchanted the other. When he spoke at the University of California he set an attendance record which was broken only once (by Kinsey), and elsewhere Reuther votaries included Chester Bowles, Aneurin Bevan, Jawaharlal Nehru and Eleanor Roosevelt, who thought he might even be qualified for the White House. His appeal to women was immense. During the U.A.W. presidential balloting in 1948, the sixty feminine delegates voted for him almost as a bloc. Women of strong liberal bent often swooned over him. They felt, as one of them said incoherently, that he had “a stranglehold over the wave of the future.”
The lady should be excused. She was only aping her idol. Walter once described a company negotiator as “a man with a calculating machine for a heart, pumping ice water,” and another time he charged that Jimmy Hoffa, Dave Beck and Joe McCarthy were reactionaries “in bed together, hand in glove.” Anybody who used as many words as he did was bound to be tripped now and then by a stray metaphor. He could talk endlessly, on anything; Murray Kempton of the New York Post called him the only man who could reminisce about the future. If you mentioned milk to him he would cite figures, in buckets, on the comparative yield of Guernseys, Holsteins and Jerseys. If you admired the bird feeder in his backyard you would be lectured on the migratory habits of rare Michigan birds. “Ask Walter the time,” said Spencer McCulloch of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “and he tells you how to make a watch.”
Only rarely was his talk small talk. Usually it was grist for his one mill—the need for “dynamic relationships” and “an economy of abundance”; labor’s right to a “bigger piece of a bigger pie,” and so forth. It could confuse strangers, particularly when he got into statistics, and yet there was a simple melody to it. Walter was different from other men because his appetites were different. In ideas he found the exhilaration others got from cronies, liquor or tobacco, none of which appealed to him. As a youth, cycling through Germany with Victor, he downed a stein of beer on an empty stomach; after that his drinking was largely confined to Anna’s homemade grape and dandelion wines.
One of his first acts as U.A.W. sovereign was to turn thumbs down on late poker sessions at union meetings, and though he took a few puffs on a cigar when he came to power, as a gag, he didn’t much like it. Once Linda Reuther and a teenaged girl friend asked permission to smoke. Their mothers said they could when Linda’s father did, so Linda, her friend and Walter sat down and lit up. After a few drags the girls put their butts aside and just stared, fascinated by the spectacle of Walter awkwardly trying to cope with a cigarette.
The men who used to win big in poker growled that he wore “a neon lining on his hair shirt.” But it wasn’t hair to him. In his youth he was an ardent member of the Wheeling Y.M.C.A., and late in life he still enjoyed the innocent pleasures of his youth. In his early days he was picked as basketball center over his brother Roy, an inch taller and a star, because he had more bounce. He always had it. Lunching in Mory’s, in New Haven, with a group of Yale students late in the 1950s, he sat beneath a fifty-year-old gallery of Eli football captains. The resemblance between him and the hale men on the wall was striking, and afterward, when he breasted the campus air with his pouter-pigeon chest, he looked like an aging, somewhat elfin Frank Merriwell, back for a day of nostalgia under the elms.
After a block the boys in the blue blazers fell behind, breathing hard. Nobody, not even Harry Truman, could outhike Walter. Sometimes he was on the streets past midnight, always hatless, and once in his early fifties he tramped seven miles into town with a young friend after a meeting outside Denver. At the end they saw The Bridge on the River Kwai. The friend just had to sit down. Walter, however, was up next morning for his usual hup-hup calisthenics. Exercise, like talking, was a release for him, and like his abstinence it was a reflection of his Horatio Alger attitudes. They baffled other labor leaders. Hoffa thought him a prig and a patsy. R. J. Thomas, who was Walter’s chief rival for the U.A.W. presidency, was taken aback when the redhead offered to shake hands before the vote. He declined, and Walter actually said, “Tommy, if you’re not big enough to lose, you’re not big enough to win.” Tommy then lost.
None of Walter’s copybook virtues unsettled the labor fraternity more than his devotion to thrift. Most union bosses, having achieved power, assume they’re entitled to a few perks. They draw pay as high as $75,000 a year, convene in exclusive resorts, and take up golf. Walter was as frugal as they come. He had a running argument with his subordinates, who couldn’t get more money till he did; his salary was $22,000, and he cut it five percent in the 1958 recession. On the road he was a straight ten-percent tipper and carried a little memo book to itemize expenses. Every big A.F.L.-C.I.O. powwow in Miami or Puerto Rico was a crisis of the spirit for him. In Florida he shared a bedroom with an assistant and took off the instant business was finished. George Meany; a cheerier sort, had to trick him into agreeing to a winter meeting in Puerto Rico. Walter was wretched there. His only happy moment was when he joined a local picket line and ate from the strikers’ kettle. During their stay May found a souvenir, a four-dollar Puerto Rican salad bowl, but Walter made her take it back. He told her tersely he’d make her a better one at home.
At home, May, a handsome former teacher with abundant, almost botanical red hair, did her own housework and cooking. In the late 1950s the Reuthers traded in a Rambler for a Plymouth; May drove it. They were amiable hosts; although most guests were offered tea, or something from the fruit dish that always sat in the living room, there was liquor for those who asked. Cleaning out his suite after a Chicago meeting, Walter discovered two bottles which the management had provided for other union delegates. One was full; the other had three fingers left. “Is this good whiskey?” he asked Jack Conway, his administrative assistant. Conway told him it was the best. “I’ll split it with you,” said Walter, handing him the three fingers and carefully packing the fi
fth for May’s cupboard. It was one of the few times he ended being one up on a convention hotel. Usually he was defeated, as in Pittsburgh, when, avoiding reporters with questions over whether he would succeed the late Philip Murray as C.I.O. president, he decided to eat in his room. The waiter handed him a tab for eight dollars. Walter was aghast. “I can’t eat out, I can’t afford to eat in my room,” he said, fuming. “What can I do?” The waiter murmured, “May I suggest, Mr. Reuther, that you bring your lunch?”
Walter didn’t bring his lunch in Detroit, but he did eat sandwiches at his desk. He avoided restaurants because, like resorts, they weren’t easy places to work, and of all his stimulants work was the greatest. Some people believed he never did anything else. Before fences and guards became necessary he lived in a residential neighborhood. One day a neighbor glanced out her window and saw a man on the Reuther lawn, weeding like nobody’s business. “May’s got a wonderful new handyman,” she told her husband excitedly. “Look at him go! I’m going to get his name.” It was only Walter, on the ball as usual. He just couldn’t loaf. May said that if she saw him sitting she suspected he was sick, and she was usually right. Even illness didn’t stop him—in the hospital after his wound he became terribly interested in medical problems, and by the time he was released wearing a leather-and-steel brace he had a hospital-insurance plan all worked out. Like all Reuther plans, of course, it infuriated conservative critics.
The irony is that this bugbear of American industrialists worked like one of them. He raced around with a bulging briefcase, studied correspondence while commuting to his office, and saved time by flying whenever possible. Once Ed Murrow suggested they meditate together in Burma. Walter was nonplused. He hadn’t time to go home, let alone Burma. In Detroit he was off beavering twelve to eighteen hours a day. If you took the bust of FDR off his desk he could have been the stereotype of the inner-directed tycoon, seated beneath framed pictures of his children, fingering his wedding ring, fastidiously dressed in a quiet gray or blue suit. During the Battle of the Overpass at the Ford Rouge plant in 1937 he went into action with a watch chain sedately looped across his vest, and he rarely unbuttoned his collar or rolled up his sleeves on the job. Rabbi Adler once served on a three-man Labor-Management committee with Walter and Charlie Wilson of General Motors. He felt very much the odd man because the other two “spoke the same language, and there was a tremendous amount of mutual admiration between them. “In his own way,” the Rabbi added, “Walter is the head of a corporation, you know. I think Wilson understood that.”
Some of the titans in Detroit’s executive dining rooms wondered what it would be like to have the redhead’s fantastic energy in their camp, a fact that tickled him; in his office he had a Richard Decker cartoon original of one executive telling another, “I’m not saying it will work. I’m just saying has anyone ever asked Walter Reuther to come in as a V.P. at a hundred grand.” Nobody did. During World War II Wilson and Big Bill Knudsen suggested he become a boss, but he wasn’t interested, and when he became a V.P. of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., holding the penultimate post in American labor, there was a question whether he would trade himself up or down. It was an idle question, because Walter could never have crossed over. The son of a brewery-truck driver, he was born on his side of the tracks—in a red-fronted two-family house in Wheeling’s mill section, on Labor Day Eve, 1907—and he liked it there.
Those who had been taught to respect Rotarian values regarded him as a rebel. Considered against the background of his own childhood, however, his career was as traditional as his personal habits. As a child he wrote on a Y.M.C.A. questionnaire that he wanted to be either a farmer or a labor leader. There was nothing to surprise his family in either. His grandfather, Jacob Reuther, a bearded Social Democrat, emigrated from a German farm in 1892 to exempt his children from Prussian military service, and a decade later Jacob’s son Valentine became a fiery leader in the Brewery Workers Union. In his early twenties Valentine was the youngest president in the history of the Ohio Valley Trades and Labor Assembly; in his thirties he joined Eugene Debs and ran for Congress as a Socialist. Late in life his politicking was confined to Lutheran synods, though he still got hot under the collar at the very thought of injustice. “He can make noise too,” Anna Reuther once said to me, glancing slyly at her husband. Walter told me with a grin, “Every time I go to Wheeling he lectures me. I keep telling him, ‘Look, I’m on your side.’”
When Walter was a boy his father had a kind of jurisdictional dispute with the local Lutheran minister, who held that the welfare of man was of no concern to God. Valentine, indignant, quit the church and organized Sunday debates for the family on social problems. At the time he had no thought of raising labor statesmen. College seemed out of the question for his sons. He was making $1.50 a day at the Schmulbach Brewery. His wife was often ill. Walter and Roy slept in one bed, Victor and the elder brother, Ted, in another. Until their little sister grew old enough to help her mother, the boys took turns at the stove—to the end of his life Walter still roasted turkey at Wheeling reunions—and did the housework. Like any other immigrant father, Valentine wanted his boys to have what his generation called “improvements.” His hope was that each would become a skilled craftsman, which he wasn’t. He thought Ted might make a cost accountant, Victor a plumber, Roy an electrician, and Walter, smallest of the four, a tool-and-die maker. Only Ted followed through. Ultimately he became a chief clerk with Wheeling Steel, and his brothers, all in the union, called him the “white sheep” of the family.
Nobody thought then that Valentine was miscasting Walter. At Ritchie Grammar School the boy had excelled in what was known as Manual Training—Anna kept a wastebasket he made then, and later May acquired a copper ash tray from those years—and he knew machinery. At sixteen he quit school to become an apprentice, and for three years he plugged along at Wheeling Steel making forty cents an hour. Then he left for Detroit, looking “like I fell off a green-apple tree.” Somebody had told him there were plenty of good jobs there. Somebody was wrong. Ford was retooling for the Model A. Jobless thousands were walking the streets, and after relatives of a Wheeling neighbor had found him a room, the best Walter could do was a thirteen-hour midnight shift at the Briggs plant. He put up with it for twenty-one straight nights. Then he strolled over to Ford’s Highland Park plant and applied for a job as a die leader.
This was preposterous. Die leaders had twenty-five years of seasoning; Walter wasn’t even twenty years old. The man at the entrance told him to run along. The guard was the first representative of management to tangle with the redhead, and he lost. Walter just kept talking for two and a half hours, and in the end the gate was wearily opened. Inside there was another scene. The hiring clerk was about to have him pitched out when Ford’s master mechanic walked by with a roll of complicated blueprints. Walter accosted him. Just for laughs, the master mechanic handed him the prints and was astonished to find that Walter could read them all. Two days later the intruder was hired at $1.05 an hour. Within five years Walter was among the most highly paid mechanics in the company, bossing forty men.
It wasn’t enough. The yeast of ambition was working in him, and he was dreaming his father’s dreams of social justice. Averaging four or five hours’ sleep, he finished high school nights; Victor came up from West Virginia, and after setting up housekeeping together they enrolled at Wayne University. For a time they flirted with the idea of becoming lawyers. It passed quickly; after a day hanging around courts they decided there was little justice there. Walter thought vaguely of becoming an aeronautical engineer, but already he was deeply involved in politics. The two brothers had first tasted victory when, remembering their grandfather, they had led a successful student protest against R.O.T.C. Now it was 1932. Detroit was in the agony of the Depression. Norman Thomas was running for President, and Walter decided to make a speech for the Socialists.
Meetings were forbidden in Henry Ford’s Dearborn. Walter, being Walter, had a plan. A fellow worker had conned h
im into making a down payment on a vacant lot a few blocks from the plant, and he already had a Ford coupe with a rumble seat. He built a platform on the seat, drove the car on the lot, and climbed up to speak. A crowd of idle men gathered. So did several police men. They told him this was private property, and he confirmed it, displaying his deed. There was a moment of official consternation; then they drove four stakes on the corners of the lot and decreed that his audience could be so large, no more. “I told my father it was the most expensive speech I ever gave,” he said. “It cost me three thousand dollars.”
It also cost him his job. A few weeks later his pay envelope carried a pink dismissal slip. Victor was already unemployed, but they had been putting money aside, so after finishing their mid-semester exams they breezily chartered a trip abroad. If they were lucky, they thought, they might see something of what both then regarded as the exciting experiment in Russia. They were lucky in another way: they withdrew their savings from the Detroit Bank just ten days before it closed. One bitter morning in February they said good-by to Roy, who was living at the Y and working on a Briggs strike committee, and left for New York bearing steerage tickets to Cuxhaven, $600 in travelers’ checks, and a sheaf of letters of introduction from Reuthers and friends who had relatives in Germany. They looked upon themselves as students of the European labor movement. In fact, they were two innocents heading into a world crisis.
Their first letter was from a member of Wayne’s German department. The addressee was a Hamburg businessman who, since the professor last saw him, had joined the Nazi party. He had, indeed, just been assigned to recruit the allegiance of Germans in other countries, and his first two prospects—or so he thought—were a pair of nice Aryan boys named Reuther. There was a nasty scene. Ten minutes after meeting him the brothers were on the street, swearing. They called next on an unemployed dock worker, the uncle of a Detroit mechanic, and lay awake in his house that night, listening to gunfire. Storm troopers were riding up and down the streets, shooting at anti-Hitler placards in windows. Meanwhile, in Berlin, other Nazis were busy with matches, and the Reuther brothers awoke to learn that the Reichstag had been burned.
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