They took the first train to Berlin. Sharing their compartment were a worried trade-union official—next day they read he had been shot—and two young German workers. The workers were interested in Walter’s account of American union activity. One invited Walter and Victor to share his house near the Berlin railroad station, and they went there after taking the first propaganda tour through the smoldering ruins of the Reichstag. It turned out their host was a dedicated anti-Nazi. The house was a political headquarters, and their second night there it was raided. The Reuthers, flourishing their American passports and talking loudly in English, managed to get their friend out and away to the Swiss border. Later he re-entered the country secretly, was captured, survived a concentration camp, and appeared unexpectedly in Victor’s Washington office one postwar winter as a visiting publisher of Ruhr union journals.
Germany was not at its most attractive in 1933. The Reichstag fire had ignited blazes everywhere, and two young American idealists carrying letters to enemies of the new order couldn’t help getting scorched. They arrived in Mannheim, their grandfather’s hometown, the day before a cousin was arrested by the Gestapo. In Scharnhausen, a suburb of Stuttgart and their mother’s former home, they saw a worker brutally beaten for protesting the confiscation of his union flag. One night they took two girl cousins to a Scharnhausen movie. The film was a Nazi propaganda picture. After it a swastika was flashed on the screen and the crowd rose for the Horst Wessel Lied. Walter, Victor and the girls, whose father was a typographical worker, remained seated. People around them became abusive, and passports and protests in English cut no ice here; they were cuffed and shoved rudely into the street. The next time a band struck up a Nazi song, they stood.
In Berlin the brothers had applied for U.S.S.R. visas at the Amtorg Trading Company. Ford was building a factory for the Russians in the Volga city of Gorki; American instructors were needed; they could find work there. The visas would take time, the Berlin agents explained, suggesting that they spend the interval seeing something of Europe. Buying bikes in Stuttgart, they cycled through the Black Forest, the old Verdun battlefields, northern Italy, and Austria, where they joined the last May Day celebration before Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss cracked down. They crossed to England and then pedaled through Holland and Belgium, sometimes carrying messages across borders for friends in the anti-Nazi underground. Neither was caught, though Victor enraged a Roman crowd by taking pictures of Mussolini during the observance of his tenth anniversary as Duce.
Meanwhile autumn was approaching. They were running out of money. Walter toppled off his bike and cut his arm badly, but they couldn’t afford a hospital, so they bandaged it and he rode on, one-armed. In France one dark night they sighted what looked like an inviting haystack. Exhausted, they dropped their bikes and crept up to it, and awoke next morning in what was all too clearly a pile of manure.
When the Amtorg agency sent word that their visas had arrived, it was the dead of the Russian winter. In Gorki the thermometer was thirty degrees below zero. Wearing zippered jackets and knickers, and carrying only their tool boxes—they had shipped their bikes and trunks—they were, Walter recalled years afterward, “completely disorganized.” Neither knew a word of Russian. A Red Army officer got them on the right trolley. It dropped them a mile and a half from the factory, and as they stepped off another passenger pointed wildly at Walter’s jacket. He looked down. Someone with a knife had quietly sliced it open and lifted his wallet. Luckily his cash was in a money belt, but all the notes on their European trip were gone, and as if that weren’t enough, when they finally reached Amerikanski Pasholik, the village for American workers, they found the factory was unheated. “It was my introduction to the workers’ paradise,” Walter later said dryly. Victor says today, “I still shiver at the memory of that cold.”
They worked in Gorki nearly two years. Walter became a foreman again, leading a “brigade” of sixteen workers and winning bonuses. He liked Russian youth, but he disliked the Bolshevik management, which kept fouling up his production plans, and he was appalled at the working conditions. Safety precautions scarcely existed. Meals in the stalovaya, the factory lunchroom, usually featured weak cabbage soup, scooped up with wooden spoons, and afterward a girl tossed a towel on the table, leaped up barefoot, and wiggled the cloth down the boards with her toes. Once the Soviet bosses held a contest. There wasn’t enough culture in the factory, they announced; everybody should think how to get more. The department next to Walter’s took an early lead when it lined its walls with fake palm trees, but he won by machining two barrels of metal spoons out of fender metal. The trouble was, the spoons kept disappearing. They were badly burred, and if you weren’t careful you got a cut lip, but in Russia they were sensational. More were made; all were swiped. At last the management announced that anybody who wanted a spoon would have to surrender his factory pass. To get the pass back, he had to produce the spoon.
The Reuthers thought they had left international intrigue behind in Germany, but when they boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway to leave Russia they fell in with a conspiring companion. He didn’t look like a conspirator. Victor remembers him as “the spitting image of C. Aubrey Smith,” and according to his own account he was a retired English officer manufacturing aluminum in Japan. Only after the war did Winston Churchill reveal to the House of Commons—and the amazed Reuthers—that until his death Lieut. Col. Haley Bell had been Britain’s top secret agent in the Far East. The colonel pumped them about Gorki and chuckled quietly at their passionate advocacy of democracy. When the train reached Harbin he suggested they hail rickshas. “What?” said Walter. “Be carried around by another human being? Not on your life!” “Silly ass,” the colonel murmured, and vanished into the crowd. Later that day Walter heard himself being hailed on a Harbin street. Here came Colonel Bell, erect in a ricksha and immaculately dressed in a white linen suit and pith helmet. As he passed by—and out of the Reuthers’ lives—he doffed his topee and called in sepulchral tones, “Behold the British imperialist!”
The colonel caused Walter and Victor no end of trouble, because while they didn’t know who he really was, the Japanese had a hunch, and anybody who had been seen with him was suspect. Whenever they were in Japanese territory the Reuthers could count on three places being set at their table each evening, the third for the local police officer, who had been told to stamp their passports and keep an eye on them.
Their Asian trip was, in fact, something of a nightmare. The worst of it came in Hankow. The Yangtze was at full flood, rice crops had been destroyed, and the Chinese were reduced to eating seed. Parades of children followed all foreigners, beating tin cans and begging food. Everyone knew there would be rice on the steamer, and when it sailed, starving men, trying to leap aboard, were clubbed to death by burly Sikh deck guards and tossed into the water. Farther down the river, the boat rammed a junk. The forty people aboard drowned as the Reuthers watched, and when Walter protested the captain turned away, muttering that Americans didn’t understand China.
In Yokohama the brothers counted their money. They had just seven dollars and were 7000 miles from home. The American consul found them berths with the crew of the President Hoover. Victor had a pleasant Pacific cruise, polishing brass and chatting with first-class passengers while Walter toiled in the engine room, and in California they spent their sea pay on bus tickets home. It was nearly three years since they had seen Wheeling. Their father didn’t recognize their voices when they telephoned ahead, and much in American labor was even stranger to them. The automobile industry was in a turmoil of wildcat strikes, blacklists and lockouts. There was little doubt that the workers were ready to be organized. The question was who was going to do the organizing. In Detroit shops the A.F.L. president was scorned as “Sitting Bill” Green. John L. Lewis had just parted company with Green to form the C.I.O., but he distrusted the politics of insurgent allies. Meanwhile tension was growing on the assembly lines. Walter, arriving from Wheeling the winter of his re
turn home, felt what he later described as “a sense of little people marching.” To Rabbi Adler the yearning for a union seemed to have become “a secular religion.” In many ways it did resemble a faith. Among other things, it had a hymn resurrected from the days of Valentine Reuther’s hero, “Big Bill” Haywood, and his I.W.W.:
When the union’s inspiration through the worker’s blood shall run
There can be no greater power anywhere beneath the sun….
They still sing Solidarity Forever in Detroit. In retrospect the years that followed the birth of the C.I.O. have taken on a romantic glow for graying workers. Friends tell how May Reuther’s brother, told to turn out leaflets, struggled with a balky duplicating machine and finally settled for the one big word, “Strike!”; Roy Reuther, the first of the brothers to work for the union, treasures the shirt cardboard on which he scrawled the plan to seize Chevrolet Plant 4 in Flint; men at Briggs describe his redheaded, bare headed brother leaping on the hood of a parked car and scourging their wavering picket line with four-letter words until it rallied and held. To Walter the late 1930s always remained a time when he was young, “and the world was simple, and there was a frontier ahead.”
It seemed neither simple nor romantic then. Management was dead set against organization. Machine guns were being brought into Flint; Harry Bennett, the former Navy boxer who had won the affection of Henry Ford, was recruiting a private army of three thousand men at Ford. Blackjacks were stockpiled in the union camp, and John L. Lewis’s political worries were not entirely unreasonable, though few took them seriously then. It was a period of leftist innocence. When Victor’s future wife, Sophie, won a scholarship to Brookwood Labor College, a neighbor told her to watch out for Communists there. “What’s a Communist?” Sophie inquired. “They believe in sharing everything,” the neighbor said. That seemed like a good idea to Sophie. Then she had a tremulous second thought. “Even toothbrushes?” she asked. The neighbor nodded solemnly, and when Sophie arrived at Brookwood she brought two toothbrushes, one for sharing and one, carefully stowed, for herself.
Victor, who was lecturing at Brookwood for the Quaker Emergency Peace Campaign, began dating her at about the time his brother was meeting May Wolf on a Detroit streetcar. Walter’s ears pricked up when May told him she was organizing fellow teachers on the sly, and they talked unions until her stop. During a three-month courtship they talked little else. After the wedding ceremony on March 13, 1936, they drove out of town—he had to address a labor rally in Mount Clemens that night—and back in Detroit he dreamed of attending the first U.A.W. convention in South Bend the following month. His local was weak; workers still feared reprisal. Only seven members showed up for the delegate election, and they picked him. The treasurer gave him five dollars—it was all the local had—and Walter hitchhiked to the convention, where he shared a room with five other delegates, ate hamburgers, and was elected to the U.A.W. international executive board.
It was an honor, but unfortunately no salary went with it. The union had thrown in its lot with Lewis; finances were shaky. Walter hitchhiked home and borrowed three hundred dollars. He hired a sound truck and rented an office, into which he moved a secondhand desk, a mimeograph machine, a typewriter and Mrs. Walter Reuther. May had been making sixty dollars a week teaching. He paid her fifteen, which she endorsed over to the union; she was, Walter later said, “the lowest-paid secretary in the city.” She was also head of Detroit’s office-workers’ union. His own income came from a tool-and-die-making job. Until just before the next U.A.W. convention, when he became the last of the Reuthers to draw union pay, he was to serve as an unpaid volunteer. He and his bride moved into a tiny La Salle Boulevard apartment with her parents. It wasn’t as crowded as it sounds, because the Reuthers were rarely home; they worked every evening and dined in a restaurant at 10:30. Supper was skimpy.
“I never knew people to eat less,” May once told me. “I was so thin the mattress hurt my hips.”
Walter’s local was growing. He was president now, and several others on the West Side merged with it, forming Local 174. The sky was just beginning to look blue when he lost his job. He had been working in a small factory. One afternoon the foreman inspected a die he was finishing and congratulated him on it. Walter instantly asked for a raise. His pay was increased a dime an hour at seven o’clock the next morning, and at nine o’clock, in an inconsistency nobody bothered to explain, he was dismissed for incompetence. Somebody had heard that sound truck. He liked the die, so he polished it off on his own time and left that evening to discover that he had been blacklisted. There was no job for him in Detroit. It was frustrating, because he had evolved a plan and needed to be inside a plant to execute it. The only alternative was to install a reliable substitute. He put through an urgent call to his brother, still on the road for the Quakers. That night Victor alerted his new wife to travel, and the following afternoon he was in Detroit’s Kelsey-Hayes factory, working a punch press for thirty-six and a half cents an hour.
Victor’s mission was to persuade workmen to sit, at the right time, in concert with members of the local. Walter had picked Kelsey-Hayes because although half of Local 174s membership was there, the company’s front office had refused to discuss speedup complaints with him on the ground that he didn’t represent the workers. The sit-down seemed practical. The idea, of course, was to prevent strikebreakers from being brought in. There was nothing new in it. Two years before, groups of Welsh and Hungarian miners had refused to come to the top until their wages were raised, and an Akron tire-workers’ local had just won the restoration of a pay cut by perching on the job. It was in Michigan, however, that the all-night sit-down was to become famous and spread until half a million American workmen were involved. Kelsey-Hayes was a curtain raiser. It was a historic moment, and it was only a moment, because Walter had briefed everyone by the numbers. One minute Victor was punching out a new piece every ten seconds; in the next a girl pretended to faint, key men pulled the right switches on the brake-assembly line, somebody shouted “Strike!” and when the uproar subsided there was Victor, standing on a packing case, telling everybody to join the union. A bewildered personnel man, plucking nervously at his cuff, suggested that he get them back to work instead. “Only Walter Reuther can do that,” said Victor, and the man, as innocent of the future as Sophie, asked, “Who’s Walter Reuther?”
Walter was sitting by his telephone and looking at his watch. When the expected call came from Kelsey-Hayes’ front office he inquired blandly, “What makes you think I can help you? You told me I don’t represent the workers.”
“If anybody can do it, you can,” said the front-office voice, adding that it was sending a company car over.
Entering the plant under escort, Walter mounted Victor’s packing case and took up where Victor had left off. Fingers twitched at his pants. The anxious personnel man said, “You’re supposed to get them back to work, not organize them,” and Walter, eyes dancing, replied, “How can I get them back to work if they aren’t organized?”
When negotiations broke down the workers sat for five straight days, and in the end an agreement was signed establishing a seventy-five-cent minimum. In six months the local’s membership jumped from seventy-eight to 2400. Meanwhile, the sit-downs were spreading—even John L. Lewis, who wanted to organize steel first, was caught off guard—and the great General Motors plants were paralyzed. Walter rushed a gang of West Side volunteers to Flint, where wives were passing children through windows to husbands, square-dancing outside, and joining in the anthem of the faithful:
In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of atoms magnified a thousandfold;
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old,
For the union makes us strong!
Sol-l-lidarity Fore-e-ever!
General Motors capitulated in February and Chrysler a few weeks later. U.A.W. membership was approaching a half million, a hundred-fold
increase. One night Emil Mazey, the future secretary-treasurer of the union, met Walter at a meeting. He was going to introduce him as speaker. Walter drew him aside, carefully explaining how it was to be done, what his title was, and so forth. Mazey says he decided then “that this man knew where he was going.” The commander of Henry Ford’s militia reached the same conclusion a few weeks later. Ford had announced that he would never recognize the U.A.W., and Harry Bennett was mobilizing. The union was wary of Bennett. A Dearborn statute required permits for distributors of leaflets, so one was carefully taken out before the organizers made their first move. As it happened, the clerk who issued it hadn’t fully understood what he was doing, but no one knew this at shift-changing time on the cloudy afternoon of May 26, 1937, when a band of U.A.W. members, mostly women, left streetcars bearing handbills and mounted the concrete steps of the overpass outside the Rouge plant. The leaders were Richard Frankensteen and Walter, who had finally made the union payroll. They had announced they were coming, and photographers, ministers and investigators from the La Follette civil-liberties committee were on hand to assure fair play. It looked safe.
It wasn’t. Inside were fifty of Bennett’s men armed with blackjacks, rubber hose and pistols. Nobody was in the dark about who Walter Reuther was now. The goons had, in fact, been told to single him out for special attention. He was still posing for the photographers when a voice rang out—“You’re on Ford property!” Before he could turn, his coat was over his head and he was down. The gorillas bounced him down the steps, flattening him, standing him up, and slugging him again, and they didn’t quit until he lay bleeding on the trolley cinders below. Frankensteen sprawled awkwardly beside him, and nearby was a writhing, sobbing group of women who had been kicked in the stomach. Down the street a man’s back was broken, another’s skull fractured. Bennett’s torpedoes withdrew, doctors arrived, and John L. Lewis sent the victims a wire: “Keep your poise. It is merely an instance.”
Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975) Page 38