Less than a year later there was another instance. It wasn’t public. The first had brought Ford bad publicity, and when Walter returned to the overpass with a new batch of pamphlets and a thousand husky union men, he was not molested. Ford hadn’t changed his mind, however, nor Bennett his tactics. On the night of April 9, 1938, a group of friends and relatives were celebrating Sophie’s birthday in the La Salle Boulevard apartment when they heard someone at the door. Since Hankow, Walter had had a weakness for Chinese food; he had ordered chop suey, and everyone at the party assumed the man from the restaurant was arriving. They were wrong. The door opened and two heavies entered, one holding a blackjack and the other a gun. The gunman pointed at Walter. He said, “Come on. We want you.”
In the scuffle that followed Sophie threw a pickle jar, a guest named Al King edged toward the kitchen, and Walter vindicated his years of Y.M.C.A. training and blameless habits. Backing into a strategic corner, he armed himself with a lamp and waited for the man with the billy, who came at him, shifting, looking for an opening. They wrestled; Walter twisted the handle off the blackjack and tossed it toward his brother Roy. King, meanwhile, had reached the kitchen window. He leaped two floors, narrowly missing a square concrete incinerator, and in the darkness his shouts for police floated up to the tense apartment. The man with the gun blurted out, “Let’s just plug him here.” Roy said quickly, “If you do you’ll never get out alive.”
King’s shouts were growing louder. A hubbub suggested a gathering below, and the visitors swiftly withdrew. Later an informer called, offering their names for five thousand dollars. Walter agreed to meet him alone in a seedy bar—“probably the first time,” a friend says, “that Walter had ever been in a dive.” Of course he didn’t go alone. The bar was swarming with nondescript union members sipping drinks, but the informer was on the level; he had the right men. To the surprise of nobody, they were revealed as employees of Harry Bennett. In court they admitted almost everything. They swore, however, that Walter had hired them to jump him for publicity, and on the strength of that they were acquitted. In 1941, when Ford bowed to the U.A.W., one of the thugs telephoned a U.A.W. official, proposing that the two of them bring Walter and Bennett together over a friendly table. The official’s reply was a volley of the kind of oaths heard often on Walter’s side of the tracks and sometimes elsewhere. The caller was aggrieved. He said, “You guys didn’t take that personally, did you?”
The strange thing is that Walter didn’t. All his life he had an odd, objective air toward everyone outside his family, friend or enemy, and his attitude toward attacks on him was detached, almost analytical. Still, he could take a hint. After the Chop Suey Incident, as it became known to the Reuthers, he began carrying a gun. He had a hunch his life was still in danger, and as it turned out, he was right.
***
The house that Walter built had to be seen to be believed, but until his death only a handful of friends and union leaders even knew where it was. It lay in green country thirty-five miles northwest of Detroit, which didn’t tell snoopers much; all you could see from the road was a nondescript white farmhouse, a tall steel fence in the backyard, and a padlocked gate. When the householder was in residence, it was no place to poke around. The white building was really a barracks, manned by armed guards, and the fence was watched by four big dogs, two in and two out.
This property was very private. Ed Murrow wanted to visit it for one of his first Person to Person programs, but although he was a good friend of Walter’s, he was refused. May Reuther wasn’t interested in publicity. She left the outside world to her husband and devoted her time to the local P.T.A., the Girl Scouts, and the domestic fairyland Walter had created behind the padlock.
Beyond the gate was the sound of quick water. Walter lightly called this “my moat.” It was a thirty-foot-wide spring-fed trout stream that described three hairpin turns within a remarkably small area. The Reuther home lay in the elbow of the third bend, and to reach it you crossed two wide bridges. Walter made both. He also planned and made the long modern redwood house; an eminent designer drew up blueprints, but knowing his client, he signed them “Architect: Walter Reuther.” Those sketches were, in fact, discarded. In the end everything, from the floating steps in the living room, each supported by a single hanging steel rod, to the white-pine paneling in the master bedroom, was Walter’s idea.
An odd thing about the house was that the rain spouts were inside. That wasn’t planned by anybody. Walter began with a one-room summer cottage. He started surrounding it with other rooms, attaching a kitchen here, a bedroom and study there, adding a second story, screening in a porch. After he had finished, of the original building only the spouts and the hand-hewn beams in the living room ceiling were visible. Except for heavy jobs like the stone fireplace and the big bullet-proof picture windows, he did all the work. He built the furniture, too, including an elaborate hi-fi set, and later he added a guest house to put up eminent people who had entertained him abroad.
Walter’s home, like its owner, was supremely practical. Built-in bookcases were within reach of deep chairs: accordion doors of hinged walnut opened surprisingly on washrooms; low cabinets were finished with boiled linseed oil—so they would be easy to fix, he explained, if scratched. Walter knew all about things like linseed oil and flaring tenons and joists. He was impressive at housemanship, especially when his guest was a writer easily baffled by a leaking faucet.
***
Still, nobody lives behind a guarded fence for fun. For all its charm, the house had the air of a voluntary prison. Eternal vigilance was part of the price Walter paid for the liberties he took with the status quo in Detroit. It started when he took out that permit for a gun. Today relatives recall the awkward pause at family gatherings when Walter would arrive and carefully shelve his pistol on the mantel; and how, driving the lonely roads of northern Michigan on an outing, they would watch to see if they were being followed.
Die-hard bosses weren’t Walter’s only enemies. He had plenty in his own union. In the late 1930s and early 1940s Detroit swarmed with extremists. It was a stronghold of both the terrorist Black Legion and the Communist party; Father Coughlin was so popular in the Chrysler and Dodge plants that he was used as a drawing card at the first U.A.W. convention in 1936, while Ford Local 600, largest in the world, was controlled by Reds. For ten years these angry factions were to give union politics a Borgia tinge which was deepened, at the outset, by inadequate control at the top.
The first U.A.W. president, Homer Martin, was a former Baptist preacher with a gift for Biblical oratory and not much else. Everybody wanted him out, including Walter. The name of Reuther already had a certain force. The Communists had an eye on him. He had worked in Russia, was a Socialist, and had displayed political ambition by running for the Detroit Common Council on a U.A.W. ticket. They thought they might pull him over the Red line. After he had led a vain attempt to overthrow the preacher they offered to back him for the presidency next time, and Louis Budenz suggested he carry a party card.
Walter declined. He was preparing to call it quits with Norman Thomas, but was going the other way, to support Michigan’s Democratic governor. The scorned Communist party decided he was poison, and a seesaw struggle opened. Twice Walter pushed anti-Communist resolutions through conventions. The Reds, striking back, defeated his brother Victor for a high office in the state C.I.O. and almost drove Walter himself from the U.A.W. executive board. They had a lot on their side—neither the C.I.O. leadership nor R. J. Thomas, the tobacco-chewing compromise candidate who succeeded to the U.A.W. presidency, was sensitive to the Red threat—but the Communists were handicapped by the rigidity of the Moscow line. In 1940 they joined John L. Lewis and other labor isolationists in rejecting Walter’s call for aid to Britain, but once Russia was invaded no sacrifice was too great for them. To the dismay of the workers they called for speedups, a dirty word in the shops. Walter protested, and Earl Browder, the Communist leader, bought space in the Detroit pa
pers to accuse him of trying to wreck the industry.
That was an odd stance for an old fighter, but the war put a strain on conservative union leadership too. The rank and file balked at the blanket no-strike pledge given by labor to Franklin Roosevelt. As vice president in charge of the union’s General Motors division, Walter found the workers didn’t always understand his problems. An approving Senate committee later reported that wartime strikes there took less than .0006 of 1 percent of total production time; the men, however, were not so approving, and they jeered him at U.A.W. conventions and waved tiny American flags. Nevertheless, he lost less popularity than the Communists and was in fair shape for a peacetime showdown.
It was a long showdown—in 1948 Henry Wallace was denouncing Walter as “the greatest single obstacle” to his Progressive party, and twelve months later the Reds were still trying to field a team against him at a U.A.W. convention—but the outcome was decided in the first two postwar years. Today the rout of the left seems to have been inevitable. It didn’t seem at all that way then, because the battle opened with a brutal Reuther defeat.
By 1945 Walter had a reputation as a strike strategist. He had acquired it before the war, when, after careful study of General Motors schedules, he withdrew eight hundred key tool-and-die workers whose absence hamstrung production while the men punching time clocks still drew pay. Now he evolved what was to become celebrated as his “one-at-a-time” stratagem. It was based on the belief that competition among auto’s Big Three—Ford, Chrysler and General Motors—was stronger than their distrust of the union. Separate one from the group, his reasoning went; none wants to be strike-bound while the other two seize its share of the market. It was a powerful argument, and it won the approval of the U.A.W. executive board. The years afterward vindicated Walter’s reasoning, for this very tactic became his unbeatable weapon at the bargaining table, but it was crippled that autumn by two handicaps.
The first was of his own making. Until then custom had sharply defined the bargaining role of bread-and-butter unionists. They stood outside the gate of management’s private domain and asked for X cents an hour or Y hours a week, but they never trespassed inside. Walter wanted to break down the walls. He contended that more money wouldn’t help the worker if the corporation charged more for its cars, stoking the fires of inflation and raising the worker’s cost of living, and he wound up asking General Motors to pay higher wages without raising its prices. This was an outright attempt to usurp the traditional prerogatives of the boss, and to make matters worse he asked to look at the corporation books so he could prove his demands were sound.
Other labor leaders were shocked; they held, with Philip Murray, then president of the C.I.O., that it was the union’s job to win money and management’s to decide whether the stockholders or the public paid the bill. Management itself was apoplectic, and in executive dining rooms there was a genuine, deepening concern over Walter’s goals which continued to his death. General Motors rejected the proposal, saying he wanted it to “relinquish its rights to manage its business.” He responded by giving marching orders to 200,000 workers. Harry Truman appointed a board of inquiry which included Milton Eisenhower, but when it began inquiring into ability to pay, the corporation excused itself from hearings. After three and a half months the workers were still on the streets.
Walter’s second handicap was that the Communists were prepared to break his strike. They controlled the United Electrical Workers, which was also negotiating with General Motors, and when they settled privately he had to quit too. The Red ruse was clear enough. He had decided to run against Thomas for the U.A.W. presidency in 1946, and they thought they could torpedo him by tagging him with a lost strike on the eve of the convention. They nearly succeeded.
Atlantic City was bedlam that March. Both sides arrived with fists cocked. There were scrimmages on the boardwalk and in bars, where an informal troupe of Walter’s boys performed a buck-and-wing and chanted, “Reuther, Reuther, rah, rah, rah!” On the convention floor leftists were hailed with “Quack, quack!” while the party faithful grimly fought to save Thomas. That round went to the right. Despite a snub from Philip Murray, Walter won the presidential balloting 4444 to 4320. Thomas stumbled from the stage weeping, and then, while Walter’s dancers and quackers were out celebrating, the Communists captured his officer roster and two thirds of the executive board.
The Reuther victory could scarcely have been hollower. He was the captain of a team sworn to ruin him, and the year that followed was the zaniest in the history of the U.A.W. Emil Mazey, the strongest anti-Communist on the board, was in the Army and didn’t even know he had been elected; his mail had been cut off as punishment for his leading of demobilization demonstrations in the Philippines. Walter managed to hire Victor as the union’s educational director, but that was the limit of his strength. The board majority decided he was entitled to his paycheck and nothing else. He wasn’t even to be told what was going on.
Communist propaganda was released to the press as official union policy statements—Walter read them in the papers—and whenever he tried to act, he was blocked. He tried to put through a bland resolution saying the workers should make progress with, not at the expense of, the rest of the community. The board majority not only defeated it; they formally petitioned Congress to change the name of the country’s labor law to the Taft-Hartley-Reuther Act, on the ground that Walter was more antilabor than either Taft or Hartley. Wild rumors were circulated: Taft and Reuther would head the next Republican ticket; Walter was anti-Semitic; he was a crony of Gerald L. K. Smith. At board meetings he was pushed around—literally—and Murray, turning now, confessed that the struggle had “sunk to a level of complete moral degeneracy.”
Walter had been getting close to Murray. They had reached the “Phil” and “Walter” stage; a state C.I.O. summer camp at Port Huron was being used to train anti-Communist speakers, who were to be sent to locals all over the country.1 In Detroit Walter was talking, he recalled afterward, “to thousands of guys all over this town.” He was also studying union by-laws. The sources of Communist Party cash had always been something of a mystery. He suspected that dues were going astray. Discovering that checks weren’t valid unless signed by the union president, he demanded control of the books. The Reds told him what he could do with his by-laws, so he notified the bank that no drafts on the U.A.W. treasury were to be honored until he had given the cashier the check numbers over the telephone. Every morning he held a numerical conversation with the bank while the Communists huddled with their lawyers. The lawyers advised them Walter was right.
The legal view, however, was that he couldn’t delegate his authority, and a neat little rubber stamp was prepared with a facsimile of his signature, for use when he was out of town. Walter was ready for that one. He called in the chief Red panjandrum. Not only was union money going to be spent by the numbers, he said; unless he got a little cooperation he would stop signing the executive board’s paychecks. “Those fellows hated my guts,” he later said with a grin, “but they loved their checks. They came through.”
Then one of them had a bright idea. The Communists dominated a little farm-equipment workers’ union. Why not merge it with the U.A.W., give it five hundred delegate votes at the next convention, and vote Reuther out of office? The board voted for a union referendum on the merger, to be held that summer, when local meetings would be lightly attended and organization would count. As it turned out, the Reds were voting themselves into oblivion. Anti-Communist speakers deployed, exposing the flimflam; Walter won the referendum two-to-one. At the convention he was swept back into office, and his slate took eighteen of the twenty-two board seats. Back in Detroit, he launched a campaign for a more perfect union, firing Reds and drones, driving lottery operators from the factories, and preparing for a militant stand at the bargaining table. It was all done with Walter’s characteristic thoroughness. He offended a great many people that winter. One of them decided to liquidate him.
H
e and his wife were then living at 20101 Appoline Street. After five years in little apartments with May’s parents Walter had saved $1265, and they had made a down payment on a $7750 brick-and-frame house with maple furniture, ruffled curtains and a basement workshop. There was an upstairs bedroom for their five-year-old daughter and another, downstairs, for her baby sister. The kitchen was in the rear. After a late meeting Walter would pace around it carefully, so as not to wake the girls, and describe his day to his wife while she prepared his supper.
At 9:30 on the cool evening of April 20, 1948, he had finished a dish of stew and was standing by the refrigerator, holding a bowl of preserved fruit, when May asked a casual question. He turned to reply. At that instant an assassin standing a few feet away in the darkened yard fired both barrels of a ten-gauge shotgun loaded with double-O buckshot. As the blast crashed through the house—the children, miraculously slept through it—Walter collapsed on the floor, calling out, “They shot me, May!”
That was the beginning of a year of horror—of “accidents,” as they would be euphemistically called in Reuther households. Walter’s right arm was in a traction splint, his condition critical. On Appoline Street curious crowds gathered. It was a free show; popcorn vendors set up shop on the sidewalk. The first Walter knew of the staring herd was when one of his confused daughters asked at his bedside, “Daddy, why can’t they let us alone? Why can’t I be like other kids?”
Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975) Page 39