There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  As Henry Ford’s health began to decline in the late 1930s with a series of mild strokes, he ceded ever greater authority to Bennett, appointing him manager of the employment office at the Rouge. Ford biographer Steven Watts suggests that Bennett, a seemingly uncomplicated man’s man, served as a kind of surrogate son to Ford, whose relationship with his own son, Edsel, was fraught with unrealized expectations. Nominally the president of the Ford Motor Company after 1919, Edsel had helped supervise construction of the Rouge, but in everyday decisions he was often overruled by his father and, like other company executives, found he was rarely able to challenge Bennett’s authority.

  Henry Ford eyed warily the UAW’s successful sit-down strike against GM, and its other advances in the automobile business, including the attainment of union recognition at Chrysler, Studebaker, Nash, and Packard. With the Depression having taken a toll on Ford Motor Company fortunes, he knew his business was vulnerable to labor unrest. Still, floor bosses only drove workers all the harder as conditions toughened. Speed-ups increased the pace of the assembly lines and new rules restricted everything from lunch hours to bathroom breaks.137

  Ford’s resistance to unions was strategic, but also intrinsic to his worldview. Friend and colleague to a generation of shed inventors like Thomas Edison, Charles Goodyear, and the Wright Brothers, he subscribed fully to the ethos of self-reliance; he distrusted unions for their collectivism, among other things, and believed they dampened individual ambition and encouraged class resentments. While he admitted to having qualms about the impact on men of mass production work, he had long ago reconciled those concerns with the faith that the assembly line offered the modern industrial worker the best means of sharing in the abundance of the new consumer age, the unprecedented bounty that his own factories helped make a reality, a philosophy that had come to be called Fordism.

  Ford likely felt ample justification for insisting that he knew what was best for his workers, for he’d often been lauded as a visionary in the field of industrial relations. In 1914 he had introduced the Ford Five-Dollar Day, $5 for a day’s work, an innovation that overnight doubled the salary of most Ford employees and made them the highest-paid autoworkers in the nation. It was a breakthrough in the simmering war between capital and labor over the adjustment to mass production, a demonstration that at least one capitalist was willing to recognize and reward labor’s contribution to profits. Even journalist John Reed approved, as did Eugene Debs and muckrakers Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell. “[Ford] is a powerful industrial baron who is interested in human beings instead of stocks and bonds,” Reed concluded in Metropolitan Magazine.138 Reed’s research into the impact of Ford’s munificence on Ford workers discovered that living conditions for most workers had improved measurably thanks to the “Flivver King’s” generosity and Progressive outlook.139

  But like many self-made millionaires, Ford’s weak spot was that he had come to assume the infallibility of his own judgment. He believed wholeheartedly in Henry Ford the folk hero, the innovative industrialist with world-shaping ideas—not only about car-making but about all manner of things, including politics, foreign policy, and worker relations. As someone who had contributed so enormously to defining what work was in the twentieth century, it was only natural for him to believe he also knew what workers needed, and Harry Bennett’s “Service Department” had done a superb job of seeing to it that what they didn’t need was a union.

  Time and economics, however, had caught up even with Henry Ford, and pressure from the UAW to organize America’s last nonunionized automaker became irresistible; by spring 1937 the tensions were fully out in the open. With Bennett serving as chief labor negotiator, Ford Motor took the position that unions were unwanted by a majority of contented Ford employees and that the UAW itself was an alien, likely Communist entity. In response the UAW launched an informational campaign designed to entice Ford workers, distributing a leaflet outside the Rouge, titled Unionism, Not Fordism, that urged, “Now is the time to organize! The Wagner Bill is behind you! Now get behind yourselves!”

  The afternoon of May 26, 1937, saw a group of UAW representatives, including Walter Reuther, who at that time headed a UAW local, and Richard Frankensteen, a former University of Dayton football player and head of all UAW Detroit organizing, lead several labor sympathizers, clergymen, and reporters across an overpass approaching the Rouge’s busy Gate Four. The Ford Company had built the overpass—employees used it to reach the streetcar stop across Miller Road—but it had been leased to the streetcar commission for the use of the general public and was not considered private property. Reuther, just to be safe, had obtained a city permit to distribute the UAW flyers, and women volunteers of a UAW auxiliary group had been delegated to actually hand the flyers to departing employees during a Ford shift change in order to minimize the possibility of confrontation.140

  Suddenly a contingent of Bennett’s men appeared to challenge the UAW group’s presence “on Ford property.” Words were barely exchanged before several thugs jumped Reuther and Frankensteen and proceeded to attack them in full view of news photographers. Frankensteen was pummeled as his assailants immobilized him by pinning his suit coat over his head. Reuther was chased and kicked down a flight of stairs. Nearly twenty people in the union group were injured, including four women who complained the Ford toughs had shoved and kicked them. The enforcers also turned on members of the press, snatching cameras and yanking out film, but shots of Frankensteen being assaulted were snapped by a photographer who did manage to escape, and his pictures were widely circulated.141

  Published photographs of what newsmen dubbed the “Battle of the Overpass” upset many Americans and did irreparable harm to Ford’s image. Where was the benign inventor Henry Ford the country had come to know and love in these images of bullies ganging up on a lone labor organizer? When the company’s effort to blame the UAW and the press for an “attack [on] a peaceable body of Ford workmen” proved ineffectual,142 Henry Ford angrily withdrew the firm’s advertising from the nation’s leading magazines—Time, Life, and Fortune—for carrying news of the incident.143 The city of Dearborn, where the Rouge was located, reacted (on Ford’s behalf) by banning the distribution of leaflets in “congested areas,” leading to the arrest of almost a thousand UAW volunteers during summer 1937 for attempting to give away union brochures in the vicinity of the plant.144

  It so happened that at this very time spying and belly-bumping operations like Ford’s “Service Department” were receiving long-overdue scrutiny from Congress. Wisconsin senator Robert M. La Follette Jr. and Senator Elbert D. Thomas of Utah, prompted by the NLRB’s difficulties in enforcing the Wagner Act, had in 1936 launched an inquiry into corporate anti-labor abuses such as espionage, provocation, and terrorism used to disrupt union organizing. The La Follette Civil Liberties Committee based its inquiries on the principle that workers’ fundamental right to organize was being violated by these irregularities. “Prior to the Wagner Act anti-labor practices had presented ethical rather than legal problems,” one history recounts. “After 1935, however, these practices were no longer merely unethical but also illegal.” The extent of the abuses uncovered proved staggering.145

  Released in December 1937, the committee’s report cited labor spying “to be a common, almost universal practice in American industry,” and listed no fewer than twenty-five hundred U.S. corporations engaged in antiunion espionage and trickery. Nearly four thousand spies and detectives, some from the Pinkerton Detective Agency, had been involved, at an estimated aggregate cost to business, and hence consumers, of almost $10 million in the years 1933 to 1936. The extent of the spying alone was considerable, with as many as ninety-three unions having been infiltrated. General Motors was the Pinkertons’ largest manufacturing client and the most flagrant offender, spending $800,000 on espionage during the four-year period, and said to possess “the most super-system of spies yet devised in any American corporation.”146 Pinkerton agents testified that even Edward F. McGra
dy, the assistant secretary of labor, had been spied on while meeting with GM.

  GM was so invested in workplace espionage, the report indicated, that when the firm grew concerned that some of its spies might be stealing company trade secrets, it hired additional spies to report on them; soon it felt compelled to employ yet a third tier of spies to keep tabs on the previous two. “Here is the essence of spy stuff,” Senator La Follette wrote. “So ineradicable is the spy habit that when faced with the evils it produces it has only one answer—more spies. Spies beget spies, lies beget lies, distrust begets distrust—until faith in all is gone…. Industry cannot survive this endless dependence upon unreliable knowledge which begets fear of all things and of all men.”

  The big auto titan was one of many corporate heavyweights exposed in the report. Bethlehem Steel and the Pennsylvania Railroad, as well as the far less likely Warner Bros. Studios, Walgreen’s Drugstores, and the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, were also found to have employed labor spies. While those involved gave various reasons for their behavior—a fear of Communism, the potential loss of trade secrets, the improvement of efficiency, the guarding against theft and sabotage—the La Follette Committee was absolute in its conclusion that “the real motive in all cases was resistance by employers to the organization of their employees for collective bargaining.” And the spies’ actions were far more treacherous than simply reporting what they saw and heard; they themselves often posed as labor organizers in order to entrap those workers who responded to the spies’ bogus anti-employer rhetoric. One spy had managed to become a union’s national vice president.

  In response to the publication of the La Follette report, the Pinkerton and Baldwin-Felts agencies announced their intention to quit the labor espionage business; at Ford, however, Harry Bennett’s troops and company management simply dug in deeper against UAW encroachment. While some Ford executives, including Edsel Ford, warned of the inevitability of unionism, Henry Ford continued to resist, his sturdy companion Bennett also vowing to fight the union nail and claw. Their position, however, became increasingly anachronistic and hard to maintain; by 1940, Ford’s once-golden reputation for industrial relations had deteriorated so badly that there was outrage from the press and public when the federal government handed the firm lucrative defense contracts to produce airplane engines. President Roosevelt justified the awarding of the contracts by saying that he hoped that Ford, by taking the federal work, would be more inclined to accept unionization,147 but even Eleanor Roosevelt, herself a unionized member of the Newspaper Guild because she wrote a syndicated column, joined the chorus of disapproving voices, among which The Nation cited Ford Motor as “the country’s foremost violator of the Wagner Act.”148 The following year, in a sign that concern about Ford’s rejection of collective bargaining had come to rest in Washington, an otherwise competitive defense-related bid submitted by the company was denied.

  Perceiving Ford’s vulnerability, the UAW launched a new organizing campaign at River Rouge in spring 1941, sponsored in part by a $100,000 grant from the CIO. On April 1, prompted by the firing of eleven night shift workers linked to the UAW, a strike was called. The huge Ford labor force split over the matter, and unfortunate scenes took place outside the plant, where strikers fought with colleagues who had remained on the job. Many of the “loyal” Ford men were African American employees, who accounted for 20 percent of Rouge workers. Shunned historically by major labor unions, black workers couldn’t help but appreciate businessmen such as Henry Ford who made it a point to hire them. Taking no chances the Rouge’s black workers would forget their debt to Mr. Ford, the company had “wooed” black ministers in the city over the years “to make sure they disseminated the views of the Ford Company from their pulpits.”149 Now it was largely black workers who resisted the UAW strike efforts, occupying a part of the Rouge premises, engaging in hand-to-hand combat with UAW picketers, and at one point hurling heavy metal buckets from the roof onto a throng of marchers below. The potentially explosive situation—a violent labor dispute with racial overtones—was monitored with deep concern at the White House.

  The standoff at River Rouge was eventually broken with the help of NAACP executive secretary Walter White, at the time one of the most respected African American leaders in America and a friend of both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. With the president’s blessing, White came to the Rouge plant and addressed the black workers from a sound car, convincing them to stop serving as strikebreakers and to side with the UAW. The willingness of the black employees to abide by White’s counsel and cross over to the UAW, rejecting their longtime allegiance to Ford, helped turned the tide in the strike.150

  Ten, even five years earlier, Henry Ford’s resistance to such a concentrated union campaign might have proven insurmountable. But his health had faded again recently, and for perhaps the first time in their relationship his son Edsel, who accepted unions as an element of modern industrial relations, was able to withstand the influence of both his father and Harry Bennett. Edsel, along with Michigan governor Murray D. Van Wagoner, arranged to settle the dispute by allowing the NLRB to conduct an election among the eighty thousand Ford workers in the River Rouge and nearby Lincoln plants to determine the unionization issue. The ballot offered workers the choice of representation by the UAW-CIO, the AFL, or no union at all.

  The May 21 vote went overwhelmingly to the UAW, with fewer than 3 percent favoring no unionization. One UAW official characterized the vote as “the end of an era in American industry. Fordism has been repudiated by the men who know it best, by the Ford workers.” He vowed that the UAW was eager to “erase all bitterness” and move immediately to negotiation of a fair contract.151 Even Harry Bennett, while carping that the outcome represented “a great victory for the Communist Party, Governor Murray D. Van Wagoner, and the National Labor Relations Board,” conceded publicly that the UAW had carried the day. “The law provides that we must live with them,” he said, “and we never violate the law.”152

  Henry Ford, however, stubborn to the end and unlike Bennett not yet willing to hoist the white flag, refused to sign the UAW contracts drawn up after the election. He threatened to shut down the company before he would share his long-held authority with an outside union. Warned by aides that his noncooperation would likely bring government intervention, Ford famously replied, “Well, if the government steps in, it will be in the motorcar business and it won’t be me.”153

  Ford was by now seen, even by company loyalists, as a tired, unwell old man, but his power was still legend and his obstinacy resolute. Thus his sudden change of heart on the matter caught even close colleagues by surprise. The very day after his line-in-the-sand remark about the government taking over the motorcar business, he reversed himself, agreeing to the UAW’s provisions and guaranteeing full cooperation with the automakers’ union on wages, work conditions, and the collection of union dues by withholding money from workers’ paychecks.

  He may have decided that it would be unbearable to watch the government meddle in his affairs, or worried that he would lose market advantage to other unionized carmakers through further noncooperation. Veteran Ford aide Charles E. Sorensen suggests a more homespun resolution. When he asked Ford what had made him change his mind, the company’s founder reported that his wife, Clara, perhaps the one person in the world who could get away with scolding the aged inventor, had lectured him in no uncertain terms about the “riots and bloodshed” his further recalcitrance would surely create. “She did not want to be around here and see me responsible for such trouble,” Ford said. “What could I do?”154

  CHAPTER NINE

  SPIES, CROOKS, AND CONGRESSMEN

  WITHIN WEEKS OF THE U.S. DECLARATION of war against Japan and Germany in December 1941, President Roosevelt gathered labor and business leaders to discuss wartime production and to obtain mutual pledges that there would be no strikes or lockouts for the war’s duration. Labor disputes were to be resolved through a newly created War Labor Board manned by repr
esentatives of industry, organized labor, and the public.

  Strikes diminished in response to the president’s initiative, but they did not disappear. By early 1943 union leaders from the AFL’s William Green to John L. Lewis of the UMW had concluded that while industry appeared to be profiting from the war, labor was not; workers were helping to meet accelerated production schedules, but their wages were failing to keep up with inflation. Hearing labor’s grumbling, the War Labor Board devised a means of compromise known as the Little Steel formula, based on a wartime wage adjustment worked out in the steel industry. Instead of meeting worker demands for higher wages based on the current fast rate of inflation, it used as a measure the pace of inflation during the more stable economic period of January 1941 through May 1942. Workers resented this approach, for the rate of adjustment never topped 15 percent, and they believed manufacturers were seeing far better returns. “When the mine workers’ children cry for bread, they cannot be satisfied with a ‘Little Steel Formula,’ ” Lewis warned. “When illness strikes the mine workers’ families, they cannot be cured with an anti-inflation dissertation. The facts of life in the mining homes of America cannot be pushed aside by the flamboyant theories of an idealistic economic philosophy.”1

  The truth was that neither side was completely happy. Labor thought there was too much adherence to the Little Steel formula, thus denying workers fair cost-of-living raises, while industry disliked the board’s solution of “sweetening” the restrictions of the formula by substituting non-wage inducements to workers such as expanded benefits. Nonetheless, the board fulfilled its mandate to keep labor peace during the war, providing settlements in 17,650 disputes and approving 415,000 voluntary wage adjustments.

  Labor’s response to these inflationary wage issues took place in circumstances much changed since the Depression. Almost 8 million Americans had been unemployed in December 1940, but by December 1943 the number of jobless stood at only 1 million. Compared to the 1.5 million people who had held jobs in the defense industries in 1940, 20 million people—including 5 million women—had joined the industrialized war effort by 1943.2 Unions reacted with patriotism and loyalty to the increased production quotas created by war, and largely adhered to the no-strike pledge. The spirit of partnership with government only solidified labor’s connection to the ruling Democratic Party, a bonding Republicans increasingly resented. This cozy political relationship, labor’s ever-present power to cause havoc for management, as well as too-frequent outbursts from John L. Lewis, prompted reactionary elements in Congress to seek ways to undermine the rights handed labor by the New Deal.