Walter P. Reuther Remembered 50 Years After His Death

By Jeffrey W. Mason

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In a quote that looks like it could have been lifted from the speech of any number of Democratic candidates running to unseat President Donald J. Trump in 2020, Reuther in 1967 argued that, “Profit sharing in the form of stock distributions to workers would help to democratize the ownership of America’s vast corporate wealth which is today appallingly undemocratic and unhealthy.”

One of the most notable labor leaders, human rights advocates (and participant in Civil Rights-era protests including the March on Selma in 1965), peace activists (and opponent of the Vietnam War), and anti-nuclear spokesmen of the 20th century was silenced when Walter Philip Reuther, the charismatic and forceful president of the United Auto Workers, along with his wife and a number of friends and colleagues, perished in a tragic plane crash near Pellston, Michigan, 260 miles northwest of Detroit around 9:30 p.m. on May 9, 1970 as the party was enroute to the union’s recreation and educational center at Black Lake, just 25 miles from where the accident happened.

Reuther, the red-haired son of German socialist Val Reuther and his wife Anna (Stocker) was born, the second of five children, on September 1, 1907 in Wheeling, West Virginia, an Ohio River town and early nineteenth century challenger to mighty Pittsburgh as a future dominant regional industrial center in this part of the country. In the decades that Reuther was growing up, workers at Wheeling Corrugating Company provided assistance to Pittsburgh steelmakers who built the lock doors for the Panama Canal. Wheeling’s name led its later city promoters to construct signage that proclaimed, “Welcome to the Friendly City” to offset the Lenape native people’s gruesome definition of ‘Weelunk’ as “place of the skull” jammed onto a pole near where Wheeling Creek intersected the river.

But Reuther’s important legacy as an auto worker and strong union leader is symbolic of the historic cultural image of millions of American automobiles wheeling freely down the highways and byways of a land where even the common man or woman can pick up roots and resettle anywhere that road will take them – a byproduct of our many American freedoms, both political and of course economic, that Reuther and countless others helped strengthen and expand, some of which even now are at grave risk.

As a young sophomore at age 16, the athletic center on his church’s basketball team left Wheeling High School on Chapline Street and by the age of 20 moved forever away from his birth town and the adoring sentiments of several admiring young females such as this writer’s mother, Mary Hartlieb, who once revealed to me that she had a crush on Walter Reuther. So he left Wheeling and his family’s home on Bethlehem Hill bound for a higher paying job in Detroit with Ford, but only after learning the craft of becoming an expert tool and die maker in the auto industry. Those who knew him then noted that his work habits were top notch, so much so he was referred to as a perfectionist.

In 1932 however, the Great Depression took its toll. Ford laid him off, but Reuther always maintained he was fired for his overly transparent socialist organizing activities. But Reuther read in the newspaper how Henry Ford made a killing by selling for $40 million (which equals over a billion of today’s dollars) outdated Model A automobile assembly kits as well as blueprints and machinery to the Soviet Union. Thousands of Americans had already traveled there to work in building up Soviet industry and after reading glowing reports of life there (stories spread of a Stalingrad tractor factory where a 23-year-old American earned $250 a month compared to $140 at Ford’s in Detroit, along with rent-free housing, a maid, 30 days of paid vacation a year and free passage to the U.S.S.R.). So, Reuther and his brother Victor travelled there and went to work in the auto plant at Gorky where they toiled from 1933 to 1935. Meanwhile, President Roosevelt’s administration formally recognized the Soviet Union diplomatically after nearly two decades of U.S. rejection of the Bolshevik Revolution.

When they left to return to America, Walter wrote, “…the atmosphere of freedom and security, shop meetings with their proletarian industrial democracy; all these things make an inspiring contrast to what we know as Ford wage slaves in Detroit. What we have experienced here has reeducated us along new and more practical lines.” Reuther’s publicized quote on his experiences in the Soviet Union may have branded him a communist Red but in later years he left the Socialist Party and spoke out against the abuses of Stalin and the Soviet system saying that, “American labor rejects the communist concepts of the class struggle.”

When he got back to Detroit he took a job with General Motors. Later he was elected president of an influential auto workers’ union local group and with his brothers, Victor and Roy, he led several sit-down strikes in 1937 and 1940, became president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) in 1946 (holding that post until his death), and helped found the Americans for Democratic Action organization in January 1947 along with other anticommunist liberals including Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. By 1949 he was an outspoken supporter of the New Deal Coalition to strengthen labor unions, raise wages, and give union leaders a greater voice in state and national Democratic politics.

C. Wright Mills described the UAW as a “Grass Roots’ Union With Ideas” and Reuther himself realized how historically significant it was calling it “the vanguard of America,” and “the architects of the future.” The Wheeling-born labor leader was just 33 in 1940 but he was already a union official and the leader of almost a quarter million workers who labored at General Motors, an industrial behemoth that Fortune magazine identified as “the world’s most influential industrial unit in forming the life patterns of the machine age.” During the Second World War, GM, with Reuther aiding the effort by his service on the War Production Board, would account for ten percent of the nation’s manufacturing capacity that became a big part of the Arsenal of Freedom that helped defeat Nazism.

But union work wasn’t for the faint-hearted. The industrial moguls like the Carnegies, Rockefellers, and auto tycoons like William Durant (General Motors), Walter Chrysler, and Henry Ford, the Big Three automakers, left no stone unturned, legal or extralegal, in trying to prevent the unionizing of their workers and later in punishing the union’s rank and file and its leaders with as harsh and brutal treatment as they could get away with. One example of many occurred on May 26, 1937 in what would later be called “The Battle of the Overpass” when Reuther and other United Auto Workers organizers began passing out flyers encouraging Ford’s workforce to unionize. A photo opportunity with a Detroit News photographer on an overpass near the Ford River Rouge Plant where a sign read “Ford Motor Company” became the scene of a bloody physical assault when the automaker’s hired security guards or “goons” beat up every union man they could get their hands on including Walter Reuther and organizer Richard Frankensteen.

During his life, Reuther had to endure many more attempts to shut him up or even end his days on this mortal coil. In April of 1938, two masked gunmen broke into his home and tried to kidnap him, but a dinner guest slipped out of the house and called police who arrested the men, but they were acquitted by a jury packed with Ford supporters. Ten years later on April 20, 1948, Reuther was hit with a shotgun blast through his kitchen window, and due to the chest and arm injuries suffered from that attack, he was never able to recover full use of his right arm and hand. In 1949, the Reuthers had two more close calls. In May of that year, individuals identifying themselves as Detroit policemen responded to a complaint of a barking dog at Victor Reuther’s house, a night later after Walter’s brother had given the dog to family friends someone entered his residence and shot Victor in the head causing him to lose part of his right eye and part of his jaw. Later in December of 1949, there was an attempt to bomb the UAW headquarters in Detroit but despite appeals by Reuther and other union officials, neither the Detroit Police nor the FBI followed up on finding the perpetrators. Almost twenty years later in October of 1968, Reuther and his brother Victor were almost killed in a small private plane as it approached Dulles Airport in Virginia, but luckily the pilots of the aircraft saw that the altimeter was inexplicably malfunctioning and adjusted their descent at the last second to avoid a disaster.

Some even speculate that his untimely death may have been more than a happenstance or an act of God. His own brother, Victor, interviewed many years after the fatal crash noted that, “I and other family members are convinced that both the fatal crash and the near fatal one in 1968 were not accidental.” Did the powers that be decide to shut him up once and for all? After all, others in the limelight of that decade of the Sixties who rocked the boat: JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy met an early demise and the odds that all of them and Reuther too died by unfortunate and unusual circumstances or accidents seem to buck the odds. Those that make these assertions argue ‘Name another decade when so many world shakers in one nation died in so short a period of time, all because of mysterious anomalies of history, unrelated to those who held unprecedented political and economic power and benefited significantly from their deaths.’ Those that make these claims perhaps believe that this man referred to as a troublemaker or even the phrase “the most dangerous man in Detroit”, took his concern for America’s future too far, for he may have angered the White House, and even the entire military-industrial-congressional-intelligence complex with his opposition not only to the Vietnam War, but the entire Cold War-era nuclear arms race.

While many believe that Reuther’s fatal plane crash in May of 1970 in the rain and fog was simply weather-related, others point to the National Transportation Safety Board report that the plane’s altimeter was missing parts or had bogus or incorrectly installed ones. But still others note that even today with the unfortunate death of Kobe Bryant that private air flight is still inherently a somewhat risky business.

In 1952, Reuther was elected president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and within three years he was a key player in the merger with the American Federation of Labor to form the AFL-CIO with George Meany heading the new organization with Reuther as his lieutenant. But the two strong-headed individuals clashed so antagonistically that Reuther and the UAW left the AFL-CIO in 1968 forming the Alliance for Labor Action with the Teamsters. In the 1960s, he marched with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in Delano, California and also strongly showed his support for the Civil Rights movement by participating in the August 1963 March on Washington led by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Reuther also marched in Selma, Alabama on March 21, 1965 with thousands of others two weeks after Alabama State Police and local law enforcement officers attacked and injured dozens of African-American civil rights protesters including John Lewis near the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The Republican candidate for president in 1964, a staunchly conservative Barry Goldwater, once declared Reuther “a more dangerous menace than the Sputnik or anything Soviet Russia might do in America.”

The Wheeling native had a quick and agile wit as illustrated by an incident that occurred at a Cleveland, Ohio auto plant in 1954. While showing Reuther the new automated production lines at the plant, a Ford executive challenged him by asking, “How do you plan to get these boys to pay your union dues, Walter?” He quickly replied, “How do you plan to get them to buy your cars?”

In a Labor Day speech in 1966, Reuther presented a strong case for utilizing rapid technological advances not for war but for improving the human condition: “The question that challenges the wisdom and the sense of human solidarity of the whole human family is the overriding question: To what purpose do we commit the potential power of the 20th century technological revolution? Do we harness the potential power to the madness of nuclear war or can we build a rational and responsible world community and harness the rising star of science and technology to man’s peaceful purposes? The 20th century technological revolution has no ideology and it has no morality. We must bend it to man’s peaceful purposes or we shall perish.”

In another speech, Reuther proclaimed, “The people of the whole world are the prisoners of the Cold War and the insanity of the escalation of the nuclear arms race. And that’s why I believe America has the responsibility for providing both the political and moral leadership to try to move the world out of this prison of the Cold War and the arms race towards reductions in the levels of armament because I believe that in the long run, peace is the only condition of human survival.”

To commemorate his life, Walter Reuther’s name appears on I-696 in Metro Detroit as the “Walter P. Reuther Freeway.” It also was used in naming a hospital and several school buildings in Michigan and elsewhere. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1995 by President Bill Clinton and made Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th Century. A statue was dedicated in his honor in October of 2006 standing between the Wheeling Civic Center and the historic Suspension Bridge just a few yards from the Ohio River in the town he was born in.

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Additional quotes by Walter Reuther

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“There is no power in the world that can stop the forward march of free men and women when they are joined in the solidarity of human brotherhood.” ~ Walter Reuther, 1970

“There is no greater calling than to serve your fellow men. There is no greater contribution than to help the weak. There is no greater satisfaction than to have done it well.” ~Quote engraved on Reuther’s statue in downtown Wheeling

“We live at a time of great change and great challenge but of equally great opportunity. Never before has the future been so pregnant with both the destructive threat of war and the bright promise of peace, for the same scientific and technical know-how that provides us with the H-bomb and the ballistic missile also provides us with…the new tools of economic abundance. Working together with these new tools provides us with an unprecedented opportunity to extend the frontiers of human progress and to advance the cause of human betterment.” ~ Walter Reuther, 1958

“There’s a direct relationship between the ballot box and the bread box, and what the union fights for and wins at the bargaining table can be taken away in the legislative halls.” ~ Walter Reuther, 1970

“…We fight for civil rights to make them universal…civil rights and human freedom are indivisible…you can be free only as your neighbor is free…We want an America in which every child has educational opportunity, an America in which every citizen has equal job opportunity, equal rights to the use of all public facilities, the right to live in a decent neighborhood in a decent house.” ~ Walter Reuther’s remarks at the 78th Annual NAACP Convention, June 26, 1957.

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Copyright 2020
By Jeffrey W. Mason, published author and adjunct professor of history and political science, born in Wheeling, attended old Wheeling High School on Chapline Street (same school Walter Reuther attended, of course), graduate of West Virginia University (BA, MA in history) now living 25 miles south of Washington, DC in Waldorf, Maryland.