Making Sense of Reuther

Midway through his extraordinarily rich biography of Walter Reuther, Nelson Lichtenstein writes about an episode that occurred in 1947 while
Republican Congress was passing the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) called for protest demonstrations. Reuther, in his capacity as United Auto Workers (UAW) president, sent telegrams to all the Detroit-area locals ordering them to stop work at 2 P.M. on April 24 and assemble at Cadillac Square. This was a political strike, familiar in Europe, and since the late1930s increasingly commonplace in American industrial centers as well; only the previous summer CIO demonstrations against the decontrol of meat prices had shut down many Detroit plants.

This time, however, General Motors (GM) drew the line. Anyone who quit work would be disciplined for violating paragraph 117 of the contract, which prohibited work stoppages. Anti- Reutherites on the executive board, and even some of his allies, wan...