The G.A.W. Man

When Walter Reuther first went to Detroit, he was 19 years old and not quite sure of himself--a youthful weakness that he has long since corrected.

According to a Detroit Y.M.C.A. questionnaire which he filled out in 1927, he wanted to be either 1) a chicken farmer or 2) a labor leader. Within a decade, he was leading thousands of men in the great sitdown strikes of Depression-era Detroit. By now, restless, redheaded, hard-driving Walter Reuther, who could never have confined himself long to a hen house, has reached the top of the heap in the alternate career: he has more personal power--although not more popularity--than any other leader of U.S. labor.

Reuther runs--with managerial efficiency--the largest U.S. labor union: the 1,500,000-man C.I.O. United Automobile Workers (U.A.W.); he has signed up 250,000 new workers in the last four years. Last week he achieved a triumph and a great victory for labor, winning from Ford Motor Co. a form of guaranteed semiannual wage for laid-off workers. This week he wrung similar terms from General Motors, the world's greatest manufacturing corporation.

Where to Pioneer. At a closed meeting of union delegates in Detroit's Tuller Hotel last week. Reuther told how he set out to establish the guaranteed annual wage (G.A.W.) in the automobile industry: "We decided General Motors was the easiest place to get money from, because it has the most, but the most difficult to pioneer with on principle. Ford is the easiest place to make progress on principle. So we decided on the strategy of implementing the principle we expected to establish at Ford with the money we get from G.M."

When Reuther first presented his guaranteed annual wage plan at the bargaining table last April, Ford Vice President John Bugas said: "This is something that we will never, never do." Replied Reuther: "Never say never, John." General Motors, which had also begun negotiations, offered a stock-sharing plan that Reuther rejected. Then Ford made a similar stock offer. "I blew my top," said Reuther, who charged collusion between the two companies. "How the hell." he shouted at the conference table, "do you get a Chevvy on a Ford assembly line?"

At noon one day last week, Ford workers in the mile-long Rouge plant were scheduled to get strike orders. Reuther and Bugas negotiated through the preceding night and into the morning. As noon neared, unshaved, rumpled newsmen who had waited up all night crammed into the corridor outside the conference room in the Detroit-Leland Hotel. Inside, after 26 hours of hard bargaining, Reuther and Bugas stood up during a brief break and stared silently at each other. Reuther, who had won his principle, as planned, suddenly grinned and held out his hand. "You've got a deal. Johnny," he said.

As the doors opened, flashbulbs flared and newsmen were toppled in the rush. Despite 40 hours without sleep. Reuther radiated his usual brisk, cold-shower glow. He praised Ford's plan for a modified G.A.W. and, after a night's sleep, tackled General Motors. Every day, flanked by U.A.W. Vice President John Livingston and Negotiator Irving Bluestone. Reuther marched into Detroit's G.M. building for bargaining sessions in the big fifth-floor conference room. Late each night they left again with no word of progress. G.M. Negotiator Louis Seaton, director of labor relations, printed and passed out to the press a card in Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Flemish. The words meant the same in all six languages: "No comment." At week's end, after a final bargaining spurt, the settlement was announced. Like Ford, G.M. accepted the principle of G.A.W. and on the same scale of benefits: four weeks of layoff pay at 65% of normal take-home wages (including state unemployment compensation) and 22 weeks more at 60% of normal. The overall contract package, including increases in wages and welfare provisions, cost General Motors 22-c- an hour per worker compared to 20-c- an hour for the Ford package. Reuther, it turned out, had been somewhat optimistic in predicting to his union delegates a substantially bigger payoff from G.M. than from Ford.

God & Socialism. A third-generation Socialist born in Wheeling, W. Va., Walter Philip Reuther was bred to worship God and to translate brotherhood into Socialist terms. His grandfather Jacob was a German Social Democrat who emigrated to the U.S. in 1892 to save his sons from military service. Jacob Reuther, a white-bearded Lutheran patriarch, often conducted Sunday services for his family at his farmhouse near Effingham, Ill. He felt that some churches "do too much for God and not enough for man"; he believed: "To add brightness to the sun or glory to the name of God are alike impossible." Walter Reuther's pattern of life was molded by his father, Jacob's son Valentine, a union organizer and an ardent Socialist. Walter retains a vivid boyhood memory of going to Moundsville Penitentiary with his father to visit Socialist Eugene Debs, sentenced to ten years under the Espionage Act.

On Sundays at home. Valentine Reuther conducted debates on issues like capital punishment and the right to strike.

"It was no accident," says Valentine Reuther, that three of his four sons became labor officials, all in the C.I.O. It is also no accident that Walter Reuther can debate Detroit's most fluent corporate talent to a standstill.

Green Apple. Of the brothers, Walter was the smallest (now 5 ft. 8 1/2 in.) and the least brilliant in school. He flunked English and algebra. At 16, he quit to become an apprentice machinist at Wheeling Steel (11-c- an hour). In 1927 he went to Detroit to make big money.

Ford was retooling and thousands were laid off, but, after standing in line at dawn daily for a week, Reuther got a job at Briggs (85-c- an hour). "I looked like I fell off a green apple tree," he later recalled. Soon he got a better job ($1.10 an hour) at Ford as a tool-and-die leader bossing 40 men. He discovered his own talents. He also discovered that he was not very interested in making money.

Working nights, he went to high school and then to Wayne University, came out of classes frothing ideas. When the Depression hit Detroit, he reacted with a surge of Socialist hope and a sense of historic urgency. Excitedly, he joined picket lines and soapboxed at breadlines, organized soup kitchens and leftist student clubs. In the 1932 presidential campaign, he mounted a rear platform on his old Ford coupe and campaigned for Socialist Norman Thomas.

Breaking company commandments, he tried to organize Ford workers. Soon after Franklin D. Roosevelt's election in 1932, Walter Reuther was fired by Ford. He and his brother Victor withdrew their savings (some $900) just before the 1933 bank closing and sailed on a world "tour of social engineering." The brothers got to Berlin just in time to see Hitler's Reichstag fire. In eleven months they bicycled through ten countries, sleeping at farms and youth hostels, visiting mines and factories--"studying life," said Walter. They got visas to Soviet Russia and worked for 16 months with other Americans and foreigners at the American-built automobile plant at Gorky, on the Volga River. On his first day in the U.S.S.R., Walter's pocket was picked.

When the workers asked for metal spoons in the stalovaya (factory lunchroom) "like workers in other countries have," the Reuthers machined a batch out of old fender metal. Delighted, the Russians took the spoons home. Soon all were gone. "This under Socialism, comrades!" sputtered a party official. "Sheer capitalistic acquisitiveness!" On leaving Gorky, the brothers traveled 18,000 miles across the U.S.S.R., came home via Japan. At 28, Walter Reuther had completed his education and was ready to get to work in an auspicious environment, Depression-haunted Detroit.

"Strike! Strike!" Labor discontent in the auto industry was erupting in sloppy, bloody, sporadic strikes. Reuther set out in 1936 to organize West Side Detroit for the struggling automobile workers union.

In six months he signed up only 78 members, half of them in the Kelsey-Hayes Wheel plant, which Reuther decided to strike. "We needed drama," he later explained. "We had a big Polish gal who had fainted on the assembly line. We assigned her to 'faint' again. Someone else was to shut down the assembly line." Next day the Polish girl fainted on schedule, the switches were pulled, and the cry arose: "Strike! Strike!" Soon the plant's 5,000 men were milling around Reuther, who delivered a rousing speech while an anxious manager tugged at his coatsleeves. When the plant shut down, Reuther and his aides went to the workmen's beer gardens near by and in 48 hours signed up 3,500 members. He was in business.

Reuther has displayed the winner-take-all talents of a Commando leader in his strike strategy. In 1939, to save strike funds, he pulled out General Motors tool-and-die men at exactly the right moment to stop all production; the other workers, technically nonstrikers, collected state unemployment compensation. In 1937, during the bitter, G.M. sitdown at Flint, Mich., he helped to organize the seizure of a key building and stop production.

"The company shut off the current in the building," Reuther said later, "and it became so cold that it was unbearable. Powers Hapgood, the organizer, and myself crawled on our bellies along the railroad tracks to go beyond the Army lines, and told state officials that the men planned to start fires in an attempt to keep warm. The heat was turned on and the lights were turned off. Again we went out and reported to officials that the men planned to make torches of oil-soaked waste rags. The lights were lighted again." After 44 days, the U.A.W. won the strike, organized General Motors and within a year had 400 contracts covering most carmakers, except, notably. Ford (where company police beat up Reuther and his associates during 1937's "Battle of the Overpass"). In 1941, with war production booming, Ford capitulated after a ten-day strike. Ever since then, the U.A.W. has been virtually unchallenged in its control of automobile labor. In postwar strikes, the automakers never even tried to keep open. Despite -- or because of -- his trip to Russia, Reuther has a good anti-Red record. "Communists," he long ago proclaimed, "are the colonial agents of a foreign power." He pushed an anti-Communist resolution through the 1941 U.A.W. convention. Thereafter, as a rambunctious union vice president, he fought the Communists relentlessly and effectively. He operated a special anti-Communist school, gave lectures and courses to expose their techniques, organized anti-Communist squads in local after local.

When the 1946 union convention at Atlantic City came around, Reuther was ready to take on the Communist-line clique that controlled the U.A.W.'s president, R. J. Thomas. Day and night, hundreds of delegates argued and battled over the Communist issue; bloody brawls between the factions broke out on the boardwalk. When the vote came at last, the Communists and their followers lost; by the narrowest of margins, Walter Reuther beat R. J. Thomas for president of the U.A.W.

His victory cost the Communists more than the U.A.W. Emboldened, the C.I.O.'s late President Phil Murray acted at last to cut the deep-seated Red rot out of the C.I.O. : eleven Communist-controlled unions were expelled and have since withered. Phil Murray, who once rated Reuther a bumptious redhead, eventually be came his friend and ally. When Murray died in 1952, Reuther ran for C.I.O. president. His campaign divided the C.I.O. bitterly. As usual, he won.

Kidney-Shaped Command Post. Today, Reuther, labor's aging (47) boy wonder, still looks boyish: no grey threads his reddish hair, no bags encase his eyes, no bulges swell his lean flanks. As a machinist, after a 13-hour factory day, he used to do calisthenics or swim at the Y. After a speech or meeting away from Detroit, he used to hike six or seven miles late at night before going to bed. A powerhouse of physical energy, he bounces and bounds with swift, long strides.

He works 12 to 18 hours a day, usually lunches on a sandwich at his desk, a 12-ft.-long kidney-shaped masterpiece that he designed himself. While reading or talking, Reuther scribbles incessantly in notebooks, jotting down his jet-stream of ideas (even in bed, at night, when he thinks of something, he gets up to make a note of it). The U.A.W.'s top officials have all picked up the habit; when called, they pick up their notebooks and gather around Reuther's kidney-shaped command post. If they argue too long, he snaps: "I think I know the feeling of the workers." Once a six-page draft memo was brought to him for approval. "It's too long." said Reuther, picking up his pencil. When he got through, the memo was 13 pages long, but he liked it better. He can -- and does -- speak almost endlessly on almost anything. "You ask him what time it is," complained U.A.W. Secretary-Treasurer Emil Mazey, "and he'll tell you how to make a watch." One Small Beer. When the Reuther brothers were touring Europe, they arrived hot and hungry one night in Munich's Hofbraeuhaus. Victor challenged Walter to down a liter of bock beer before dinner. He did and has not cared for drinking since. At cocktail parties he takes a Manhattan, eats the cherry and leaves the drink. At a union meeting once, he promised to "have fun with the boys afterwards" in return for a favorable vote. Reuther won the vote and, as promised, had fun: he smoked one cigar and drank one small beer.

In recent years Reuther has read only one novel (The Caine Mutiny), seen only one movie (On the Waterfront) and taken no vacations. Years ago some fellow unionists took him to a Lake Huron shore cottage for a holiday; he stayed indoors reading up on economics. When they finally got him out on the lake, the water turned rough and Reuther got seasick.

An apostle of the more abundant life, Reuther is usually too preoccupied for leisurely pleasures. When Miami was suggested last winter as the site for the A.F.L.-C.I.O. unity meeting, Reuther was distressed. "Why, I can't go to Miami," he cried. "It wouldn't look right." Some years ago he assembled his Detroit staff to meet two visiting Congressmen, one of whom remarked archly about the collection of secretarial beauties. Walter looked up and stared at them in surprise before it dawned on him that the Congressman was right. Said one of the girls later: "I honestly think it was the first time he ever saw any of us."

Help Needed. On Friday, March 13, 1936, Reuther married pretty, auburn-haired Mae Wolf, a physical-education instructor whom he met before his European trip. He never wrote to her, but began courting on his return. "On our wedding night," Mrs. Reuther recalls, "we took a drive out of town somewhere. Walter had to make a speech.''

At first, during the early, hectic organizing drives, they lived in Detroit's Knickerbocker Apartments, a nest of friendly, frenzied C.I.O. officials. "We hardly ever slept at all," Reuther remembers. Thugs once beat him up in his own apartment. Later he moved to the north side, where a gun blast fired by a would-be assassin ripped into his right arm. Reuther lost blood copiously but never lost consciousness. "I decided," he said later, "to fight harder than ever."

A bodyguard follows him everywhere, and Detroit newspapers never mention his present address. Last September Reuther moved to a converted summer cottage on a trout stream near Detroit, where he lives with his wife, daughters Linda Ann, 12, and Elisabeth Luise, 7, two lambs, two kittens, one horse, one German shepherd, one cocker spaniel, one sheep, one parakeet and one goldfish.

Reuther, who likes woodworking, remodeled the house himself. He helps Linda with her homework after dinner or on weekends. Last weekend he stayed in town for the Ford negotiations and did not get home at all. When Linda heard of the G.M. negotiations this weekend, she cried: "Daddy, you got to come home--I have a test on Monday."

The Yipsol Mind. Outside his family, Reuther has no intimates and few friends. Glowering John L. Lewis, the founder of the C.I.O., is one of the few labor leaders who have publicly expressed themselves on the subject of Walter Reuther. He referred to him as a "pseudo-intellectual nitwit." Labor leaders generally dislike his metallic personal qualities--the iron will, the tinny personality, the brass nerve. They distrust his power and his policies.

"His early training sharpened him," said one top labor leader, "but it also put him on the wrong track so far as trade-union philosophy in the U.S. is concerned.

He started out trained in Marxist concepts, and he believed in the elimination of private ownership. He was one of those youngsters we used to call a 'Yipsol' [from Young People's Socialist League]. They could talk like hell, but they could not produce anything." But the same critical labor leader admits that Reuther is changing; he is becoming more a "bread-and-butter unionist" and less a social engineer out to "remake the world." Not that he has dropped his habit of making grandiose plans. He prepared a wartime plan to raise the sunken liner Normandie; later he blueprinted a "100-year plan" under which the U.S. would give the rest of the world $1,300 billion for peace. He called it "Proposal for a Total Peace Offensive to Stop Communist Aggression by Taking the Initiative in the World Contest for Men's Minds, Hearts and Loyalties." President Roosevelt called him "our engineer." Reuther's rival, R. J. Thomas, present on one such occasion, quickly corrected F.D.R.: "No, Mr. President, he's only a tool-and-die maker." .

Time and success have mellowed both Reuther and the mass movement that swept up the distressed workers of Detroit two decades ago. Ford workers average $106 weekly; economic desperation no longer harasses the men for reasons beyond their ken. Union conventions, once rough and fiery, now seem like Rotary meetings. In 1945 the G.M. strike began with the class-struggle refrain, Solidarity Forever. This month's strike threat brought forth, instead, over the U.A.W. radio program, a comic song directed at Henry Ford II: Dance With Me, Henry.

Sample lyrics: "You better feel that boogie beat, and get the lead out of your feet." Reuther still uses some of the old mechanical cliches of class-struggle philosophy. But he is too alert a man not to realize how much he has won for his followers within the framework of capitalism--and how much the picture holds within that same framework. In a recent speech Reuther said: "Movements release tremendous emotional forces, and they get into motion great dynamic qualities; then they tend to dissipate themselves. They sort of spend themselves. You always need to find a way to re-create enthusiasm and spiritual power." Maybe Reuther will. Maybe not. Talking about the Ford settlement last week, he said: "You never get everything." He sounded quite resigned about it.

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