Walter Reuther; Labor's Rugged Individualist

"Walter Reuther was a devoted, fighting champion of working people who dedicated his life to proving that democracy could operate for labor as well as capital and rose to become one of the most influencial leaders of the labor movement in the United States during his thirty-three years as president of the United Automobile Workers. Reuther was markedly a product of his family background, particularly his socially-conscious German Lutheran grandfather and his father, Valentine, a questioning disciple of Eugene Debs. This book portrays these early influences and demonstrates how Reuther brought them to his first clashes with the automotive industry when he left his native Wheeling, West Virginia, for Detrioit and how they remained with him during his battles to win not only a larger paycheck but a louder, more effective voice for labor in the changing economy of a newly-industrialized society. His brief experience in the Soviet Union convinced him that democracy provided a far better means of achieving the goals of labor than totalitarian socialism. With methods that were often rash, even reckless, and sometimes unwise, he sought the power to carry out his ideas such as the wartime conversion of automobile plants to airplane manufacture, wage increases without a rise in prices, an effective international labor organization, and conservation of waste materials. In his reach for power, he underestimated his prime opposition in the labor movement and inadvertently diminished his strength. His untimely death laves a moot question the extent to which he would have regained it. There is no question, however, of the importance of the role that this hard hitting, rugged individualist, loved by his friends and hated by his enemies, played in the history of American and world labor". - Publisher.