JUNE 1962
Guns: 8.9% of GDP
Butter: 5% of GDP
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 581
We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.
—Port Huron Statement, 1962
The test of democratic trade unionism in a democratic society is its willingness to lead the fight for the welfare of the whole community.
—Walter Reuther1
The same month when Ronald Reagan learned that his television show was history, a University of Michigan student named Sharon Jeffrey arranged a meeting to plan the future. The meeting of students and activists would take place at some lakeside cabins outside the town of Port Huron, Michigan. Alan Haber, the son of an Ann Arbor economics professor, would lead. Michigan undergraduates and recent alumni, as well as students from other campuses, would attend. So would Michael Harrington, the progressive writer who had published the bestseller on poverty, The Other America. Harrington was thirty-four, “the oldest young socialist” around, as he described himself.
Some of the students traveled from the South, where they had volunteered to help the disenfranchised blacks of Mississippi in voter registration drives. Tom Hayden, a former editor of the Michigan student newspaper, came. Hayden had spent his twenty-second birthday in a jail in Albany, Georgia, after trying to integrate the train station there. Casey Hayden, a graduate student from Austin, Texas, who had recently married Tom, had joined sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and worked with Ella Baker, already a famous civil rights leader. Casey had helped blacks build up a new group to halt discrimination, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. A few academics came to Port Huron, including a former president of Sarah Lawrence College, Harold Taylor. Taylor was known for mounting a bold petition to expel the red baiter Joseph McCarthy from the U.S. Senate.
Years later, many in the Port Huron crowd would write down what they remembered. The concerns the attendees took up varied from the particular to the universal. The students resented infantilizing university deans who enforced visiting hours in female-only dorms, for example. They could not understand how men aged nineteen could serve the military in places as far away as Thailand, yet could not vote. The students worried about the effect of automation upon the American soul. They were tired of the siege mentality of the Cold War that they had grown up with. And they wanted to see an end to segregation in the South. America, the students told one another as they gathered, was stuck in a kind of national stalemate. The country wasn’t truly a democracy any longer.
Before departing office, President Eisenhower had worried about the great clique at the national economic table. The danger was that America would become a nation led by a “military-industrial complex.” The students shared Ike’s concern. A few interest groups ran the country: the automakers of Detroit; the Defense Department; and Big Labor, which they considered complicit, “too quiescent.” Like Ike, or Lem Boulware, the students suspected the military-industrial complex as sinister. Monoliths shut individuals out, forcing them into “powerlessness.” How could a new movement be started? Some thought the best starting point, as notes written in preparation for the meeting argued, was the university: “the only mainstream institution that is open to participation by individuals of nearly any viewpoint.” But what drew them all to Port Huron was the same question that Bonanza, or GE, had asked: what to do with American prosperity? The students acknowledged that they themselves had been “bred in at least modest comfort,” and were “housed now in universities.” What could they do for those who didn’t enjoy the same comfort? They were not yet sure.
As the students settled in at the cabins, they told one another they were the New Left, with the emphasis on “new.” Most of the students did not stop to wonder why they were near the town of Port Huron, which happened to be the boyhood home of Thomas Edison, the place where the young genius had conducted his earliest experiments inside an old railroad car.2 Most did not know who had built the cabins. The camp’s name was Four Freedoms, after the four freedoms for Americans that Franklin Roosevelt had outlined late in his presidency. Even that did not matter to some of the attendees. To them the setting was a kind of accident. Any new “agenda for a generation,” as they called what they hoped to write together, had to spring from youth itself, not from some relic of Franklin Roosevelt’s time. Some of the students believed that meaningful change could come only through what they called participatory democracy, or what was now an alternative term for the same concept, community action. The way to ensure a democracy was to ensure “that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life.” There would be an end to the America where the promise of equality “rang hollow before the facts of Negro life in the South and the big cities of the North.”3 The group knew that to realize their dreams they had to be serious: “We seek to be public, responsible, and influential—not housed in garrets, lunatic, and ineffectual,” read the language of a draft Alan Haber brought. To pursue their dreams some of the attendees had already created a new organization, which they called Students for a Democratic Society.
In 1956, the poet Allen Ginsberg had revolutionized his medium with a meterless, rambling poem called “Howl.” Now, Tom Hayden hoped the group could compose something that would galvanize politics in the same way. “I craved for a political ‘Howl’,” he later recalled. Hayden, whose friendly, puckish face contrasted with his strong rhetoric, tried to build up the drama as they all worked on the agenda’s language, still general. A New Left “must start controversy across the land,” as a draft of the statement read. The New Left “must include liberals and socialists,” the draft said, the socialists “for their sense of thoroughgoing reforms in the system.” The meeting at the cabins outside Port Huron would itself be a trial run of participatory democracy, so any agenda had to be the result of independent, spontaneous work. Taking their places in the meeting area and talking, the young activists and students could almost feel the friendly emanations, inklings of the statement they would agree upon. The meeting felt spiritual. “Are there any prophets,” Hayden asked the others in letters inviting them to the meeting, “who can make luminous the inner self that burns for understanding?”4 At Port Huron, words and ideas flowed. As Hayden would later describe the mood by the lake: “it was like God was sending us a message.”5
God—and Walter Reuther. For while the Port Huron retreat felt independent and spontaneous, it was not. The camp itself belonged to the United Auto Workers and its parent, the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Sharon Jeffrey’s mother, Mildred, worked at the UAW, where she served in various jobs, including as director of the women’s bureau at the union and Walter Reuther’s political lieutenant.6 The reason the students could use the camp at all was that Millie Jeffrey had called the executive director of the Michigan office of the CIO and arranged permission.7 Sharon Jeffrey herself had spent time at Four Freedoms labor retreats as a child, teaching other children union songs like “Solidarity Forever.” There was little spontaneity about the agenda, either. Months before, the UAW on the one hand and Haber, Hayden, and Harrington on the other had been planning a convention like this, and had also discussed the content of any report or manifesto that came out of such a meeting.8 Hayden, the newspaper editor, had in fact arrived at the cabins with not just scribbled notes but a lengthy draft he and Haber had already circulated to some of the attendees. The United Auto Workers had long funded a group on the left called the League for Industrial Democracy. LID had a small student branch, the Student League for Industrial Democracy, or SLID. SDS was an update of SLID. Irving Bluestone, another of Reuther’s advisors, thought Haber and his friends were just right for the work of political education—they were “our kind of youngsters,” as Bluestone put it.9 Victor Reuther, Walter’s brother and also his aide, worked on outreach for Reuther as well. Victor liked the idea of a rebranded student group and arranged $10,000 in funding for Haber to take Students for a Democratic Society national. The students didn’t merely hope for support for SDS;10 they counted on it. “Whenever we were in trouble, and needed money or help from the elders,” Hayden recalled much later, “the call would go out to Sharon’s mother, who was invariably on the road with Walter Reuther.”11
Nor was getting a student movement off the ground the only area where the mighty union leader was at work. In his day job Reuther could idle a mighty company with a snap of his fingers, as he did that month, when forty-two thousand men at sixteen assembly plants of the Ford Motor Company had walked off their jobs on United Auto Workers’ orders. General Electric executives might appear to joust with James Carey alone, but they were really jousting with Reuther as well, for Reuther backed up Carey and had helped to create Carey’s union. So tenacious was Reuther in tangling with companies that George Romney, the auto executive, referred to him as “the most dangerous man in Detroit.” Senator Goldwater of Arizona, the “right to work” militant, went a step further, calling Reuther a “more dangerous menace than the Sputnik or anything Soviet Russia might do to America.” All the union powerhouses, like George Meany of the AFL-CIO and Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters, enjoyed tremendous clout. American labor unions by the 1960s had grown mighty, and were, taken together, worth $3 billion, on a scale with General Electric and General Motors. Meany and Reuther, along with other union leaders, regularly attended Washington meetings with Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg and Henry Ford II. Just recently JFK himself had dropped into one of those meetings.
But Reuther was livelier and earthier than the officious Meany, who actually claimed, with pride, that he had never walked a picket line. Reuther was also squarer than Hoffa, who was always under investigation. And Reuther enjoyed better access to the Kennedys, both the president and the attorney general. Indeed, Reuther would spend fifty minutes without the other union men at the White House on Friday, June 15, the very day the conference at Port Huron finished up its manifesto. Reuther’s power could also be felt everywhere in the new civil rights movement. He stood side by side with Martin Luther King, who had written to him the year before that “more than anyone else in America, you stand out as the shining symbol of democratic trade unionism.”12 It would be Reuther to whom Attorney General Kennedy would turn in 1963 when Alabama courts set an exorbitant bail for the release of King and fellow protesters from a Birmingham jail. Reuther and others would raise $160,000 and dispatch two UAW staffers—Irving Bluestone and William Oliver—to Birmingham, their midsections bulging with cash in money belts.13 Reuther’s support for Martin Luther King was admired by whites and blacks alike. Reuther was one of the few whites who would speak at a march on Washington for civil rights the following year. The largely black crowd on the Mall would applaud, though not everyone in the crowd recognized him. “Who is that?” one member of the crowd asked another. “Don’t you know him?” came an answer. “That is the white Martin Luther King.” It seemed that in every new movement—or what promised to be a movement—Reuther or his people were present financially and physically, obviously or behind the scenes. The Port Huron meeting was no exception. Millie Jeffrey drove over to the FDR camp to check up on her daughter and the others. Millie later recalled that she was “intimidated by all those brilliant university students.”
Students did not intimidate Reuther. Unlike the tentative attendees at Port Huron, Reuther knew what to do with prosperity. The thing to do with American prosperity was to share it. Reuther did not believe you could count on private individuals or private companies “to do the right thing voluntarily,” as the Boulware pamphlets exhorted them to. Reuther, like President Kennedy, had scant time for Westerns on television. But he did see prosperity as a vein of gold or silver in rock, or something to be mined, and carefully, so that all Americans, even the poorest, could work their way up to a living room with a television—hopefully, a color set. Reuther believed in the U.S. political process. He believed America could end inequality through socialism, or social democracy, if it was safer to call it that. But what Reuther had long sought he did not yet have. That was an American president to lead his redistribution revolution.
* * *
EXACTLY HOW to bring socialism to America had been the question that drove the Reuther family even before Walter Reuther was born. The Reuthers came from Edigheim, a small town on the Rhine, and Valentine Reuther, Reuther’s father, was still a boy when the family departed for the United States, refugees from the bayonets and bureaucracy of the Prussian empire. Grandfather Jacob always rose at 4:00 a.m. to read the Bible, but he rejected much of the church, and he was said to have commented that churches did “too much for God and not enough for men.” Valentine himself settled in Wheeling, West Virginia, delivering beer by cart by day and organizing with the Ohio Valley Trades and Labor Assembly by night. When one of the founders of Roger Blough’s U.S. Steel, Andrew Carnegie, sought to give the town of Wheeling a library, Valentine had been among those who had strenuously argued against accepting the gift, on the premise that acceptance would whitewash Carnegie’s brutal treatment of steelworkers in the Homestead Strike in Pennsylvania. There ought to be, said an anti-Carnegie ally of Valentine’s, “one place on this great green planet where Andrew Carnegie can’t get a monument to his money.” Valentine and the others prevailed over Carnegie, and the nation noted it: “Wheeling alone stands aloof and will have nothing of the great steelmaker’s millions,” commented an Ohio paper. Wheeling built its own library.
The family Americanized the pronunciation of the name to “ROO-ther.” But whether in German or English, Father Valentine called himself a socialist, and preached against inequality and for worker power to his sons, Theodore, Walter, Victor, and Roy. Valentine even took young Walter to visit an earlier labor legend, Eugene Debs, while Debs sat in prison, accused of sedition during World War I. Walter himself dropped out of high school to work, and learned his first lesson about safety in the workplace when a four-hundred-pound die crushed his big toe.14
From their teens on, the Reuther brothers played union activism the way other men play a contact sport: physically, statistically, and as a team. They gravitated toward the new center of industrial might, Detroit. As a young man, Reuther worked the night shift, learning the details of a precise trade, tool and die work, so that during the day he could work his way through Dearborn High School and then Detroit City College. Reuther so impressed his boss at the Ford River Rouge Plant that the executive spoke to him, telling him one day he’d make it to company vice president. But Reuther had already determined he was on the worker side, the socialist side. Val Reuther was proud, writing to his son, “to me socialism is the star of hope that lights the way.”15 While still young, Walter was fired for organizing a rally for Norman Thomas of the Socialist Party. When, in 1931, Henry Ford sold the production equipment of the Model T to the Soviet Union, Walter and Victor went over to teach Russian workers how to run assembly lines. The two Reuthers worked on the Ford-built assembly line in Gorki, spending eighteen months in Russia but also inspecting Nazi Germany, Turkey, Iran, and China, and even making a bike tour of Japan.16 Once back in the States, Reuther joined the United Auto Workers, working closely with socialists and, occasionally, communists.
The young man had, however, taken away something from Russia and Europe: it would be dangerous, heinous, for American socialists to replicate Soviet communism. Upon his return Reuther plunged into an effort to bring American unionism into the mainstream. His great heroes became Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, especially after President Roosevelt shepherded through and signed the Wagner Act, whose power Reuther knew even better than Lem Boulware. Roosevelt had also led others in establishing Social Security, the public American pension system. In fact, the father of one of the young men at Port Huron that June, Alan Haber, was William Haber, who had helped draft supplemental language for Social Security legislation at the end of the New Deal. With his allies Roosevelt had managed what later presidents hadn’t, to shove the country toward socialism while sustaining democracy. The Four Freedoms in the camp name were ideals Roosevelt had enumerated: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.
The union crowd woke to young Walter Reuther’s potential when in 1936, just after passage of the Wagner Act, Reuther scored his first big victory with automakers at the Kelsey-Hayes plant, winning 75 cents an hour for both men and women. Though at that point he was busy consolidating Local 174 in Detroit, Reuther also played a role in the unionization of General Motors in 1937, helping his brothers lead a GM sit-down strike in Flint. After the Reuther men had locked up GM and Chrysler, they turned to the big holdout, Ford. During one strike, as Walter Reuther waited on a public overpass for a group of women to bring pamphlets, a clutch of men in Ford’s private army had beaten him and others to the ground and thrown him down a flight of stairs. The moment was still recalled as the Battle of the Overpass. Several years later, Reuther finally managed to force Ford to give in to unionization, too. His brothers joined him in his work, at the UAW and outside it. Back during the early struggles to unionize, Reuther had also won the attention of a Michigan undergraduate. “He was a pale and reflective man with red hair and a simple, direct quality of respectful attention to me,” the playwright Arthur Miller later wrote. “I realized that he did not think of himself as controlling this incredible event but as best guiding and shaping an emotion that boiled up from below.”
By the time World War II ended, the determined Reuther had become a figure on the national stage, leading at the growing United Auto Workers and at times, at the umbrella group, the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The U.S. Senate and House overrode President Truman’s veto with a new labor law that required union leaders to sign a document confirming they were not communists. Reuther, realistic, saw that for the UAW to play a major role on the U.S. stage it must force out its communists. Reuther purged them—personally, at times. It was Reuther who severed the UAW’s relationship with a left-wing publishing house, the Federated Press, where Betty Friedan, then a young radical, wrote.17 After consolidating the UAW, Reuther had then proceeded to convert his hopeful worker alliance into national powerhouse. In 1948 a would-be assassin had shot through the window of the Reuther family bungalow in Detroit, hitting Walter in the back, stomach, and hand, where dozens of bones were broken. Soon afterward, Victor was shot, also through a window, and lost an eye and partial use of an arm. The hit men were never caught, but the Reuthers’ courageous recovery only drew them more admiration. “Take my eye, or my arm or leg, but please fix up my tongue. I’ve got a living to make,” Victor told the surgeons.
Discipline elevated Reuther above his peers. It took great patience to seal a union negotiation with a big company. Reuther was as focused in a session with a company rep as he was theatrical before a camera. One company executive told another that there were two kinds of Walter Reuther, the radical on the battlefront and the logical one in the negotiation room. Colleagues noted that Reuther carried a toothbrush to parleys with corporate executives. When the others took breaks to smoke, or even take a sip, Reuther refreshed by brushing his teeth.
Building a union that could beat the automakers at the negotiation table sounded like enough work, but Reuther also, early on, decided he wanted more. Reuther was falling in love with Northern Europe’s social democracies, countries where democratic government supplied health care and good schools, and even, Reuther noticed, funded time at worker spas for workers to recover from strenuous labor. It seemed to Reuther there was no reason America could not replicate the Scandinavian model. In the 1940s, Lem Boulware spoke at a graduation at Harvard University, making an early case for Boulwarism. During the same years Reuther gave the commencement address at Howard University, the historically black college in Washington. At Howard, Reuther said that U.S. unions needed to deliver better housing and medical aid to all Americans, not just union members. Otherwise, unions weren’t worth much. “The test of democratic trade unionism in a democratic society,” Reuther said, “is its willingness to lead the fight for the welfare of the whole community.”18
An American version of socialism was a big dream, but by the 1950s, there had seemed no reason Reuther could not dream it. Politicians liked the earnest redhead. Camping on a trip to Washington, Reuther had even slept on the couch in the apartment of Lyndon Johnson, then still a congressman on Capitol Hill. Reuther had wooed Harry Truman relentlessly, and the president returned the affection, even serenading Reuther on the piano. Reuther’s brother Victor was so comfortable with Truman that he referred to him as “Harry.” With every jump in the economy—and the 1950s economy did jump—Reuther gained more for his workers. After unionizing the Big Three, Reuther had pressured the automakers into granting factory men and women pensions, thereby, again almost personally, hauling the American worker into the middle class. Reuther admired the new, modern architecture of the social democracies. He hired the modernist architect Oscar Stonorov to design UAW headquarters, and Solidarity House was one of the first great modern buildings in Detroit when it was completed in 1951. Reuther believed in Detroit, and believed that copying European developments there would help to ensure that Motor City remained great. Reuther also worked on the plans for Lafayette Park, a modern development in downtown Detroit designed by the fashionable International School architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Creating Lafayette Park had meant razing Paradise Valley, an area that was home to poorer blacks. But Lafayette Park, at least theoretically, also increased the supply of middle-class homes and thereby helped sustain the city’s dwindling tax base. The FDR camp at Port Huron stood on a beautiful site. But they were just a halfway point. Reuther imagined larger retreat centers, not just for union leaders or international powwows, but also for American progressives and workers. The union retreats would not reek of wealth, as did Bal Harbour in Florida, where the AFL-CIO held its convention. They would be plain but elegant, good for families, not for fooling around. At his retreats, Americans could, as Reuther said, begin “putting the world together.”
In the 1950s the Reuthers and their union were an obvious target for Senator Joseph McCarthy, who could have delved into the Reuthers’ prewar time in Russia. But rather than hide from McCarthy, Walter chose to bluff and tangle with the bully, contending that McCarthy, too, had a communist connection—he had been supported by UAW communists. Whether this was true or not, McCarthy, intimidated, backed off. Another potential antagonist was Robert Kennedy, who was making a name for himself targeting unions for corruption. Kennedy made a crusade of his investigation of Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters, saying publicly that he would jump off the Capitol dome if Hoffa was not convicted. The same committee investigated the UAW, but far less strenuously. At one point Kennedy went out to Sheboygan, Wisconsin, to investigate the UAW’s strike at Kohler, the plumbing supply company. He later described his impression of the union men at Kohler, so different from the Teamster men. “It was a striking contrast, one I noted again and again as I came in contact with the other UAW officials. These men wore simple clothes, not silk suits and hand-painted ties; sported no great globs of jewelry on their fingers or their shirts; there was no smell of the heavy perfume frequently wafted by the men around Hoffa.”19
To keep the McCarthys and Kennedys off his case—and to live up to his father and his family—Reuther did make a point of leading a clean, alcohol-free, almost ascetic life. One year Reuther rejected, for example, a luxurious set of digs at an AFL-CIO convention. James Carey of the Electrical Workers promptly took the suite, joking that he would tell newsmen hunting for Reuther that Reuther was down the hall in the linen closet, “squeezing his own orange juice.”20 The Teamsters, who drove trucks, were natural partners of the United Auto Workers, who built the trucks. Yet the AFL-CIO had ejected the Teamsters recently for corruption, and Reuther took care to distinguish himself from the Teamsters. In the case of the Kennedy brothers, however, there was another reason Reuther escaped targeting. The Kennedy clan recognized in the Reuthers a mirror of themselves, another clan of brothers who together had achieved more than any one of them could have alone. The Kennedys’ favor made another of Reuther’s dreams seem feasible: he wanted to supplant the aging George Meany as head of the AFL-CIO.
While waiting, Reuther pursued yet better union packages and more health care for workers. Since the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, Reuther and George Meany had been running a race against time: companies were indeed moving South and West. The union men saw, just as the executives at GE had seen, that one factor driving the moves was the Taft-Hartley provision that allowed state governments to make working with unions optional for employers. The provision was so controversial that Americans could not even agree on what to call it: the Republicans, proudly, called it “right to work,” but union leaders simply referred to the provision as 14(b), after its location in the Taft-Hartley Act. The passage of the act had come over Truman’s veto, and all union men regarded repeal of section 14(b), the “right to work” section, as the ne plus ultra of legislative goals. But in the meantime, Reuther and Meany had to prove to workers that unionland offered a better life. Reuther came up with his own reform: profit sharing with workers by corporations, an idea for which neither America’s great companies nor his fellow union men could marshal enthusiasm. In 1961, George Romney of Detroit’s fourth carmaker, the American Motors Corporation, gave Reuther his chance on profit sharing. Romney secretly invited Reuther to negotiations. Romney, after all a bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, felt he could deal only with a man with a moral basis. Romney had commenced the meeting sanctimoniously, by asking Reuther if he believed in God. Well, Reuther said, he was a Methodist. Romney had thereupon launched the talks, and the pair concluded a deal that included a pilot profit-sharing component, something unusual in the world of labor. Ten percent of AMC’s pretax profit would be contributed to a “progress-sharing fund.” The fund would increase benefits to hourly workers. But another 5 percent of pretax profit would go to the purchase of AMC stock in workers’ names, though the voting rights would remain with the company trustees. Reuther’s colleagues remained skeptical. Sharing profits was fine in good years, and the prospects for the next years did look good, but what would happen in bad years? The payout from profit sharing would be less, and to workers that would feel like a simple clawback by the company. To many company lawyers, as well, profit sharing looked like a lose-lose proposition. To keep it up, a company might have to cut wages. “Do you think George Romney will enforce that? When the time comes to cut into wages, will he do it?” asked a columnist in the Washington Post.21 Nonetheless, Reuther could be proud. Now, at least, he had something to hold Romney to, if Romney did not honor the deal.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Reuther often traveled overseas. His trips abroad served a business purpose: narrowing a pay differential between American and European industrial workers. Americans’ pay was higher, and ate up a greater share of company budgets. When Arthur Goldberg, while still a lawyer for the steel union, described the wage packages American steelworkers got, the German steelworkers were “shocked and stunned,” commented another U.S. official. A European plant resembled an American steel plant: “the plants look alike, they smell alike.” But the Europeans got less pay.22 Eventually, the Americans knew, foreign steelmakers could take advantage of those low labor costs to cut prices, and challenge American steel. The American union men went over to Europe, or Japan, to try to convince local workers to demand higher pay. Goldberg was pleased when Harry Douglass of Britain’s steelworkers’ unions came over to him at a conference and said, “By God, we’ve got to stiffen our demands.”
In the case of Reuther, the trips also represented a chance to draw strength from his European models. If pay in Europe was less generous than American pay, government benefits there were greater. Reuther saw, to his satisfaction, that the heavy presence of government in European countries did not seem to slow growth—the German economy had more than doubled in size in the 1950s. Reuther nursed friendships with the leaders of the social democracies he admired. He always took care, as Meany did, to make it clear in America that while social democratic, or socialist, he, too, abhorred East Bloc communism. To paint socialism as communism was a tragedy. The mayor of West Berlin, a man of Reutheresque charisma himself, Willy Brandt, invited Reuther to speak at a May Day rally in 1959. Reuther’s German was rusty, but he wanted to speak in the language of his listeners. To prepare, he brought home a tape player and a German grammar book, and practiced as assiduously as Ronald Reagan before the filming of GE Theater. For weeks, Reuther’s daughter Elisabeth later recalled, Reuther recited grammar phrases to build up his confidence. “Lisa, if I speak in German, then thousands of people behind the Iron Curtain will hear an affirmation of their hope for freedom,” Reuther told her. Some half a million Berliners, East and West, showed up to hear Reuther speak and call for reunification. Reuther and Brandt also traveled outside Berlin to speak to East Germans—this was before the 1961 construction of the Berlin Wall. Twenty thousand showed up there, too.23 The Berlin event got international attention.24
John Kennedy was not the UAW’s first choice for a presidential candidate in 1960. In fact, “all hell” had broken loose among the union men when Kennedy announced that his running mate was Lyndon Johnson.25 Johnson was one of the men who had voted to override Harry Truman’s veto of Taft-Hartley.26 The labor fury was so palpable that John Connally, Johnson’s protégé, and Robert Kennedy had even discussed whether organized labor would riot and break up the entire convention over the Johnson surprise. Reuther nonetheless in the fall of 1960 put enough force behind the Democratic campaign that he could claim he’d pulled Kennedy and Johnson over the line. After the election, Reuther planted one of his aides, Jack Conway, at the Housing and Home Finance Agency. There Conway was assigned the brief of realizing one of Reuther’s goals, the elevation of the housing agencies into a formal cabinet-level federal housing department. Reuther was ready to move to John Kennedy’s side in both the good and the bad. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, Reuther’s brother Victor tried to cheer Kennedy on by seeking the president’s endorsement of a plan that traded American tractors to Castro in exchange for the prisoners Castro had taken. Reuther along with other unions joined Kennedy in a push for tax cuts. The worker, Reuther said, was “shortchanged.”
Kennedy, however, suspected that Reuther could also be treacherous, doubtless in part because Reuther’s rival, George Meany of the AFL-CIO, told the president so. Kennedy, astutely, divined that the union corruption battle was a sideshow. He had been awake during the fight over Taft-Hartley. The real issues were the laws that gave the unions their power. A clean union was more of a threat to corporations and the Boulwares than a corrupt one. Barry Goldwater took the same view, saying, “I would rather have Jimmy Hoffa stealing my money than have Walter Reuther stealing my freedom.” Reuther was a powermonger, a rival for presidents. On meeting Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev told him that “we hanged the likes of Reuther in Russia in 1917.”
As 1962 arrived, Reuther, now fifty-four years old, found he was not any closer to making the United States the social democracy he sought, or even winning presidential support for key union crusades. Try as he might, Reuther would never be able to convince the wary Kennedys to make their number one issue repeal of Taft-Hartley, even though companies were gradually moving West to “right to work” states. Even William Haber, the old New Dealer, father of the Port Huron leader and still a progressive, acknowledged that the labor-heavy Michigan business climate was too hostile to attract business.27 Thinking ahead of John Kennedy, the UAW chief built friendships with future potential leaders. In 1963, Reuther would take Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota to attend a retreat of the prime ministers of Britain, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway—all labor party men or social democrats—at Harpsund, the country home of the Swedish premier, Tage Erlander. The idea of labor coming together somewhere green and quiet appealed deeply to Reuther. The UAW leader found that the commute from his home in rural Paint Creek outside Detroit to Solidarity House on Jefferson Avenue was well worth the effort. He could think about unions’ future at Paint Creek. A disturbing sign for both Reuther and Meany was that union membership was not keeping up with population, a point that someone made sure was duly inserted into at least one draft of the Port Huron Statement. To get any 1960s president to back a social democratic platform, Reuther needed a larger coalition, which was one reason he hosted Martin Luther King in Detroit and helped fund the civil rights revolution, or handed out small checks to the idealistic students at Port Huron.
For the students to succeed, Reuther saw, they had to believe they were operating independently, not as tools of the old guard. New generations needed their own slogans and their own missions. “You can’t keep talking to a guy about what happened in the Depression when he wasn’t even born then,” as they said. “This is the trouble with the American Labor Movement,” Reuther would explain just a few years later. “It is becoming part of the Establishment.” The elders behind the Port Huron meeting felt comfortable with figures like Michael Harrington, whom they recognized as both reliable and thoughtful. Harrington could be counted on to deplore communism. For reading, Harrington assigned students in the Young People’s Socialist League The God That Failed, a collection of first-person essays by European and American writers who had personally worshipped communism until they witnessed the Communist Party, here or in Europe, in operation.28 Harrington had followed the Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 closely, drawing about the same conclusions as Ronald Reagan. Norman Thomas, the head of America’s Socialist Party, might reject the corrupt regime of South Vietnam, but he did not advocate teaming up with the Stalinist Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam.
Harrington took a frank position on the shame of urban renewal, in which unions had been complicit. After World War II, the unions had joined the federal government in a great plan to rebuild the cities. The bulldozers obliterated the slums, but also evicted entire black communities like Paradise Valley. This was not “urban renewal,” it was “Negro removal,” as the writer James Baldwin said. Two-thirds of the families displaced by urban renewal were black.29 Harrington argued that when the heavy equipment, whether Dwight Eisenhower’s in the past or new presidents’ in the 1960s, arrived at so-called slum neighborhoods, it crushed untold value. Old slums hadn’t merely been slums; they had been starting points: “there was community, there was aspiration.”30 New communities did not come to life in the new projects. The projects were cages that became graveyards. Harrington noted that the new housing that supplanted old tenements created “a new type of slum,” which isolated black families in ghettos. Harrington had seen the new type of slum firsthand in his hometown, St. Louis, where black families had been moved out of the Mill Creek areas to one of the largest of the urban renewal public housing projects in the country, Pruitt-Igoe.
Reuther welcomed such arguments. Maybe he could learn something from Harrington. Reuther always thought in terms of interest groups and social classes. The Other America portrayed poverty as a kind of festering wound that threatened the American organism, a new concept for the United States, if not for Europe or in biblical times. By focusing a spotlight on this poverty, Harrington had handed Reuther another potential constituency, the poor. “You know, we didn’t know we were poor until we read your book,” Martin Luther King once told Harrington later, only half joking.31 What Reuther’s crowd saw was that the outrage Harrington generated might even be converted into legislation. It wouldn’t hurt if Big Labor got the credit. Some of the other young people heading to Port Huron also looked promising. Tom Hayden was aware of the danger of staking a position too far to the left. In a memo he wrote to the others before the meeting about the statement, Hayden pointed out that their group could render itself politically irrelevant. “We will be ‘out’ if we are explicitly socialists, or if we espouse any minority political views honestly,” he noted. Like Reuther, Hayden understood that “we can be further ‘in’ if we are willing to call socialism liberalism.”32
Other young people the UAW supported posed more of a risk to the union, and to Reuther’s strategy. Activists could criticize the UAW or unionism among themselves, as in a family discussion. But they had to understand that in public you represented a larger group and picked your battles, sustaining solidarity on less important issues. Reuther’s and Harrington’s entire effort to move America toward socialism could be sabotaged by activists within days if the activists antagonized or divided the Democratic Party.
* * *
FROM THE moment the Port Huron conference kicked off, the split between those willing to work within the great American political machine and those who wanted to work outside that machine made itself felt. When Harrington and another labor movement socialist, Donald Slaiman, arrived at the conference, they could see that the SDS parvenus failed to appreciate the key distinction between communists on the one hand and socialists, or social democrats, on the other. One of the faces at Port Huron was that of a high schooler, Jim Hawley. Hawley was there to represent a communist-affiliated youth group, the Progressive Youth Organizing Committee. What was Hawley doing there? Harrington wanted to know. The presence of any possible communist affiliate, even a high schooler, at this conference represented a serious risk to the credibility of the SDS. Modern union law required that union members swear they were not communists. Harrington issued warnings—more like orders, the Michigan students thought. By the time the conference finally compromised and conceded Hawley might hold lowly “observer status,” the attendees discovered their problem was academic. The young man was embarrassed into silence and departed early.33
More serious tensions emerged over the drafts of the Port Huron Statement, as they were starting to call it. The group allowed that placing “manifesto” in the title would be too provocative, evoking Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. But they did not agree to expunge all hostile references to organized labor or to the anticommunist movement. Unwilling to pin the others down, Hayden played referee, emphasizing that both in the drafting and in its initial publication, the statement would be a “living document,” one that could be rewritten, and might never be final the way a book was. To Harrington and the others, this living document idea seemed a dodge. At least one version of Hayden’s draft contained some lines arguing that Russia “was becoming a conservative status quo nation state.” Since “conservative” and “status quo” were terms radicals used to criticize the United States, the effect was to sound as though the students equated the Soviet Union with the United States, and that would be untenable. Another section of the material claimed that “unreasoning anticommunism has become a major social problem for those who want to construct a more democratic America.” The “unreasoning anticommunism” line represented a slap at American union leaders, Harrington thought. Slaiman went berserk. “The American labor movement has won more for its members than any labor movement in the world,” another attendee remembered Slaiman reminding the students. “You people have some nerve attacking the labor movement.”34 The students were good with “any left-wing Stalinoid kind of thing,” Slaiman continued, but had no problem criticizing American unions. That was a fatal double standard. The attendee who later recalled the scene best, Hayden, remembered Slaiman yelling in rage in defense of the AFL-CIO head: “George Meany, don’t you attack George Meany.”
The others were shocked. Of course they wanted something different from old party lines. “We were very aware we were taking a position different from the LID’s,” Sharon Jeffrey remembered later, “and we were very willing to do it.” The storm passed with promises of further edits, and Harrington departing early. The SDS group dutifully included anticommunist boilerplate: “as democrats we are in basic opposition to the communist system.” In the end that language seemed a relatively small compromise to make for the moment, a compromise after all that in a “living document” could be changed. The great emphasis of the meeting, as it turned out, was on establishing a formal doctrine for what many Port Huron attendees were already doing in the South, helping poor people overcome disenfranchisement. The name of the doctrine was “participatory democracy.” Staughton Lynd, a professor at Spelman, later reminded Casey Hayden of the moment when she had told him about that missing piece. “I shall never forget your coming back from Port Huron and telling us about the new words, ‘participatory democracy,’ very slowly and pronouncing each syllable separately as if you were eating a chocolate éclair.”35 Hayden and the others created little individual teams to craft different sections of the statement. The teams covered capitalism, automation, and statistics on wealth, which revealed a “have” and “have-not” gap at home. America should “abolish squalor,” one draft said, and undertake a “full scale initiative for civil rights.” What did not make it into the draft, in any iteration, was a thorough review of the role of religion, or the opportunity that the public-sector unions presented for union expansion, an omission that attendee Kim Moody later found significant. There was no section on progress for women. When the teams finished their formulations and agreed on the statement’s language they went down to a dock at the lake and watched kids swimming. “We were elated,” Sharon Jeffrey later recalled. “We were sure we had done something visionary and had done it collectively.”
After the meeting, Hayden and Haber got into a car and drove to Washington in the hope of meeting the president. Talk about audacity of audacity, Hayden thought. Meetings with anyone important in Washington were the next best thing and demanded concessions, including sartorial concessions. Hayden dressed up, donning not only a shirt but a tie and a suit. The pair met with Senator Joseph Clark, an ally of the UAW and an advocate of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. As for the White House, it was “because of Mildred,” Tom later recalled, that they got as far as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Hayden presented Schlesinger with their copy of the Port Huron Statement.36 Schlesinger already had Michael Harrington’s book. The pair talked their heads off, laying out the plan for Schlesinger, and left the statement on Schlesinger’s desk. Tom and his wife, Casey, were now ready to work at a small office in New York, laboring at their Gestetner mimeographing copies of the Port Huron Statement. Casey would type the mailing list onto Addressograph stencils.37 Each envelope they mailed would include a membership form for the SDS.38 Kim Moody, from Baltimore, was going back to Johns Hopkins dead set on building up an SDS chapter there.
Harrington, however, was in no mood to let the others settle down to work. Shortly after Port Huron, the author went to SDS’s formal parent group, LID. Without reviewing the changes to the document made at Port Huron, Harrington, officious now, lodged a formal complaint about the Port Huron Statement with LID’s executive committee. The LID executive director then told her board that SDS had adopted “a policy statement which placed the blame for the cold war largely upon the U.S.” A LID committee, a kind of Alice in Wonderland tribunal, haled Hayden and Haber in for a tough interrogation. Considering themselves the grown-ups in the room, the LID authorities then fired Haber and refused to put another activist, Steve Max, on the payroll, despite the fact that Max had been elected to the SDS staff at Port Huron. The trouble with Max was that he was a “red diaper baby,” the son of the editor of the communist Daily Worker. At the time, SDS was still tiny, with only 750 or so members. LID was trying to strangle the baby in its cradle out of spite, Hayden thought. Harrington, himself a congenital rebel, had forgotten what a spur a display of authority can be to rebels. Haber did not retreat in humiliation. He returned to the SDS offices in New York and gleefully picked the locks. To the SDS crowd, their LID minders were not really parents, after all, but midwives, at best, to this new, independent movement. And what was LID? A group of older people whose own political impact had peaked in 1937. The LID leaders backed off.
Nonetheless, for Tom and Casey Hayden, the sting of Harrington’s betrayal did not fade. After all, Harrington was just an older version of Hayden. Harrington and Hayden were similar—Catholic activists, Midwesterners with disarming smiles. Harrington had attended the Haydens’ wedding. The men were drinking buddies. In September, Casey Hayden went to a meeting at the University of Ohio where Norman Thomas, the granddaddy of the Socialist Party, appeared.39 Harrington was there. Casey acidly told Harrington that in its procedure LID had acted just like the communist officials it so abhorred. “Well I know now what it must have been like to be attacked by the Stalinists.”40 To Casey, Harrington was now just another member of the Establishment—the old left establishment. The fight would simmer on. Later, published, versions of the Port Huron Statement still contained the “unreasoning anticommunism” line, and claimed that to the average American, “‘big labor’ is a growing cancer.” His friends’ naïveté, the distraught Harrington told himself, merely had to do with their age. “The Christopher Columbus vision of themselves as the first to discover the truths of radicalism was,” Harrington concluded, “alas, a most logical deduction from their own experience and our failures.” They could not see the evil way Maoists or Stalinists took over idealistic organizations. Harrington knew enough to see a danger in the SDS group’s arrogance—and not just danger for the unions. By defining its leftism “emotionally,” he later wrote, and turning away from mainstream labor and liberalism, the SDS might indeed deprive itself of any meaningful impact. Economic redistribution took discipline. The SDS would surely then also undermine the causes of all traditional liberals—and traditional American socialists. Depressed at what he had wrought, Harrington left to spend 1963 in Europe.
There is little evidence that Reuther or others at the top of the UAW seriously scrutinized drafts of the Port Huron Statement. What the UAW cared about was the scale of the potential constituency that students represented. At the beginning of the 1960s, there had been more than 3.6 million Americans enrolled in institutions of higher education, up from 2.4 million at the beginning of the decade before.41 That figure was set to double in the coming decade. Students would join workers in a great future UAW. And the UAW could also find much to like in the principles that had come out of Port Huron. The first advantage was the name, “Port Huron Statement,” rather than “Manifesto,” which felt too close to Karl Marx for political comfort. Many of the points actually read as though they had come out of Reuther’s UAW propaganda mills, as they may have. In addition to emphasizing income inequality, the statement noted that “the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans own more than 80 percent of all personal shares of stock,” a concentration of wealth that Reuther also railed against. The students noted the domination of the military in the economy—Reuther was concerned about that, too. The statement quoted Charles Erwin Wilson, who had headed GM, as noting that the country could be characterized as living in a “permanent war economy.” Well, in a way, the country was.
Other goals listed in the statement aligned reassuringly with the UAW’s and Reuther’s own goals. Making the Declaration of Independence line “all men are created equal” true for black Americans everywhere—Reuther was pouring UAW money into that cause, despite some resistance from his more conservative membership. Giving the underrepresented Americans outlets “for the expression of personal grievance” and a voice in decisions about their lives—that was what social democrats sought. Making work “involve incentives worthier than money or survival”—Tage Erlander or Willy Brandt could have written that. On economics, the students also concluded that “the economy itself is of such social importance that its major resources and means of production should be open to democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation.” The automakers might read that last as a demand for nationalization. But “democratic participation” could also be construed as a version of the profit sharing that Reuther had elicited from Romney. The Port Huron Statement advanced the progress of American social democracy, in a fashion its history-averse conferees might not have intended. Working day and night the students had, whether consciously or not, covered three of Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom from want, freedom from fear. The only freedom they had missed was freedom of worship, and that, Hayden said, had happened because the man running the religion draft section, James Monsonis, had fallen asleep in the last moments of Port Huron, exhausted.
As Reuther, his brother, and Mildred Jeffrey watched, SDS students and their colleagues moved forward. Those students who had gone to the South to help out in voting drives found meaningful and even dangerous work. Casey Hayden joined the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, whose acronym, SNCC, they all pronounced “snick.” Together with Robert Parris Moses, a black teacher who had left the classroom to come down, Casey moved precincts of angry Southern sheriffs. Hayden, following it all, heard that in Greenwood, Mississippi, Bob Moses had been shot at in a car. Another activist took a bullet in the spine. A SNCC office burned to the ground. The UAW itself cast an occasional parental eye on Tom Hayden, who was settling in at Ann Arbor to make the University of Michigan SDS a model for other campuses, and saw to it that he received his funds. Hayden was brash, claiming to have thought up the Peace Corps himself and pitched it to Kennedy when Kennedy visited Michigan in the fall of 1960, but the reality was that Reuther himself had mooted such an idea with the presidential candidate while visiting him that summer at Hyannis Port. Still, they told one another again, brashness was sometimes necessary. Someone like Hayden could serve as the UAW’s national messenger.
By fall Reuther and Mildred Jeffrey were giving much of their attention to other topics, for 1962 was a midterm year. In California, Richard Nixon, the former vice president, was losing support in a humiliating contest for governor with the popular incumbent, Democrat Pat Brown. Benefiting the Democrats was an ugly little fight within the Republican Party. Nixon, perhaps seeking to win the support of Californians put out by Joseph McCarthy, was calling for a ban of the controversial John Birch Society. Other Republicans were supporting the society’s right to Roosevelt’s first freedom, the freedom of speech. Another divide involved Ronald Reagan, the Republican statewide campaign chairman. California Republican Howard Jarvis assailed colleagues for allowing Reagan to get such a post, as Reagan had so recently been a Democrat. The more right-wing the candidate, however, the better for Reuther: a John Birch–type Republican was an optimal opponent for a broad Democratic Party. In 1963, scanning the horizon for national candidates in the next presidential race, Reuther disingenuously would tell the press he liked Goldwater of Arizona, unions’ great enemy. “I would be pleased if the point of view of Goldwater became the guiding policy of the Republican Party,” Reuther said. Goldwater would be far easier than some others for Reuther’s new coalition to beat.
Reuther’s efforts to gain advances for labor from either Lansing or Washington, however, were not succeeding as well as he would like. His leverage with Romney of American Motors on profit sharing was now in doubt, for Romney had decided to leave AMC and run for governor of Michigan—as a Republican. That meant Romney was running against the Democratic allies of the UAW. To emphasize solidarity, Reuther joined the Democratic governor, John Swainson, on the stage at the annual Labor Day rally. Romney was not permitted to speak. Nonetheless, Romney persevered, bragging about his past dealings with Reuther. Romney even turned the AMC-UAW agreement Reuther and he had concluded the previous year—the one with the profit sharing—into evidence that he could out-union the Democrats. Irritatingly, Romney quoted Reuther, who had called the profit-sharing agreement “perhaps the most significant and the most historic collective bargaining agreement that has ever been written in the United States.” Romney won.
Early in 1963, Reuther tangled again with Romney. Reuther struggled to block the governor from signing a bill that would limit the pool of strikers who received jobless pay in a given strike. On the national scene, Kennedy was moving Goldberg over to the Supreme Court and replacing him as labor secretary with Willard Wirtz, who, Reuther politely assured Kennedy, was “a good choice.” Wirtz, however, was not as interested in labor-management disputes as Goldberg, who lived that fight. As 1963 progressed, Reuther found that President Kennedy kept more distance than he had in the Goldberg days. Kennedy sometimes seemed to favor George Meany. The president just wasn’t enthusiastic enough about Reuther’s programs. Reuther was coming to realize that the New Frontier would never dramatically deepen the achievements of the New Deal. “I met with Walter Reuther and Hubert Humphrey,” Arthur Schlesinger at the White House wrote in his diary that spring. Humphrey and Reuther spoke like New Dealers. But, Schlesinger went on, the truth was that “the New Frontier has a deep mistrust of what it regards as the pat liberal sentimentalities and clichés of the Thirties.” The difference was one of commitment. The New Dealers wanted “to do something because it is just and right,” whereas New Frontier men were “technocrats who want to do something because it is rational and necessary. The New Frontier lacks the evangelic impulse,” Schlesinger noted, “in part no doubt because there is no audience for it.”42 Even UAW members did not care about Reuther’s big picture. The old belligerent union men who would once have insisted that their congressman force repeal of Taft-Hartley were now more concerned with pay packages.
Some of the UAW’s students were meantime stalling. Hayden initially set up in Ann Arbor, the goal being to take SDS national. But he found Ann Arbor depressing, for he could not seem to move SDS from talk to action—in part because the goals in Michigan were far less compelling than those in the South. Hayden just couldn’t figure out what the new institution he led was supposed to do. “SDS remained mostly an intense subculture of discussion,” Hayden later recalled. The others grew frustrated with Hayden. “He didn’t understand economics,” Sharon Jeffrey later observed.43 His wife, Casey, had taken secretarial jobs in Ann Arbor to help fund her household. Accustomed to the genuine work and actual danger of the South, she grew impatient with SDS seminars. Like Harrington, she began to see folly in the SDS effort to write philosophy from scratch. One night Casey Hayden walked out of another of those freewheeling seminars, saying to the assembled group (men), “I seriously believe y’all are discussing bullshit.” Casey left Ann Arbor and went South. The SDS discussions were nothing like the action being taken by courageous blacks in Alabama or Mississippi.
Once again, the UAW rode to the rescue. If SDS itself was not sure what SDS should do, Reuther and his allies in the labor movement were. SDS should organize a poor people’s movement in the cities, perhaps a union to represent the unemployed, a SNCC of the North for whites and blacks. Organized, that movement could demand jobs, schools, and homes. Reuther and other unions, including the Packinghouse Workers, the Shoemakers, and the union of Operating Engineers, would fund staff for more than a dozen on-the-ground offices in different locations. Irving Bluestone of the UAW and Ralph Helstein of the Packinghouse Workers would write letters to friends and colleagues in the communities to make the initial contact with locals for SDS. Though the economy was booming, there were always poor corners, in the countryside or the towns. The point men and point women for this new network would move in and take their place in time to be ready when the real trouble of a recession hit. This project of unionizing the poor represented more than pro forma outreach for Reuther and the others—it was where their hearts lay, and where they placed their children. Toni Helstein, the daughter of Ralph Helstein; and Leslie Woodcock, the daughter of Reuther’s deputy Leonard Woodcock at the UAW, were dispatched to man one pilot, in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago.44 Sharon Jeffrey would head to Cleveland to organize welfare mothers to demand school lunches and higher welfare benefits. Tom Hayden would try to build an interracial movement of the poor in Newark. The inspiration for many of the young people was Saul Alinsky of Chicago, who believed in awakening poor people in the cities not only to the franchise but to their own rage. This Northern participatory democracy program was now given a formal name: the Economic Research and Action Project, ERAP, which the workers pronounced “ee-RAP.”45 Maybe the North was more like the South than Americans knew.
Or maybe not. In April 1963, Martin Luther King reminded them all of the North-South contrast when he was jailed in Birmingham, then released, then jailed again. If Jack Kennedy was keeping his distance, his brother the attorney general was not. It was Robert Kennedy who contacted Reuther about putting up bail. “Why do you call me?” Reuther asked. “Because we don’t know anyone else that we can call,” Kennedy replied.46 Civil rights now seemed the obvious way to lure the president himself closer, and Reuther began advertising a new coalition, which he and others were now calling the Coalition of Conscience. To catch Kennedy’s eye, Reuther and the others worked with King to build up plans for a genuine showstopper, an August march on Washington. The entire march, “For Freedom and Jobs,” would be organized by a man who worked for the AFL-CIO. That was Bayard Rustin, whom Tom Hayden and others knew from their chats at Al Haber’s apartment. Rustin had just left Martin Luther King’s group, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and in the case of the march, proved a marvelous organizer. One of Rustin’s aides was Eleanor Holmes, a Yale graduate student who would later become a congresswoman. “There had been ten years of movement in the South, but there were no remedies in the South,” she later recalled. “The only remedy was in Washington.” An old Reuther ally would speak: A. Philip Randolph, the man who had organized the first great black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. So would Martin Luther King. It was because of Randolph and Reuther, the union men, that the march would be subtitled “For Jobs and Freedom,” and not merely “For Freedom.”
The president, the men learned, didn’t particularly like the idea of the event—why not march after the presidential election? He himself argued that new civil rights legislation was an absolute necessity. But men from Kennedy’s own party, Southern Democrats in the Senate, were filibustering his civil rights bill already, and a disruptive march on Washington would only strengthen their argument that the new law would give black Americans license to protest yet more. More useful and inclusive at this point, Kennedy told others, might be general statements from America’s leaders about freedom. In late June, Kennedy flew into divided Berlin without Reuther, giving a ride on Air Force One to Reuther’s competitor, George Meany. Kennedy appeared before hundreds of thousands at Berlin’s Rathaus Schöneberg, the provisional town hall since the Berlin Wall went up in 1961. Kennedy did not try to pull a Reuther and speak paragraphs in German, but he did drop what became a famous line: “Ich bin ein Berliner”—“I am a Berliner.” The president also included a line that referred to the American civil rights struggle, along with Soviet communism: “When one man is enslaved, all are not free.”
Reuther and King determined that Kennedy’s reluctance would not stop them from bidding for presidential attention, and they planned rallies building up the excitement for the great August march on Washington. Days before Kennedy spoke in Berlin the pair upstaged him with a march for civil rights in Detroit. City leaders and Reuther called this march the Walk to Freedom, a chance for Detroit to speak out about racial segregation in the South and discrimination in the urban North. The date was significant because it marked the anniversary of a Detroit race riot during World War II in which more than two dozen had been killed. Working with local black leaders, Mayor Jerome Cavanagh, Reuther, and King were together able to turn out a crowd of 125,000. King delivered an impassioned speech that prefigured his speech in Washington. “I have a dream this afternoon that one day my four little children . . . will be judged on the basis of the content of their character, not the color of their skin.” The Gordy label, a division of Motown, recorded King’s speech for a single.
Well prepared after its Detroit dress rehearsal, members of Reuther’s coalition spent the summer readying themselves for the Washington march. Some Port Huron alumni were helping.47 In Baltimore, Kim Moody’s new SDS organized buses. Moody’s group’s special initiative was to ensure that buses were also provided for the unemployed. At Washington more than 200,000 people materialized—some observers later claimed 300,000. On the agenda Reuther enjoyed pride of place, coming after John Lewis, the new head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; and before James Farmer, the national director of the Congress on Racial Equality. Reuther made his most expansive bid: “I am here today with you because with you I share the view that the struggle for civil rights and for equal opportunity is not the struggle of Negro Americans but the struggle for every American.” Demand freedom now, Reuther told the crowd. Demand “fair employment within the framework of full employment.” You couldn’t have freedom in Berlin if you didn’t have freedom in Birmingham—Reuther was echoing over the crowd what Kennedy had said in Berlin. Aside from Rabbi Uri Miller, a Jewish leader, Reuther was the only white man on the schedule.
Reuther’s ultimate prey that summer day in 1963 was the still elusive President Kennedy, and Reuther and other march leaders headed over to the White House after the march. Reuther and King were pleased because the day had run so smoothly. They and Bayard Rustin and the hundreds of thousands of people who had come to Washington had exercised the self-discipline of worthy citizens. “Everything was perfect, just perfect,” Reuther praised Martin Luther King as they trailed in, for Reuther, after all, still had more experience with big rallies than King. But the guests, once again, did not find the New Frontier president especially receptive to instant change. The White House in fact expressed its alarm at a SNCC notice charging that the Kennedy Administration was moving too slowly on civil rights. Kennedy complimented King on his speech, and King politely asked if Kennedy had heard Reuther. “Plenty of times,” the president said, a comment that had to be recognized as further evidence that Kennedy was tiring of Reuther.48
That fall of 1963, Reuther continued to make little headway in Washington. He had long nursed the idea of creating a federal department of housing, and while Kennedy assented, the president never managed to get Congress to go along. Robert Weaver, a black housing official expected to be the head of the new agency, was twiddling his thumbs. The tax cut Kennedy and Reuther had pushed hard for remained mired in committee on Capitol Hill, and Reuther complained loudly, arguing that the longest strike in America now was not a worker strike but a “congressional strike.” The big initiative on poverty that Harrington sought wasn’t going anywhere, though the Kennedy Administration did talk about poverty problems piecemeal. Eunice Kennedy Shriver, a personality every bit as powerful as her brothers, had pushed for an initiative to study juvenile delinquency and poverty, and that research was going strong. An informal task force with economic advisors from various departments in Washington was meeting to discuss a “Widening Participation in Prosperity” plan, but these were only meetings. In November, Walter Heller, the president’s economic advisor, spoke with the president about some kind of anti-poverty program. The president allowed that it would probably happen in 1964, and in tones that scarcely suggested a revolution. Reuther meanwhile suffered setbacks close to home. There was bitter news from American Motors, where Reuther’s old opponents, the profit-sharing skeptics, found vindication. With Romney in the governor’s mansion, Romney’s successors at AMC reduced the contributions to the profit-sharing kitty, even though AMC profits were up and the directors boosted the quarterly dividend to shareholders. The economic pie at AMC was growing, but, the union men thought, the growth was not being shared. Reuther had long hoped to supplant George Meany as head of the AFL-CIO. On November 20, though, the AFL-CIO reelected the sixty-eight-year-old Meany to a fifth term. Reuther began to prepare for his next chance to widen his influence, the 1964 presidential election. He called for a law that would doubtless be popular, a $2 minimum wage. What else could he do?
Two days later, Harrington and his wife, Stephanie, were dining in a restaurant in Milan. One of their recent stops, Poland, had reinforced Michael’s convictions about the evils of Eastern communism. Harrington had also attended the Eighth Congress of the Socialist International in Amsterdam and met with Reuther’s friends Harold Wilson of Britain and Willy Brandt of Germany.49 But that night, a waiter paused by their table to tell them some shocking news: “It’s just terrible, they have just killed Kennedy.” Disbelieving, the Harringtons raced to a telex to read the wires. It was November 22, and Kennedy was gone. The Texas governor, John Connally, had been shot as well. Harrington reflected on Kennedy and his interest in the progressives. Vice President Johnson was sworn in as U.S. president. Walking by a Communist Party office the following day, the Harringtons saw a large poster the Italian communists had hung, mourning Kennedy’s death. Despite his deficiencies, Harrington saw, “Kennedy had opened many windows.” Perhaps Johnson would close them.
The New York Stock Exchange closed. Not only Reuther, but leaders from all across the world, including the Social Democrat Olof Palme of Sweden and Harold Wilson of the Labor Party in Britain, raced to Washington to attend services for the assassinated statesman. The small group of social democrats hoped against hope that the suspicious Johnson, the new leader of the free world, would pick up where Kennedy had stopped. Walter’s immediate reaction was to draft a statement of policy, his brother Victor later recalled.50 Would Johnson even read such a statement? Or even heed progressives, except insofar as to collect their support for the Democratic Party? The men in the room at the Statler Hilton on Sixteenth Street where the UAW met had little clue.
Years later scholars would find the first evidence of the political agenda of the new president in a single document: the White House appointment book. On Saturday, November 23, the day after Kennedy’s death, the new president held meetings and telephoned all day. The incoming calls were largely ones of condolence. At 3:22 p.m., for example, Romney of Michigan called the White House to convey his sympathy.51 But for a man who had been vice president just a day before, a man whose president had been shot down, Johnson also paid great attention to policy and coalition building. At 3:42 p.m. Johnson met with Sargent Shriver, the director of the Peace Corps and the president’s mourning brother-in-law; and Bill Moyers, Shriver’s associate director of public affairs at the Peace Corps. After that, at 3:52, Johnson met with Arthur Goldberg, now a Supreme Court justice. At 4:15 Johnson placed a call to Pittsburgh, to David McDonald of the United Steelworkers, Roger Blough’s old antagonist.52 Johnson asked McDonald to stand by, as he might be asked for help.
At 4:20 p.m. Johnson called Reuther. “I’ll need your friendship more than I ever did in my life,” Johnson said.53 Reuther promised “every possible help I can offer.” A lawyer named Joseph Rauh was in Reuther’s suite at the Statler Hilton at the time. Rauh remembered the moment. “Everybody was pretty set up about the fact that the new president wanted advice from Walter and wanted his help. We all thought that was great.” Even on that somber weekend, Rauh and the crowd in the suite had to smile. For soon enough, it became clear that Johnson wanted more than one call to Reuther’s crowd. At some point a bodyguard came in and said, as Rauh remembered it, “Joe, the White House operator wants to know if you can get the phone numbers of David Dubinsky, I. W. Abel, Dave McDonald”—all union leaders, and some on the more belligerent end of the spectrum.54 Rauh later recalled their surprise. The new president was supposed to be a conservative. Yet “Johnson was contacting liberal labor people all over the place.”
There was more. Though Reuther didn’t know it yet, at 7:41 p.m. the inexhaustible Johnson greeted Walter Heller, the economic advisor who had looked into the idea of an anti-poverty plan. It turned out that Johnson was far more interested in poverty than Kennedy had been. “That’s my kind of program,” Johnson told Heller. “Move full speed ahead.” What Johnson was thinking, even in those early hours, was that he could at this moment, in part because of the tragic circumstances, pursue larger aims than Kennedy did. “Labor’s White House Stock Rises” read a headline just a few days after Kennedy’s assassination.55 On the following Monday, November 25, Johnson spoke with Martin Luther King by phone, and told King that he would try to show “how worthy I’m going to be of all our hopes.” King elegantly laid out a plan and promised to pay tribute to the late president by supporting Kennedy’s “great progressive polices.” “Well I’m going to support them all, and you can count on that,” LBJ said. In the following days, Johnson began to make good on his word, one by one telling constituents, cabinet members, and lawmakers that he would deliver. In early December, for example, Kermit Gordon, the director of Johnson’s bureau of the budget, informed the president that big programs for housing were expiring. Would there be a new law? Johnson said others thought they ought to get “some urban renewal and some public housing.”56 Johnson didn’t fail to get to Republicans, especially the Senate minority leader, Everett Dirksen. Dirksen represented Illinois, the Land of Lincoln, and would help him prevail over Southern Democrats and push through unfinished civil rights legislation. At 9:00 p.m. on January 1, 1964—Johnson placed many such calls at night—the president phoned Dirksen to wish him a happy New Year. Within a quarter hour, Johnson was on the phone to another key player, the Senate majority leader, Mike Mansfield of Montana, telling Mansfield that he was “mighty proud of your friendship.”
When Harrington returned to the United States that winter, he discovered his own ideas for a drive to halt poverty—the abstract noun, “poverty,” was a meme now—were also moving full speed ahead. Word was that Johnson would announce a major federal program for the poor shortly. All the evidence suggested that Johnson might even do more than a poverty initiative, and that he was even willing to understand and support Reuther’s and the students’ idea for a banner of great social change. In January, Johnson did more than any of them had imagined. The president declared an “unconditional war on poverty” in his State of the Union address. He promised he would fight not merely to address the symptoms of poverty, but to “to cure it.” Johnson recommended more federal support for education, health, and retraining than any president had in American history, plans so expansive they rang European to listeners’ ears.
The price of such friendship to Reuther’s causes, Reuther knew all too well, would be electoral support. Later that January, Johnson called Reuther, who was in Michigan. The president was of course already thinking about November. “Now listen Walter . . . I don’t want you to raise any hell until after I get elected . . . I don’t mind how many times you march after November but don’t do it in September.” Reuther was silent on that point, but did assure Johnson that in a recent speech he’d “agreed completely with your economic policy on wages.” As they chatted, the two agreed on one point: car prices. If the Big Three cut car prices, there would be less competition from Europe. Or maybe it was time to shrink autos some more. Johnson offered the government might buy a smaller car. The call between the president and the union leader concluded with Johnson asking Reuther to vet a man for him, someone who had been recommended for a high position at the newly unionized Post Office.
In the same period Johnson also asked Richard Goodwin, a progressive who had been working for Robert Kennedy, to move over to the West Wing as a presidential aide for domestic affairs. “Those Harvards think that a politician from Texas doesn’t care about Negroes,” Johnson said to Goodwin, accurately enough.57 Johnson would show them. Goodwin sensed Johnson’s strong will: not only intellectually, but also viscerally, Johnson wouldn’t be content with extending Kennedy’s agenda.
At his ranch in Texas, the president astounded the young Goodwin by inviting him and Bill Moyers of the Peace Corps into his pool for a skinny dip. The Skinny Dip Session, despite its disconcerting circumstances, marked another turning point in history. For it was here, paddling around the kidney-shaped pool in Johnson City with the chief executive, that Goodwin and Moyers heard Johnson say that he wanted not merely to carry on the Kennedy mission, but to “create a Johnson program, different in tone, fighting and aggressive.”
How aggressive Reuther and the others could not know at the time. On February 1 the president was ready to name Sargent Shriver to coordinate his new program on poverty, even if that office didn’t exist yet or have a strategic plan. LBJ phoned Shriver to let him know he would announce Shriver’s new job in a press conference. Shriver hemmed and hawed—“You announce somebody . . . and they don’t know what the hell they are doing . . . then you’re in a hell of a hole.” Well, “you’ve got to do it,” Johnson retorted, in effect ordering Kennedy’s brother-in-law to take an undefined job.
Except when he was angry, as in 1962, with the steel men, Kennedy led by indirection. Johnson, they all were learning, operated in your face. Johnson pointed out to Shriver that he had already made it clear he was going to devote resources to what everyone was now calling the War on Poverty. So why was Shriver hesitating? “You’ve got the authority, you’ve got the power, you’ve got the money,” Johnson warned. “Now, you may not have the glands.” Shriver was incredulous at hearing a phrase like that from his chief executive. “The glands?” LBJ: “Yeah.”58 By mid-February, Sargent Shriver, now willy-nilly Mr. Poverty, was inviting Harrington to Washington to help him consider how the new administration might put muscle into its poverty war.
The meeting was Harrington’s moment. Socialism, his ideal, might be too grand and controversial for even what was emerging as an administration more progressive than Kennedy’s. The writer spoke about Appalachia, the basis for his book; about poverty in the South; about poverty in New York; about health care; about the civil rights movement. Harrington had great authority on civil rights; he had worked with Bayard Rustin, who organized the March on Washington the prior summer. Mayor Robert Wagner of New York was piling on with his own plan for a municipal war on poverty, but Wagner’s program had to be aggressive. Harrington offered advice that related to his hometown, St. Louis, and the big housing project there, Pruitt-Igoe. That old failure, urban renewal, Harrington said, could work if you trained the slum dwellers to clear the properties themselves and build integrated, classless housing projects. In discussion with Harrington and Paul Jacobs, a fellow labor activist with whom Harrington had coedited a book, Shriver mentioned the amount Johnson was thinking about spending on poverty: somewhere between a quarter of a billion dollars and a billion. Shriver, after all, had some experience in Washington, and had labored mightily in the past two years to build up a small endeavor, the Peace Corps. Just weeks before, in another lifetime, he had fought like a lion to get Congress to vote to approve a budget of $102 million for the Peace Corps. Now poverty spending could be ten times that. Harrington countered that even a billion dollars was “nickels and dimes.” A billion was in fact just a bit higher than the $800 million President John Kennedy and Congress had allocated to Americans of all social classes when they extended benefits for Social Security in 1961.59 Shriver would have none of it. “I don’t know about you, but this is the first time I’ve spent a billion dollars.”
Observers could wonder if Harrington, not Shriver, was the better reader of the political mood. In Michigan that winter, joblessness stood at 3.5 percent, the lowest rate since 1955. Experts had long said that two good automobile years could not occur in a row, yet they did, a Motor City bonanza. In Michigan, relatively few seemed to mind that George Romney, who had campaigned on the theme of restraint and the success of his downsized Rambler, had as governor put through the largest budget in the history of the state of Michigan.60 Detroit, too, had deep pockets, deep enough to model dramatic social change for the rest of the country.
The Detroit mood spilled over into the rest of the country, where the enthusiasm for expansion of new programs kept growing. Onto the table came other plans for helping the poor. Shriver’s Peace Corps had been a great success, “wonderful,” as Arthur Schlesinger put it, and especially good at transforming Venezuelans’ vision of America.61 Now the success would be replicated with a domestic social service plan whereby young people would spread across the country into cities to help enable local communities to act for themselves. There would be what was soon known as Head Start, school for three- and four-year-olds to prepare for kindergarten. Adam Yarmolinsky, one of Shriver’s aides, was drawing up a plan to open one-stop social service centers for the poor in cities. Those centers would offer a new service: legal advice and representation funded by Washington for the poor.
Through the spring, Johnson kept increasing his own obligations. The president promised Shriver he would stick to Shriver and the poverty project forever, “Death do us part.” Johnson told lawmakers he would deliver a major tax cut, legislation Kennedy had sought but failed to steer through. The tax cut would stimulate the economy. The Dow Jones Industrial Average had already nosed past 800, up by 35 percent since June 1962. How much faster could an economic heart beat? Yet Johnson pressed on: “It would be self-defeating,” the president told others, working the logic he’d heard so often, “to cancel the stimulus of tax reduction by tightening money.” From ignoring Harrington, the New York Times went to quoting him as a prophet. The paper respectfully quoted Harrington’s suggestion that the nation needed “a great national upsurge” in public opinion for the new war against poverty to take place.62
On the Hill, some lawmakers were alarmed at the alacrity with which Johnson wanted to drive so many other laws through Congress. To do all Johnson wanted, Senate minority leader Dirksen bleated to the press, “it would take fiscal legerdemain.” Someone at the White House “made a mistake in arithmetic,” said Senator Hugh Scott, a Republican from Pennsylvania. “We suffered through the New Deal and the Fair Deal,” commented Senator Thruston B. Morton of Kentucky, “and now we’ve got the Fast Deal.” But these men were all Republicans, and Democrats held both houses of Congress.
Many of the students who had been at Port Huron hesitated to support Johnson, whose fellow Democrats guarded the polling booths to keep blacks out in the South. But for men like Reuther or Harrington, “fast” couldn’t come fast enough. During the halting Eisenhower and Kennedy years, they had longed for a president who dared to try himself to “put the world together,” in Reuther’s phrase, a president who would take America to social democracy, who would complete Franklin Roosevelt’s revolution. Now they had one.