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TAKE THIS JOB AND LOVE IT

Not long after V-J Day, General Motors president “Engine Charlie” Wilson addressed a group of his executives in Detroit, laying out half a dozen fundamentals to ensure the company’s “continuing success” and “to maintain our competitive position” as the automaker embarked on the transition from a military to a peacetime economy. Most of these guidelines hinged on giving workers what they needed to thrive on and off the job—tangibles and intangibles alike. “Put the right people in the right places,” Wilson advised. “Train everyone for the job to be done; make the organization a coordinated team; supply the right tools and the right conditions; give security with opportunity, incentive, recognition; look ahead, plan ahead for more and better things.”

As platitudinous as these principles may have seemed to some, they were sufficiently inspiring to be invoked two years later, in the fall of 1947, by William Kitts, a junior engineer in the company’s Fisher Body Division, as he sought to shed light on why he appreciated working for GM. Citing Wilson’s words was a nice touch—nice enough, at least, to help Kitts’s composition stand out from the nearly 175,000 others submitted as part of a company-sponsored letter-writing contest. Everyone who’d entered had been directed to explore the same topic: “My Job, and Why I Like It.” Bill Kitts’s prize: a brand new black Pontiac Streamliner four-door sedan. At the grand awards banquet, Wilson himself would hand Kitts and thirty-nine other winners keys made of gold.

In all, about 59 percent of GM’s hourly and salaried workforce participated in the contest—a deluge of entries so large that, had they been stacked one on top of another, the pile of paper would have extended six stories high. The frenzied response was prompted by a crush of promotional activities, which began in September with a two-week teaser campaign in which the initials “MJC” were tossed out unexplained, adding an air of mystery to the proceedings: it was then revealed that they stood for “My Job Contest.” Spurred on by more than one hundred contest chairmen spread across GM’s factories and offices, foremen and supervisors urged their underlings to write letters. Buildings were festooned with streamers and posters, letting everyone know that their views were welcome. “You Don’t Have To Be A Highbrow… Know How To Spell… Be A Skilled Writer… Fine Penmanship… Use English… Or Even Own a Pen,” read one placard. Plants held open houses, exhibits, and parades to gin up interest. Six full-color postcards were mailed to employees, reminding them to get their letters in. And they did—in every form and fashion imaginable.

The average letter ran about 250 words, though one wag put down but a single sentence. Others ballooned to 20 typewritten pages. About 700 were in foreign languages—Polish, Spanish, German, Hungarian, French, Lithuanian, Hebrew, and Arabic—and required translation. One was written in Latin, another in braille. Some employees took the “or even own a pen” line literally, sending in phonographic recordings. One worker put together a six-minute silent film, showing him talking about the contest with his family, writing his letter, and then placing it in the corner mailbox. Poems, acrostics, and renderings were also part of the mix.

Without a doubt, many of the missives were barefaced attempts by GM employees to snare one of the forty cars (one Cadillac, three Buicks, six Oldsmobiles, ten Pontiacs, and twenty Chevrolets) or the more than 5,000 other items offered to those deemed best: refrigerators, freezers, ranges, washing machines, radios, and more. To this end, some engaged in pure sycophancy—nothing but “apple-polishing,” as Time bluntly put it in a write-up of the company contest. But many others, the magazine added, penned pieces that “had a ring as authentic as the clang of the drop-forge hammer” used to stamp out engine parts or axles at one of GM’s giant factories. Kitts, whose job was to make improvements to the assembly line at Fisher Body’s St. Louis plant, was among those who weren’t blowing smoke. “The better the tools, facilities, and working conditions,” Wilson had stated back in 1945, “the more that can be produced with the same human effort and the lower the cost of the product. When this results, higher wages can be paid and more good jobs provided.” Wrote Kitts in his essay: “I feel that in some small way I am helping to put into effect one of the basic points that Mr. Wilson set up.… The reason I like my job is because I’m doing a job that is important and at the same time is exactly what I wanted to do to make a living. What more could any man desire?”

Kitts, who was twenty-three, had been fascinated by cars since he was a little kid. After high school, he took a job as a stock clerk at the Fisher Body plant in his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. One day, shortly after Kitts started, the head of industrial relations at the site asked him if he would consider applying to the General Motors Institute—the company’s technical training center in Flint, Michigan. He did, and was accepted. “This was one of the biggest moments of my life,” Kitts recounted in his winning letter. “It was about this time that I first began to feel a great like for the corporation, for I realized that it not only had an interest in production, but also had an interest in the individual employee as well.” By taking advantage of this break, Kitts was put on a pathway that big businesses such as GM loved to tell the world they afforded. “Think of the corporation as a pyramid of opportunities toward the top with thousands of chances for advancement,” Alfred Sloan had written in his 1940 book, Adventures of a White-Collar Man. “Only capacity limited any worker’s chance to grow, to develop his ability to make a greater contribution to the whole and to improve his own position as well.”

In Kitts’s case, he wasn’t going to let anything limit him. “I learned early on that I wasn’t as smart as some people,” he said, “but I could outwork them.” For four years, Kitts traveled every eight weeks by rail between the General Motors Institute—where he took courses in metallurgy, math, and physics—and Fisher Body operations in Memphis and, after the war, St. Louis. In Flint, he cleaned blackboards and swept out classrooms to earn a little extra money. “That’s how you learned responsibility,” he said. Once he’d completed his studies, having displayed particular talent on the lathe, his assignment was to recommend the best portable hand tools to heighten efficiency at Fisher Body. “I had immense pride working at General Motors,” Kitts said. “You’d be surprised how much pride you had. I’d compare it to Annapolis or to West Point.”

There was more to liking a job than deriving from it personal honor and satisfaction, of course. Kitts noted in his MJC submission that he was “receiving good wages,” and many others also highlighted the company’s pay policy. Overall, 52 percent of those writing contest letters applauded how much they earned at GM, making income the most frequently mentioned of eighteen broad themes identified by the company. Mary Linabury, who held a job in the Electro-Motive Division’s engineering department, wrote that she “never yet had to ask for a raise” because “they have come through steadily with my increasing abilities.” Vernon Halliday, a grinding-machine operator for Buick, whose letter was playfully written in the style of a bumpkin, said: “I gets paid every Friday,” and “the pay is good, too”—though there were other ways that GM took care of him. Halliday, who had joined the company in 1922, lived with his family in one of about 1,000 houses that GM had constructed in a Flint neighborhood called Civic Park, offering workers sweetheart financial incentives to buy.

Other MJC winners also touted the company’s fringe benefits. Betty Kraft, of the GM patent office, pointed to the retirement program as an essential reason for her “happiness and peace of mind.” Delphia Baugh, who’d joined Fisher Body’s Fleetwood Plant in 1929, wrote that her “neat little white cottage” in Detroit was, in a sense, “a gift to me” from the company because it had awarded her a $1,000 bond for an idea that she’d had to increase production during the war—part of the GM Suggestion Plan. “With this bond,” she said, “I made the down payment on my home.” Wrote C. Wales Goodwin, who worked in the engineering department at Pontiac: “In my twenty-seven years with General Motors, I have not only seen marvelous mechanical progress, but I have also seen great humanitarian progress” with “old-age benefits established, pension and retirement funds set up, group and hospital insurance set up, shorter working hours, higher wages, and vacations with pay for all employees.”

GM did pay well—an average of more than $3,000 per employee across the company in 1947 (equal to about $32,000 today). That compared with about $2,700 for all US workers. But in this regard, GM was merely at the fore of a much larger trend. Nationally, full-time workers had seen their wages and salaries rise markedly since the end of the war, up more than 18 percent in two years. A good chunk of this gain reflected the need for Americans to keep up with the cost of consumer goods, which was now surging after the lifting of wartime price controls. And there had been some serious bumps along the way, especially in certain industries like autos, which experienced massive layoffs right after the war’s end. Yet the US unemployment rate remained below 4 percent through 1946 and 1947, and it wasn’t long before a real and lasting prosperity began to sweep across the country, elevating millions of families “from poverty or near poverty to a status where they can enjoy what has been traditionally considered a middle-class way of life,” Frederick Lewis Allen, the editor of Harper’s Magazine, observed in his book The Big Change. In concrete terms, this meant “decent clothes for all, an opportunity to buy a better automobile, install an electric refrigerator, provide the housewife with a decently attractive kitchen, go to the dentist, pay insurance premiums, and so on indefinitely.” Benefits were expanding widely as well. The National Industrial Conference Board discovered that group accident and health insurance was in place at 64 percent of the 3,500 companies it surveyed in 1946, a sharp increase from the 31 percent with such protections in 1939. Pension plans were now being offered by 42 percent of the companies, up from a scant 13 percent seven years earlier.

Yet, in the end, many GM workers reached past such practicalities and, like Kitts, found tremendous pride in the company and its products. Indeed, nearly half of all the MJC letters captured such feelings—almost as many as those referring to the magnitude of GM’s remuneration. “I’ve got a job I’m really proud of!” Linabury wrote. “It is from this engineering department that come all of the changes in design that produce stronger, lighter cars with smoother, more efficient engines and motors.” Taylor Phillips, a color-spray man, said he wore his GM “badge as proudly as the proudest G.I. wears his honorable-discharge button because I know that my job is an important and necessary one in this gigantic organization.”

Eliciting comments like these was just what Charlie Wilson and his senior colleagues wanted. Workers were always going to beef about something, they figured, but just getting them to articulate some of the pluses at GM was bound to help keep them more content. “In the words of the popular song, it caused these men and women to ‘accentuate the positive,’” Wilson said. “As one letter writer indicated, he had never before stopped to think about the good things connected with his job, but when he did stop to think, he was surprised with the number of ‘positives’ there really were.” Harry Coen, GM’s vice president for employee relations, added: “A bit of homespun philosophy has run like a thread through all of the material issued during the contest, and that is—‘Let’s look at the doughnut instead of the hole.’ It’s just as simple as that.”

The contest had a second purpose, too: to allow management to peer inside the minds of GM’s workers. To help them determine the best way to interpret the letters, Coen’s staff met with experts in the fields of education, social psychology, psychiatry, and political science. Readers, specially trained by the Statistical Analytics Company, coded every entry, carefully tabulating on IBM “mark-sense” cards which prevailing subject or subjects the writer had brought up. Peter Drucker, who served as an employee-relations consultant to Wilson and was also one of the MJC final judges, called the contest “the richest source of information ever about workers, their needs, desires, and capabilities.”

This claim, even if half-true, was impressive, given the widespread use of employee-attitude testing at the time. From the mid-1940s through the mid-1950s, two in five large companies in America would conduct at least one such survey. Sometimes, the aim was to generate results that could be used to propagandize: “Ninety-seven percent of employees think this is an above-average plant!” Other times, the intent was to give workers a place to vent their complaints—a safe avenue for a calming catharsis. Kodak, for instance, set up a program in which department heads would meet regularly with small groups of hourly workers for an open-ended conversation. One of its primary aims was “to serve as a psychological ‘safety valve’ for individual employees.” In either case, such efforts were often used to blunt union organizing, helping management unearth and assuage workers’ concerns before they could fuel official demands by an outside labor representative.

Despite these manipulative moves, real insights were gleaned from attitude testing. From the time that the technique had been pioneered in the 1920s, researchers found that managers hoping to foster good morale tended to overestimate the value of paying their workers well and underestimate how crucial it was to treat them fairly, provide jobs that have real meaning, and communicate clearly the way in which each individual’s role fit into the larger mission of the organization. “Apparently it is not enough to have an enlightened company policy, a carefully devised (and blueprinted) plan of manufacture,” wrote Elton Mayo, the famous Harvard professor, who in the late 1920s guided the interviewing of some 21,000 employees (half the total) at the Western Electric Company’s Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois. “To stop at this point, and merely administer such plan, however logical, to workers with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude has much the same effect as administering medicine to a recalcitrant patient.… This is the essential nature of the human; with all the will in the world to cooperate, he finds it difficult to persist in action for an end he cannot dimly see.” Other scholars—Abraham Maslow, Douglas McGregor, and Frederick Herzberg, among the most highly esteemed—would also stress how critical it was for people to find a loftier purpose in their jobs. “Unless there are opportunities at work to satisfy these higher-level needs,” McGregor wrote, “people will be deprived; and their behavior will reflect this deprivation.”

The MJC reinforced these notions. As Drucker summarized it, “the contest fully proved” that extrinsic rewards such as pay and promotion—what Herzberg termed “hygiene” factors—could cause dissatisfaction among workers if handled poorly. “But satisfaction with them,” Drucker continued, “is not particularly important and an incentive to few. Achievement, contribution, responsibility, these are the powerful motivators and incentives.” Taken by this core finding, Wilson floated an idea: he wanted to test a new organizational structure in which management and blue-collar employees would work closely together to find ways to improve GM’s operations. For the first time, frontline laborers would have real input into the corporation’s decision making.

The concept was immediately shot down from both directions. Sloan, who as chairman of GM remained by far the most influential person at the company, “had little use” for Wilson’s progressive views, Drucker remembered. “For the great majority of GM executives—and for executives in American industry altogether at that time—anything like” what Wilson was advocating “represented the abdication of management’s responsibility,” Drucker added. “‘We are the experts, after all,’ they argued. ‘We are being paid for knowing how to organize work and job, or at least for knowing it better than people with much less experience, much less education, and much lower income. We are accountable,’ they argued, ‘and not only to the company, its shareholders, and its customers, but above all to the workers themselves, to make them as productive as they possibly can be—or how else can we pay them a decent wage?’”

Although Wilson invited the union to be a part of his program—and although Walter Reuther privately characterized the GM president as “a very decent, genuine human being”—the opposition from the leadership of the United Auto Workers was every bit as violent as that from the company’s executive suite. “To the UAW,” Drucker said, “anything that would establish cooperation between company and workers was a direct attack on the union.” Without an ally in sight, Wilson’s vision died swiftly—or at least it would remain in a deep coma for the next thirty years.

In the meantime, Reuther and the UAW did all they could to discredit the MJC. “The General Motors contest is an attempt to conduct a one-sided opinion poll of the workers,” Reuther contended. “The corporation hopes, by offering a number of valuable prizes, to buy employee statements to the effect that General Motors is a kindly, fatherly, and understanding employer, sympathetic to the workers’ problems and needs, which will later be used in so-called goodwill advertising. If GM is sincerely interested in a true opinion poll of its workers, the corporation should be willing to offer equal prizes for letters stating what is wrong with GM employer-employee relations with constructive suggestions for improving such relationships.”

At least a few union men ripped down MJC posters from plant walls. Others, like R. E. McDonald, writing in The Searchlight, the newspaper of UAW Local 659 in Flint, resorted to verse instead of vandalism:

UAW supporter Phil Singer, writing under the pseudonym Paul Romano in a widely distributed tract called The American Worker, also reported that attitudes about the MJC were sour. The rank-and-file’s “remarks vary from: ‘The biggest liar will win’ to ‘The winners are already picked out,’” he wrote. “Others say: ‘I like my job because I can feed my family,’ ‘I like my job because I want to win a new Cadillac,’ ‘I like my job because I want to keep my job,’ etc.… The company is pressuring the workers to enter the contest. The foreman and plant superintendents have been going around trying to coerce workers into entering. One long-employed worker was in the office about it. He noticed that the boss had a mark next to his name. He became furious and had an argument with him. He said that he would write a letter only if he himself decided. So far he had decided not to, and no one was going to compel him.”

For all of this tough talk, though, there was no escaping it: by the fall of 1947, it was organized labor—and not companies like GM—that had been knocked back on its heels.

On June 23, 1947, Congress voted into law a piece of labor legislation that would turn out to have as much impact on the relationship between employer and employee as any other in American history: the Taft-Hartley Act. As is often the case, the measure’s full wallop would not be felt for quite a while; despite a number of restrictions that Taft-Hartley placed on union organizers, the ranks of labor continued to grow in the immediate wake of its passage, and the share of the nation’s nonagricultural workers who were unionized would not fall below 30 percent for fifteen years. Still, whether because they were prescient or just trying to be provocative, labor advocates were apoplectic about Taft-Hartley from the outset. Less than a week after the law’s approval, pickets surrounded the Cincinnati church where Lloyd Taft, the son of the bill’s Senate cosponsor, Republican Robert Taft, was getting married. “CONGRATULATIONS TO YOU. ____ TO YOUR OLD MAN,” read one of the protestor’s signs, leaving it up to onlookers’ imaginations to fill in the blank with all manner of invective.

President Truman, whose veto of Taft-Hartley had been overridden by overwhelming majorities in both the House and Senate, called it “a slave-labor bill.” Walter Reuther excoriated the law, known formally as the Labor-Management Relations Act, as “a vicious piece of Fascist legislation.” Said Thomas Johnstone, assistant director of the UAW’s General Motors Department: “If allowed to stand, the clock may be turned all the way back… to the days of the open shop and industrial war.” Actually, Taft-Hartley came about through industrial war, in a fracas that pitted, among others, GM against the UAW.

The union had followed its electrifying triumph in the 1937 Flint sit-down strike with another huge victory, winning a contract at GM in 1940—this time, without needing to implement any work stoppage. The wage increase in the accord was small, just one and a half cents an hour. But it forced GM to give up paying different amounts to workers who did the same jobs. No longer would the whim of the boss hold sway. No longer were laborers subject to the sort of individual bias they had encountered in the past. No longer could a particular plant supervisor pay his employees based on his own proclivity for stinginess. “GM’s shift toward a uniform, nationwide wage pattern represented one of the industrial union movement’s most significant steps toward the New Deal era’s transformation of the American class structure,” the historian Nelson Lichtenstein has written. “Factories within the same firm, and companies within the same industry, would cease to compete for lower wages, and within those factories and occupations wage differentials would decline” for millions of blue-collar workers.

The 1940 agreement was also pathbreaking in its establishment of a grievance arbitration system. Under it, the stickiest shop-floor disputes were decided by an “umpire” who considered written briefs and oral arguments from UAW officials on one side and members of GM’s industrial-relations staff on the other. Many of Sloan’s top men were uncomfortable with this arrangement, fearing that it gave the union an invitation to interfere with the prerogatives of management and would further drive a wedge between the company and its workers. “Often, through union activity directed at gaining the exclusive allegiance of the union membership, there is lost the essential element of loyalty and recognition of dependency upon effectiveness of management,” groused Donaldson Brown, the GM vice chairman. “An understanding of the mutuality of interests of management and labor is dissipated. Efficiency is reduced, and the interests of all concerned suffer as a consequence.” But Wilson realized that having the union’s explicit involvement in a corporate disciplinary system was paramount to promoting peace—or at least to preserving what many would regard over time as an “armed truce.”

The arrival of World War II introduced its own complications into the dynamics between union and company. Reuther talked up the ideal of “victory through equality of sacrifice.” And in a show of patriotism, the UAW and other leading trade unions offered an unconditional no-strike pledge. But many workers resented having their wages held in check by the War Labor Board, which was trying to tame inflation by keeping a lid on pay, while corporate coffers grew fat on military contracts. Union membership in America swelled during the war, increasing from about 9 million to 15 million from 1940 to 1945. Grievances piled up, and wildcat strikes—actions unauthorized by the union brass—proliferated across heavy industry: autos, coal, rubber, steel, and shipbuilding. During 1944, more than 2 million laborers across the United States walked off the job, an all-time high. More than half of all autoworkers took part in some kind of work stoppage that year, including 7,000 employees at GM’s Chevrolet Gear and Axle, who were enraged over the firing of five workers who’d failed to meet stepped-up production schedules. “When we found that there was no other solution except a wildcat strike,” said one GM worker, “we found ourselves striking not only against the corporation but against practically the government, at least public opinion, and our own union and its pledge.” Many of these were quickie strikes, of limited economic consequence. But they were a potent symbol of working-class solidarity—and a harbinger of more unrest to come.

Leaders of labor and management tried to head off additional trouble. In March 1945, the presidents of the US Chamber of Commerce, the American Federation of Labor, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations signed a seven-point charter that acknowledged “the inherent right and responsibility of management to direct the operations of an enterprise,” as well as “the fundamental rights of labor to organize and engage in collective bargaining.” The idea was to “substitute cooperation and understanding for bitterness and strife,” as the AFL’s William Green described it. That turned out to be wishful thinking. By the fall, with Germany and Japan having now surrendered, 200,000 coal miners, 44,000 lumbermen, 43,000 oil workers, 35,000 longshoremen, and thousands more in the glass, textile, and trucking industries had struck their respective employers. In the final four and a half months of 1945, 28 million “man days” of work were lost to walkouts—more than double the high reached over a full year during the war. The key issue was wages: wartime bonuses and overtime had been cut and the cost of living was climbing rapidly.

On November 5, with the public growing increasingly dismayed over the seemingly endless strike wave, President Truman convened seventy-two delegates from the AFL, CIO, Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, and other groups at a labor-management conference in Washington. He implored them to figure out a way past their differences. “There are many considerations involved,” the president said in opening the colloquy. “At the base of them all is not only the right but the duty to bargain collectively. I do not mean giving mere lip service to that abstract principle. I mean the willingness on both sides, yes, the determination, to approach the bargaining table with an open mind, with an appreciation of what is on the other side of the table—and with a firm resolve to reach an agreement fairly. If that fails, if bargaining produces no results, then there must be a willingness to use some impartial machinery for reaching decisions on the basis of proved facts and realities, instead of rumor or propaganda or partisan statements. That is the way to eliminate unnecessary friction. That is the way to prevent lockouts and strikes. That is the way to keep production going.”

Not everyone was thrilled with the message. GE’s president, “Electric Charlie” Wilson, thought that Truman’s oratory had tilted unfairly against the corporate community. “It was too one-sided to do other than egg labor on to get all they can,” he said. Whether Truman’s speech served as the impetus or not, packinghouse, steel, coal, and railroad workers would lead protracted strikes in the coming months. During the year after V-J Day, the scope and intensity of labor-management conflict would go down as unmatched in US history. About 5 million men and women were involved in more than 4,500 work stoppages. At GE alone, 100,000 members of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers walked out in January 1946, seeking higher pay. “The problems of the United States can be captiously summed up in two words: Russia abroad, labor at home,” Wilson said, as the nation’s unions remained restive and the Cold War dawned.

But by far the longest impasse—lasting 113 days—would play out at GM. The strike’s principal architect was Walter Reuther, who at the time was running the UAW’s GM Department and was still four months away from assuming the union presidency. The son of a German immigrant union activist, Reuther was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, on September 1, 1907—Labor Day eve. As an eleven-year-old, he went with his father to visit the old man’s hero, then in prison: the Socialist leader Eugene Debs. Reuther moved to Detroit in 1927, where over the next few years he’d show great skill as a die maker at Ford Motor, stump for Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas, and take economics and sociology classes at Detroit City College. In January 1933, Reuther and his younger brother Victor set off for Europe and then Russia, hoping to learn more about the Soviet system. Taking jobs at the fledgling Gorky Auto Works, they were impressed. “In all the countries we have thus far been in,” Victor Reuther told a friend, “we have never found such genuine proletarian democracy. It is unpolished and crude, rough and rude, but proletarian workers’ democracy in every respect.”

In late 1935, the Reuthers returned to Detroit, where Walter rejoined the Socialist Party and began to make his mark as a UAW organizer, most dramatically during the Flint sit-down strike at GM and, several months later, at the Battle of the Overpass at Ford. In that brawl, several company union-busters had kicked and slugged Reuther and another UAW organizer near the Miller Road overpass outside Ford’s sprawling Rouge plant. For good measure, Reuther was thrown down a flight of stairs. He came away bloodied and battered—but proud and able to claim the moral high ground in the union’s tussle against corporate America. As deft as Reuther was at fighting the large companies, he demonstrated equal aptitude for dispatching his foes inside the union, adroitly navigating the internecine rivalries that plagued the UAW in the 1930s and ’40s. At first, Reuther allied himself with the union’s more radical faction, which included a group of Communists, in part because it allowed him to differentiate himself from those leaders who favored a policy of accommodation with GM. Later on, when it suited his ambitions, he turned against the Communists and resigned from the Socialist Party as well. By 1940, according to Lichtenstein, Reuther had emerged as “a national spokesman for the pro-defense, pro-Roosevelt ‘right wing’ within the American labor movement”—a standing he cemented with a bold plan, known as “500 Planes a Day,” to speed the auto industry’s conversion to military output.

Now, with GM focused on how it would reconvert its lines for postwar production, Reuther again thrust himself into the spotlight—leading 180,000 workers to walk out of the company. The strike began on November 21, 1945, just two weeks after President Truman had tried to smooth things over at his labor-management conference. “It is time to debunk the notion that labor can meet in parleys with government and management and by some miracle fashion a compromise that will keep all parties happy and contented,” Victor Reuther said, speaking for his brother. GM initially proposed to raise average pay by 10 percent, from a $1.10 an hour to $1.21. In early December, in response to newly issued wage and price regulations from Washington, the company upped its offer by two and a half cents, an overall boost in pay of 12 percent. But the union was pressing GM to increase average hourly income all the way to $1.43—a 30 percent jump—so as to make up for the mountain of overtime that workers no longer would receive because of the end of the war. “Never in the history of this industry has there been so perfect a chance to correct the inequalities… and to obtain a real increase in wages,” the UAW asserted, “for the major auto companies are swollen with war profits and are hungrily reaching for the greatest potential market for automobiles that has ever been seen, or ever will be seen again in our lifetime, in all probability.”

Reuther didn’t stop there. The company was so flush, he insisted, it could meet the UAW’s 30 percent demand without charging any more for its cars. “Wage increases without price increases” became Reuther’s rallying cry—a strategy that widened the circle of support for the strike. “In this struggle,” he later explained, “we were defending the interests not only of autoworkers alone, but of labor as a whole and of all the millions of small farmers, white-collar workers, intellectuals, pensioners, etc. who stood to be damaged just as much as we if living costs were permitted to spiral upward.”

The company countered that it was in no position to pay anything close to the amount that Reuther was trying to exact. GM’s sales may have doubled during the war, it said, but profits had actually fallen 12 percent over that time. And even though the company’s income could conceivably surge going forward amid a blossoming consumer economy, there were many uncertainties and no guarantees. “We had the gun put to us awfully quick,” Wilson said. “When we were still hearing echoes of the atomic bomb, we got 30 percent” as the UAW’s ultimatum. What’s more, said Wilson, to think that wages could be raised without affecting prices was sheer folly. Should the union get what it wanted, “prices to customers would have to be raised 30 percent,” he warned. “If wage raises in automobile plants forced such increases in car prices, the market for automobiles would be restricted. Fewer cars would be sold; fewer people would be able to afford and enjoy them, and fewer workers would be employed in making them.”

Reuther didn’t back down. If GM’s financial condition was really as precarious as the company claimed, he said, prove it—open the books. For GM, this was the ultimate indignity: a challenge far outside the normal framework of union negotiations. Federal labor law covers “such areas as rates of pay, hours of work, working conditions,” the company said in a full-page newspaper advertisement it took out across the country. “No mention is made of earnings, prices, sales volume, taxes, and the like. These are recognized as the problems of management.” The ad, which bore the headline “A ‘Look at the Books’ or ‘A Finger in the Pie?,’” went on to add that Reuther’s gambit would “surely lead to the day when union bosses, under threat of strike, will demand the right to tell what we can make, when we can make it, where we can make it, and how much we must charge you—all with an eye on what labor can take out of the business, rather than on the value that goes into the product.”

In January 1946, a federally appointed fact-finding board recommended that GM hike average pay by nineteen and a half cents an hour, or 17.5 percent. Although this was far less than the UAW had been pushing for—a terrific letdown for Reuther—the panel embraced the union’s basic reasoning: a fast-growing marketplace for autos, it suggested, would stimulate a buildup in production and profits that could easily absorb higher wages without higher prices. Reuther hailed the board’s report as “a complete endorsement of the union’s position” and a “historic step.” GM’s Donaldson Brown fretted that the Truman administration had bestowed upon Reuther “a moral victory.” But as time dragged on, it became apparent that the company had the much stronger hand to play. Early in the strike, the government had sent GM more than $34 million as part of a refund of “excess profits” taxes paid during the war, giving it a sizable cash cushion. Those in the union, conversely, were running out of dough. By March, Detroit’s Public Welfare Department said the city’s relief funds had been nearly exhausted by GM workers on strike. Meanwhile, a string of other companies were able to sign contracts for far less than the thirty-three cents an hour that constituted Reuther’s line in the sand. Ford, Chrysler, Radio Corporation of America, and most notably, the nation’s big steelmakers had all settled for gains of eighteen or eighteen and a half cents an hour. Precedent had been set. The United Electrical Workers, which bargained on behalf of about 30,000 GM employees who were not part of the UAW, similarly settled with the company for eighteen and a half cents, with no concession on prices—a move denounced by Reuther as a Communist-inspired double-cross.

Despite the setbacks, Reuther’s bluster continued. “The president’s offer of nineteen and a half cents was a compromise of our demand,” he said. “I will be God damned if I will compromise a compromise.… This is all horseshit about going back to work.” Yet within a few weeks, Reuther was out of tricks. The final agreement with GM, reached with the help of a federal mediator, called for a base wage increase of eighteen cents an hour, plus an extra penny to correct certain inequities—a 19 percent increase overall. In addition, the union won some new language regarding seniority, along with a mechanism to facilitate the collection of dues from workers. All in all, however, it wasn’t much to show for a strike that had lasted nearly four months. If there was any real winner, it was Reuther, who was narrowly elected president of the UAW on March 27, 1946, a couple of weeks after the contract’s ratification. His nerve in taking on GM, the leviathan of American industry, unquestionably had helped his cause.

But there would also be a heavy price to pay—for the UAW and for all of American labor. Having unleashed strike after strike after strike, the union movement had gone too far in many people’s estimation. “The public will not tolerate a continuance of the civil war which prevailed in 1946,” the Committee for Economic Development said in its appraisal of the situation. Even President Truman, who usually could be counted on as a friend of labor, had become so irritated that a handful of men could cripple the economy, he threatened to conscript striking railroad workers in May 1946. “No longer the underdog in the public’s mind,” historian James Gross has written, “‘too powerful’ became the most-used adjective for labor unions.” Editorial cartoonist Thomas Little, who’d later win a Pulitzer Prize for the Nashville Tennessean, neatly encapsulated the country’s mood by depicting swirls of factory smoke that curled into the air and spelled out the word STRIKES. The caption read, “Better Get It Under Control.” To do that, the nation turned to the GOP, which campaigned under the slogan “Had enough?” “We know that in the year after V-J Day we had lost $6 billion in the standard of living in America due to industrial strife,” said Richard Nixon, who came to Washington as a congressman from California in 1947, part of a Republican rout in the midterm elections that saw the party wrest control of both the House and Senate from the Democrats. “We had seen unprecedented force and violence in labor disputes throughout the country. We had seen abuses by labor leaders.… We had seen, as well, in the labor-management field how a few persons, irresponsible leaders of labor, could paralyze the entire country by ordering a strike by the stroke of a pen.”

Although America’s antiunion sentiment had come to a fast boil—“The public was happy with labor on V-J Day, but in the years since we have seen a shift in public opinion,” Nixon said—the reaction on Capitol Hill was more of a slow burn. Ever since the Wagner Act had been passed a dozen years earlier, giving workers the right to organize and bargain collectively under the vigilant eye of the National Labor Relations Board, the law had been under constant assault. Business interests, including the Alfred Sloan–backed Liberty League, at first challenged the act’s constitutionality. When the Supreme Court upheld the act in April 1937, the battleground relocated to Congress. Over the previous decade, lawmakers had put forward 169 amendments to national labor policy, most of them repeating “the same chant of hate: ‘Regulate labor, curb labor, destroy labor,’” said Philip Murray, who served as president of the CIO as well as president of the United Steelworkers. In general, these proposals had sought to ramp up the regulation of internal union affairs, limit the ease with which strikes could be called, restrain picketing and boycotting, and make illegal the “closed shop” (a business in which membership in a union is a condition for being hired and continuing to work there). The Taft-Hartley Act, just one of 200 labor-related bills introduced at the start of the 1947 congressional session, was more of the same—and then some. Opponents called it a “death warrant” for unions. But others had a gentler interpretation. Reform, said GE’s “Electric Charlie” Wilson, was needed “to save labor from its own excesses—excesses which, if unrestrained, will in the long run be injurious to labor itself.”

It is tempting to dismiss Wilson’s comment as a total charade—an attempt to make himself seem fair and reasonable when what he really wanted was to see America’s industrial unions obliterated. But issues like this are rarely so black and white. By 1945, even the hard-nosed National Association of Manufacturers had given up trying to have the Wagner Act repealed outright. In part, this was a calculated bid by the NAM to seem less reactionary and burnish its image. Beyond that, many executives of larger companies had learned to like collective bargaining because it provided a measure of predictability and stability on the shop floor. What was needed, the CED said, were some “orderly ground rules” moving forward. For others, putting up with a union man like Walter Reuther was simply superior to the alternative. These executives “believe that pension plans, good lighting, and personnel counseling are better than socialism,” C. Wright Mills wrote in his 1948 classic The New Men of Power: America’s Labor Leaders.

Given this stance of most of big business—it wanted to rein in, not do away with, unions—there couldn’t have been a more fitting person recruited to write the Taft-Hartley Act: a one-time New Deal Democrat who would remain lifelong friends with FDR’s labor secretary, Frances Perkins, but who’d drifted more and more to the right over the years and would soon become a high-priced lawyer and lobbyist for GE and GM. His name was Gerard Reilly.

Reilly grew up in Boston, the oldest of three children, in a working-class household that was long on discipline. His father, an accountant, “would beat the boys—not because they did anything wrong, just to keep them straight,” Reilly’s daughter, Margaret Heffern, said. Reilly earned a scholarship to Harvard, where he graduated with honors in 1927. Gangly in appearance and possessing a slight stutter, “he was socially awkward and very cerebral,” said his son, Jack. To help pay his expenses through school, Reilly worked as a gas-station attendant and as a substitute mail carrier. After earning his diploma, he became a newspaper reporter in Rhode Island, where one coworker recalled him as “a very idealistic young man with a liberal social philosophy.” Reilly eventually went to Harvard Law School, where he studied with Felix Frankfurter, and then joined the Roosevelt administration. He wound up in the Labor Department and quickly worked his way up to be the top lawyer there. The Senate confirmed him as solicitor in 1937, and he became a close and trusted adviser to Secretary Perkins.

Reilly’s views were not as far to the left as those held by some New Dealers, and he worried that certain individuals in the Labor Department were ignoring administration policy “because of mistaken zeal.” Still, official Washington was a tight community, and with his easy laugh Gerry Reilly befriended many who were part of it, including White House aide James Rowe Jr. and the Hiss brothers, Alger and Donald. (Alger Hiss would become one of the most controversial figures of the Cold War after being accused of spying for the Soviets and convicted of perjury in 1950.) Even with his relatively moderate leanings, Reilly had little doubt that many aspects of the capitalist system had crumbled amid the Great Depression and might never be rebuilt. “The days of ‘laissez faire’ economy are past” in Reilly’s judgment, the Washington Star wrote. “He is an unqualified advocate of federal regulation in the field of… social insurance as ‘safeguards to workers.’” In particular, he urged Perkins to fight for tough labor standards. “Millions of employees are being paid wages insufficient to maintain themselves and their families in decency and comfort, and are being forced to work unconscionably long hours,” he told Perkins in August 1937. “The need for correcting these evils has long since been recognized by commentators, legislators, administrators, and the public at large.”

In 1939, House conservatives went after Perkins and Reilly, accusing them of conspiring to avoid the deportation of Harry Bridges, the Australian-born leader of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union and a suspected Communist. The secretary and solicitor maintained that they were just following the law in not moving precipitously against Bridges, but a resolution was introduced in Congress demanding their resignations. “Do you remember the priest that walked beside Joan of Arc when she went to the stake?” Perkins asked Reilly as the two entered a House Judiciary Committee hearing. It isn’t known whether Reilly indulged any of his vices that day, pouring himself an extra glass of bourbon or puffing on a few extra Chesterfields, but he couldn’t be blamed if he had. Settling in before the hostile panel, “you could see them all sharpening their knives and their pencils,” Reilly later said. In spite of the pressure, he comported himself very well. Emanuel Celler, a Democrat on the committee, told Perkins afterward that Reilly’s “sincerity and guilelessness were most disarming.” The two survived the ordeal, and in September 1941, President Roosevelt picked Reilly to join the National Labor Relations Board. Upon Reilly’s departure from the Labor Department, Perkins thanked him not only for his service—“You have had an extremely important part in… lifting the standard of living of the people of this country in compliance with our new conception of what makes a healthy economy in a mass-production system”—but also for his “warm personal friendship.”

By this point, the NLRB had accumulated “a fine roster of enemies,” Time pointed out. This included, not surprisingly, antiunion businesses that were upset over the board’s vigorous enforcement of the Wagner Act. What outraged them, apart from any substance of the board’s actions, was its tone. In those days, the NLRB had a habit of “not only telling the employers they were wrong… but telling the employers they were immoral,” said Paul Herzog, who would later chair the board. The AFL also pilloried the NLRB, accusing it of “brazen favoritism” toward the CIO in a series of jurisdictional disputes in which the rival labor coalitions were vying for members. “I have never seen a more united or extensive protest against a federal board,” said Rep. Howard Smith, a Virginia Democrat, who was the NLRB’s chief antagonist through the late 1930s. Even worse, the NLRB had garnered a reputation as a hotbed of communism.

Much of the condemnation of the NLRB was exaggerated, with little real evidence to indicate that the board was exercising partiality in its decisions. Still, hoping to quiet the critics, President Roosevelt shook up the three-member NLRB after the election of 1940 by nominating two men who didn’t have the baggage that their predecessors did. One of them was Reilly. “It may be said of Solicitor Reilly… that he has at least kept himself above the great ideological controversies in his field to remain comparatively unknown to the general public,” the Baltimore Sun wrote. What no one had yet detected was that Reilly had become deeply disillusioned. He was aghast that staffers at the NLRB and in other parts of the federal government were, as he said later, “waist deep in the Communist Party.” And he was offended by the “skullduggery” that some at the board had perpetrated to tip official rulings in labor’s favor. Workers may well have needed a guardian angel more than businesses did during the 1920s and early ’30s, Reilly reasoned, “but certainly by the time of the war, the pendulum had swung too far the other way.” As he saw things, it was unions—not companies—that had begun to exploit workers for their own aggrandizement, with an unabashed assist from the NLRB. “It’s a very paternalistic attitude… these union leaders take toward the rank-and-file,” he said. Many inside the NLRB were infuriated by Reilly’s politics. He had started his career “as a kind of sneaker-wearing Georgetown type, very bright and very liberal” but “ended up a kind of legalistic spokesman for industry”—a switcheroo that led to “more cussing” at the NLRB than almost anything else at the time, said Herbert Fuchs, who worked there.

But what appalled some appealed to others. After leaving the NLRB in 1946, Reilly was invited to draft legislation that would vitiate the Wagner Act and the NLRB, first by Republican senator Joseph Ball of Minnesota and then by Robert Taft. Reilly would help, as well, with the bill being advanced in the House by Republican Fred Hartley of New Jersey. And when differences in the Taft and Hartley measures needed to be reconciled by a conference committee, Reilly was on hand there, too. At times, his old world and his new one collided. “I’d go and play with Alger Hiss’s son, and that evening Representative Nixon would come by and meet with my father at our house,” Jack Reilly recalled. Through it all, somehow, Reilly and Frances Perkins remained devoted to each other: he, now a Republican insider; she, the epitome of New Deal liberalism—“Saint Frances of the Labor Department, Our Lady of Working Americans,” as one of her Democratic successors called her. Even though Reilly’s and Perkins’s politics had totally diverged, “he adored her,” his daughter said. He even became the executor of her estate and would always cherish the cufflinks that President Roosevelt had given to her and she had passed on to him.

The act that finally became law—despite President Truman’s objections that it contained “new barriers to mutual understanding” between employer and employee—put a hard bridle on union organization and operations. Taft-Hartley created a Federal Mediation Board to decrease strikes and reorganized the NLRB, shunting much of its policy-making authority to the courts. It gave the president the power to limit a union’s right to strike in peacetime by requiring a sixty-day cooling-off period on national security grounds. It prohibited jurisdictional strikes between the AFL and CIO, which were still feuding over turf, and designated sympathy strikes and secondary boycotts as “unfair labor practices.” A “free speech” provision made it easier for employers to try to dissuade their workers from even joining a union. It barred the unionization of “managerial and supervisory” employees. And it put an end to the “closed shop” while expressly sanctioning state “right-to-work” laws under which no person could be obligated, as a condition of employment, to join or pay dues to a labor union. In sum, Taft-Hartley didn’t outlaw collective bargaining, but it emphasized the rights of individual workers—just the way Gerard Reilly wanted it. “He morphed into a very thoughtful conservative,” said Frank Nebeker, who sat with Reilly on the federal bench in the 1970s before being appointed by Ronald Reagan to direct the Office of Government Ethics. “He even out-conservatived me.”

If the full effect of Taft-Hartley would come slowly for most of America’s rank-and-file, one group found itself pinched right away: factory foremen, who as part of the “managerial and supervisory” class no longer had any right to organize and bargain collectively. Companies like GM had been hankering to clamp down on them for years, ever since the Foreman’s Association of America had evolved into a disruptive force during the war—amassing a membership of as many as 50,000, staging walkouts at Chrysler and other manufacturers, winning contracts at Ford Motor and United Stove Company, and cutting a deal with the Congress of Industrial Organizations by which the CIO agreed that its members wouldn’t replace any foremen should they go out on strike.

They had a lot to strike for. Once paid as much as 60 percent more than the hourly workers they oversaw, foremen at some companies were now earning less than their subordinates because, unlike those in the United Auto Workers and other industrial unions, they couldn’t plump their salaries with overtime. Their fringe benefits often trailed as well. Hoping to turn that around, the foremen’s demands were not much different than those of the workers they supervised. They wanted, among other things, a seniority system, sick leave, and a premium for covering the night shift. They were also angling to recover some lost respect. Through the 1920s, foremen played God inside many of America’s factories—hiring, firing, driving, and rewarding those on the line. But as industry became more technologically advanced and was managed with greater sophistication from above, their clout diminished and in some cases disappeared.

As warranted as the foremen’s frustrations may have been, GM and most other companies viewed their unionizing as an utterly preposterous proposition. In their eyes, foremen were the first-line officers of management; they spoke for the enterprise and, therefore, had no choice but to take sides. The laborers under them could simultaneously feel loyal to both company and union—a phenomenon that management theorists called “dual allegiance”—but this division of sympathies was untenable for foremen, a nonstarter. What, for instance, would happen if a group of foremen was to affiliate with the CIO, the same labor organization that the UAW was part of? How could they possibly represent the company when ironing out grievances submitted by their union brethren? “The dual allegiance which will arise when foremen are unionized will imperil their ability to fulfill their responsibilities to maintain efficiency and discipline of the men under their direction,” GM’s Charlie Wilson said. “In such circumstances, management cannot continue to give them such authority any more than the Army can risk granting a commission to a man who holds partial allegiance to another country.”

Taft-Hartley removed, once and for all, the chance that America’s foremen would feel any such pangs of dual allegiance. But the law left them feeling something else: stuck in the middle. If the foreman “don’t get it from the people below him, he gets it from those above,” said Joseph Kundla, who ran a crew of thirty-six men in the car conditioning department at GM’s Framingham, Massachusetts, factory. One of Kundla’s peers from the chassis department, William Keinath, also had the sensation of being squeezed. Whenever something goes wrong, he said, “no matter who the fault actually lies with, the foreman gets blamed.” Added James Frederickson, a foreman in the plant’s paint department: “When it comes down to it… management pulls the strings on us like we were puppets. They call us members of management, but they don’t treat us like we are.” Too far down in the hierarchy to have any real voice in company decisions, but high up enough to incur the antipathy of the guys on the line, foremen like Kundla, Keinath, and Frederickson were caught in a corporate netherworld—their vulnerability foreshadowing that of the cubicle-dwelling middle manager of the 1980s and ’90s.

Still, not everyone despised the job, not all the time anyway. Kundla thought the pay was fine, and he was pleased with the varied nature of his work. “It’s not monotonous,” he said. Keinath looked forward to moving up the ladder at GM. “I hope to go a long way,” he said, “and I think I have the potential.” For Frederickson, there was dignity in his work: “I do have a strong drive to want to do a good job and be trusted to do it.”

For most employees—salaried or hourly, unionized or not—this was (and would remain) their day-to-day reality: they found lots of things about their jobs to be exasperating, but they found others to be exhilarating, with most falling somewhere in between. After all, these are “human beings,” Peter Drucker wrote, and not “the statistical abstractions that most management men and many sociologists and industrial relations people see in their mind’s eye when they say ‘worker.’” They “do not ‘like’ everything, nor do they completely ‘dislike’ everything,” he added. “They discriminate. They are never ‘satisfied’ but also seldom totally ‘dissatisfied.’ They judge.” In this light, GM’s My Job Contest wasn’t meaningless; employees’ letters were valid expressions of what they liked about their work. But, as Drucker noted, this was only half the equation. A more rounded, more nuanced, more illuminating picture would come from hundreds of interviews conducted by a team of Yale University researchers several years after the MJC. Roaming two GM factories (Framingham and Linden, New Jersey), they talked to foremen (including Kundla, Keinath, and Frederickson) and production workers of every occupation. From this, they heard it all: the positives and the negatives, compliments and brickbats, professions of gratitude and outbursts of anger.

Steve Domotor, a forty-five-year-old Hungarian immigrant, had bounced around several industries—shipping, autos, textiles—before he found his way to the Linden plant in 1937. He was seduced instantly. Working with metal “was in my blood,” Domotor said, and the money that GM offered was above the national average. He started off at seventy-five cents an hour, pounding out imperfections in car bodies before they were painted. A week later, he was making eighty-five cents, “and in no time,” Domotor recalled, “I was up to a dollar.” By the early 1940s, he’d become a “ding man,” a painstaking job that required him to remove dents and fix damage without marring the paint or polish that already had been applied. This took so much dexterity that only 8 of 2,000 people in the whole plant rose to be “ding men.” It was one of the highest paying jobs at Linden—not bad for someone with a sixth-grade education and, in that way, a telling example of how workers with minimal schooling could pull down solidly middle-class wages in the postwar era. Yet it was the size of the challenge, and not just the size of his check, that really excited Domotor. Each banged-up piece of metal that came his way had to be puzzled out. “Every day there’s something new,” he said. “You see those wrecks on the highway? There’s no two alike, is there?”

But Domotor also learned that people could be as twisted as fenders. “If the foreman treats you like a man, everything is alright,” Domotor said. “An experienced foreman will listen to you. You talk to him, and you can compromise with him.” But others, he found, use language “that’s not fit for pigs.” One supervisor was “authority crazy,” Domotor complained. “He wants you to bow down to him.” Many others said the same thing: whether they liked a job depended, to a large extent, on whether or not they reported to a jerk.

Some were naturally suspicious of all foremen, carrying a level of animus so intense it seemed almost tribal. “The company trains them guys,” said John Sillup, who during his fifteen years at GM had mounted cushions, seats, and side-arm panels on Buicks, Oldsmobiles, and Pontiacs. “They teach them how to pat your back and feel for a soft spot to put the knife in.” Others were more generous. “The pressure is on the foreman just as on the worker,” said Bradford DeGroat, a welder. “It’s the higher-ups who brew all the trouble.”

Amid this welter of opinion, there was one well-defined area of agreement: everybody, virtually without exception, abhorred the unremitting pace under which they worked. “The line keeps moving, moving, moving—and there’s no avoiding it,” said John Donohue, who assembled heaters to be installed inside Oldsmobiles. In many sections of the factory, the din was continuous, and the air befouled by oil, smoke, or other contaminants. “Here, look at my cap,” said Stanley Tomsky, a metal finisher, holding up a hat full of steel dust. “Imagine what my lungs are like.” Production workers were supposed to take breaks, with “relief men” swinging into position to keep the line moving in their absence. But many times, “you can’t get relief until they see the piss running out of your eyeballs,” said Robert Scales, a glass installer.

Overtime delivered extra pay. But it also intruded into the normal rhythms of workers’ households. “You never know when you’re going to eat lunch, and my wife doesn’t know when to have supper for me,” said DeGroat. “They not only hire you; they run your life.” Men went home irritable, exhausted, beaten down. “I can’t go bowling or shoot pool anymore,” said John Hajducsek, a thirty-eight-year-old seat-installation man, who was hired by GM in 1940. “I have no energy to go out. As far as I’m concerned, I’m finished.”

“Here they know a man is being overworked, and they try to get that last ounce of blood out of him,” said Glace Bright, a welder. “The whole thing is that you’re constantly working under pressure. Your mind is never at ease.

“It isn’t a question of liking the job,” Bright said. “You just do what you’re told, whether you like it or not.”

GM feted the forty top winners of the “My Job, and Why I Like It” contest at the Statler Hotel in Detroit a couple of weeks before Christmas 1947. The six MJC judges made brief remarks. Charlie Wilson gave a speech. “The results of the… contest have exceeded all our expectations,” he said, “not only because of the number of General Motors employees who participated, but more particularly because of the tone and quality of the letters themselves.… They are the most sincere and most moving human documents it has ever been my privilege to read. They give one a feeling that so long as people such as the men and women who wrote those letters live and work as Americans, our country and our institutions are safe.” The evening wasn’t all so earnest. Del Delbridge and his orchestra played, while guests feasted on shrimp cocktail Neptune, essence of chicken royal, and filet mignon. The high point was when Wilson handed over the golden keys to the winners’ new cars. Thomas Anslow, a forging machine operator, got the top prize: a Cadillac. Bill Kitts drove off in his Pontiac Streamliner. Mary Linabury, Betty Kraft, and C. Wales Goodwin each received Chevy Fleetline Sportmasters. Both Taylor Phillips and Delphia Baugh went home in a Buick Model 51 sedan.

There was just one snag. Vernon Halliday, the grinding-machine operator from Flint, didn’t go to the banquet because his son Douglas, a GM engineer, had been mistakenly told he should attend instead. It wasn’t until the end of the festivities, when Wilson read excerpts of the winning entries, that Douglas realized something was wrong. “The names of the authors of these excerpts were not given,” Vernon later told his own parents, “but Douglas instantly recognized mine and at the end of the banquet announced to Mr. Wilson the error. The head of the personnel division here at the Buick, who sat at the same table with Douglas, told me privately that he knew something of the mental anguish which Douglas suffered during the reading of my entry when the truth dawned upon him.… No one but our son knew of the error, of the whole four hundred assembled.” Vernon sold his new car, an Oldsmobile Series 76 Dynamic Cruiser, and tried to split the money with Douglas. “But he won’t hear to taking a cent,” Vernon said. “What would have been such joyful news, had there been no error, just left us feeling sort of numb.… Not that he wasn’t proud to have his dad win—only that it was such a letdown to discover that his expected and planned-for prize belonged to another, especially after we had talked together of his selling it and using the proceeds as an investment fund against a time of need.”

Some days you like your job. Some days you don’t.