(Note to reader: this is a final paper that I have just submitted for a class I am taking in my American Studies program at Kennesaw State University on Labor History after World War II, even though this event took place before the war. I thought it would be interesting for my readers. Even though I work at the Edison Ford Winter Estates in Fort Myers, Florida and I talk about Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company, I believe in telling both sides of a story. This document tells of Ford and a labor dispute at his River Rouge plant called the Battle of the Overpass. I have cut out the citations and references to make it easier to read. The text is below.)
Walter Reuther
When the Battle of the Overpass is mentioned, most people believe that it was an obscure battle that occurred during the American Civil War era, instead of one of the many labor disputes that occurred in the United States throughout its history. This incident occurred during the latter period of the Great Depression on May 26, 1937 and it would involve members of the Ford Motor Company and the United Auto Workers union clashing at the River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan. The reason for the name “overpass” had to do with the action beginning on the Gate 4 overpass that traversed Miller Road on the plant property. Employees of the company traversed the Miller Road overpass to go from the parking lot to the Gate 4 entrance of the plant. It will be described what transpired during this incident and how it made the labor organizer Walter Reuther, a member of the United Auto Workers, a well-known figure in labor history for the next thirty years.
Reuther and members of the UAW were beaten by Ford security guards. Photographs were taken of the incident and were released to the public, damaging the reputation of Henry Ford and his company. Support for Ford greatly decreased after this. Walter Reuther and the UAW were attempting to unionize the workers at the Ford Motor Company. They fought for higher wages and pensions for automobile workers and the Ford Motor Company was no exception. At that point in time, the company had a long history of resisting unionization. In fact, they were one of the last of the major automotive companies to unionize. Henry Ford used the brute force tactics of security manager Harry Bennett to keep the unions out of the company. Bennett resorted to intimidation, espionage and outright violence against union organizers and sympathizers. Bennett instructed his security men to snoop around employees and listen to their conversations, both at work and after hours. He gave authorization to these men to fire employees at any time.
Reuther, on the day of the altercation, was “in a confident mood” when arriving at the overpass spanning Miller Road. He arrived with several members of the UAW including Richard Frankensteen. Other members of the UAW had already arrived to peacefully hand out leaflets and they expected no violence to occur whatsoever. Reuther and the men that arrived with him planned to stand on the overpass to take a photograph in front of the building that showed the name “Ford Motor Company” clearly visible behind them.
Around 2pm that day the men climbed to the top of the overpass and were smiling for the news photographers that were taking pictures, when about forty men from the Ford Motor Company surrounded them. The Ford security men shouted to them “this is private property, get the hell out of here!” and immediately started to pummel the UAW members. They were attacked by Ford security men led by Sam Taylor and Wilfred Comment, who was a Ford supervisor. Reuther and Frankensteen were the targets, with the latter getting the worst of the attack because Frankensteen was enraged and fought back when the fighting started. A news photographer nearby began taking photographs throughout the entire ordeal.
Reuther briefly told of his experience. “I didn’t fight back. I merely tried to guard my face…...They picked me up about eight different times and threw me down on my back on the concrete and while I was on the ground they kicked me in the face, head, and other parts of my body.” Reuther then described how he was kicked down the stairs of the overpass and the Ford men “started to hit me again at the bottom of the stairs.” “The more we tried to leave the worst it was for us. They simply wanted to slug us out, not let us out.” Even female members of the UAW who were at the site handing out leaflets were shoved, punched, and kicked. Katherine Gelles, who was the head of the UAW Local 174 auxiliary, “traded punches with a Ford goon.”
Ford security men realized that there were many photographers around who were taking pictures of the action going on. As a result, they threatened photographers and forcibly took away their cameras to destroy the negatives and plates of the photos they just took. They didn’t want these photos to make it into the newspapers. One of the news photographers James Kilpatrick from the Detroit News was approached and Ford men demanded he give up the negatives of what he had just taken. Kilpatrick gave the men blank plates and concealed the actual plates taken during the altercation. Kilpatrick turned over the plates to his news photographic department and over the next several days these photos were flashed all over every newspaper around the country and it made headlines across the nation. This brought attention to the media about the brutality of the Ford Motor Company.
Because of these photos of the Battle of the Overpass and their release to the public, it ruined Ford’s reputation for a time. Most of the publications that came out about the battle denounced Henry Ford and his company. Time magazine was “particularly graphic” and as a result, Henry Ford decided to withdraw advertising from Time, Life and Fortune magazine for seventy weeks. The Detroit Free Press newspaper was one of the few publications that declared that the UAW was “looking for trouble.” The reputation of the Ford Motor Company sank to an all-time low. The UAW came back stating “today the world has seen the true character of the Ford Motor Company. We don’t intend that it shall forget it.”
Ford Motor Company head of security Harry Bennett attempted to soften the impact of the incident by claiming that “there were no Ford service men involved.” He claimed that the battle had been staged by the UAW. A press release by the company claimed that the union needed to cause a dramatic incident “to cover up its conspicuous failure to influence Ford employees.” These newspapers needed a “Ford strike story.”
The Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant during this period “resembled an armed camp.” A company manager who drove to the plant during this period noticed “a lot of Ford employees with baseball bats…...and lead pipes. They were on picket duty.” Henry Ford faced labor problems during the 1930s because of his refusal to conform to the unions. These volatile situations stemmed from the Great Depression and the poverty that came along with it. His factories turned into oppressive conditions that he refused to acknowledge and, as a result, workers became unhappy and many wanted to unionize. Author Steven Watts described Henry Ford as “a man whose organization had been noted for progressive attitudes toward labor now appeared as a despot who abused his workers.”
During the Great Depression employment and production declined steadily at the Ford Motor Company plants. This caused the remaining workers who had retained their jobs during this period to experience new changes in the mode of production. The assembly line was in a “speed up” mode with foremen demanding a faster work pace. The pace was at such a speed that workers were not allowed to talk to one another and were not even allowed to take bathroom breaks unless a substitute could take the workers place while they were gone. Workers received only fifteen minutes for lunch, which was close to impossible to eat their entire lunch. As a result, workers would sneak their lunch near their workplace early so they could start eating before going on break.
The foremen at the River Rouge plant were relentless when driving their workers. Foremen would go up and down the assembly line yelling at the workers to “Let’s go! Let’s go!” They constantly pushed the men to near exhaustion. The workers private lives were examined by Harry Bennett to make sure that no subversive activity was going on. Bennett had men that would go about spying, harassing and physically beating members of the company as part of his managerial skills.
Reuther decided to distribute copies of Upton Sinclair’s recently written damaging account of Henry Ford and his company, called The Flivver King, written the same year. Because of the Battle of the Overpass the Ford Motor Company “lost the moral edge that its long history of paternalism and civic activism had once sustained. The company’s ability to control its workers would henceforth rely even more on simple terror.”
Ford eventually had to succumb to pressure to agree to a collective bargaining contract with the UAW on June 20, 1941. Harry Bennett, earlier that year in April, fired eight union members and it started a sit-down strike. After ten days of no movement from either side Henry Ford’s wife Clara persuaded her husband to “do right by his employees and ensure a future where her children could take over the Ford business.”
The Battle of the Overpass made Walter Reuther a high-profile individual for the UAW.
Reuther and his two brothers, Victor and Roy, were members of the United States labor movement throughout most of their lives. They were born to Anna Stocker Reuther and Valentine Reuther in Wheeling, West Virginia. Valentine was a socialist brewery worker who had immigrated from Germany, and he was also a union activist and supporter of Eugene Debs, a socialist who ran for President of the United States on the Socialist Party ticket five times in the early 1900s and was a founder of the Industrial Workers of the World.
Reuther attended school at Wheeling High School but dropped out at the age of 16 to become an apprentice tool-and-die maker. Because he tried to form his first union, he was fired from this position and Reuther moved to Detroit and was employed by the Ford Motor Company. He was attracted to Ford’s promise of higher wages and a shorter workweek. He became one of the most skilled workers at Ford’s River Rouge plant. During this period, he worked nights while he earned his high school diploma at the age of 22 and then took classes at the Detroit City College, which is now Wayne State University.
During the Great Depression the Reuther brothers became interested in political and social activism. They became involved in union activism and Walter helped in campaigning for Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas. Reuther was an accomplished public speaker by the time of the Battle of the Overpass and was a rebellious figure with not a hint of shyness in him. In 1946 Reuther became the president of the UAW and turned against Communism. He felt that the Communists had “subordinated the interests of the union and its members to that of the party and its Soviet sponsors.” Reuther supported the anti-communist provisions found in the Taft-Hartley Act, written in 1947, to restrict the power of the labor unions. In 1948 he became a founding member of the staunchly anti-communist Americans for Democratic Action.
During this period there were several assassination attempts against all three Reuther brothers at one time or another. Victor survived an attempt in 1949 and was at home at the time, injured about the face and upper body. Upon awaking in the hospital, Victor Reuther told the surgeon “Take my eye, or my arm or leg, but spare my tongue. I’ve got a living to make.” Walter himself would be injured in an assassination attempt in April of 1948 at his home. He was hit by a shotgun blast through a window. He happened to turn to his wife at the moment of the blast and was hit in the arm instead of his heart, saving his life. Both incidents were never solved.
Later in life Walter Reuther became the director of the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Department (IUD), unwilling to step down as president of the United Automobile Workers. He worked with both Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson to fight for civil rights protections for all Americans. In 1968, Reuther became frustrated with the inability of members of the AFL-CIO to move on opportunities and actions and decided to pull the UAW out of the AFL-CIO. He formed his own Alliance for Labor Action with the Teamsters but before he could launch any initiatives, tragedy struck.
On May 9, 1970, Reuther, his wife May and several other associates and family, took off in a private plane from Detroit Metro Airport to fly to the UAW facility at Black Lake. On approach to the nearby Pellston Regional Airport at Pellston, Michigan, the pilots had problems with staying on the glide path during pre-landing procedures. At 9:33pm the Learjet 23 crashed into a line of trees and burst into flames, killing all occupants on board. The National Transportation Safety Board, in their post-accident investigation, found that the plane’s altimeter had possibly been tampered with. They discovered that the altimeter was missing some parts, other parts were incorrectly installed with even one installed upside down. This led to speculation that Reuther had been murdered.
Walter Reuther and his legacy began with the Battle of the Overpass and made him into a national figure concerning the labor movement for the next thirty years. Reuther and his brothers Roy and Victor fought for better wages and treatment when it came to the factory system. They were supporters of civil rights and justice for all whether it was female worker or people of different ethnic races. His legacy of civil rights activism and social justice continues to impact the labor movement to the present day.
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