Uaw Politics in the Cold War Era

by Martin Halpern

This is the first book-length study of the triumph of the Reuther caucus over the Thomas-Addes-Leonard coalition in the United Auto Workers union. The dramatic defeat of the left-center coalition had far reaching significance. It helped to determine the shape of postwar labor relations, the direction of postwar liberalism, and the fate of the left.Based on manuscript sources, oral histories, and quantitative analyses of convention roll calls, UAW Politics in the Cold War Era places this union conflict in a national political context of postwar economic conflicts, the cold war, and the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act. Halpern offers a fresh point of view on the character of the two contending coalitions and the reasons for the Reuther triumph. His work is a valuable contribution to the current reassessment of the domestic politics of the early cold war years.

361 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1988

Reviews

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Martin Halpern's volume, UAW Politics in the Cold War Era, looked at the pivotal rise of the right-center Reuther faction over the center-left Thomas-Addes-Leonard faction and argues against existing historiography of the late 1980s about how Reuther was able to win ascendancy in the divided union. He pointed out that the labor historians tended to break into two camps: 1) the anti-Stalinist leftists and conservative historians who argued that the center-left faction lost because of discrediting themselves through the wartime no-strike pledges and calls for more production (he noted that no-strike pledges were popular amongst both the Left and the Right during the war so while they lost some credit, it was relatively minor) and 2) the liberal historians who argue that Reuther won because of committment to rank and file militancy that he gained through his leadership in the GM strike (Halpern points out that individual leaders of the left were plenty militant.) Instead, Halpern argued it boiled down to more simple things, in that the patronage politics effected power balance, as the left-center's airplane workers were demobilized at the end of the war which had been a large constituency of the ATL faction, while Reuther successfully maneuvered to block the merger of the leftist Farmer Equipment union that would have solidified the Center-Left faction. Halpern argued that Reuther was a mix of union politician, rank n file militant, and labor statesman who successfully used the anti-communist hysteria at the beginning of the Cold War to gain ascendancy, letting Communists be run out of the union, even after he within a few years begin to take some of the left's previous positions, moving away from his conservative ACTU allies. This followed actually allying with the Communists until 1939.

Halpern notes though that the destruction of the UAW left-wing largely helped end the popular front culture in American everyday life. While the base of the ATL faction tended to be African-Americans, first generation immigrants, people from Eastern and Southern European backgrounds, and committed leftists all of whom participated in Popular Front cultural activity like sports, plays, music, dances, socials, forums, those groups were pushed to the side to a certain extent, or at least their interests became less of a concern (and indeed, even as Reuther embraced Civil Rights, the UAW's black leadership development slowed and stagnated after the rise of his faction.) Though Reuther gave lip service to desegregation in his rise and early years, it was only in the years after his triumph that he would put UAW resources into Civil Rights (and slow in the actual UAW.) Halpern argued that the purging of the left in the UAW opened the gates to the later McCarthyite attack by not realistically opposing Taft-Hartley in practice, limiting itself to defending the New Deal. This marked an unfortunate end to the Popular Front, as a byproduct of the Cold War, which Halpern argued boiled down the real reason why Reuther rose to power.