Showdown at the Rouge
Solidarity forever? Not by 1951, Robert Zieger argues, when the visit of one of American labour's great heroes to a celebratory rally at a Ford Motors complex near Detroit revealed just how deep the split between old- and new-style unionism had become.
Groups of workers were always asking John L. Lewis to participate in reunions and celebrations. As head of the United Mine Workers (UMW) since 1919 and founder of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s, Lewis carefully limited his appearances. But in the spring of 1951, when the officers of United Automobile Workers (UAW) Local (or branch) 600 at Ford Motor Company's River Rouge plant, near Detroit, petitioned him, the seventy-one-year-old patriarch readily accepted. Victory at the Rouge in 1941 had been his last major triumph as a CIO chieftain. Moreover, the 62,000-member local was a hotbed of opposition to the leadership of Walter P. Reuther, president of the parent UAW, and to Lewis, Reuther was the personification of what had gone wrong with the American labour movement since the Second World War. Where better for Lewis to renew his reputation as America's boldest and most fearsome labour leader than in Reuther's home territory?
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