Reuther had traveled a long way to become the instrument of a maneuver that strangled the possibility of a liberal progressive realignment of the Democratic Party—a goal he had worked for much of his political life. Originally a skilled craftsman in the automobile industry and a democratic socialist organizer, he was among the thousands of leftists who helped build and lead the working-class movement that propelled the Congress of Industrial Organizations to victory in the late 1930s. An astute strategist and a master of polemical debate, Reuther survived a series of faction fights inside the UAW and took control of the union in 1947. Using rising anti-Communism as his main weapon, he then consolidated his hold over the union, and over the following two decades transformed the UAW from a lively body whose spirited conventions were a model of popular participation and debate into a one-party union machine. His midlife anti-Communism was principled rather than just tactical; he was a founding member of Americans for Democratic Action, which became the ideological vanguard of cold war liberalism. Although not a major theorist of this particular version of liberalism, he was its main organizational hope, as most ADA activists were intellectuals without any mass base. Reuther, while no slouch as a thinker and talker, was very much a man of conventional power, and as the leader of one of the biggest, tightest working-class organizations in the country, he was in a position to use it.
Beginning in the late 1940s, Reuther put that power to the service of what labor historians call “social unionism,” a second cousin of democratic socialism, and an idea of unionism that was especially attractive to Cesar Chavez. It held that unions should lead a movement of progressive social change throughout society rather than just represent the immediate interests of their own members. This watered-down version of the Marxist idea that working-class liberation meant the liberation of the whole society was explicitly reformist, with its strategy and goals tailored to meet what Reuther saw as the actual political opportunities of his time. Full employment, universal health care, high wages, stable prices, and racial harmony could all be achieved, Reuther (and many others) believed, by forcing the Dixiecrats out of the Democratic Party, where they served as a brake on New Deal policies. With the two parties realigned—the Dixiecrats part of a truly conservative Republican Party and the eastern Republicans part of a thoroughly liberal Democratic Party—the new Democrats could take their progressive program to the American people.
Reuther remained committed to this goal into the early sixties. But with his power in labor officialdom diminished in the newly merged AFL-CIO (where he took a back seat to the federation president, George Meany) he began to pin his hopes on a more conventional alliance with liberals inside the actual existing Democratic Party. Initially, he wooed and was wooed by the forces represented by Hubert Humphrey, then was enchanted by the Kennedy brothers, and finally was captured by the charms of Lyndon Johnson, the master politician, who kept Reuther and most of the rest of the cold war liberals close by his side as he took them into the jungles of Vietnam and down the path to political oblivion, where Reuther landed shortly before his physical death in a plane crash in 1970.
Reuther’s main problem was that in the late 1950s and early ’60s, following a decade of declining militancy among American trade unionists—that had been kicked off by the anti-Communist purges, which Reuther abetted—he had become deeply ensnared in the web of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy. Reuther’s chief hope for cutting through that snare was the civil rights movement. It could reinvigorate what was left of a progressive liberal-labor alliance, he thought, and provide the energy and social weight necessary to carry out his faltering agenda. But neither official labor nor the triumphant liberalism of the cold war years could quite bring itself to embrace civil rights activists on their own terms. At the same time that he called for racial justice in general, Reuther opposed efforts by blacks inside the UAW to reclassify jobs so that they could advance into more skilled positions held by Reutherites on factory floors and workplaces in Detroit and elsewhere. Meany and many other AFL-CIO bosses were worse. With their social power partially based on the exclusive right of white workers to relatively privileged working-class jobs, they were not about to risk their place in the establishment with a wholehearted endorsement of even the early civil rights movement. The liberals of the labor-liberal alliance for their part had well-worked-out suspicions of any movement that emerged from the lower levels of society, seemingly beyond institutional control. The challenge for Reuther was to find a way to support the civil rights movement while making sure it stayed within limited, acceptable bounds.
He had powerful means: money, personnel, and his particular mixture of well-articulated progressive goals and strategies tightly woven together with anti-Communist, anti-utopian rhetoric and ideology. But he couldn’t turn the trick. The gulf between the needs, interests, and demands of black Americans in the 1960s and the limits of Democratic Party–AFL-CIO politics was too wide to bridge. The young SNCC organizers had adopted the Mississippi Summer–Freedom Democrat strategy despite grave internal doubts and at the cost of a few lives and much suffering. But they had been convinced, and had convinced themselves, that it would all be worth it if at the end of the day they could remake the politics of the South and with it, all of America. Instead, SNCC militants were left with nothing but a handful of apologies and a mouthful of humiliation. Eventually, many reemerged as full-blown revolutionaries who staked their hopes far from home, in the worldwide struggle against the American empire. But over the next few years, as they went down in flames, they managed to leave a legacy that would last: a push toward the idea of black pride based on black power, an uncompromising early opposition to the war in Vietnam, and the hope that an unfettered, democratic movement by ordinary people might change the world.
The liberals who had helped design the particulars of the MFDP strategy actually turned out to be the chief victims of its betrayal. Reuther, Rauh, and Lowenstein lost all influence within the most energetic element of the civil rights movement. Cut off from the southern civil rights activists, unable to deal with the coming black power struggle in the North or with the white backlash it generated, and finally becoming the apologists for an unpopular war, the liberals lost most of their connection to any actual, existing movements or political forces in American society. Nixon and Reagan would pick up the pieces. Within a generation, the word “liberal” (although hardly the basic set of ideas it stood for) would become the “L-word” of American politics.
Reuther’s trip to Delano in December of 1965 symbolized white liberalism’s last, best hope for relevance. And Chavez understood the liberals well. Older and much more experienced than the SNCC radicals, he was expert at preventing the divisions that had crippled the civil rights movement from damaging his own organization. Certainly, he was able to do that because the needs and demands of the people he represented—at least as formulated by him—were potentially easier for American capital to accommodate, or so it seemed for a while. But he was also sophisticated about what he asked of his allies. He did not try to realign the Democratic Party; rather, he simply joined one segment of that party and did his best not to alienate the rest. Similarly, he tried not to get involved in the many internal battles of the church groups that supported his organization, nor in the divisions within the constantly changing student groups. He was careful to stay neutral on the gut-wrenching question of the war. Finally, he was quite conscious of the possible entanglements that went along with accepting support from powerful allies, and he did his best, in the context of the boycott alliance, to maintain maximum independence for himself and the farm workers organization.
On December 16, 1965, Reuther arrived in Delano in the UAW’s private plane. Two carloads of national newsmen had preceded him to report on his visit. After disembarking, in full view of the cameras, Reuther gladly grabbed the NFWA’s black eagle symbol and jauntily joined a supposedly illegal march through town, defying the police to arrest him. On this short visit, Reuther’s national prominence secured him meetings with both the mayor and a committee of growers, whom he admonished to begin