Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

by Rick Perlstein

The grandest of all the actions struck GM’s giant works in Flint, Michigan. It was a watershed in labor history. At the height of the uprising, in early 1937, the new Michigan governor, Frank Murphy, moved in the militia, and strikers prepared for the inevitable blows to rain down upon their heads. They never came. Murphy was intervening on the union’s side—because he owed his office to the UAW’s get-out-the-vote effort for him the previous November. This was an enormous lesson, the same lesson learned by Denison Kitchel, and Reuther was among the first labor leaders to grasp it: now the real battles were to be fought and won in the political arena. Previous labor leaders jealously guarded their independence from government. But Reuther rose by combining old-school shop-floor organizing, legislative-floor politicking to create a friendly legal climate, and precinct work to elect the politicians that believed in Walter Reuther’s grand left-wing vision, inherited from his father, that business, labor, and government, working together, could more rationally run industries than could private enterprise alone. He never saw his dream fulfilled. But with more and more labor-friendly politicians in Washington and the state capitals willing to back him up, he did manage to negotiate the most splendid contracts—and some of the most liberal laws—American workers had ever won. And that, to his enemies, was bad enough.