Toni Gilpin. The Long Deep Grudge: A story of big capital, radical labor, and class war in the American Heartland. Chicago: Haymarket Books. 2020. 422 pages.
Edward McClelland. Midnight in Vehicle City: General Motors, Flint and the strike that created the middle class. Boston: Beacon Press. 2021. 221 pages.
Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin. Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: a story in urban revolution. 1975 (3rd ed 2012). 254 pages.
I’ve heard many times in my life that labor unions have outlived their usefulness. I’ve even heard it since I moved to Michigan. I once believed it, raised as I was in a Nixon household, but unencumbered by any meaningful study myself of the history of labor and how we got where we are.
In recent years, I’ve tried to fix that, tried to get informed, to understand how we got from “15 hours work days from the time you turn 6” to the rise of the working middle class, and now regressing again to 70-plus-hour work weeks just to get to the poverty line. It’s a fascinating, maddening arc.
Three recent works (recent only to me, and lumped together because I happened to read them all in fairly tight chronology) left me with some clear take-aways about the American labor movement.
The AFL has never been a radical movement.
The Communist Party’s “infiltration” of labor in America was probably the best thing ever for workers, including women, and for racial justice.
Company owners are generally not to be trusted when it comes to fair treatment of workers.
Labor organizing is the keystone of broader social justice, then and now.
There are ways to do what needs to be done, if we can avoid being sucked into capital’s power vortex.
Toni Gilpin’s work, The Long Deep Grudge, is as much memoir as history, in that her father was a principal in the movement she describes — the fight from the 1880s to organize what would become International Harvester, primarily in Chicago, then Louisville. To be sure, she backs up way before her father, to Cyrus McCormack, the founder of McCormack Works, a farm implement company built on the idea stolen from an enslaved man with whom Cyrus was raised — would-be peers, but that one of them was enslaved and the other was free to steal ideas and make fortunes.
Gilpin traces the Farm Equipment workers in its various iterations, beginning with the industrialist McCormack and his nemesis, Anarchist August Spies and the Haymarket incident, through to McCarthy’s anti-communism, Reuther’s self-interest, and FE’s loss to the UAW, and with it, the collapse of radical labor. In her telling, Reuther and the UAW were skin-tight with GM and corporate leadership, tending their own fires whilst advocacy for the workers took a back seat. Her father eventually was part of UAW, enthusiastically a union man, but never with the zeal of his days with FE and the communist party.
The UAW likewise takes a bit of a shellacking from McClelland in his tale of the 1936-37 Sit-Down Strike (also mentioned in Gilpin’s work). The suggestion is that organizations that grow too large lose sight of their mission, and begin to focus on their own sustainability and economy (as any large church could bear witness, if it were honest). Gilpin tells the story of a century; McClelland, after 8 pages of bringing us up to speed, recounts just 6 months of dispute that beat GM and won something big for workers. (And it was here I met Frances Perkins, lifelong labor advocate and FDR’s secretary of labor, who helped navigate the strike and bring resolution for the workers.)
Gilpin and McClelland are both compelling storytellers. Both these books are delicious reading.
Detroit: I Do Mind Dying is another kind of work altogether, recounting history, but less chronologically and more in a way that tells of various efforts and manifestations of the Detroit Black labor organizing in the 1970s — DRUM, the Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement, which became RUMs in a multitude of settings, the underground press, the international alliances, the Black Panthers and other revolutionary groups, the desire (like the Communists in Gilpin’s story) to make life better beyond the workplace. McClelland tells of “workers” which almost always meant “white workers;” Gilpin discusses racial justice work the FE engaged in and the engagement of Black workers in the Party and union; but this work of Georgakas and Surkin is specifically, pointedly about Black workers in the automotive industry in Detroit and beyond. The authors tell a story of just a few years, 1967-1974, and include factories, city government, policing (as relevant now as ever), and public art. Perhaps most awe-inspiring for me was the takeover of the Wayne State campus newspaper, which became for a couple of years the voice of the radical left.
In all these stories, the feeling you get is just how close labor has been so many times to something really good, and how government has conspired with corporate leadership (and union leadership) to undo what might have been. The stories show how all those power-mongers (government, capital and eventually unions) set up straw men to scare America and move public opinion away from the left edge.
Gilpin did a huge favor by beginning with a glossary of acronyms, to which I referred regularly. Such a thing was less needed in McClelland’s work, but would have been a gift in the Georgakas/Surkin work. Because it wasn’t chronological, but organized by people, places, organizations or strategies, I was constantly looking back to remind myself of who was who and who was with whom.
All three books are valuable, in depth and well-documented, and all three have pictures, which is a fun bonus. Gilpin tells about organizers in for the long-haul. Georgakas/Surkin especially draw a bit of a roadmap to what’s possible and warn about how it may all fizzle out. If you’re looking for light, feel-good, McClellan is the one — and also the least radical of the three. If you want an engaging story that emerges over a century, choose Gilpin. If you want strategy ideas, go with Georgakas/Surkin. Or read all three. (Also, Haymarket Books may be my new favorite publisher.)