Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…

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pages: 264 words: 74,785

Midnight in Vehicle City: General Motors, Flint, and the Strike That Created the Middle Class by Edward McClelland

collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, Ford Model T, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Jeff Bezos, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair

This time the strikers trust Governor Murphy enough to evacuate the plant, with the promise that it will not return to operations until an agreement is reached. Walter Chrysler, who had counseled Sloan to compromise with the strikers, willingly signs a contract with the union. Henry Ford resists. On May 26, 1937, at Ford’s River Rouge plant, forty guards batter and bloody four union organizers—including Walter Reuther—who attempt to cross a footbridge to distribute union literature (this becomes known in labor lore as the Battle of the Overpass). In 1941, Ford finally submits to a National Labor Relations Board election, in which its workers vote to join the UAWA. Eventually, the UAWA will represent all autoworkers at the Big Three: GM, Ford, and Chrysler.

When, after the aborted 1934 strike, Roy Reuther teaches labor history classes in Flint, Genora attends. Flint’s Socialist Party founds a chapter of the League for Industrial Democracy, a socialist chautauqua that brings in speakers such as Norman Thomas, a six-time Socialist Party of America presidential candidate. Genora invites Walter Reuther to the Masonic Temple on Saginaw Street to speak about his experiences as an autoworker in the Soviet Union. She sells two hundred and fifty tickets at twenty-five cents apiece. So once the sit-down begins, she considers herself an experienced labor organizer, and tells the men at the Pengelly Building that organizing is what she intends to do.

(154) The next morning at nine-thirty, Knudsen and Lewis sit down: “Knudsen and Lewis Meet to Discuss Strike at Invitation of Governor,” FJ, February 3, 1937. (155) “The irreconcilable anti-unionism”: Walter Lippman, “Today and Tomorrow,” February 1937. (156) they send a desperate telegram to Murphy: FMP; “Text of Telegrams by Strikers Appealing to Governor for Aid,” FJ, February 3, 1937. (156) But from Fisher One, strike leader Bud Simons writes: Bud Simons Papers, Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University. (156) Yet even as Knudsen and Lewis talk: “Knudsen and Lewis Meet to Discuss Strikes at Invitation of Governor,” FJ, February 3, 1937. (157) In response to the union’s show of force: “Sheriff Appeals to Governor for National Guards,” FJ, February 5, 1937; “Drastic Steps Taken Here to Safeguard Citizens,” FJ, February 5, 1937


pages: 502 words: 125,785

The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War by A. J. Baime

banking crisis, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, gentleman farmer, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, interchangeable parts, Louis Blériot, mass immigration, means of production, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker

On the morning of May 26, 1937, a union leader named Walter Reuther organized a gathering outside the Rouge’s main entrance, Gate 4, to hand out United Auto Workers union literature—mostly quotes pulled out of Roosevelt’s Wagner Act, which dictated by federal law for the first time that labor could organize. The Wagner Act changed the playing field in Detroit like nowhere else, putting unprecedented amounts of power in the hands of the workingman. It was a typical spring morning in southern Michigan, warm and humid, with a drab, acid-stained sky. As more union men gathered, reporters and photographers showed up, as well as clergymen.

The historic “Battle of the Overpass” had begun. For months Henry Ford had stoked the fire in the Rouge. All of the Detroit companies had resisted union activity (General Motors, by this time the largest company in the world, paid $1 million to detective agencies in the mid-1930s to infiltrate the plants and rid them of labor leaders), but Henry had gone a step further. The advent of the union, a keystone of Roosevelt’s New Deal, incited rage in Henry. “Labor unions are the worst thing that ever struck the earth,” he said in a statement in 1937. “Financiers are behind the unions and their object is to kill competition so as to reduce the income of the workers and eventually bring on war.

When it came to the Ford family, as one government official put it, “nothing was ever impossible.” 8 “Gentlemen, We Must Outbuild Hitler” Spring to Fall 1940 England’s battles, it used to be said, were won on the playing fields of Eton. This plan is put forward in the belief that America’s can be won on the assembly lines of Detroit. —WALTER REUTHER, 1940 AT THE ROUNDTABLE LUNCHEON in Dearborn, with Henry Ford sitting between Edsel and Sorensen and waiters in white coats hovering, the conversation turned to the war in Europe. The situation overseas sent Henry into fits of rage, which he unleashed at the Roundtable. He was “obsessed with the European situation,” according to Sorensen.


pages: 1,037 words: 294,916

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein

"there is no alternative" (TINA), affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, anti-work, antiwork, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business climate, card file, collective bargaining, company town, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, distributed generation, Dr. Strangelove, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, ending welfare as we know it, George Gilder, haute couture, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Herman Kahn, index card, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Joan Didion, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, Project Plowshare, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, the medium is the message, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

Eisenhower’s second term, Goldwater distinguished himself from an older generation of congressional conservatives, whom Time labeled “the Neanderthals,”by his youth, charm, and vigor. KNOW YOUR OPPONENTS Here’s the Labor Slate. Study it carefully. For Governor, Walter Reuther For Lieut.-Governor, Walter Reuther For State Senator, Walter Reuther For Atty.-General, Walter Reuther For Treasurer, Walter Reuther For Secretary of State, Walter Reuther Goldwater gathered his first national following as the archenemy of United Automobile Workers president Walter Reuther, notorious among businessmen for his aggressive attempts to increase labor’spolitical muscle. A dramatic televisedshowdown between Goldwater and Reuther at a Senate hearing over the violentstrike at the Kohler Company, near Sheboygan, Wisconsin, minted Goldwateras a national political star.

Fear of backlash made for no little tension in the little jet Johnson had packed with Democratic pols and AFL-CIO officials for the trip to the Motor City from the capital. They exchanged pleasantries—and thought to themselves, Would Lyndon Johnson suffer Endicott Peabody’s fate? Here was their answer. He stood side by side, hands held aloft, with Walter Reuther and—both men’s fathers spinning in their graves—Henry Ford II, then wrapped up in difficult negotiations over the next UAW contract. In the crowd, 100,000 union members cheered themselves hoarse. Labor and management, allies not adversaries, reasoning together for their common good: this was Lyndon Johnson’s dream. He spoke, with a tremor in his voice, about responsibility. “I am not the first President to speak here in Cadillac Square, and I do not intend to be the last.

And in Washington, Barry Goldwater was inserting the fight against Reutherism into the McClellan Committee’s proceedings on union corruption at every turn. He was looking for a wedge to get Walter Reuther into the witness chair. The panel would ask a local Teamsters officer why the union had given $5,000 to the defense of a Portland district attorney indicted as a fixer for the city’s gangsters. Goldwater would change the subject, asking about a $2,000 contribution to the campaign fund of a local politician. Colleagues zeroed in on an admission from a Pennsylvania union officer that he operated goon squads to keep union members from attending meetings when Goldwater interjected: “Suppose union membership was purely voluntary, with no union shop or anything like that.


pages: 655 words: 156,367

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Auerbach, Labor and Liberty: The La Follette Committee and the New Deal (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966); Fraser, “The ‘Labor Question’ ”; Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Jefferson Cowie, The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990). 10.Lichtenstein, State of the Union, 20–97; Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), chapter 7; Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Christopher L. Tomlins, The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Steve Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York: Free Press, 1993); James A. Gross, The Making of the National Labor Relations Board: A Study in Economics, Politics and Law, 1933–1937 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974); Nelson Lichtenstein and Howell Harris, eds., Industrial Democracy in America: The Ambiguous Promise (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1993). 11.Sidney Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969); Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit; Eric J.

Then the terrible Great Depression struck.29 As production plummeted in the United States and the rest of the western capitalist world, it soared in the Soviet Union. Indeed, the Soviet Union more than tripled its share of world manufactured products in the 1930s.30 And everyone in Russia’s industrial sector seemed to have a job. The Soviet Union boasted that the reason for its success lay in its ability to replace chaotic market mechanisms with intelligent government planning. A steady stream of visitors, including many Americans, arrived in the Soviet Union in the 1930s to see the new world of communist planning in action.31 One was Walter Reuther, a young tool and die maker from Wheeling, West Virginia, who worked in Detroit’s automobile industry.

White, The Making of the President, 1964 (New York: Atheneum, 1965), 243–293; James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries: A Personal Account (Washington, DC: Open Hand, 1985), 386–395; Len Holt, The Summer That Didn’t End: The Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Project of 1964 (New York: Morrow, 1965), 149–183; John Lewis with Michael D’Orso, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 283–299; Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 392–395; Kevin Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945–1968 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 193–196; Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), 151–162; Branch, Pillar of Fire, 456–476. 10.Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2012); William Appleman Williams, Thomas McCormick, Lloyd Gardner, and Walter LaFeber, eds., America in Vietnam: A Documentary History (New York: Anchor Books and Doubleday, 1985); Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991); George C.


pages: 235 words: 62,862

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

Indeed, the absence of such a law may well imperil the free market itself. “We have to save capitalism from the capitalists,” Piketty concludes.37 This paradox is neatly summed up by an anecdote from the 1960s. When Henry Ford’s grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory, he jokingly asked, “Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?” Without missing a beat, Reuther answered, “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?” So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors.

If you were to ask a mercantilist for his top tip, it would be lower wages – the lower the better. Cheap labor hones your competitive edge and therefore boosts exports. In the words of the famous economist Bernard de Mandeville, “It is manifest, that in a free Nation where Slaves are not allow’d of, the surest Wealth consists in a Multitude of laborious Poor.” Mandeville couldn’t have been wider of the mark. By now we’ve learned that wealth begets more wealth, whether you’re talking about people or about nations. Henry Ford knew it and that’s why he gave his employees a hefty raise in 1914; how else would they ever be able to afford his cars?

John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy (1848), Book IV, Chapter VI. http://www.econlib.org/library/Mill/mlP61.html 3. Quoted from Bertrand Russell’s essay, “In Praise of Idleness” (1932). http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html 4. Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, “The End of Shorter Hours,” Labor History (Summer 1984), pp. 373-404. 5. Ibid. 6. Samuel Crowther, “Henry Ford: Why I Favor Five Days’ Work With Six Days’ Pay,” World’s Work. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/HENRY_FORD:_Why_I_Favor_Five_Days’_Work_With_Six_Days’_Pay 7. Andrew Simms and Molly Conisbee, “National Gardening Leave,” in: Anna Coote and Jane Franklin (eds), Time on our side. Why we all need a shorter workweek (2013), p. 155. 8.


pages: 593 words: 183,240

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford Delong

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, ASML, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, industrial research laboratory, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, occupational segregation, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, Stanislav Petrov, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, surveillance capitalism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, TSMC, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Yom Kippur War

Thomas Piketty and Emmanual Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 1 (February 2003): 1–39, https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/pikettyqje.pdf. 14. Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor, New York: Basic Books, 1995. 15. J. Bradford DeLong and Barry Eichengreen, “The Marshall Plan: History’s Most Successful Structural Adjustment Program,” in Postwar Economic Reconstruction and Its Lessons for the East Today, ed. Rüdiger Dornbusch, Willem Nolling, and Richard Layard, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. 16. Charles Kindleberger, Europe’s Postwar Growth: The Role of Labor Supply, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Center for International Affairs, 1967; Barry Eichengreen, The European Economy Since 1945: Coordinated Capitalism and Beyond, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947. 17.

But that this “great compression” is found all across the North Atlantic economies suggests that the political-economic factors played a greater role than the supply-and-demand factors. Unions also contributed to compressing the wage distribution. And minimum wage laws and other regulations played a role, too. Finally, there was the strongly progressive tax system instituted to fight World War II—which disincentivized the wealthy from trying too hard to enrich themselves at the expense of others. If a CEO rewarding himself with a much larger share of the company’s total profits incited the ire of the union, it might not have been worthwhile for him to try. Walter Reuther was born in 1907 in Wheeling, West Virginia, to German immigrant socialist parents.14 His father took him to visit imprisoned socialist-pacifist Eugene V.

Membership fell into a trough of perhaps three million by the time of FDR’s inauguration in 1933, grew to nine million by the end of 1941, and took advantage of the tight labor market of World War II to grow to some seventeen million or so by the time Eisenhower was inaugurated in 1953. From 1933 to 1937, organizing unions became easier—in spite of high unemployment—because of the solid swing of the political system in favor of the increasingly liberal Democrats. The federal government was no longer an anti-, but a pro-union force. The Wagner Act gave workers the right to engage in collective bargaining. A National Labor Relations Board monitored and greatly limited the ability of anti-union employers to punish union organizers and members.


pages: 422 words: 89,770

Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate governance, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food desert, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Pearl River Delta, Plato's cave, post scarcity, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Antiwar activists were portrayed as spoiled children of the rich and the middle class who advocated free love, drug use, communism, and social anarchy. The unions remained virulently anticommunist, spoke in the language of militarism and the Cold War, and were largely unsympathetic to the civil-rights and antiwar movements. When student activists protested at the 1965 AFL-CIO Convention in San Francisco, chanting, “Get out of Vietnam!” the delegates taunted them by shouting, “Get a haircut.” AFL-CIO president George Meany ordered the security to “clear the Kookies out of the gallery.” Once the protesters were escorted out, Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers and a leading force in the AFL-CIO, announced that “protestors should be demonstrating against Hanoi and Peking . . .

Some of the people who are listed as “hard workers” in the organization are David Starr Jordan, who is the Treasurer; L. P. Lochner, the man who is generally credited with having persuaded Henry Ford to back the peace ship venture; the Rev. Dr. Judah L. Magnes, Algernon Lee, and Morris Hillquit, the Socialists who failed to get passports to Europe recently, where they wanted to attend the so-called Stockholm conference; Max Eastman, editor of a radical pamphlet; J. Schlossberg, a labor leader; Fola La Follette, a daughter of the Wisconsin Senator; Professor W. L. Dana of Columbia University, who, it was said at the offices of the organization, is also a prominent member of the Collegiate Anti-Militarist League; Mrs.

The act forbade secondary or “common situs” picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns. All union officers were forced to sign noncommunist affidavits or lose their positions. Heavy restrictions were placed on union shops, while individual states were allowed to pass “right-to-work laws” that outlawed union shops. The Federal Government was empowered to obtain legal strikebreaking injunctions if an impending or current strike “imperiled the national health or safety.” The act effectively demobilized the labor movement. It severely curtailed the ability to organize and strike and purged the last vestiges of militant labor leaders from the ranks of unions.


pages: 559 words: 169,094

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, citizen journalism, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, DeepMind, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, East Village, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, food desert, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, Larry Ellison, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shock, PalmPilot, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, smart grid, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, too big to fail, union organizing, uptick rule, urban planning, vertical integration, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, white picket fence, zero-sum game

Hillsborough and the neighboring counties became conservative, churchgoing country, with antiabortion signs and prophecies of Judgment Day scattered among the highway billboards advertising model homes and liposuction. But those older values went soft in the flat light that stared down like a constant high noon. There were the Luxes, Richard and Anita, from Michigan. Anita’s father had worked in Ford’s River Rouge plant long enough to remember Henry Ford and Walter Reuther, and Anita had a job with the city of Dearborn, until Richard’s architectural firm asked him to start a new Florida office in the eighties. Anita brought her father’s frugality to St. Petersburg and remained a coupon queen. But she went to work at Wachovia Bank, which got heavily into subprime loans after acquiring World Savings, out of California: the loans were called “Pick a Pay,” and the customers were invited to design their own mortgages, choosing an interest rate and a payment plan.

Frank Purnell continued to run Youngstown Sheet and Tube after the war, speaking the new institutional language of labor-management relations, while the old class conflicts remained alive. In 1950, he stepped down as president and became chairman of the board, and in 1953 he died of a cerebral hemorrhage. His widow, Anne, lived on for almost two more decades in the mansion at 280 Tod Lane—years when most of the other elite families sold their mills and left Youngstown for more cosmopolitan, better-smelling locales. The steel companies continued to keep out other industries that might have competed for Youngstown’s labor force. In the fifties, when Henry Ford II was exploring the possibility of opening an auto plant on a railroad scrap yard north of the city, local industrialists and absentee-owned corporations threw up enough obstacles to kill the idea.

After getting thrown out by Gary and them he came very close to quitting biodiesel, but it turned out to be one of the best things in his life. Otherwise, he never would have come up with the new idea. He would have stayed at Red Birch until he died trying. There was a Henry Ford quote that he’d read somewhere: “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” TAMMY THOMAS Tammy loved doing actions. She loved the bigger stage, the larger movement. Public speaking freaked her out, but in 2009, when the organization joined unions and other groups in rallies for health care reform and other causes all over Ohio and in Washington, Tammy would be at the front of the bus leading the songs and chants.


pages: 546 words: 176,169

The Cold War by Robert Cowley

Able Archer 83, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, launch on warning, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, transcontinental railway

The second DAFT episode, weaving domestic politics with world affairs, opens in August 1963, when “the shamed representatives of the new African states went into virtual hiding” at the U.N. because “most Caucasians south of the Sahara to the Union of S. Africa had been wiped out in a gruesome cannabalistic [sic] orgy of Inter-tribal MauMau murder more shocking than anything in history.” The U.S. ambassador to the U.N. (then Adlai Stevenson) “introduced only an insipid motion of censure against the responsible African governments.” So “the U.S. Congress, Press and public, surfeited with our namby-pamby reactive policy (dubbed ‘shrinkmanship’ by ex-governor Tom Dewey), blew up.” Congress demands U.S. withdrawal from the U.N. and impeaches the president. In the new Cabinet, United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther is secretary of state and Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa is secretary of labor.

In Houston, a Protestant minister became so angry dictating a telegram to the White House that he died of a heart attack. In the hallways of the Senate and House office buildings, Western Union messengers made their deliveries with bushel baskets. According to one tally, of the 44,358 telegrams received by Republicans in Congress during the first forty-eight hours following Truman's announcement, all but 334 condemned him or took the side of MacArthur, and the majority called for Truman's immediate removal from office. A number of prominent liberals—Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Reuther, Justice William O. Douglas—publicly supported Truman. Further, throughout Europe, MacArthur's dismissal was greeted as welcome news.

Truman later wrote that Lincoln was patient, for that was his nature, but at long last he was compelled to relieve the Union Army's principal commander. And though I gave this difficulty with MacArthur much wearisome thought, I realized that I would have no other choice myself than to relieve the nation's top field commander…. I wrestled with the problem for several days, but my mind was made up before April 5, when the next incident occurred. On Thursday, April 5, at the Capitol, House Minority Leader Joe Martin took the floor to read a letter from MacArthur that Martin said he felt dutybound to withhold no longer.


pages: 864 words: 222,565

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American energy revolution, Apple II, basic income, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Columbine, complexity theory, Computer Lib, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, declining real wages, digital nomad, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Golden Gate Park, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hydraulic fracturing, index card, information retrieval, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Graham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, remote working, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

All joking aside—I can’t think of a more beautiful time—strategically—for you and I to quit.” For his next move, Fuller decided to approach Walter Reuther, the progressive vice president of the United Automobile Workers. His old roommate Ken Beirn had told him that Reuther was interested in converting aviation plants to housing, for which union support would confer a huge advantage. As mediators, Fuller chose Herman Wolf and Gregory Bardacke, two public relations officers from the US War Production Board whom he had met through Clare Boothe Luce. Both had strong labor connections, and they agreed to sound out aircraft companies as soon as possible. Fuller wanted to outmaneuver a rival project at the Office of Economic Programs, which advised on foreign development, and he was mindful of his own conflicts of interest.

Fuller claimed that his clients had arranged for a construction firm to haul away the pieces if it collapsed, but if he thought his success would yield an ongoing arrangement with the Ford Motor Company, he was disappointed. He presented a copy of Nine Chains to Henry Ford II, who was unable to grasp what had made his grandfather a great artist. “Ford’s son and grandson failed to understand old Henry’s inspirational philosophy of real-wealth producing,” Fuller wrote, “and learned to play only the game of moneymaking with the money they inherited.” In any event, as his first commission for a dome, it was a landmark.

While most Americans regarded this momentous development with dread, Fuller saw it as a sign that the world was falling into line with his predictions, and he prepared to assume a leading role. On a tour with Soviet engineers, he basked in their praise: “They said that I was recognized in Russia as one of the pioneers, if not the pioneer, in applying airplane technology to architecture.” His personal impressions of Moscow were largely uncritical. As he wrote later, “Many a US worker citizen, participating in the installation of the American Exhibit dome in Moscow, looked with envious reminiscence upon the unstinted, unlimited hours of enthusiastic work dedication universally exhibited by the Russian laborers. . . . The more work we gave them, the more friendly they became.”


pages: 540 words: 168,921

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

The percentage of people living below the poverty level went from one-third in 1950 to 10 percent in 1973.37 What Americans didn’t get was a social safety net like those that were being put in place, or perfected, in Europe. Walter Reuther, head of the United Auto Workers, had taken a world tour for thirty-two months before the war, working around the globe. When he became head of the UAW after the war, he threw himself into lobbying Congress for full pensions, health care, and workers’ wage protection during bad times. His efforts coincided with Americans’ growing hostility to the Soviet Union, making his ideas sound like socialism—or worse, communism. They were rejected so Reuther, who had started out campaigning for all American workers, changed course and won these benefits for UAW members at the bargaining table.

Americans didn’t like tampering with their Supreme Court either, and he backed down. After the Court declared parts of the National Recovery Act unconstitutional, Congress extracted the sections dealing with labor and put them in the Wagner Labor Act of 1937, which greatly enhanced opportunities for successful union negotiations with employers. Quickly unionized nonagricultural labor accounted for 36 percent of the work force, its highest level ever. Probably the most successful New Deal program was the Civilian Conservation Corps, which gave jobs for six months to two years to young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three who promised to give most of their pay to their families.

There were other forces working against labor in the United States. The union’s reliance on mandatory dues and closed shops offended a sense of fairness to many in the public. Scandals over union bosses and their misuse of funds eroded respect. And then there was the fact that jobs were moving out of the industrial sector to workplaces harder to organize, like restaurants and hospitals. A renewed flow of immigrants, both legal and illegal, gave employers access to a compliant labor force, particularly after a change in the law in 1965 that eliminated the preference for European immigrants.42 Labor even lost out rhetorically as less and less was said about the “working class” and more about the “middle class,” a term that obfuscated the profound differences between well-paid professionals and those who worked but still lived in poverty.


pages: 430 words: 135,418

Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century by Tim Higgins

air freight, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, call centre, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, family office, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global pandemic, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, paypal mafia, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration

More than six thousand work grievances remained backlogged in GM’s system when the factory closed. Even as a teenager, Ortiz understood the power of the UAW. As part of a school project, he read a book about the life of Walter Reuther, the union’s founder. He dreamed of one day becoming the president of a UAW local. The factory found salvation in 1984. Toyota sought to set up shop in the U.S. as it faced increased protectionist fears. A confluence of needs led GM and Toyota to consider partnering on a manufacturing facility. GM was eager to learn about Toyota’s fabled manufacturing system; Toyota didn’t feel confident it could work with U.S. workers.

March’s reveal of the show car, built by hand at SpaceX, gave O’Connell the perfect prop to take to Washington. The same vehicle that had been shown to customers and the media in Los Angeles in late March was then quickly shipped across the country for an East Coast tour, including a stop at David Letterman’s Manhattan studio, to appear on his popular CBS Late Show on TV. A New Yorker writer tagged along, penning a lengthy piece that ran months later, featuring pictures of Musk and his young sons. The media attention gave his project a renewed sense of credibility. Perhaps most importantly, O’Connell arranged for a tour of the car around Washington.

Musk was looking to expand his senior leadership team, and he became convinced that manufacturing needed to be put under one person instead of the two warring units of vehicle and batteries. Straubel advocated for elevating his own manufacturing leader, Greg Reichow, who had overseen the rollout of the battery pack line at Fremont with relatively little drama. Musk agreed, but in a surprise to Straubel, Reichow would join Straubel in reporting directly to Musk, given orders to create a new assembly line for both the Model S and Model X. Straubel’s influence waned. Likewise, Musk had been courting Doug Field, a high-ranking Apple engineer, to join the team. As Musk led Field around the factory on a tour, senior leaders recognized that Field was being considered for more than just advanced engineering.


pages: 354 words: 118,970

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream by Nicholas Lemann

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, buy and hold, capital controls, Carl Icahn, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snow Crash, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

When the war ended, demand for automobiles soared, and the end of price controls set off a large increase in inflation; GM was eager to sell cars, and the UAW members were afraid that inflation would make their incomes fall while the company’s profits increased. In the winter of 1945–46, Walter Reuther, the president of the union, led its GM workers on one of the longest, largest strikes in American history—113 days, more than three hundred thousand workers—and wound up getting them a 17.5 percent wage increase. GM’s executives and the UAW leadership had spent the past decade in an atmosphere of maximum conflict, locally between labor and management and globally between the United States and totalitarian political systems. Both sides were inclined to see their negotiations as having very high stakes.

Corporations like these were operating all over the country, but the Upper Midwest felt like the unofficial home region of the corporation-dominated institutional order. It was where the cars were made and the steel was milled, where unions were strongest, where the white-collar managerial culture felt most culturally dominant. If you were going to be an auto dealer, you could be anywhere, but there was a centrality, a perfectness of fit for dealers in the Midwest that no other place could quite match in those days. A leading example would be the Spitzer family, in northeast Ohio. One day early in the second decade of the twentieth century Henry Ford was riding a train from New York to Detroit. The train stopped in the small town of Grafton, Ohio, twenty-five miles west of Cleveland, to take on water.

GM, in exchange for the promise of a long period of labor peace and the union’s putting aside its ambitions to function as comanager of the corporation, was willing to set itself up as a comprehensive welfare state for its workers. Both sides came out of the negotiations not only claiming victory but also believing that they had invented a new American social compact that would have an effect far beyond even the capacious boundaries of a very big corporation and a very big union. Fortune led its July 1950 issue with an article called “The Treaty of Detroit.” The author, Daniel Bell, the magazine’s young labor editor, noted that GM’s profit in 1950 might be almost as much as its profit during the entire decade of the 1930s.


Presidents of War by Michael Beschloss

anti-communist, British Empire, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, full employment, guns versus butter model, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, long peace, Monroe Doctrine, New Journalism, pneumatic tube, Ronald Reagan, traveling salesman, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration

Knowing that, under existing rules, an incumbent President had great power to bend the party to his will, he assured allies that he had the nomination locked up: “Somebody may try, but they can’t take it away. I’ve got my votes already.” He implored the Indiana Governor Roger Branigin, who was running in his state’s primary as a Johnson stand-in, “Let’s don’t have a damn New Hampshire thing….Just let us know what you need now….We’ll go right after them, hammer and tong.” Johnson reminded Walter Reuther, the United Auto Workers chief, that “when you’ve got your back to the wall,” he came to Reuther’s aid, and pooh-poohed McCarthy and Kennedy: These boys can’t get this nomination….They’ll win some primaries because I don’t have much time to make calls like this….I’m no Goddamn fascist.

.*12 McKinley’s new muscularity outraged members of the Anti-Imperialist League, created after the start of the Spanish-American War to uphold the principles of nonintervention and consent of the governed appearing in the Declaration of Independence, President Washington’s Farewell Address, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Its leaders included Mark Twain, the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, and Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor. Many of its members complained that the idealistic volunteers who had signed up to fight in Cuba were now being compelled to wage McKinley’s more ignoble war against Filipino insurgents. During a League rally at New York’s Cooper Union in May, ex-Senator Carl Schurz of Missouri, a Union General during the Civil War and McKinley’s onetime friend, exclaimed that during the conflict with Spain, the United States had let the Filipinos “believe that in fighting on the same side with us, they were fighting for their own independence.”

Instead, with Eleanor present for the early part of the railroad journey, that fall he took a two-week, 8,754-mile “nonpolitical” inspection tour of military installations, war factories, and naval hospitals. Wartime security compelled the entire trip to be kept secret until Roosevelt was safely back at the White House. The President asked the train’s engineer to keep down the speed, knowing that his paralyzed legs and unpadded rear end could not protect him from jolts. Roosevelt stopped first at a Chrysler tank factory in Detroit, rolling into the plant in his beloved open-topped Lincoln parade car, called the “Sunshine Special,” with bulletproof windows that were rolled up to shield him from the side. Henry Ford showed him B-24 bombers being assembled by workers at Ford Motor Company at Willow Run, Michigan, including “midgets,” as they were called at the time, hired to work in difficult-to-reach spots on the planes.*16 Outside Chicago, the President was driven through the rain around the Great Lakes Naval Training Station and Camp Robert Smalls, established the previous spring by the segregated US Navy to train African American seamen for the first time.*17 There he stopped to listen to recruits sing a spiritual called “Travelin’.”


pages: 1,205 words: 308,891

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

Robert Reich, a reliable source of sweetly leftish errors of facts and ethics, declares that “the decline in unionization [of private companies] directly correlates with the decline of the portion of income going to the middle class.”6 But paying selected workers on the auto assembly line more than they can earn elsewhere, at the expense of other, sometimes poorer, workers buying autos, is hardly a formula for raising up the working class, or for that matter the middle class. Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers long ago, replied to a young manager enthusiastic about robots on the assembly line, “Tell me, those wonderful new robots—will they go out and buy cars from your company?”

. / He thinks too much,” who finds the ideas first and is courageous enough to invest in them—Mark Zuckerberg (and roommates) find Facebook, Henry Ford finds cheap cars, Andrew Carnegie finds cheap steel. As Luigi Einaudi wrote in 1943, summarizing the analysis in 1730–1734 of the Irish/French Richard Cantillon of the word “entrepreneur,” what distinguishes the imprenditore, the entrepreneur, is not possessing and accumulating capital at a fixed interest rate, but “assuming the risk of acquiring the factors of production [such as land and labor and capital itself] at the price on the market . . . and of selling their product at an uncertain price.”5 Buy ideas low and hope that you can sell them high.

We must carry out what seems justified in the Socialist program and can be realized within the present framework of state and society.”20 A modern case is South Africa, in which high wages for trade unionists are protected by a high, state-enforced minimum wage and the state-enforced impossibility of dismissing anyone once they have somehow got a job. The system discourages substitution of the pool of cheap and now unemployed labor for unionized and now employed labor, which secures for the government the affection of the unions. The South African union of unions, COSATU, though frankly communist (though with an honorable history fighting apartheid), has for example opposed a scheme for the government to subsidize employment for youths. The resulting high unemployment (officially 25 percent, 70 percent for youths) is assuaged by small income subsidies to those without jobs sitting in huts in the backcountry of the East Cape or KwaZulu-Natal.


pages: 851 words: 247,711

The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War by Norman Stone

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, central bank independence, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labour mobility, land reform, long peace, low interest rates, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Money creation, new economy, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, V2 rocket, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, éminence grise

Now, the old Second World War associations came alive again: Eisenhower, Montgomery, the French all knew each other well, and they co-operated again. Here was the start of NATO, and of much else, as Atlantic ties multiplied and thickened. Trade unions co-operated in a free association. The American trade unions (the AFL, or American Federation of Labor, had merged in 1946 with the CIO, or Congress of Industrial Organizations) were now strongly antiCommunist (their leader, Walter Reuther, having worked for two years at a Ford plant in Nizhny Novgorod, and thus knowing his Soviet circumstances) and the Western trade unions set up an organization of their own, challenging the older international one, which the Communists had taken over.

It had quite long origins: even in the 1830s, Stendhal, for instance, has throw-away and dismissive lines about American business and dollar worship, and the Teamsters, a famous union mainly on the docks, took their name from the mule-drivers of yore. In the 1850s Sam Colt was able to assemble a first-class gun in thousands, because he made each part the same, to within a thirty-second of an inch to start with, and then a five-hundredth, so that they were interchangeable, and Linus Yale, of locks fame, goes back to that period. Machines were soon made with interchangeable parts, and the tools that produced these became an American specialty, keeping British war industries going in both of the world wars. Henry Ford famously transferred this to motor cars that were therefore cheap.

Though born illegitimate, and lacking schooling, he was literate (using phrases such as ‘with alacrity’) because, like so many of his class at the time, he could and would make use of the after-hours workers’ education libraries and self-help mechanisms without embarrassment. He was an astute trade union leader, and that gave him some insight into the ways of Communists, who would exploit an industrial crisis for their own political ends rather than for the workers’ own good. Bevin ran his machine well at the Foreign Office, and he needed to, because his in-tray was a very gloomy one. Was Great Britain bulldog or bullfrog, ran one question.


Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima by James Mahaffey

clean water, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, Ford Model T, Google Earth, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, it's over 9,000, loose coupling, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, Richard Feynman, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Suez canal 1869, uranium enrichment, wage slave, wikimedia commons

Ground was broken at Lagoona Beach in 1956, after Cisler had secured $5 million in equipment and design work from the AEC and a $50 million commitment from Detroit Edison. It would be a long crawl to implementation of Cisler’s plan, fraught with ballooning costs, many engineering novelties, and strong opposition to the project by Walter Reuther. Reuther was an interesting fellow. A card-carrying Socialist Party member, anti-Stalinist, and a fine tool & die machinist, he became a United Auto Workers organizer/hell-raiser and was attacked by a phalanx of Ford Motor Company security personnel in the “Battle of the Overpass” in 1937. This, at the very least, made him a well-known figure in Detroit.145 Reuther, the UAW, and eventually the AFL-CIO filed suit after suit opposed to the building permit for the plant and later the operating license, based on multiple safety concerns and the fact that it was not an automobile.

By 1969, evidence of the Hallum reactor was erased from the prairie, but the Hallum-type pump remains as a credible means of moving liquid sodium. 145 Walter worked as a “wage slave” at the Ford Motor Company starting in 1927. Henry Ford sent him to Nizhny, Novgorod, Soviet Union to help build a tractor factory, but he became overly interested in the proletarian industrial democracy, and Ford fired him in 1932. After working for a few years at an auto plant in Gorky, Reuther returned to the U.S. and became a very active member of the UAW. On May 26, 1937, at 2:00 P.M., he and Richard Frankensteen were in the middle of a leaflet campaign (“Unionism, Not Fordism”) and they were asked by a news photographer to pose on the pedestrian overpass in front of the Ford sign.

A fellow who had worked on the project damned HTRE-3 with faint praise, saying “It was so powerful, it could practically lift its own weight off the ground.” Today, the two engines are tourist traps. You can go up and take a picture of your kids pointing into the exhaust nozzles. They are in the parking lot of the EBR-I, which is a National Historic Landmark, opened for touring between Memorial Day and Labor Day. 101 There is a bit of confusion here. The NRTS records show that the HTRE-3 operated between September 1959 and December 1960, but this account is taken from Summary Report of HTRE no. 3 Nuclear Excursion. APEX-509, and it places the accident in 1958. This type of event was usually classified SECRET, and the operating schedule may have been distorted to hide it. 102 I’m not sure there was anywhere to eat near the test stand, so they probably brought lunch with them or had it trucked in.


Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age by Lizabeth Cohen

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, benefit corporation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, charter city, deindustrialization, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Lewis Mumford, megastructure, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent control, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

In a letter to Chester Bowles in 1957, he reaffirmed what they had both learned in India about how social change and infrastructural improvement were entangled: “In the North, race relations and slums and blight are interwoven in such a way as to convince me that the only real hope of a solid, sustained improvement in race relations lies in an imaginative and vigorous urban renewal program.” He went on to complain that labor unions could do so much more to advance both goals—and improve their image—by investing pension funds in building decent, integrated, moderate-cost housing, an idea he had floated to Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers several years earlier.72 Logue seemed not to recognize, however, that the effectiveness of his racial agenda was seriously compromised by the infrastructural choices the renewers had made to replace slums with less densely populated, modernist alternatives like the Florence Virtue Homes in Dixwell.

Rather, this analysis goes, they used the leverage of their lending and bonding powers to force New York City and New York State to radically reorient themselves from liberal, social democratic public policies to more neoliberal ones. In demanding an austerity budget that scaled back labor union commitments and social welfare services, including the UDC’s ambitious housing program, banking and business leaders sought to fundamentally restructure the behavior of elected officials and the expectations of the public about what government could and should deliver. As the CEO of the New York Telephone Company bluntly put it, “To balance the budget, to restore the confidence of the financial community whose resources we need in order to survive, to guarantee the survival of New York City there is an urgent need to alter the traditional view of what city government can and should do.

They aimed instead to keep middle-class families in the city, thereby fulfilling the criticism frequently made of Title I of the Federal Housing Act that it took land from the poor, often minority, and gave it to middle- and upper-income residents, usually white. But city officials also tried to tap federal programs to provide improved housing for those who were desperate for it. They made extensive use of the 221(d)(3) provision of the Federal Housing Act subsidizing cooperatives sponsored by nonprofit organizations such as churches, community groups, and labor unions. Sponsors received 100 percent Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loans with forty-year terms and below-market interest rates, which they used to build housing for moderate-income people who put $325 down, paid a below-market monthly fee, and ended up owning a home.