Excerpts from The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit:Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor, p. 383-388.

Walter Reuther represented the liberal leadership of the labor movement and the Democratic Party. The UAW had made significant compromises with the Democratic Party and the military industrial complex in the postwar, accepting higher wages and benefits for capitulation to managerial rights. Reuther assisted the civil rights movement with significant money, but in the 1940s and 1950s Reuther had made compromises with racists and red-baiters in the UAW to win his position of leadership. T o the young activists who were putting their bodies on the line and facing danger every night, the kind of old-line politics of compromise represented by Reuther became increasingly hard to stomach. This is a description of Reuther’s role in getting John Lewis to change the content of the speech he was to give at the Lincoln Memorial. .

Reuther . . . was organized labor’s most vigorous and powerful champion of the civil rights insurgency, and for this he momentarily won the well-deserved place within the high councils of movement decision-making. But throughout these crucial months of 1963 and 1964, Reuther used his influence to serve that of the President within these councils. He saw no contradiction, for the UAW president had become convinced that the corridors of power were now open to labor-liberals for the first time in almost a quarter-century; a great realignment in American politics seemed in the offing. Reuther had been at the margins of power for so long that he took even Kennedy's limited accommodation as signifying an intimate collaboration. "He was close to us because I believe we understood each other and shared the same values and dreamed the same dreams," Reuther told a union conference two months after the assassination.' Taking into account even the bathos of the post-Dallas weeks, one senses again the powerful seduction to which Reuther had succumbed. Though he complained of Kennedy's timidity, Reuther gave his administration, and that of his successor, the kind of political trust that was certain to be broken.

Beginning in late June the Kennedys worked through Reuther, as well as the white philanthropist Stephen Currier, to make certain that the thrust of the [March on Washington] and that of the administration ran along parallel paths. To step up the work of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and move its operations from New York to Washington, Reuther funded two additional staffers and provided the office space. . . With strong support from Roy Wilkins, Reuther also proved instrumental in giving his "Coalition of Conscience" a broader leadership by encouraging Randolph to add the Protestant notable Rev. Eugene Carson Blake, the Jewish leader Rabbi Joachim Prinz, and the Catholic layman Matthew Ahmann to the "Big Six" civil rights leaders (King, Wilkins, Randolph, SNCCs John Lewis, the Urban League's Whitney Young, and CORE's James Farmer) who composed the March on Washington steering committee. The restructuring into a "Big Ten," including Reuther, diluted the social democratic content of the March on Washington, shifting it toward an exclusive endorsement of the administration's rather limited civil rights bill, which at this stage did not contain even an FEPC provision. (FEPC: Fair Employment Practices Commission) Randolph and Rustin had seen a full-employment economy as central to the well-being of black America, but this demand now evaporated, as did the urgent necessity for a two-dollar minimum wage, which white religious leaders vetoed."

News of the impending march brought to the surface the atavistic fears of a deeply racist society. Washington was still a southern city, and even among partisans of the Kennedy civil rights bill, few imagined that thousands of blacks could pour into town without some outbreak of violence, drunkenness, or racial conflict. Expectations were so negative that the Washington Senators postponed two night baseball games, and hotel rooms went begging because so many businessmen and tourists stayed out of town. To monitor the situation, Robert Kennedy set up a justice Department planning group that came to play an increasingly large role in the management of the march itself. The attorney general was particularly interested in making sure the gathering was peaceful and orderly, keeping the rhetoric within bounds, and getting the focus of the demonstration turned from the Capitol to some other part of the city. The president and his brother also wanted to make sure that the gathering was impressive in size and with noticeable white 'participation.'

Reuther and Jack Conway, who represented the UAW president with both the Justice Department and the march organizers, played key roles in moving the demonstration in this direction. In several New York planning sessions for the march, Conway argued that only a large and unobstructed area away from the Capitol could comfortably contain the two hundred thousand now expected for the rally. Downplaying the political significance of the switch, Conway convinced Randolph and other organizers that the Lincoln Memorial would work best for such a large turnout; of course, Reuther's Industrial Union Department would foot the $16,600 bill for the large and expensive sound system necessary to reach an audience now awkwardly divided by the monument's reflecting pool. “That was the 'clincher," remembered Conway.

To anchor his "Coalition of Conscience," Reuther wanted the AFL-CIO to endorse the march. But when [AFL-CIO President] George Meany finally convened a council meeting at the ILGWUs Pocono retreat on August 12, Reuther got nowhere. For an entire afternoon their contest was a replay of all the old fights. "George Meany was very sharp and very negative," remembered Reuther. Meany feared mass action and riot, mistrusted Reuther's activism, and held the public support of most labor chieftains. "You either were voting for him or against him," Reuther told his own executive board. 'It had nothing to do with the idea.' In the end Reuther got two votes, his own, and that of the march organizer A. Philip Randolph. Meany himself drafted a self-serving release that restated AFLCIO support for a comprehensive civil rights bill and permitted individual trade unions to participate if they chose to do so. Several did, and in force, including the ILGWU, the IUE, and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). But Reuther's jibe, that Meany's endorsement was "so weak that they will have to give it a blood transfusion to keep it alive long enough to mimeograph it," appeared near the top of most press accounts.

By late August the UAW had shifted a sizable proportion of its entire staff to Washington in support of the march. The union rented two hundred hotel rooms, printed two thousand signs, and hired buses and trains to bring a minimum of five thousand of its own members to the march. But the night before the ceremonies Reuther faced one last threat to his conception of the civil rights coalition essential for a successful March on Washington. Jack Conway had found a freshly mimeographed copy of SNCC Chairman John Lewis's speech for the Lincoln Memorial rally. Justice Department aides got their copy at almost the same moment and passed on the text to Robert Kennedy and his assistants. All were alarmed. The speech said that SNCC could not support the Kennedy civil rights bill because it was 'too little and too late.' 'We are now involved in a serious revolution," read the text, which was the joint effort of several SNCC staffers, some fresh from the frustration and brutality of southwestern Georgia. Lewis's rhetoric would soon become the common coin of the New Left, but in 1963 his language was certain to outrage many of the more moderate civil rights supporters whom the Kennedys and Reuther had been so anxious to involve in the leadership of the march. "this nation is still a place of cheap political leaders who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic and social exploitation,” The text Declared. “We will take matters into our own hands.... If any radical social, political and economic changes are to take place in our society, the people, the masses, must bring them about." And Lewis vowed a transformation of the South: "We will march through the Heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own 'scorched earth' policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground-nonviolently.""

"Here was the Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee calling for open revolution," Reuther told his executive board a month later. "That Negroes could not get redress of their grievances within the framework of the legal structure.... It was really something." Apprised by Robert Kennedy of the contents of Lewis's speech, several Catholic notables threatened to issue a denunciation and pull out. Patrick Cardinal O'Boyle, the prelate of Washington, declared he would not offer the invocation or share the same plafform with Lewis."

Working in tandem with the Justice Department, Reuther turned his considerable powers of persuasion and organization into getting the speech modified and the leadership coalition reunified. A late-night meeting with Lewis and others in SNCC proved inconclusive, so the dispute continued on the morning of the march. It was still unresolved when Reuther, King, Randolph, and other march leaders assembled at the Lincoln Memorial. Reuther laid out the issues as if he were at a union caucus:

Look. We have got a decision to make real quick, and there is no use debating it because we haven't got time .... If John Lewis feels strongly that he wants to make this speech, he can go some place else and make it, but he has no right to make it here because if he tries to make it he destroys the integrity of our coalition and he drives people out of the coalition who agree to the principles and he stays in when he doesn't agree. This is just immoral and he has no right to do it, and I demand a vote right now because I have got to call the Archbishop.

As Lewis and his comrades retyped their speech, Reuther called O'Boyle's hotel room and reached an agreement with the prelate that if the Protestant churchman Eugene Carson Blake were given a veto over the revised draft, then the Catholics would again participate. The deal struck, O'Boyle and his contingent were soon spirited to the Lincoln Memorial by a Secret Service detail and opened the ceremonies as scheduled. Lewis delivered his revised speech and was immediately fol- lowed by Reuther, who had thought he might have to "pick up the pieces in case it became necessary.""

At the podium Reuther first offered a well-worn but still vital query: "if we can have full employment and full production for the negative ends of war, then why can't we have a job for every American in the pursuit of peace?" He cautioned the movement to "rational and responsible action," but his seven-minute speech also contained several of the day's most radical and pointed phrases. He denounced the nation's "pious platitudes" and "high octane hypocrisy," after which he put a sharp barb in Kennedy liberalism itself. "We cannot defend freedom in Berlin so long as we deny freedom in Birmingham!" Reuther thumped the podiurn repeatedly and spoke loudly into the microphone, his voice easily carrying the length of the reflecting pool. Applause interrupted him time and again, even as his voice cracked with emotion. His peroration offered a prophetic warning: "if we fail, the vacuum of our failure will be filled by the Apostles of Hatred who will search for answers in the dark of night, and reason will yield to riot and brotherhood will yield to bitterness and bloodshed and we will tear asunder the fabric of American democracy." Though his remarks were instantly overshadowed by the prose poetry of Martin Luther King, Reuther had remained faithful to the original social democratic thrust of the march, linking fair employment to full employment, jobs and freedom in equal measure.

It was a good speech, but two decades of such talk had long since devalued Reuther's brand of social democratic rhetoric. Indeed, the summer of 1963 may well be taken as the moment when the discourse of American liberalism shifted decisively out of the New Deal-Fair Deal-laborite orbit and into a world in which the racial divide colored all politics. When march leaders met in the White House cabinet room at 5:00 Pm. that day, Martin Luther King knew he had given the speech of a lifetime, but one that might well evoke a large measure of jealousy from other civil rights leaders. So he deflected a presidential compliment for his "I Have a Dream" oration by asking Kennedy if he had heard the excellent speech of Walter Reuther. "Oh, I've heard him plenty of times" replied Kennedy. Both president and nation had turned their ears to another messenger and another message.

Reuther may not have been the star, but he still felt immensely proud of the role played by the UAW in staging the March on Washington. Millions of TV viewers had seen Reuther marching in the front rank with King, Rauh, Randolph, Wilkins, and the other civil rights leaders. Neatly printed UAW signs calling for "FEFC, Equal Rights and Jobs NOW'were in every photo. "I think it was one of the great things in the history of American democracy," Reuther told his union executive board. "People were impressed all over the world that this many people could come together in a free society and demonstrate and not have one single incident.""