Daniel J. Clark - Disruption in Detroit: Autoworkers and the Elusive Postwar Boom

Disruption in Detroit

THE WORKING CLASS IN AMERICAN HISTORY

Editorial Advisors

James R. Barrett, Julie Greene, William P. Jones,

Alice Kessler-Harris, and Nelson Lichtenstein

A list of books in the series appears at the end of this book.

Disruption in Detroit

Autoworkers and the
Elusive Postwar Boom

DANIEL J. CLARK

2018 by the Board of Trustees

of the University of Illinois

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Clark, Daniel J., author.

Title: Disruption in Detroit : autoworkers and the elusive postwar boom / Daniel J. Clark.

Description: Urbana : University of Illinois Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018007677| ISBN 9780252042010 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780252083709 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH : Automobile industry workersMichiganDetroitHistory20th century. | Automobile industry workersLabor unionsMichiganDetroitHistory20th century. | Automobile industry and tradeMichiganDetroitHistory20th century. | Detroit (Mich.)Economic conditions20th century.

Classification: LCC HD 8039. A 82 U 632165 2018 | DDC 331.88/129222097543409045dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007677

E-book ISBN 9780252050756

To Bob and Bonnie

I offer my deepest gratitude to all the retired autoworkers and their family members who allowed me to interview them for this project. Those conversations were amazing gifts of incalculable value. Running partner Ed Lyghtel and former student Steve Clinton led me to UAW retiree chapter presidents Bob Bowen from Local 849 in Ypsilanti and Bonnie Melton from Local 653 in Pontiac. Bob and Bonnie immediately understood the importance of exploring the experiences of their chapters members and facilitated many of the interviews at their respective union halls. This book would not exist without them.

A number of students recommended family members for interviews, and at the risk of overlooking someone, I want to offer specific thanks to Greg Miller, Paul Dusney, Marie OBrien, and Kim Frink for connecting me, respectively, with L. J. Scott, Dorothy Sackle, Ernie Liles, and Allen Leske. Marie OBrien, who is a superb historian, deserves to be in some sort of Hall of Fame for transcribing the first drafts of the majority of the interviews. She did an outstanding job bringing conversations to life on the printed page, and she has been supportive of this project from the beginning.

Much of my research took place in the Microfilm Room at the University of Michigans Hatcher Graduate Library. The staff there seemed to practice poses of nonrecognition, even toward those who showed up every day for weeks on end, but they were always extremely helpful when necessary. The cool vibe broke one day during DecemberI cant remember which yearwhen a staff member offered me an ornament made of a book jacket cover, one she had made for their holiday party. I cherish it. I also have to thank the last of the old-fashioned microfilm readers, which was far superior to newer models for the type of research I was doing and which held out just long enough for me to finish.

Many thanks as well to the journalists at the Detroit Free Press , Detroit News , and Michigan Chronicle , whose work I read on microfilm. I have relied heavily on their reporting, and I remember feeling shaken when reading about Free Press columnist Leo Donovans untimely death in 1957, and like a friend was moving away when Free Press staff writer Robert Perrin left the paper in 1955 to work for Senator Patrick McNamara in Washington.

Thanks to John Beck and Michigan State Universitys Our Daily Lives/Our Daily Bread lecture series for hosting me twice and offering insightful feedback. Likewise, two appearances at the North American Labor History Conference in Detroit proved helpful, and I especially thank Liz Faue for helping to organize a crucial panel in the early stages of this project. I was honored to be the target of two hours of intense grilling in Chicago by members of the Newberry Librarys Seminar in Labor History. It was exactly what a researcher hopes for, and it was the most fun Ive had as a scholar.

Oakland University provided a fellowship to launch the project. Within the history department, Todd Estes, Cara Shelly, Keith Dye, and Bruce Zellers always checked in on how my research was going, and no matter what they thought privately, they always seemed to have faith that a book would come from it someday. Todd talked with me at length on many occasions about the project, always with sharp insight, and he alerted me to the Newberry Library opportunity. I appreciated the comments offered by colleagues at a First Drafts presentation hosted by my department. Graham Cassano, an accomplished sociologist who specializes in labor, offered particularly challenging feedback. He has also strongly supported this project, in part by producing a wonderful podcast about its oral history component that is available via the website for the journal Critical Sociology . The Saturday morning breakfast gathering at Afternoon Delight, in Ann Arbor, especially Bruce Zellers, Sue Zellers, and Beth Yakel, heard me go on and on about what I was finding in my research, and I appreciate their patience, insight, and support. Generations of Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society members have followed my progress. Most of them understood that my dedication to them slowed down the book but that I also would not have had it any other way. Theyre celebrating with me.

Darren Clark tracked down all the missing article titles and dates in my mountain of newspaper research. Lesley Chapel helped me get back to basics when thinking through oral history methodology. Quinn Malecki gave the penultimate version of the manuscript a close reading and identified many glitches that had escaped my bleary eyes. Petra Flanagan located most of the rest and brought a needed nonhistorians perspective to the work. She also believed in the project, and in me, from the start.

The publication process has its suspenseful moments. Laurie Matheson and James Engelhardt from the University of Illinois Press guided me through them, and Im grateful for their constructive criticism and crucial support. Im also thankful for copyeditor Jill R. Hughes, whose eagle eyes and rigor significantly improved the manuscript.

Disruption in Detroit

How did autoworkers in the metropolitan Detroit region experience the 1950s? Historians have generally portrayed the 1950s as a decade of job stability and economic advancement for blue-collar auto employees, who entered the middle class as beneficiaries of generous contracts negotiated by the United Automobile Workers (UAW) during the heyday of the postWorld War II boom. Yet despite all that has been written about the auto industry and the UAW, no research focuses in any sustained way on autoworkers themselves. Instead, most studies have focused on top-level union policies and officials, particularly Walter Reuther, the longtime president (19461970) of the UAW. The lack of attention given to actual autoworkers inspired me to launch an oral history project to explore that subject. Although my research focus shifted over time, the goal of learning more about how ordinary autoworkers experienced the postwar years has remained central to this work.

At the risk of simplification, what follows is the composite view of autoworkers that can be gleaned from the existing literature. Most significantly, they made increasingly large amounts of money, as their real wages doubled between 1947 and 1960, mostly because of cost-of-living allowances (COLA) and the productivity-based annual improvement factor (AIF). They also enjoyed new fringe benefits such as pensions and company-paid health insurance.